This pioneering work traces the emergence of the modern and contemporary art of Muslim South Asia in relation to transnational modernism and in light of the region's intellectual, cultural, and political developments. Art historian Iftikhar Dadi here explores the art and writings of major artists, men and women, ranging from the late colonial period to the era of independence and beyond. He looks at the stunningly diverse artistic production of key artists associated with Pakistan, including Abdur Rahman Chughtai, Zainul Abedin, Shakir Ali, Zubeida Agha, Sadequain, Rasheed Araeen, and Naiza Khan. Dadi shows how, beginning in the 1920s, these artists addressed the challenges of modernity by translating historical and contemporary intellectual conceptions into their work, reworking traditional approaches to the classical Islamic arts, and engaging the modernist approach towards subjective individuality in artistic expression. In the process, they dramatically reconfigured the visual arts of the region. By the 1930s, these artists had embarked on a sustained engagement with international modernism in a context of dizzying social and political change that included decolonization, the rise of mass media, and developments following the national independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Bringing new insights to such concepts as nationalism, modernism, cosmopolitanism, and tradition, Dadi underscores the powerful impact of transnationalism during this period and highlights the artists' growing embrace of modernist and contemporary artistic practice in order to address the challenges of the present era.

This book by SADEQUAIN Foundation titled Lines and Drawings by SADEQUAIN is the first comprehensive collection of more than 300 drawings. It is a result of more than four years of research and discovery of his drawings spread from Japan, Singapore, Pakistan, India, Middle East, Europe, and North America In technical terms the drawings in this book display the unity of disciplines of drawing, calligraphy as well as the traditions of Urdu and Persian poetry which Sadequain shared to his core. Most importantly, the drawings in this book show how Sadequain's lines, whether complex or simple, performed magically with the complexity of a well-orchestrated symphony; they represent poetry of color, harmony of rhythm, and the power of a tempest. It is hoped that this book will be helpful in analyzing the imagery in Sadequain's drawings and establishing the links to appropriate historical and cultural context. Its empirical research and textual contents are balanced to address the sensitivities that attempt to compare and contrast arbitrary and loaded concepts.

Celebrating fifty years of Pakistani painting and sculpture, this is the definitive story of the introduction and unfolding of modern art in Pakistan.

Sadequain's paintings, based on the poetry of Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz represent a confluence of the most extraordinary talent of the art and Urdu literature. The extraordinary collection of 53 illustrative paintings and two murals by Sadequain included in this book, based on the visions of the greatest poets of the Urdu language, Ghalib, Iqbal, and Faiz reminds us that, renouncing the seduction and eschewing the allurement of material entrapments can help levitate mankind to an exalted state.

Bringing together a broad range of contributors including art, architecture, and design academic theorists and historians, in addition to practicing artists, architects, and designers, this volume explores the place of the sketchbook in contemporary art and architecture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theories, practices, and reflections common to the contemporary conceptualisation of the sketchbook and its associated environments, it offers a dialogue in which the sketchbook can be understood as a pivotal working tool that contributes to the creative process and the formulation and production of visual ideas. Along with exploring the theoretical, philosophical, psychological, and curatorial implications of the sketchbook, the book addresses emergent digital practices by way of examining contemporary developments in sketchbook productions and pedagogical applications. Consequently, these more recent developments question the validity of the sketchbook as both an instrument of practice and creativity, and as an educational device. International in scope, it not only explores European intellectual and artistic traditions, but also intercultural and cross-cultural perspectives, including reviews of practices in Chinese artworks or Islamic calligraphy, and situational contexts that deal with historical examples, such as Roman art, or modern practices in geographical-cultural regions like Pakistan.

As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book unsettles both the categories of 'art' and 'secular' in their theoretical and historical implications. It questions the temporal, spatial and cultural binaries between the 'sacred' and the 'secular' that have shaped art historical scholarship as well as artistic practice. All the essays here are anchored in a conception of a region, whether we call it South Asia or the Indian subcontinent – one, fissured by histories of partition, state formations and religious nationalisms, but still offering a collective site from which to speak to the disciplines of art and the knowledge worlds in which they are embedded. The book asks: How do we complicate the religious designations of pre-modern art and architecture and the new forms of their resurgence in contemporary iconographies and monuments? How do we re-conceptualize the public and the political, as fiery contestations and new curatorial practices reconfigure the meaning of art in the proliferating spaces of museums, galleries, biennales and festivals? How do we understand South Asian art's deep entanglements with the politics of the present?