The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration, on view through March 12, 2006. Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration will feature a series of works by six contemporary Pakistani artists: Aisha Khalid, Hasnat Mehmood, Muhammad Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Talha Rathore, and Saira Wasim. The exhibition will be open to the public from August 21, 2005 through March 12, 2006. A reception for the exhibition will be held at The Aldrich on Sunday, October 16, 2005. Karkhana has been organized by Jessica Hough, curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; London-based independent curator and writer Hammad Nasar; and Anna Sloan, a writer, curator, and historian of Islamic and South Asian Art at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. This exhibition will travel to The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco from August 4 through November 5, 2006 and Asia Society, New York in 2007.

Almost six feet in height, Shanaz Siddiq has to safeguard her reputation. She is the designer that the world-famous crystal people, Swarovski of Austria, handpicked out of the other Pakistani designers. This was in 1998, when the company wanted to introduce its ‘hot-fix’ crystals that could be used to embellish Pakistani clothes.

Shanaz opines that although fashion in Pakistan is still evolving, there is a need to go into the international market and network with foreign designers.