Friday, October 17, 2008
Lahore

Defying the serious law and order situation in the country, thousands of people participated in the inaugural ceremony of the 7th eight-day-long Rafi Peer Theatre’s Youth Performing Arts Festival at the Alhamra Cultural Centre, Qaddafi Stadium, on Thursday evening.

The festival showcasing over three dozen different kinds of performing arts activities by the vibrant youth of the country including mime, short plays, multimedia plays, theatrical performances , film screenings, and musical events proved to be a blessing in disguise for the live-hearted people of the city.

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.

With September approaching fast and summer getting mild, the art scene in Lahore is gaining momentum as three painting exhibitions are being held in the last week of August.

Of the three art shows, one opened at Ijaz Gallery on Saturday whereas the rest would be held on August 28 and 29.

Artist Ali Kazim displayed an exclusive show of pigments on wasli (a traditional handmade paper) at Ijaz Galleries. Art lovers and students from various arts institutions of Lahore attended the one-day exhibition.

Don’t get surprised if you spot the most stunning model of the town at the modest interior of PIVIC Saddar arguing at the absence of Roshan Ara Begum rather than rocking in frenzy at some lazy number of Beyonce Knowles at a trendy elite party. The popular Nawab Sultan of Umrao Jaan Ada, IMRAN ABBAS in person too seems to belong more to the oriental Moghul era with a refined sense of aesthetics rather than today. Don’t get surprised; just reaffirm your faith in the age old maxim that appearances are deceptive.

Hoooo… Channo ki aankh mein ik nasha hai. I thought I heard someone sing…dang, you hear it too, don’t you?

Resonating throughout Pakistan, USA, UK, and all around the world for that matter, the sudden Channo-mania has caused quite a hullabaloo, uproar, and frenzy. The man behind the mania, whose voice is often compared to Kishore Kumar’s, is none other than, painter/model/singer, Monsieur Ali Zafar.

We had a chance to meet up with Ali Zafar, who was in Karachi for a couple of days. Sammy kept singing, Ke huqqa paani…

“Arg! It’s stuck in my head!” Sammy hollered.

A military leader is how the world views General Pervez Musharraf. But it is his taste for modern art that has begun to open up minds as well as drawing rooms in Pakistan.

In Delhi after a five-day camp at Agra — the city where Musharraf attended the failed summit with Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2001 — to celebrate 350 years of the Taj Mahal, young artists from Pakistan acknowledged his contribution to making modern art commercially viable, particularly in conservative Lahore.