Miniature paintings small enough to be carried around in your pocket

Risham Syed is a Pakistani artist who lives and works in Lahore, the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab, and the country’s second largest city after Karachi. In her ‘Lahore’ series, Syed documents changes in the urban landscape. Syed draws on the refined tradition of South Asian miniature painting. Since the 1980s, this art…

Patachitras: A form of audiovisual communication

Thought to be one of the oldest forms of audiovisual communication, with their traditional presentation involving storytelling and songs, patachitras are deeply embedded in the vernacular traditions of West Bengal. Patachitras or ‘pats’ are scroll paintings from West Bengal, in eastern India, that are intimately bound up with itinerant storytelling and song. Historically, pats were…

Ground-breaking exhibition at the National Museum of Cambodia

In the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh this week, Cambodian artists who have participated in the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) take centre stage in a landmark exhibition, acknowledging the role QAGOMA has played in supporting projects by Cambodian artists through its collecting and exhibition program. Histories of the Future places some of…

Celebrating modernists of India

Two seminal Indian artists of the twentieth century have captured the international spotlight this year, as the subject of major retrospectives in art centres of the Western-art world. A few weeks ago Indian modernist Nasreen Mohamedi’s exhibition concluded at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, a monographic survey which opened the Met Breuer, The…