Aarish Sardar

Repatriation of Tipu’s Tiger, Saba Qizilbash An email arriving around Christmas last year took Saba Qizilbash by surprise. The Pakistani diaspora artist, who lives and practises in Oxford, England, initially struggled to believe what she was reading. Repatriation of Tipu’s Tiger (2022), one of her large-scale drawings, had been selected for ‘Musical Bodies’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York.

Alphabet Book By Ali Kazim and Hammad Nasar Ochre Books ISBN: 978-1-0682265-0-2 144pp. Most alphabet books, in any language, are quiet, humble objects — functional by design, forgettable by nature, and discarded once their lesson is learned, or not. The struggle with the Urdu script is familiar to parents everywhere, whether in the diaspora or not. Even in Pakistan itself, English-medium schooling has quietly estranged children from their own script.

At the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham, ‘Riverless Water’, London-based Pakistani artist Saba Khan’s debut solo exhibition in the United Kingdom (UK), explores the human and environmental legacies of the Mangla Dam in Azad Kashmir. Built in the 1960s on the Jhelum River, its construction submerged large parts of the Mirpur hamlets and triggered one of the largest migrations from Pakistan to the UK, significantly shaping the cultural landscape of England’s north and midlands.