Fahd Burki: daydreams

“For too long, we have tried to find the right vocabulary for the rest of the world (as well as for purists back home) to understand how our practices—Burki’s art and my writing—are Pakistani even when they don’t look or sound it. In some ways, we may not fit the bill at all, and we are entirely comfortable with that; but in many other ways, we are the quintessential generation of city kids who grew up in the middle of an independent media revolution and, later, the arrival of the Internet.”—Saira Ansari

Suggesting subtle ways in which the reductive language of geometric abstraction can be opened up to spatial and temporal complexities, Fahd Burki’s almost decade-long foray into minimalist abstraction, results in a body of work marked with reversals, contradictions, and paradoxes—yet, very little is ever left up to accident or chance.

This book was published in conjunction with Burki’s first survey exhibition, daydreams, held at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, which brought together works spanning fifteen years of the artist’s practice. His influences, methods, and approaches to art making are chronicled through a generous visual apparatus and compelling essays by Saira Ansari and Murtaza Vali.

Edited by Dawn Ross and Lucas Morin.

Texts by Saira Ansari, Antonia Carver, Dawn Ross, and Murtaza Vali