Hunar ہنر

In Allama Iqbal's poem Dīn o Hunar (Faith and Skill), hunar is understood not merely as technical accomplishment but as a spiritual force that sustains civilizations. For Iqbal, skill is inseparable from meaning; it is through acts of creation that cultures preserve their values, knowledge, and sense of self. Within South Asia's artistic traditions, the act of making has long occupied this dual role, joining craftsmanship with ways of seeing and understanding the world. The image, therefore, is more than an aesthetic object, it is a bearer of memory and a keeper of stories.

Across South Asia, images have long served as vessels for storytelling. From the painted folios of miniature manuscripts to richly woven textiles, temple murals, and domestic objects, visual forms have carried histories, myths, memories, and lived experiences across generations. For centuries, images have functioned as conduits of collective knowledge, preserving stories that moved between oral traditions, material culture, and artistic practice. They record encounters, migrations, rituals, landscapes, and acts of everyday life, allowing memory to endure and cultural connections to persist across time.

Marking the recent opening of APRE Art Mumbai's new space, Hunarbrings together the works of Marium Agha, Abid Aslam, Arienao Kera, Masuma Halali Khwaja, and Zahra Mansoor to explore the image as an active narrator of experience. Working across painting, drawing, textile-based practices, and the neo-miniature, these artists engage with the capacity of images to hold, transmit, and transform memory. Their works do not merely depict stories; they generate them. Through fragments, symbols, gestures, and material traces, they invite viewers into narratives that move between personal recollection and collective history, while drawing upon visual traditions and cultural inheritances that resonate across South Asia.

For centuries, visual culture in the region has served not only as a repository of knowledge and memory but also as a means through which societies narrate themselves. Among South Asia's most enduring artistic traditions are miniature painting and textile production, practices that evolved in close dialogue through shared systems of patronage, craftsmanship, and exchange. Miniature paintings documented political histories and intimate encounters, while textiles encoded regional identities, trade routes, and networks of cultural exchange through pattern and ornament.

 Often produced within the same cultural and courtly milieus, these art forms shared visual vocabularies, with painted depictions of textiles preserving the intricate motifs, materials, and aesthetics that circulated across the region. Together, they reveal how stories become embedded within material forms, carried forward through acts of making, viewing, and interpretation. Both these mediums have also had a resurgence in the contemporary art forms of the region, as seen through the practices of these 5 artists. 

The urgency of such a conversation feels particularly resonant today. In an increasingly divided world, where political, social, and cultural fractures often threaten the bonds that connect communities and shared skills and spirituality, the image offers another way of understanding our shared inheritances. At a moment when histories are contested, identities fragmented, and narratives reduced to simplified national frameworks, art reminds us of the deeper continuities that persist across borders and generations. Rather than presenting South Asia as a fixed geography, the artists in this exhibition approach it as a network of memories, materials, and visual traditions that continue to circulate through time.

The coming together of Marium Agha, Abid Aslam, Arienao Kera, Masuma Halali Khwaja, and Zahra Mansoor represents a rare and timely conversation. Working from distinct contexts and artistic positions, they are united by a sustained engagement with storytelling as a critical artistic strategy and by a shared commitment to the transformative potential of hunar. Through references to miniature painting, textile traditions, craft practices, ornament, landscape, and personal memory, they reveal how images can operate simultaneously as archives, witnesses, and acts of imagination. In bringing these artists into dialogue, APRE Art Mumbai affirms its commitment to fostering conversations that transcend division and foreground the cultural connections that continue to bind the region. Their collective presence serves as a reminder that shared skill, artistic exchange, and acts of making have long formed a common language across South Asia.

The artists presented here continue this lineage. Together, these works remind us that storytelling is not confined to language alone. Images, too, possess the capacity to narrate, preserve, and imagine. Through acts of visual invention, the artists participate in a longer tradition of hunar; one in which making is not simply an aesthetic act, but a cultural and spiritual practice through which histories are carried forward and connections sustained.

- Noor Ahmed is curator of Karachi Biennale 2027