‘Garden of Ideas: Contemporary Art from Pakistan’, an exhibition being held at The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto tries to explains the concept of a garden. “Created for pleasure, spiritual reflection, and aesthetic contemplation, gardens have held many meanings,” says its page on the museum’s website. “Beyond their beauty, they represent the human impulse to organise, contain, and collect the natural world. Without cultivation, a garden would cease to exist.”
Six contemporary Pakistani artists will be showcasing their romance with gardens at this exhibition, which will run from September 18 to January 18, 2015. The Aga Khan Museum was inaugurated on September 16.
“The second floor of the museum features two temporary exhibition galleries,” said Azim Alibhai, Chief Communication Consultant at The Aga Khan Museum “The first inaugural exhibition in gallery one is called ‘In Search of the Artist: Signed Paintings and Drawings from the Aga Khan Museum Collection’ and the second is the one featuring Pakistani artists.”
The main floor of the museum features a permanent exhibition gallery, which displays around 250 to 350 of over 1,000 objects from The Aga Khan Museum collection. The Pakistani artists whose works are being showcased at the museum include Bani Abidi, Nurjahan Akhlaq, David Chalmers Alesworth, Aisha Khalid, Atif Khan and Imran Qureshi.
The exhibition is being curated by Sharmini Pereira, a curator-publisher who is based in Sri Lanka and New York.
