The octagonal corridors of Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS were transformed into a sanctuary for the city’s soul. As part of the Lahore Biennale 03, Lamenting the Beloved City or Pledging Devotion Afresh? curated by Dr Nadhra Shahbaz Khan was an exhibition and a call to reckoning with the intertwined destinies of urbanisation and ecological collapse. Here, nineteen artists grapple with the urgency of climate change, each voice an offering, each work a lament or an invocation. Art, once reflective of mere beauty, now wrestles with the burdens of a planet on the brink.
If the city is suffocating, Ali Baba’s thought-provoking sculptural installation Rise gives that suffocation form—a tall, translucent acrylic box where human legs dangle, suspended in an unnatural state. The gradual shift from opacity to transparency mirrors our descent into ecological chaos. Encased yet trapped, fibreglass legs evoke a chilling sense of isolation, reminiscent of Kafka’s absurdities––the body in exile. This alarming work transcends its materiality in Lahore and beyond, where smog clouds the horizon, and human, bird, and tree resiliencies are tested daily. It becomes a cry for air—a visceral reminder of the fragility of both bodies and ecosystems.
Waste to worship, Poojan Gupta's Wished combines ceremonial practice with ecological critique by transforming pharmaceutical trash into a spiritual sacrifice. Inspired by the Hindu custom of tying Mauli threads around banyan trees to invoke blessings for health and well-being, the piece is a tall prayer column decorated with over 110,000 empty blister packs. The blister packets are elevated above their ordinary origins by Gupta, who threads them onto delicate chains and wraps them around the column. What was formerly a landfill was transformed into a place of shared hope, establishing a meeting point for spiritual devotion and ecological awareness. Fundamentally, her work challenges the paradox of contemporary healthcare procedures: although they save lives, they also cause significant environmental damage due to medical waste. Yet Gupta does not stop at critique; the work offers a poetic reconciliation, suggesting that even waste can hold sacred potential if we reframe our environmental sensibilities. The prayer column becomes a shrine to ecological awareness, reminding us that reverence for the earth can—and must—begin with how we treat its discarded remnants.
Art, once reflective of mere beauty, now wrestles with the burdens of a planet on the brink
Salima Hashmi’s mixed media work, A River Dies of Thirst, transforms the Ravi River into a poignant metaphor for Lahore’s fractured relationship with its natural heritage. Hashmi uses mixed media on paper to capture the ghostly essence of a river that once nurtured the city and its culture, now reduced to an arid and polluted remnant. The muted tones and layered textures evoke the slow erasure of Ravi’s vitality, as if the river itself mourns its fate. Hashmi’s work is wailing for a lifeline severed by human neglect and ecological apathy. In reflecting on Ravi, Hashmi’s art resonates with Wendell Berry’s poignant observation: “The river flows and the seasons turn, and we are their story.” Berry’s words echo the natural rhythm of rivers as witnesses to human history, a rhythm now disrupted in Ravi’s decline. From the British literary tradition, Wordsworth’s poetic invocation and veneration of rivers as sources of solace and spiritual renewal contrasts sharply with Ravi’s present condition—a river no longer able to nourish the city’s body or soul.
Saad Ahmad’s Sailing Through the Times is a stainless-steel etching that speaks to the enduring tension between nature and humanity. The work mirrors the fractured relationship between permanence and transience with earth pigments and impressionistic whispers. The unforgiving yet reflective metal recalls the waterbodies; Ahmad’s artefact questions the ethics of progress that erases its past. The river becomes a metaphor for a city once brimming with life, now gasping under the weight of urban sprawl and smog. Ahmad’s layered and shimmering visual language urges us to pause and remember what we’ve lost in pursuing an unsustainable future.
Nosheen Saeed’s Concrete Plan I and Concrete Plan II articulate poignant irony. Using reinforced concrete and glass, Saeed reflects on the relentless march of urbanisation, where Lahore’s gardens give way to high-rises and the earth’s green is entombed in grey. The works stand as both monuments and warnings, embodying the oxymoron of progress—a process that builds by destroying. Through her deliberate choice of material, Saeed forces the viewer to confront the permanence of human error. Concrete, often associated with strength and durability, becomes a symbol of fragility when viewed through the lens of ecological loss. The glass, meanwhile, captures fleeting reflections, reminding us of the impermanence of beauty amidst concrete jungles.
Similarly, Asif Khan’s Landscapes 1 and 2 (video diptych) show haunting visual meditations on transforming Punjab’s once-thriving agricultural lands into an urban mess and a wasteland. Using drone imagery, Khan captures the aerial perspective of a region gasping under the relentless surge of urbanisation. His works evoke a profound sense of loss, as the fields that once symbolised abundance now appear as fragmented mosaics, scarred by concrete and asphalt. Khan’s use of drones is not merely technological but is seen as aerial elegies. The elevated perspective distances the viewer, mirroring humanity’s estrangement from the earth. Lahore, a city whose gardens were once celebrated in poetry and prose, now bears witness to a stark inversion—its greenery suffocated under the grey sprawl.
Nosheen Saeed’s and Asif Khan’s aeriform works become opuses of the vanishing greens for land that can no longer sustain its history, asking whether we have crossed the threshold of irreparable loss.
On a different note, Nashmia Haroon’s The Aesthetics of a System Default uses scaffolding as a potent metaphor for urbanisation, reimagining it as a net that traps traditional spaces within rigid frameworks of modernity. Drawing parallels to Guy Debord’s critique of urban alienation in “The Society of the Spectacle”, Haroon’s work questions the relentless restructuring of organic environments into mechanical patterns. The octagonal scaffolding encasing the NCA courtyard fountain mirrors the fountain’s form while symbolising the imposed rhythm of urban growth. Haroon critiques the monotony of these systems, such as the chaotic yet systematic Kalma Chowk, highlighting how such progress homogenises spaces while disrupting their essence. By combining photography, video, and installation, she challenged conventional artistic mediums and urged viewers to confront the entanglements of urban transformation.
In Naazish Ata-Ullah’s Shift I and Shift II, archival inkjet prints on Hahnemühle paper, the pandemic's disorienting disruptions find their visual echo–shifting epochs. These prints are not merely compositions but psychological landscapes—fragments of an unsettled world. The delicate and fleeting paper became a metaphor for the tenuous state of existence during COVID-19 when certainties dissolved overnight. The starkness of Ata-Ullah’s medium underscores her philosophical inquiry: how do we navigate the void left by normalcy’s collapse? The works evoke the Japanese concept of “Ma”, the space between things, where absence is as potent as presence. Once fragrant with jasmine, Lahore's air now carries the void of a city struggling to breathe.
Laila Rahman’s work Junoon (Madness of Passion) is a profound meditation on resilience amidst despair. The piece features a lotus flower, a timeless symbol of purity and renewal, emerging from a surface tarred and blackened with sadness. The juxtaposition of the lotus against the dark, viscous tar evokes the cyclical nature of life, where beauty and growth persist even in the most inhospitable conditions. Rahman’s intricate layering of graphite, oil, and gold leaf speaks to the tensions between life’s fragility and its indomitable spirit, offering viewers a contemplative moment to reflect on humanity’s capacity for survival amid adversity. The spiral motif in this potent work mirrors the natural cycles of destruction and rebirth, drawing parallels to the layered history of Lahore itself—a city simultaneously mired in ecological degradation and bursting with cultural vitality. "Rahman’s exploration of the lotus recalls the meditative poise it embodies in Buddhist philosophy, where the flower signifies purity and enlightenment rising above the mire. This interplay between struggle and transcendence mirrors Rahman’s dialogue with themes of spiritual renewal in desolate landscapes."
The show’s philosophical undertones echo Amitav Ghosh’s critique of the “Great Derangement,” in which art and literature often fail to confront the realities of climate change. However, the artists rise to the occasion, bridging the gap between imagination and action. Their works served as mirrors and maps, reflecting the crisis while charting paths toward resilience. In the words of the curator, “I may be a single drop; together, we become an ocean.”
In its diversity, this exhibition formed that ocean—a collective force that challenged the inertia of complacency.