SYDNEY.- Celebrating 30 years of artmaking and featuring more than 100 works, many not seen before in Australia, as well as a newly commissioned installation, Nusra Latif Qureshi: Birds in Far Pavilions is the first major solo exhibition of the Pakistan-born, Melbourne-based artist.

Nusra Latif Qureshi is best known for her multi-layered paintings that revisit musaviri, the tradition of Persian and South Asian miniature painting, from a contemporary perspective. Born in Pakistan in 1973, Qureshi studied at the National College of Arts in Lahore where she trained in the intricate art of musaviri, which was brought from Persia to the Mughal courts of what is now India and Pakistan in the 16th century and developed in the region. Qureshi recontextualises historical archives in collage, photographs and paintings that bear witness to the asymmetries of life and its representation.

The monographic exhibition includes the subtle yet powerful suite of paintings for which Qureshi received the Bulgari Art Award in 2019 and that are now held in the Art Gallery collection. These works speak to her experience of moving to Australia in 2001 and offer a window into the rich and complex history of Pakistan while bearing witness to the conflicts and consequences of colonialism.

A site-specific installation titled Museum of Lost Memories has been commissioned for the exhibition that explores the histories of museum collecting practices and displays objects from the collections of the Art Gallery and the Powerhouse Museum among objects from the artist’s own studio in a series of historical showcases.

Art Gallery of New South Wales director Michael Brand said: ‘This is the first major monographic exhibition of Nusra Latif Qureshi to be presented in a major Australian art museum. At once beautiful and challenging, Qureshi’s works testify to the indelible presence of history and the concurrent persistence of trauma, dislocation and loss, coupled with the uncertainties of love. In her meticulously painted vignettes, singular female figures frequently float among fields of colour, paradoxically inscribed on the page and yet yearning for freedom.

‘This exhibition highlights the Art Gallery’s enduring relationship with Qureshi through the acquisition, research, exhibition and publication of her work, while exploring the ideas that have driven her practice across her impressive career in both Pakistan and Australia,’ Brand said.

Qureshi graduated from the National College of Arts in Lahore in 1995 and continued to lecture there until 2000, and received critical acclaim with shows in Pakistan, the United Kingdom and Finland during this period. In 2001, she moved to Melbourne to take up a Master of Arts by research at the Victorian College of the Arts.​

Her work has been exhibited widely in Afghanistan, Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom and her home countries of Pakistan and Australia. She was included in the 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in 2006, the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and the 15th Sharjah Biennale in 2023. Most recently she was exhibited at the Kunst Historisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Her work is held various Australian and international collections including the British Museum, London; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Parliament House, Canberra; and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Exhibition curator and Art Gallery of New South Wales curator of Asian art Matt Cox said: ‘For Nusra Latif Qureshi, art offers a site of contestation, a way in, a dialogue, a dream, a moment of reflection where subjective histories can divulge new ideas with and against universalising truths.’

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that offers a comprehensive exploration of Qureshi’s process, inspirations and significance in contemporary Australian art. The publication features new writing by five local and international contributors including essays by exhibition curator Matt Cox, Art Gallery director Michael Brand, academic Sugata Ray, arts writer Julie Ewington, curator Esa Epstein and philosopher and psychoanalyst Robyn Adler.

Nusra Latif Qureshi: Birds in Far Pavilions is being presented in the Franco and Amina Belgiorno-Nettis and Family Contemporary Galleries in Naala Nura from 9 November 2024 to 15 June 2025. Entry is free.