My first meeting with Meher Afroz goes back half a century when she had just moved to Karachi from Lucknow. Since then, | have followed her career first as her student and later as a friend and art critic, but always as someone who has been inspired by the intense trajectory of this significant artist of Pakistan.

The impenetrable darkness of her early work, while it perplexed many, was for me a space that offered obscure stories of the disenfranchised, the forgotten and of a society losing its moral compass as it clutched on to tools of survival.

Meher is a reflective artist and her oeuvre comes after periods of incubation. Whenever a new body of work appears the audience usually has a visceral response to it, often leaving its conceptual complexity undiscussed. | have always felt the urgency to make visible the deep and dense cultural layers that are sedimented in her oeuvre and map the intersections between her art and history.

My initial dilemma was to decide between authoring the book or inviting others to contribute. | opted for the second, as | have written extensively on Meher’s art practice since the 1990s, which is already available. Besides this, she was also a part of my first book Pioneering Perspectives (1998). Putting together an anthology also held greater appeal as it would give me the opportunity to explore her art through the lens of diverse art thinkers. Texts by art critics, curators, art historians, artists, a filmmaker, an anthropologist.