This archive covers the narratives embedded in the micro history of the last four decades. The columns, articles, publications, curatorial projects are critical interventions that disentangle strands of recent history through the lens of coloniality, gender concerns and societal challenges. These are maps of memories and lived experiences that challenge erasures and discontinuities, half- truths and stereotypes to imagine a tomorrow, with justice and agency.

The acclaimed journalist, Zubeida Mustafa understood the importance of culture as a catalyst of change and invited me to write for the Opinion Pages of Dawn, a rare honor for an art critic. Mainstream dailies and monthlies for which I wrote , provided the opportunity to include a wider readership in the conversation on the transformative power of art.

While collating the material I revisited memories of publications that were instrumental in creating space for art discourse in Pakistan but don’t exist any longer . The Frontier Post where I started my journey in 1990 and the iconic Newsline that I wrote for several decades. Gallery Dawn, a weekend magazine of Daily Dawn devoted to art, that carried The Critical Space , my first ever column . They all lost the battle of survival to inflation and shrinking space for freedom of expression. A funding crisis also shut down NuktaArt, Pakistan’s only contemporary art journal run by art critics just after it completed its ten years in print. As a founder and its editor, this was a particularly sad moment. It however, makes me happy to see its legacy of independent critical writing, groundbreaking editorial design and South South exchange is being acknowledged by researchers and new entrants in the field.

Several titans of the art world of Pakistan have helped me to understand the important task of documenting the nascent history of postcolonial societies. Ali Imam with his invaluable archive of art press clippings, Jalaluddin Ahmed, who was not only the publisher of Art and the Islamic World but a zealous advocate of research and documentation. Dr Akbar Naqvi’s influential book and Meher Afroz’s art practice reinforce the importance of epistemic continuity. London based Rasheed Araeen, who with the Third Text and his radical art practice, has globalized the debate on multiple modernities and the aesthetic knowledge of non- Western people. It is to these significant thinkers that I would like to dedicate this archive of my critical practice.