Lala Rukh I [First Part of the Exhibition]
The importance of staying quiet
Grey Noise Gallery, Dubai
September 18 – November 5, 2025
In 2014, The importance of staying quiet was exhibited in Hong Kong as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art. Conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, the presentation brought together works spanning six decades, between the 1950s and 2010s, and included Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985), Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999), Lala Rukh (1948–2017), Rashid Rana (b. 1968), Hamra Abbas (b. 1976), Sara Salman (b. 1978), Ali Kazim (b. 1979), Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979), Fahd Burki (b. 1981), and Iqra Tanveer (b. 1983).
Rather than showing signature works often associated with these artists – most of whom are not minimalists – the exhibition highlighted moments where they pared form and image down to their most distilled elements. The proposition was that minimal vocabularies in Pakistan are not anomalies or exceptions, but part of a more layered understanding of artistic abstraction in the region.
A decade later, The importance of staying quiet returns as a year-long dialogic exchange between Butt and Ansari and will include a series of presentations shaped through discursive encounters. This time, the programme will examine the development of practices that have deliberately engaged minimal or abstract strategies. This exercise is not only about tracing a lineage of abstraction, but about sustaining a way of looking that requires deeper reading and slower appreciation.
The first exhibition of The importance of staying quiet opens with Lala Rukh’s photographic archives from her years at the University of Chicago (1974–76).
While pursuing a second master’s degree at nearly thirty, Lala Rukh already had a trained eye, but these images reveal the sharpening of her framing and the intent of her gaze. This exhibition revisits that gaze, bringing together early works that carry a cinematic sense of composition before arriving at her later language of minimal abstraction.
Photography was central to Lala Rukh’s life yet largely unseen by the public until Sagar (2017) offered a first glimpse into how her retinal memory developed. The exhibition included photographic documentation of rivers and seas across India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Burma, shot during her travels between 1992 and 2005. Each composition follows a specific format, where water bodies, the horizon, and the sky feature in varying proportions. The absence of people and objects is consistent. Among the countless images she took, Lala Rukh’s selection for the exhibition revealed solitude and an intimacy with the waterscapes, preserving fleeting moments in time.
The Chicago photographs, however, are different. They are not minimal or abstract. They contain architecture, people, animals, objects, and most importantly, construct narratives. Additionally, the ‘set’ and direction recall filmic technique. Where a person or an animate body is absent, the scene is weighted with arrival or departure. These photos document Lala’s new surroundings and influences. The artist was broadening her perspective, and encountering art, music, and politics that encouraged experimentation. While these elements are present in the photographs, they are not the main subject of this presentation. Instead, the elemental techniques of printing – resized reproductions of film negatives, and pairing frames in diptychs, triptychs, and other polyptych sequences – are centred.
Lala Rukh’s works on photo paper and other forms of mixed media printing are more clearly offshoots of her photography practice. But her characteristic affinity for rigour, design, and precision can also be seen at play here. Together they foreshadow the ways her later works were composed, executed, and presented.
These images mark an artist testing how vision and perception could be distilled into structure, laying the foundations of a radical practice. Nearly half a century later, they allow for a nuanced reading of an artist whose early experiments in framing, sequencing, and looking shaped her language of abstraction. Connections between these photographs and her later works, particularly in their use of colour and compositional discipline, will be explored in Lala Rukh II, the second part of this exhibition.
Although Lala Rukh produced these images with intention – prepared and perhaps shown during her university years – she never formally presented them as artworks. The editors of this presentation therefore frame them carefully as reflective studies within her archive, read in retrospect as a way to trace her process.
Artist Lala Rukh
Lala Rukh (b.1948, Lahore; d. 2017, Lahore / Lived and worked in Lahore, Pakistan) studied art at Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan (MFA) and University of Chicago, USA (MFA). She taught for 30 years at Punjab University, Department of Fine Art and the National College of Arts where she set up the MA(Hons) Visual Art Program in the year 2000. After retiring from teaching, Lala Rukh devoted her time in her studio in Lahore and to activism. She was amongst the foremost feminist activist artists of South Asia.
A selection of exhibitions includes: Göteborg International Biennial For Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden / In Our Own Backyard, Asia Art Archive, Hongkong / Lala Rukh: In the Round, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE / After Rain, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia / Notations on Time, Ishara Art Foundation, UAE / Line, beats and shadows, Kiran Nadar Museum Art, India / Luogo e Segni, Punta della Dogana, Italy / Artist’s Rooms: Lala Rukh, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE / Peindre La Nuit, Centre Pompidou – Metz, France / Documenta 14, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany / For an Image, Faster Than Light – Curated by Bose Krishnamachari, Yinchuan Biennial, Yinchuan, China / The past, the present, the possible – Curated by Eungie Joo, Sharjah Biennial 12, Sharjah, UAE.
GREY NOISE GALLERY
Unit 24, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, UAE
