Latest news with #ImranQureshi
Business Recorder
23-04-2025
- Business
- Business Recorder
KE asks Power Div for consultation on NEP
ISLAMABAD: The Power Division's alleged apathy with respect to consultation process on the National Electricity Plan (NEP) has irritated K-Electric (KE), well informed sources told Business Recorder. In a letter to Secretary Power, KE's Chief Regulatory Affairs Imran Qureshi referred to KE's letter of January 15, 2025 regarding the NEP 2023-2027 and eligibility criteria (Electric Power Supplier Licenses) Rules 2023 ('Supplier Rules') notified by the federal government along with earlier correspondence on this matter wherein the power utility company submitted its comments to the Power Division for consideration and incorporation of the same accordingly. According to the power utility company, considering the significance of the matter and possible implications on KE and its consumers, it also requested for a one-to-one consultative session to discuss KE's comments, as well as, certain recommendations on the notified NEP including the implementation timelines for certain strategic directives and on the supplier rules, as well. However, despite continuous correspondence from KE, the response from Power Division is still awaited. KE explains power generation cost in Dec KE, in its letter of April 8, 2204 reiterated that a thorough consultation with all stakeholders is critical for effective implementation of the NE Plan and supplier rules, as well as, for the sustainability of the sector, including the proposed transition towards opening up of the market under the Competitive Trading Bilateral Contracts Market (CTBCM) framework. 'KE acknowledges and highly appreciates the ongoing sector reforms, and we are confident that a well-considered and collaborative transition, finalised in consultation with stakeholders, will not only serve the best interests of consumers but also send a positive signal to both existing and prospective investors in Pakistan,' Qureshi said adding that support and understanding of Secretary Power in this matter is crucial. He also assured engagement in constructive dialogue to ensure a smooth and beneficial transition for all stakeholders involved. Earlier, in his letter to Secretary Power, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Syed Moonis Abdullah Alvi stated that KE had sent its comments on the NEP which need to be considered for incorporation in the plan accordingly. 'Considering the significance of the matter and possible implications on KE and its consumers, KE also requested for a one-to-one consultative session to discuss KE'S comments, as well as, certain recommendations on the notified NE Plan including the implementation timelines for certain strategic directives and on the supplier rules, as well. However, despite continuous correspondence from KE it is most respectfully submitted that response is awaited in this regard,' he added. Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
Gulf Today
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Tirmizi lauds Qureshi's ‘Vanishing Points'
Ambassador Faisal Niaz Tirmizi, Pakistan's Envoy to the UAE, visited the exhibition 'Vanishing Points' by renowned Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi at Alserkal Avenue. The exhibition, curated by Nada Raza, Director of the Alserkal Arts Foundation, ran from April 13–20 and featured Qureshi's innovative works, including photography, video, paintings and a site-specific installation. During the tour, Ambassador Tirmizi received a detailed briefing from Curator Nada Raza on the conceptual depth and technical mastery of Qureshi's artworks. The Ambassador commended the artist's ability to capture Pakistan's cultural vibrancy, stating, 'Imran Qureshi's art vividly transforms Pakistan's day-to-day life into breathtaking visual narratives. 'Through his lens, the bustling streets, Sufi shrines, and architectural heritage come alive, arising a deep sense of connection. 'His depiction of a Sufi tomb with Qawwali resonating in the background is particularly mesmerising and emotionally powerful.' Ambassador Tirmizi emphasised the role of art as soft power in enhancing Pakistan's global image and fostering cross-cultural understanding. He highlighted the exceptional talent of Pakistani artists and called for greater international recognition of their contributions to contemporary art. Reaffirming the Embassy's commitment to promoting Pakistani culture, the Ambassador assured full support for future collaborations with institutions like Alserkal Avenue to showcase Pakistani artists in the UAE. 'We are eager to collaborate on platforms that amplify Pakistan's rich artistic heritage on the global stage,' he added. A recipient of Pakistan's Sitara-i-Imtiaz and France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Imran Qureshi is a pioneering figure in contemporary miniature painting. His works are part of prestigious collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, among others.
Arab News
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
At Dubai exhibition, Pakistan's envoy says art can shape global perception of his country
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates Faisal Niaz Tirmizi, said on Sunday art could serve as a powerful tool of soft power for his country, helping project its positive image on the world stage, as he visited an exhibition by a leading Pakistani artist in Dubai on its concluding day. Titled 'Vanishing Points,' the event ran from April 13 to 20 as part of Alserkal Art Week and was held at Concrete, a prominent contemporary art space at Dubai's Alserkal Avenue. Curated by Nada Raza, Director of the Alserkal Arts Foundation, the show featured Imran Qureshi's latest body of work, spanning photography, video, painting and a site-specific installation, offering a vivid meditation on urban life and the visual chaos of South Asian cityscapes. Known for pioneering a contemporary revival of Indo-Persian miniature painting, Qureshi's practice blends traditional techniques with modern perspectives. 'Imran Qureshi's art vividly transforms Pakistan's day-to-day life into breathtaking visual narratives,' Tirmizi said after touring the exhibition. 'Through his lens, the bustling streets, Sufi shrines and architectural heritage come alive, arising a deep sense of connection,' he continued. 'His depiction of a Sufi tomb with Qawwali resonating in the background is particularly mesmerizing and emotionally powerful.' The ambassador emphasized the importance of art as a form of diplomacy, saying it could promote cross-cultural understanding and enhance Pakistan's global standing. He also pledged support for future cultural collaborations in the UAE, particularly with platforms like Alserkal Avenue that promote diverse artistic voices. A recipient of Pakistan's Sitara-i-Imtiaz, one of the country's highest civilian honors, and France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a prestigious distinction recognizing significant contributions to the arts and literature, Qureshi is among the internationally celebrated artists. His works are housed in prominent collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Qureshi's works are also featured in Art Dubai, another major international art fair running in the city. This year's Art Dubai edition includes work by 10 Pakistani artists, reflecting the country's growing presence on the global contemporary art scene.
Khaleej Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Khaleej Times
Art Dubai 2025, Alserkal Art Week: How the city turned into a gallery
Inside the raw, industrial space of Concrete in Dubai's Alserkal Avenue, Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi's Vanishing Points unfolds like a handwoven story. The work, made from dyed nylon rope, stretches from floor to ceiling — part installation, part manuscript. It draws on the tradition of charpai weaving, once a household craft in South Asia, which is now disappearing. 'It's vanishing slowly with time in this age of technology and science,' Qureshi said. With this piece, he hopes to keep that memory alive — one knot at a time. The installation is massive — spanning more than 30 metres overhead — and the colour palette pulses with repetition: red, yellow, red, blue. From inside, the piece looks out onto the Alserkal lawn, where people line up outside coffee shops and concept stores, beverages in hand. Just beneath the tapestry of ropes, near a wall lined with woven panels in the same tones, Qureshi has placed a few charpai chairs. You can sit. Look up. It's quiet here — deliberately so. He gives you space to pause, rest, and remember the kind of craftsmanship that once lived in homes, now reimagined in a space built for looking, thinking, and maybe holding on. He built Vanishing Points like a manuscript, stitched across the air. Each panel has its own frame and uneven border, like the layout of an Islamic miniature. In the middle: repeating sky patterns dotted with stars. One side is red with blue stars, the other blue with red. 'They look very similar, but they are not,' he said. The patterns pull from tradition, but the palette — drawn loosely from the colours of the American flag — carries quiet commentary. He's not interested in prescribing meaning. 'Everyone has their own way of looking,' he added. 'The work has many, many layers.' In the inbetween That idea — of art responding to place, not just existing in it — also runs through Between a Beach and a Slope, Alserkal Avenue's public art commission curated by Fatoş Üstek. 'Alserkal is situated in a liminal space,' she said. 'It lies between contrasting geographies — beach and slope, desert and skyline. That in-betweenness isn't just physical; it resonates metaphorically.' Shilpa Gupta's Still They Know Not What I Dream is a large light sculpture featuring the reversed phrase: 'Still they know not what I dream.' Displayed in glowing text and flipped backward, the words are deliberately difficult to read, forcing viewers to slow down and decipher them. This intentional distortion mirrors the ways voices — especially dissenting or marginalised ones — are often silenced, misunderstood, or hidden in plain sight. For Üstek, the avenue's openness to experimentation and refusal to conform to traditional institutional models made it the right site for a project built around movement, ambiguity, and public encounter. 'The avenue allows for a more porous form of engagement,' she said. 'People encounter the works as part of their daily rhythm. That creates a different kind of intimacy — one rooted in chance and discovery.' People encounter the works as part of their daily rhythm. That creates a different kind of intimacy — one rooted in chance and discovery" Fatoş üStek As someone who's worked internationally across formats and cities, Üstek sees the UAE's evolving art scene as both promising and at a turning point. 'There are so many artists here whose practices resist categorisation,' she said. 'They deserve platforms that match their complexity.' For her, curators in the region have a role to play not just in presenting what's visible, but in surfacing what has long been overlooked — stories shaped by migration, indigenous knowledge, and ways of making that fall outside dominant frames. That same complexity — rooted in displacement, memory, and motion — threads through Iranian artist Hadieh Shafie's work. In her first solo presentation in Dubai, Shafie brings time, memory, and language into orbit through Resonant Turns, a series of hand-cut, layered works that blur drawing, photography, and text. 'The core of my work has to do with the passage of time,' she said. In the Sapphire series, she layers Farsi script onto a cotton museum board, then cuts and twists the material into circles — creating whirlpools of colour, poetry, and motion. 'It's akin to throwing stones on water,' she explained. Her own image appears for the first time in one drawing, meeting the viewer with what she calls a 'soft, aggressive' gaze. Infused with fragments of poetry and childhood memories of drawing grass during wartime in Iran, the work is deeply personal yet open-ended — rooted in place, but always moving. Now, Shafie is based in New York city. But during her visit to the UAE, she said: 'I feel like I'm the closest I've ever been to the motherland…We have borders, but I feel like I am from here.' This year's Alserkal Art Week runs under the theme 'a wild stitch' — a fitting phrase for a region where artists are constantly threading together memory, identity, and place in ways that feel both personal and political. But it's not just about what's on the walls. Across the UAE, art is being backed — not just shown. Alserkal continues to anchor the grassroots side of things, while Art Dubai has grown into a heavyweight on the global fair circuit, bringing in more than 120 galleries and platforming voices from the Global South. Together, they reflect a bigger shift. Dubai isn't just a stop on the art map anymore. It's shaping the terms — blending local textures with global momentum and building a scene on its own terms. And that shift isn't just aesthetic — it's structural. Dubai Culture has rolled out new funding models to help local galleries show up on the global circuit, while programmes like Campus Art Dubai — part mentorship, part hands-on training — and the Dubai Collection — the city's first public art archive — focus on building talent and memory at home. These aren't side projects. They're part of a bigger push to make culture stick. In 2024, Dubai Culture launched a grant covering half the cost for galleries showing at international fairs — a clear signal of where the city's placing its bets. And the return is real: Art Dubai 2023 brought in Dh143 million in direct economic impact. This isn't just about soft power anymore — it's business. This April is a test for artists and curators in the region — and some are making the most of it, showing work across both Art Dubai and Alserkal Art Week. At Art Week, Dastan Gallery and Parallel Circuit teamed up with Zaal Art Gallery and Leila Heller Gallery for a collaborative show titled Maydan: A Living Agora, curated by Behrang Samadzadegan. Set inside Alserkal's A1 space, the show pulls together artists who are thinking about what it means to share space — not just physically but also socially and conceptually. The 'maydan' (gathering space) here isn't a metaphor. It's built into the structure: a room for exchange, disagreement, and reflection. Some works lean heavily on narrative, others play with form, but all of them sit within that same tension — how we gather, and what we carry into those gatherings. At Art Dubai, Dastan Gallery is showing in both the Contemporary and Bawwaba sections — offering two different but connected views into its orbit. In the Contemporary section, the gallery presents a wide mix of works by artists it has shown over the years, from established names to younger voices. The setup shifts throughout the week, allowing the booth to evolve — less static showcase, more living archive. Over in Bawwaba, Parallel Circuit is showing a solo presentation of Mohammad Piryaee. His sculptures look like they've been pulled from a buried past. Paired with his fragile monument-like drawings, the work sits squarely in this year's curatorial theme: finding common ground through memory in a time of dislocation. If art in the UAE is changing — getting bigger, more visible, and more professionalised — Crit Club is where that change gets tested. Held inside Jossa by Alserkal, one performance-based talk series turned public critique into something closer to live theatre: unscripted, tense, sometimes funny, and often messy by design. At the start of each session, the audience was asked the night's core question — yes or no — and the room, packed wall to wall, would raise their hands. Conceived by Cem A., an artist with a background in anthropology and the mind behind the art meme page @freeze_magazine, Crit Club intentionally departs from the polished format of traditional panel talks. 'This is a vulnerable format and kind of untenable,' he said. The idea was to artificially create a space for real disagreement, even if it's performative. Each conversation was part debate, part staged confrontation, and part genuine inquiry into where the art world stands now. While much of April is about visibility — fairs, openings, polished booths — Crit Club pointed to something deeper: an art scene learning how to think out loud. As the UAE's art world grows more public and more professional, spaces like this feel increasingly necessary — not to present the scene, but to shape it.
What's On
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- What's On
Alserkal Art Week 2025: Welcome dissent with A Wild Stitch
No neat stitches at Alserkal Art Week… Alserkal Art Week is back in the new year – in great news for all the art enthusiasts, culture crawlers and fine philosophy fiends – and this year, the week-long programme invites you to lose yourself and discover a new meaning of rebellion with A Wild Stitch , the theme of this stint. Running from April 13 to 20, this edition comes as a challenger to singular perspectives, as always responding to the need of the hour and the region, and reaffirming it's role in sparking a flame of unabashed, bold conversation around the present. Singularity is a fallacy, but why? Why do we need perspectives of variety, of multiplicity, hybridity? Through this curation, take an alternate look at narratives that refuse to be neatly stitched into submission. The flagship exhibition The highlight of the week, the flagship exhibition of this edition is Vanishing Points debuting new works by Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi, presented for the first time at Concrete. Curated by Nada Raza, the exhibition is all about miniature art and showcases photography, video, painting, and site-specific installations by Qureshi. Qureshi is a leading figure from the acclaimed Lahore school of contemporary Indo-Persian miniature painting, renowned for his innovative reimagining of this classical form. He captures the layered cityscapes of South Asia, where Mughal and Sikh architecture merge with the post-industrial present, rejecting the singular, narrow gaze of European perspective, by collaborating with skilled practitioners. Public Art Commissions Curated by independent writer and curator Fatoş Üstek, this year's public art commissions across the Avenue include Between a Beach and Slope , inspired by Emirati artist Nujoom Alghanem's poem of the same name and Indian artist Shilpa Gupta's light-text sculpture in The Yard, Still They Know Not What I Dream , gives form to silence and resistance. The commissions will be accompanied by talks by the artists and curator, live block-printing workshops,and a film screening. Majlis Talks Curated by Stephanie Bailey, the Majlis Talks hosts a special edition of Crit Club, a performance project. Framed as a sports tournament, the talks invite participants into a site-specific arena to dialogue and debate on unrealistic questions and impossible positions—drawn from conversations within the UAE art scene. Gallery Exhibitions Alserkal Art Week brings together artists from the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, with 16 galleries presenting exhibitions that confront histories of displacement, resilience, and identity. Some of these include Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons' I Am Soil. My Tears Are Water, Zawyeh Gallery's British-Palestinian artist Bashir Makhoul's The Promise, and Ayyam Gallery showcasing Iraqi-Palestinian Sama Alshaibi's photographs, reconstructing Baghdad's shifting landscapes through LiDAR technology and archives, bodies and identity. Discover the rest of the programme here… Alserkal Art Week, Alserkal Avenue, Apr 13 to 20, @alserkalavenue Images: Supplied > Sign up for FREE to get exclusive updates that you are interested in
