The solo exhibition of Amin Rehman opened at the Chawkandi Art Gallery, reinscribing power, labour, and the geopolitics of vision. At Chawkandi Ar
The solo exhibition of Amin Rehman opened at the Chawkandi Art Gallery, reinscribing power, labour, and the geopolitics of vision.
At Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi, Amin Rehman’s latest exhibition, Strands of Pearls: A New Awakening, opened on 1st October 2026. It expands his sustained engagement with globalization, neo-colonialism, and the material afterlives of empire. Through a body of mixed media paintings, neon installations, and a video work in dialogue with Sri Lankan researcher Uditha Devapriya, Rehman examines the socio-political reverberations of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in South Asia. The exhibition reconfigures the region’s entanglement with global capital into an aesthetic of sedimented meaning, layered, overwritten, and persistently incomplete.
Rehman employs a palimpsest technique, integrating text and image through a process of erasure and re-inscription. This visual strategy resonates with the historical layering of colonial and postcolonial encounters that continue to shape the geopolitics of the region. Works such as People from There and While Crossing the Border evoke both literal and symbolic crossings, alluding to displacement, economic precarity, and the uncertain agency of those living within development’s margins. Each composition reads as an archive in flux, fragments of language, maps, and bureaucratic phrasing intertwine with painterly gestures, producing a visual field where state rhetoric and human narrative coexist in tension.
Rehman’s neon work, Mamlakat-e-Khudaa-daad, draws upon the language of national piety to expose the contradictions of statehood sanctified by divine rhetoric. The work’s luminous text, suspended between reverence and irony, extends his ongoing exploration of language as both medium and ideology. Similarly, the inclusion of portraits, Raja, Shantha, Ines, and others, complicates the abstraction of geopolitical discourse by foregrounding lived realities. These figures, rendered through mixed media and textual overlays, become witnesses to transnational projects that often render them invisible.
By incorporating video as dialogic material, Rehman situates artistic production within a broader epistemic framework, blurring the distinction between research, activism, and aesthetics. This interdisciplinarity underscores his position as a transnational artist whose practice traverses geographies, from Lahore to Toronto, and who consistently interrogates the power structures that define cultural exchange.
Formally, the works oscillate between documentary and abstraction. Their surfaces bear the marks of revision and concealment, mirroring the bureaucratic opacity of global infrastructure politics. The use of text fragments, sometimes legible, sometimes erased, echoes the instability of truth in the era of strategic diplomacy.
Strands of Pearls: A New Awakening thus extends Rehman’s long-standing inquiry into the aesthetics of resistance. It situates South Asia not as a peripheral geography but as a critical site for rethinking the ethics of development and the visuality of empire. Within the broader discourse of postcolonial art, Rehman’s practice resists both romantic nationalism and cynical detachment, insisting instead on the persistence of care, critique, and collective memory.
At a time when cultural production is often subsumed by the very economies it seeks to critique, Rehman’s work offers a necessary recalibration, illuminating the costs of progress and the fragile intimacies that survive in its shadow.