The Significance of Mobility and the Artistic Practice of Zahoor ul Akhlaq
Mobility informs the work of the Pakistani artist and teacher Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999), who developed an aesthetic that is marked above all by his endless explorations of space as an abstract system. Through study visits to London and Yale, and exploratory travel in South, Central, and West Asia, the artist developed a visual language based on the spatial and structural division of a Mughal miniature painting and a traditional manuscript page, the foundation of which is a gridded pictorial ground and a rectangular frame. This article analyzes the way that mobility inscribed itself onto Akhlaq’s works by viewing his work in terms of its processual, dynamic, transgressive, and transcultural qualities. Given the diversity of the cultural and historic background that informs Akhlaq’s art practice and his conceptual approach to art making, this paper demonstrates that Akhlaq’s grid and frame can be seen as the formal properties that transcend national confines and the then prevalent ideas of a self-contained culture.
Copyright (c) 2023 Simone Wille
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Copyright (c) 2023 Simone Wille
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
