Footnotes

Provenance
Property from a private collection, UK.

Exhibited
MK Gallery, 7th October 2023 - 28th January 2024, England.
The Box, 17th February 2024 - 2nd June 2024, England.

Published
Emily Hannam, Hamad Nasar, Fay Blanchard & Anthony Spira, Beyond the page: South Asian Miniatures and Britain, 1600 to now, Great Britain, 2023, pg. 172.

Zeeshan is renowned for his innovative approach to miniature painting, which he reimagines through provocative themes, unconventional materials, and digital interventions. Born in 1980 in Mirpurkhas, Sindh, Pakistan, Zeeshan trained at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, where he specialised in traditional Indo-Persian miniature painting. While deeply rooted in this classical discipline, Zeeshan has consistently pushed its boundaries to explore issues of violence, power, censorship, and the complexities of contemporary identity.

Zeeshan's practice is marked by a bold engagement with socio-political realities, often using the meticulous techniques of miniature painting to present scenes that are unsettling, ironic, or darkly humorous. His work critiques systems of control and the rewriting of history, frequently employing faceless figures, symbols of authority, or fragmented bodies to comment on institutionalised violence and collective amnesia. Dying Miniature, exemplifies his style, blending traditional aesthetics with a charged, contemporary narrative of conflict and erasure.

In Dying Miniature, 'he has used sandpaper as the base, rather than wasli and has applied graphite, silver leaf and copper. The base paper is particularly pertinent, as it forgoes the smooth surface of the polished wasli...for the roughness of a paper used usually to strip painted surfaces, is an ironic gesture in its reversal of the actual material process. Zeeshan's use of such unlikely material is deliberately set up as a challenge to the mythical aura created around miniature practise today.' (Virgina Whiles, 'Social, Political and historical formations relating to Miniature practise, Art and Polemic in Pakistan: Cultural politics and tradition in contemporary miniature painting, London, 2010)