Abstract:
Existing scholarship on Pakistani art politics conventionally frames 1988 (the end of Zia-ul-Haq’s military rule) as a definitive rupture, framing art censorship as a closed chapter confined to the Zia era and post-1988 period as one of democratic transition and global artistic recognition. This linear narrative renders the 2019 Karachi Biennale (KB19) censorship incident—where artist Adeela Suleman’s Killing Fields of Karachi was sealed and destroyed by law enforcement and disavowed by the biennale organizing committee—a “missing event” unaccounted for in academic discourse. Adopting Foucauldian eventualization, stratigraphic metaphor, and the framework of intergenerational dissident networks, this study retrieves the KB19 incident from news archives and situates it within a continuous historical stratum stretching from 1983 to the present. It argues that the 2019 censorship is not a residual echo of 1980s repression but a structural recurrence of Pakistan’s women’s dissident network, which originated with the 1983 Women Artists Manifesto and was reactivated across generations in the 2019 solidarity open letter. By comparing the two texts, this research reveals evolving modalities of censorship—from named state repression under martial law to anonymized neoliberal censorship and institutional self-censorship—alongside the persistent structural grammar of artistic dissent, including professional identity-based resistance, metaphorical political expression, intergenerational institutional transmission, and strategic deployment of silence.
Keywords:
Pakistani contemporary art; art censorship; Karachi Biennale 2019; women artists’ dissident network; stratigraphic analysis; intergenerational transmission
