Lala Rukh
In the Round
Sharjah Art Foundation

A vocal activist, yet a quiet artist. An admired professor and founder of collective initiatives, yet rarely exhibited herself. The many sides of Lala Rukh (1948–2017) emerged from “In the Round,” the first major international survey of the late Lahore-based artist, curated by Hoor Al Qasimi and Natasha Ginwala at the Sharjah Art Foundation’s Al Mureijah Art Spaces. Surveying more than three decades of her artistic practice—spanning women’s movement protest posters, figurative drawings, delicate prints, experimental photographs, and video and sound installations, as well as archival photographs from her life—“In the Round” revealed not the striking contrast of Rukh’s diverse modalities of her activities but the continuities and resonances across myriad forms. 

Two pivotal events in Rukh’s life formed points of anchor and resistance. In 1959 her father Hayat Ahmad Khan established the All Pakistan Music Conference, dedicated to reviving Hindustani classical music. She and her sisters’ involvement with the organization and its many influential participants engendered a lifelong appreciation of South Asian cultural heritage, leading her to later study calligraphy under a master practitioner while she was head of the Master’s program in visual art at Lahore’s National College of Arts. The culmination of those interests manifested in her final installation, Rupak (2016), where we see diamond-shaped qat strokes demarcating a classical rhythm system of the seven-beat taal across 88 musical-score like drawings arrayed on shelves around the walls of a large gallery. At the room’s center was an animated video projection showing white qat marks dancing across a black screen to a tabla’s percussive rhythm.