ArtReview: “The Conversation: Nurjahan Akhlaq and Shaan Syed”

Ravi Ghosh
ArtReview, 7 March 2024

Shaan Syed and Nurjuhan Akhlaq discuss the Pakistani diaspora, miniature painting and the ever-present weight of the Partition of India on their lives and work.

Artists Shaan Syed’s and Nurjahan Akhlaq’s time studying at Goldsmiths College overlapped in the mid-2000s, but they didn’t know it back then. They might have been at house parties together, Akhlaq admits. In the south London studios, Toronto-born Syed was exploring making pared-back, spatially self-conscious abstract paintings; and Akhlaq, hailing from Lahore, used collage to understand years of childhood migration from Pakistan to the US and Turkey with her father, the esteemed modernist and educator Zahoor ul Akhlaq.

The pair were only properly introduced earlier this year by a mutual friend, prior to the opening of Syed’s current show Les Rapports at Bradley Ertaskiran in Montréal, where Akhlaq now lives. Syed’s paintings have expanded from abstraction to reflect what he calls his family’s migratory ‘trajectory’ – from the British Raj to the UK and then Canada – and also a host of regional motifs and references, from the Iraqi Great Mosque of Samarra which informed the blocky, ziggurat-shaped paintings in his 2020 exhibition Thank you India, Goodbye Pakistan, Hello England, to the rubber tree which is the starting point for the three double-panel and 29 painted works on linen in Les Rapports.