Farazeh Syed’s exhibition ‘All the Women in Me’ at Karachi’s Canvas Gallery prosecutes the colonial archive: its camera, its titles, its voracious gaze, while nurturing — patiently and insistently — the lives of women crushed by that record.

The exhibition brings together paintings on canvas and wasli that rework found colonial photographs of South Asian women, set in conversation with intimate personal images drawn from the artist’s familial past. Syed uses photographs of her legendary grandmother, the singer Malika Pukhraj, who spent her later years in Lahore. Syed spent several formative years closely attached to her and says that the photographs “represent a South Asian woman from the same era who was fierce and formidable in her strength and vulnerable and fallible in her humanness. They, thus, serve as a contrast to the denial of individuality, autonomy and agency in the colonial images.”

Syed reads violence in these images — violence through detached reflection, through distortion and erasure, through a gaze that spoke for women while denying them voice. In her paintings, that violence is neither sensationalised nor aestheticised — it is held in tension with a repaired register.

The works on wasli are the most evident attempt to undo this damage. By reimagining it through a South Asian female gaze, Syed loosens the archival grip that once fixed these women in place. Faces gain expression rather than vacancy and bodies shed their performative submission. The women are no longer captives to a controlling eye but conversers within a visual language that recognises them as individuals.

Farazeh Syed’s recent exhibition takes visual documentation of South Asian women by British colonialists and upends their ways of looking

Syed’s long engagement with the female body — shaped by years of rigorous training under the artist Iqbal Hussain who passed away recently, and informed by her immersion in music — rolls here with quiet confidence. The bodies in ‘All the Women in Me’ are not arranged to please. They occupy space with weight and purpose. Even when seated or motionless, they seem internally active, absorbed in private thought or reminiscence. The women are not there to be seen, they are there to be.

Colour and rhythm do much of the work. Flora and fauna appear as carriers of memory. These elements recall the orchards and animals of her grandmother’s Lahore home, and they also function symbolically, suggesting growth, interdependence and the non-human witnesses to women’s lives that archives ignore. While this exhibition is unmistakably political, the paintings do not lecture. The exhibition trusts viewers to feel their way into its arguments, to recognise the unease of the colonial image and the relief of its undoing.

Syed’s interdisciplinary practice, her scholarship, her teaching, her deep relationship to music, all quietly underwrite the exhibition. One feels the discipline of years spent drawing the human form, the patience of research and the lyricism borrowed from raga and rhythm. I imagine that the “me” of the title is not autobiographical but instead expands outwards, encompassing mothers and daughters, known women and unnamed ones, those photographed and those who escaped the lens.

In a wasli painting derived from a colonial ethnographic photograph of a seated woman, the artist pares the scene down to its essentials. The Victorian paraphernalia that once framed the subject, such as long curtains, furniture, architectural prompts, has been stripped away. What remains is the woman, rendered with a gravity that counterattacks submission. Her eyes no longer slip past the viewer in rehearsed vacancy and instead hold a quiet, inward resolve.

The canvases based on photographs of Syed’s grandmother operate as a different chronicle altogether. Her figure fills the frames with unrepentant presence. The brushwork is emphatic but not forceful. Here, distinctiveness emphasises itself through various specifics: the tilt of the head, the compactness of the torso, the unapologetic weight of age and experience. This is not a metaphorical woman but a person whose authority derives from having lived.

Across the exhibition, moments like these accrue importance. The women are no longer frozen in time and are instead allowed to exist within it. In doing so, Syed offers more than a critique of the archive. She models an alternative archival practice that is grounded in empathy, composition and the determination that women’s bodies are not sites of display, but storehouses of lived knowledge.

‘All the Women in Me’ was on display at Canvas Gallery, Karachi from January 20-29, 2026

Rumana Husain is a writer, artist and educator. She is the author of two coffee-table books on Karachi, and has authored and illustrated 90 children’s books

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 1st, 2026

“We were a bunch of students picnicking at [Karachi’s coastal] Mubarak Village. We spent the entire day there trying to catch fish by lowering a string into the water from the rocks, but we caught nothing. By evening, we were not just empty-handed and hungry but sunburnt as well.” Deep sea freediver and spearfishing instructor Akif Raj laughs at the memory from 20 years ago. “What a waste of time and effort it was.”

Akif found himself watching a freediving video on YouTube one day. He says he had always felt a pull towards adventure sports. “I did not play cricket or football, neither did I ride bicycles as a kid. I did think about scuba diving but its equipment was too expensive. But the YouTube video got me thinking. I realised that one doesn’t need any equipment except for a spear, maybe. I built a spear from an aluminium rod for myself,” he says. 

“I knew swimming already and, after watching more freediving videos on Youtube, I started practising on my own. Honestly, it feels like you are floating in space with zero gravity when you are under water. That spear I had built came in handy after two years, when I managed to hunt my first fish, a 200g yellowfin bream.”

Akif waxes on about his first catch. “It wasn’t easy, as it required going very near the prey,” he says. “I was so proud of my accomplishment that I did not let anyone touch my catch after bringing it home, though my mother wanted to cook it. I kept it in the freezer, so I could take it out and admire it whenever I wanted. I did that often until, one day, when a cat ran off with my prized possession.” He laughs.   

Pakistan’s first deep sea freediver and spearfishing instructor learnt his trade from YouTube videos. But he’s now trained thousands of others and dreams of representing the country in international competitions

Looking to improve on his weaponry, Akif frequented the junk and scrap market in Karachi’s Shershah, where he was lucky to come across an underwater gun. “But it needed repairs. The stretchable rubber part in it, which created its slingshot effect, broke after only one use. I had to mend it somehow. I tried to replace the part using the air bladder inside a football and rubber sheets, but it was not working. Then, one day, while lending support to a friend whose uncle was on his deathbed in a hospital, I found exactly what I was looking for in the tubing of a blood pressure checking device. I wished the uncle well and left in a hurry to rush to the medical supply shops, where I asked for the tubing,” he says. 

The repairs to the gun helped Akif catch many fish underwater. But while he would bring all his catch home with him, Akif wouldn’t let anyone cook the fish. “They were too beautiful to eat,” he explains wistfully.

Meanwhile, his mother was getting very sick and tired of all the fish. “It came to this that, when I returned home, she would only let me inside if I were empty-handed. If I came with a catch, she would tell me to go back to where I found it,” he chuckles. 

“Her attitude forced me to sell my catches. The first time I sold a fish I had hunted, I sold it for nine thousand rupees. It was good money, 17 to 18 years ago,” he shares. It gave Akif encouragement to hunt more fish and sell them. Once, he didn’t come home for two days because he was hunting for fish. That is how he made Rs30,000 by selling those two days’ catch.

More money started coming in this way, enabling him to improve on his equipment. First, he ordered for himself a pair of swim fins from Lebanon. Later, he was approached by a brand, Triton, from Ukraine. They had heard about him and offered him sponsored equipment, which included better diving gear and hunting equipment. 

“I also started educating people about freediving through social media. It also got me more fame and more sponsors. I am a brand ambassador for seven companies now that produce high-quality gear for freediving and spearfishing, besides being their freediving product tester,” he tells me.  

A few years ago, Akif also thought of teaching others what he had taught himself. “I wish swimming was made compulsory in our schools,” he says. Starting by teaching his friends for free, he started taking on other students who paid him fees for the classes.

“Today, I have over 2,500 students,” he beams with pride. “I call my course, in which I teach my students to dive as deep as 30 to 40 feet, ‘Zero to Hero’.”

The biggest issue faced by Akif while teaching freediving is getting access to swimming pools. His course spans only four to five days, for which he rents out the pools. The clubs where he conducts his courses want his students to acquire membership, however.

He says there are big international freediving championships taking place in the world all the time, in which he would like to compete. The 2025 CMAS World Championship Freediving Depth took place in Greece, where the top diver hunted a 7kg grouper. “And here we are hunting 30 to 40kg groupers all the time, thanks to Pakistan’s rich marine life,” he says, adding that Pakistani waters have 38 of the world’s best table fish.  

Coming back to international freediving championships, he says that he has an invitation to participate in the next one but can’t because of our country’s lack of understanding about this sport.

“I emailed our sports minister to allow me to represent my country in international freediving competitions, but I was asked why I don’t dive with a ‘batli’. Yes, he called the diving oxygen cylinders ‘batli’! I tried explaining about freediving to him but he didn’t get it,” he says sadly.

He also informs me that neighbouring India has no freediver but he has trained so many here in Pakistan. Still, he admits, we have no female freediver till now. “That seat is vacant,” he smiles. 

In the meanwhile, Akif keeps himself busy in his own freediving adventures. He says that freediving also promotes sustainable and selective fishing. “Otherwise our fishing practices, where our fishermen often use illegal mesh, catch the smaller fish or eggs too, which is devastating for marine life,” he says. 

Akif shares an incident where he found a bottlenose dolphin calf tangled in such a net. “It was crying. I approached it with the intention of freeing it, and its mother came too. I swear, she looked like she was praying as she watched me cut away the net.

“It took me half an hour to release it but, in doing so, I gained the friendship of the dolphins. The mother, in particular, recognises my boat. Whenever I go out to sea, in the winter mostly, she comes. And she brings me her new babies, too, along with gifts. Once she brought me an empty cold drink bottle. At another time, she brought me a pink shopper,” he laughs.

The writer is a member of staff. X: @HasanShazia

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 1st, 2026