Aatish Taseer in The New York Times:
ON A SUMMER day in New York some 20 years ago, the singer and songwriter Ali Sethi (then an aspiring novelist) took me to his apartment off Washington Square Park. Sethi’s parents were family friends of ours in Lahore, Pakistan — his father edited The Daily Times, which my father owned — and he shared his apartment with two Lahori painters, Komail Aijazuddin and Salman Toor. To see Toor’s early works on the walls, enveloped in afternoon gloom, was to be given my first (and perhaps most profound) experience of that phrase the American critic Edmund Wilson once popularized, “the shock of recognition.” Here, I thought, was an artistic talent as raw and conspicuous as any I’d ever seen.
Two decades on, Toor’s talent has been recognized across the globe, most notably with a 2020 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but what I couldn’t have known then was that Toor would be only the brightest star in a firmament of diasporic creativity out of Pakistan. From the haunting voice of the musician Arooj Aftab to the pastorals of the writers Daniyal Mueenuddin and Taymour Soomro, or the lambent note of protest in the expressive nudes of the painter Hiba Schahbaz and the sly subversiveness of the director Saim Sadiq’s film “Joyland” (2022), the meeting of Pakistan and the West, on both sides of the Atlantic, has brought forth a dazzling generation of artists.
More here.
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