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Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration
Originally aired on Monday, October 17th, 2005
A conversation between the curators and one of the artists from the exhibition Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration, which featured a series of works by six contemporary Pakistani artists. The exhibit was held at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum from late 2005 through early 2006 and at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in later 2006.

At the core of the exhibition is a series of collaboratively-produced paintings initiated as a creative experiment by Muhammad Imran Qureshi in 2003. He contacted the five other Pakistani painters, all alumni of the National College of Arts in Lahore but now living in different cities around the world, with the suggestion that each artist start two new paintings made on wasli (hand-made paper). Each work was then sent to another artist in the group, who applied another layer of imagery, marks, or other processes, and passed it along until all of the artists had added to each of the twelve paintings. The exhibit includes these twelve miniature paintings, and five additional paintings by each of the six artists. These paintings are an experiment in artistic collaboration revealing improvisation, acts of creative destruction, semiotic play, and dynamic adaptation.

Jessica Hough is curatorial director at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut where she has worked since 1998. She is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Her recent exhibitions include Alyson Shotz: Light, Sound, Space (2005), Shahzia Sikander: Nemesis (2004), and Into My World: Recent British Sculpture (2004). She is co-curator of Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration.

Nusra Latif Qureshi is a painter living in Melbourne, Australia. She was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1973, and educated at The National College of Arts, Lahore, where she studied in the miniature painting department. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions around the world, including Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration. She is represented in New York by Waqas Wajahat, LLC.

Anna Sloan is a writer, curator, and historian of Islamic and South Asian Art at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She holds a BA from Brown University, and a PhD from University of Pennsylvania. Sloan curated an exhibition of Nusra Latif Qureshi's work at Smith College Museum of Art in 2004 titled The Way I Remember Them. She is also a partner in Green Cardamom, a non-profit organization founded to introduce artists from South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East to a global audience through public exhibitions, publications, symposia, and commissioned artworks. She is co-curator of Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration.