Despite the terrorist attack in Kashmir that left India and Pakistan on the brink of war, despite the chaos of canceled flights at Newark Liberty International Airport, despite the New Jersey Transit strikes and the unpredictability of arriving in the U.S. as a foreigner, the Newark Museum of Art’s artist of honor made the last flight out of Lahore, Pakistan, and the show went on.
The museum opened “Destiny Fractured” in May amid a storm of high stakes variables. But Risham Syed, the artist, was prepared for turbulence.
“We were worried, would she be allowed out? Number one,” said Catherine Evans, the museum’s interim co-director and co-chief executive. “And would she be allowed into this country? Number two.”
But the biggest hurdle, as it often goes, was the unexpected: A pair of plaster birds.
Syed, who is from Pakistan, was flagged upon arrival in Newark, and the ceramic birds she had packed for the exhibition were cut out of their Bubble Wrap for inspection. But after immigration officers scanned her bag, she was on her way.
“They said, ‘Have a great time,’” Syed, 56, said during an interview in a Manhattan restaurant.
Elegant and soft-spoken, Syed combines artistic disciplines as a painter, singer and sound artist. In much of her work, she couples a reverence for nature with her explorations of colonial histories. These themes run parallel in “Destiny Fractured,” her first solo museum show in the U.S.
Syed, who is also a professor of fine arts at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, creates a dialogue between paintings of bucolic American landscapes from the Newark Museum’s permanent collection and photographs and videos of the natural environment in Lahore today. Are you seeing the American West or Pakistan? In these artworks, idyllic vistas seduce across two continents — and centuries. But beneath the surface is a story of colonialist expansion.
Her pairings are so uncanny the scenes appear to be nearly identical. In Thomas Hewes Hinckley’s 1853 oil painting, “Cows and Sheep in a Landscape,” bovines lounge and graze beneath soft blue skies. Nearby, a herd of cattle grazes beneath hazy Pakistani skies.
In another pairing, Albert Bierstadt’s “Landscape,” a sepia-tinged cluster of trees at the edge of a field from the 1850s, appears strikingly similar to Syed’s “Landscape (after Albert Bierstadt’s ‘Landscape’),” a 2024 video of towering trees rustling, almost imperceptibly, in the wind.
Each scene is presented in an oversize gilt frame, leaving the viewer to consider how beauty deceives the eye. In the American landscapes, out of view is the decimation of the local habitat and expulsion of Native peoples. In the photographs and videos of Pakistani scenery, Lahore’s pollution — among the most unhealthy in the world — is obscured by lush greenery and pastoral streams. Beyond the frame, as conflict with its neighbor, India — just 16 miles to the border — threatens the region’s equilibrium, violence looms.
“There’s this real draw to bring you in, to make you feel comfortable and easy,” said Atteqa Ali, the show’s curator and the museum’s associate curator of Arts of Global Asia. “There’s beauty and luxury, but then it turns around and becomes something much more intense.”
Syed, whose mother was a trained classical singer, and her father a poet and playwright, grew up in Lahore, where she danced and played the sitar. Her parents, who are Muslim, each moved from India to Lahore as children when they were displaced by the 1947 partition that killed hundreds of thousands of people and left millions homeless.
“It was still very, very raw and very immediate,” she said. “One heard of those stories as a child.”
Her own reckoning with colonial history came when she moved to London for a master’s program in painting at the Royal College of Arts, where she began to reflect on the culture of her upbringing. With distance from her home country, she began to see Lahore — its colonial architecture, the missionary convent schools she attended, the Punjabi-Victorian values that shaped the social landscape — through a different perspective.
“I was looking at London from the lens of Lahore,” she said, “and looking at Lahore from the lens of London.”
And though she was drawn to climate in the abstract, it wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic — when, she said, she saw blue skies in Lahore for the first time — that she became inspired by nature in a tangible way.
“I saw strange birds that I’d never seen before in my life, and that was just because of the lockdown, and it happened within a few days,” Syed said. “It was magical. I never thought it would be so palpable.”
In her recent exhibition “Unn, Pani, Sut (Grain, Water, Truth),” at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates, Syed erected kinetic sculptures and planted wheat patches, a contemplation on agrarian abundance.
“It’s a living sculpture, in a sense,” said Natasha Ginwala, the exhibition’s curator, who worked with Syed and the local municipality to grow the wheat locally, which took six months. “It went from green to gold and back to green again.”
In “Each Tiny Drop,” Syed’s 2023 experimental sound art exhibition for the Manchester International Festival in England, she drew upon South Asian river rituals, inviting audiences to collect water transported from the Soan River in Pakistan and pour it into Manchester’s River Medlock.
“I’ve consistently seen how she works with such material dexterity,” Ginwala said. “And at the same time, there’s this kind of voracious appetite of a collector of histories and historiography in her work.”
During a one-week visit to Newark last year, Syed began to sort through the museum’s extensive archive. Racks of landscape paintings were Syed’s starting point. But along the way, her curiosities led her down a different path — to a startling collection of taxidermy birds and John James Audubon’s, “The Birds of America,” whose brutal notes on killing whooping cranes en masse glared in sharp contrast to his radiant watercolor images of peaceful birds.
“He talks about nature and the beauty of nature, and he’s grateful to God for giving him that experience,” Syed said. “And in the next moment, he’s talking about slitting the throat of the bird.”
The images of terror and power re-emerge in the last segment of “Destiny Fractured.” The plaster birds from Syed’s suitcase now sit on a table in the exhibition’s living room space. Perched nearby on a branch inside a glass vitrine, a taxidermied hawk peers down over a cluster of small, dead birds tipped over onto their sides.
A warbler with a yellow head lies helplessly, its talons suspended in air. A black bird with a red neck stares with anger. A starling with speckled feathers has had its beak sealed shut.
It’s a reversal from the start of the show, where beauty belies the horrors that quietly lurk outside the frame. Is it allegory? A haunting lesson? Syed offers no explanation. Here, power, and the victims it leaves in its wake, are on full display.
Destiny Fractured
Through March 2027 at the Newark Museum of Art, 49 Washington Street, Newark, N.J.; newarkmuseumart.org.
Rachel Sherman reports on culture and the arts for The Times.
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