Grey Noise presents The Importance of Staying Quiet: Lala Rukh I, on display until 5 November 2025. This exhibition inaugurates a curatorial series dedicated to exploring practices of minimalism and abstraction, taking as its starting point the practice of Pakistani artist Lala Rukh. The show features rarely seen photographs from her years in Chicago (1974-76) alongside later drawings and photographic sequences. It traces the evolution of an artistic language grounded in restraint, rhythm, and attentiveness.
While in Chicago, having already completed an MFA at Punjab University (Lahore), Rukh created photo images that illustrate her experimentation with composing frames, enlarging film negatives, and arranging sequences (diptychs, triptychs, polyptychs) that gesture toward her later abstraction. The Chicago photographs differ from the later “waterscape” series for which the artist became famous.
Whereas Rukh’s subsequent work concentrates on water bodies, horizons, skies and near-silence (often excluding people or objects entirely), the Chicago output includes architecture, animals, people, and objects. In many shots, a sense of arrival or departure is implied, as if cinematic sets have been staged. These earlier pieces reveal an artist in transition: absorbing influences of sound, music, and politics in a new environment, yet already honing a “trained eye” in terms of framing and formal discipline.
At the heart of the exhibition is an invitation to slow one’s gaze. The featured works are framed as archival studies. Rukh never formally presented the Chicago images as finished artworks, so the show treats them as reflective material, read in retrospect to understand how her perception and visual methods evolved.
By placing the narrative-rich Chicago photographs alongside the implicit anticipation of later minimalism, the exhibition invites visitors to consider how sequencing, framing, negative printing, and repetition become tools of inquiry rather than decoration. The show thus situates Rukh’s early photography as foundational for her later abstractions in colour, composition, and temporality.
About the artist
Lala Rukh (b. 1948, Lahore, Pakistan — d. 2017) was a Lahore-based artist and activist who earned MFAs from the Punjab University (Lahore) and the University of Chicago (USA). Later, she taught for 30 years at Punjab University’s Department of Fine Art, and at the National College of Arts, where she established the MA (Hons) Visual Art Programme in 2000. Following her retirement, Rukh devoted herself fully to her art, working across drawing, printmaking, photography, and video.
Beyond her artistic contributions, Rukh was a central figure in Pakistan’s feminist movement. She co-founded the Women’s Action Forum (1981), the feminist collective Simorgh (1985), and Vasl Artists’ Trust (2000), initiatives that sought to challenge state oppression, advocate for women’s rights, and create platforms for artistic and intellectual exchange.
Her visual language, marked by subtle rhythm, economy of means, and a meditative sense of time, drew inspiration from Hindustani classical music. Through minimal forms, calligraphic gestures, and finely calibrated tonal shifts, the artist translated the structure and flow of sound into visual terms. Her recurring motifs (horizons, lunar cycles, coastlines, and archaeological traces) embody a deep engagement with continuity, memory, and the passage of time.
Rukh’s art pieces have been displayed in many exhibitions, such as In Our Own Backyard (CCG Library, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, China, 2025); Lala Rukh: In the Round (solo) (Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, 2024); Lahore Biennale 01 (2018); Documenta 14 (Athens, Greece / Kassel, Germany, 2017); and Scripted Across the Indian Ocean (Green Cardamom, London, UK, 2011), among others.
To learn more about The importance of staying quiet: Lala Rukh I, please visit the show’s official web page.
You might also be interested in seeing The Gulf Through Time: Dariush Zandi’s Photographic Journey and Instruments of Viewing and Obscurity by Nazgol Ansarinia.
