Lala Rukh: At the Origins of the Gaze

With the exhibition The importance of staying quiet, Grey Noise opens in Dubai a wide-ranging project that revisits the roots of abstraction in Pakistan. After its first edition in Hong Kong in 2014, the initiative curated by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt returns as a cycle of exhibitions and encounters, focusing on minimal vocabulary and the ability to subtract rather than accumulate. The first chapter, Lala Rukh I, running from September 18 to November 5, 2025, presents the photographic archives the artist created during her years of study at the University of Chicago between 1974 and 1976. These rarely seen images depict architecture, people and objects in scenes with a narrative and almost cinematic character, far from the rigorous abstraction that would later define her work. Through sequences, diptychs and triptychs printed from negatives, one can trace the artist’s early interest in compositional discipline, precision and structure that became central to her practice. Although never formally presented as artworks, these photographs are today reread as revealing studies that illuminate the connections with Lala Rukh’s later experiments. The exhibition marks a return to the origins and offers a valuable key to understanding the genealogy of her abstraction and the role she played in shaping an essential and radical visual language in South Asia.