Alliance Française Lahore to host exhibition celebrating 25 years of art and memory

Lahore: The Alliance Française de Lahore is set to host THEN, NOW & EVERYTHING BETWEEN, an exhibition bringing together 15 artists from the National College of Arts (NCA) Fine Arts graduating batch of 2001 to reflect on 25 years of artistic practice, personal experiences, memory and creative transformation.

Scheduled to open on Tuesday, October 13, 2026, at La Galerie, Alliance Française de Lahore, the exhibition will offer a collective retrospective of the participating artists’ creative journeys since their graduation. Through the gathering of works and perspectives shaped over a quarter of a century, the exhibition seeks to explore how artistic practices evolve with time and how individual experiences, changing circumstances and encounters with the world influence creative expression.

The exhibition brings together artists who began their professional journeys as members of the same graduating batch at one of Pakistan’s leading art institutions. Their reunion after 25 years provides an opportunity to revisit the ideas, influences and aspirations that informed their early artistic development, while examining how their work has matured and diversified over the years.

Titled THEN, NOW & EVERYTHING BETWEEN, the exhibition places time and transformation at the centre of its narrative. The title reflects the distance between the artists’ formative years at NCA and their present-day practices, while acknowledging the experiences, challenges, discoveries and developments that have shaped their individual trajectories along the way.

By bringing together 15 distinct artistic voices, the exhibition will present a broad reflection on continuity and change in contemporary artistic practice. While the artists share a common educational background and graduating year, their subsequent journeys have been shaped by individual perspectives and experiences, offering an opportunity to consider both the connections that unite them and the differences that distinguish their work.

The participating artists are Fatima Salman, Ayaz Jokhio, Mahbub Shah, Fatima Saeed, Imran Ahmad, Maria Imaad, Asad Hayee, Maryam Rahman, Nadia Khawaja, Hasnat Mehmood, Shahana Munawar, Sabina Zaffar, Hassan Rana, Zainub J Khawaja and Sadaf Naeem.

Renowned artist Imran Qureshi will attend the exhibition as the guest of honour, adding to an occasion that brings together established artistic voices around a shared history and a continuing engagement with art.

The exhibition has been curated by Shah Zaman Baloch, Fatima Salman and Anne Sophie Francais. Their curatorial collaboration brings together the participating artists’ individual practices within a shared framework of memory, reflection and artistic evolution.

The exhibition also highlights the significance of artistic communities and the lasting connections formed during formal art education. A graduating batch represents more than a shared period of study; it can serve as the starting point for diverse professional paths, sustained experimentation and changing approaches to artistic expression. Reuniting after 25 years allows the participating artists to reflect on these trajectories and revisit the relationships between their early influences and present creative concerns.

For the Lahore art community, the exhibition offers an opportunity to engage with the work and experiences of artists whose practices have developed over a significant period of personal and professional change. It also provides a platform for reflecting on the role of memory, time and lived experience in shaping artistic identities.

The Alliance Française de Lahore, which promotes cultural exchange and artistic engagement, will host the private opening at La Galerie on October 13 at 6:30pm.

Through this collective presentation, THEN, NOW & EVERYTHING BETWEEN seeks to bring together past and present, highlighting the enduring relationship between an artist’s formative experiences and the creative possibilities that emerge over time.

The exhibition will open to invited guests at 6:30pm at La Galerie, Alliance Française de Lahore.