Project of Canadian Community Arts Initiative in collaboration with Beaconhouse National University, Lahore Museum, and ThinkFest Lahore present the exhibition, BE(COMING) The Museum, 2023.

This work is inspired by a series of Mughal miniature paintings from the collection of the Lahore Museum. She investigates the rich and layered language of ornamented miniature painting borders, and their far-reaching influence on indigenous visual vocabulary; the colors and motifs meticulously placed in these borders can be seen in the vernacular of everyday aesthetics today, such as the ornamentation found in architecture, textiles, or objects of daily use. Six Mughal miniature paintings are selected from the Lahore Museum’s collection in order to investigate the color aesthetic of South Asian Mughal Miniature. This ornamental sensibility and color palette are still indigenous to South Asian identity. As opposed to Eurocentric ideals that create a distinction between arts and craftsmanship or contemporary debates that divide digital and traditional art practices, Bukhari explores an alternate path. By interchanging pigment and paint with mediums associated with mass production, she draws parallels between the meticulous steps present both in traditional and digital miniatures. Although miniature painting techniques retain their original vocabulary, their materiality, aesthetic and narrative functions continue to shape-shift and evolve. Bukhari, through her work Aesthetic Hybridity in Mughal Paintings, expanded on the borders of the olden Mughal Miniature paintings and reconstructed them using machine embroidery in silk and metallic threads, with silver and gold leaf. The illustrations/imagery, within the confines of the borders, were reduced to a few colour bars; perhaps employing the colour palette of the borders with the eyedropper tool to individually, and digitally printed on canvas. All the old and new exercises were encapsulated in the glass cabinet