The importance of staying quiet 6. Open Forms

The importance of staying quiet 6. Open Forms is a group exhibition of seventeen artists at Grey Noise in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, from 23 September to 30 December 2026. The series was conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, who sign the exhibition text.

The exhibition spans painting, drawing, sculpture, prints, projection and an artist book, from the mid 1950s to 2026. Works include Zubeida Agha's Untitled (c. mid 1950s to early 1960s), oil on board, and Shahid Sajjad's bronze Babylonian Landscape II (1991). Also shown are Ayessha Quraishi's Floor 2 (1986), oil on paper, and Lala Rukh's Untitled A, B (2011), graphite on carbon paper. Iqra Tanveer's The forgetting curve (2017) uses an overhead projector and transparency film. Recent works include Zara Mahmood's Vignettes (2025), oil on steel plates, and Fatima Haider's How (2026).

The artists are Ali Kazim, Bani Abidi, Mussarat Mirza, Zara Mahmood, Faraz Aamer Khan, Sara Salman, Iqra Tanveer, Lala Rukh, Seher Shah, Shahid Sajjad, Faheem Abbas, Fatima Haider, Inaam Zafar, Fahd Burki, Fazal Rizvi, Ayessha Quraishi and Zubeida Agha. The curators write that they are drawn to artists "whose work seems to emerge from a self-imposed stillness, at some distance from the noise around them." They write of conceptual developments "that move away from narrative, focusing instead on making and the material through which the abstract is constructed."

Open Forms is the sixth and final exhibition of the 2025 to 2026 iteration of The importance of staying quiet. The series was first shown in Hong Kong in 2014, in the gallery's words "as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art." Five artists from that first presentation also appear here: Lala Rukh, Sara Salman, Ali Kazim, Fahd Burki and Iqra Tanveer.