03/27/2026
Aritst from PAKISTAN
Farrukh Adnan
was selected through a worldwide artist application process and participated as an official Artiade artist in the Artiade – Olympics of Art, New York 2024.
Farrukh Adnan, a visual artist based in Lahore, Pakistan, explores the cultural memory of his ancient hometown, Tulamba, through intricate drawings. Adnan's work focuses on patterns and structures found in local ruins. His artistic process involves meticulous on-site research and documentation, including collecting relics and using his own movements as mapping tools. Through this unique approach, Adnan creates visual narratives that bridge personal experience with historical significance, preserving and reinterpreting his cultural heritage.
Artist Statement
My practice emerges from walking sites, observing terrain, and collecting terracotta, soil, and marks in my hometown, Tulamba, in southern Punjab. From childhood, land records, maps, and Masavi Latha (land survey) documents entered my everyday life through my father's work in the Punjab Revenue Department. These encounters turned geography, archaeology, and systems of land measurement into lived experiences, shaping my understanding of space, memory, and history, and guiding my inquiry toward socially palimpsestic landscapes layered through memory, displacement, and human presence.
In my drawings, fragments of excavation plans, aerial views, and ancient South Asian pottery motifs unfold into calligraphic fields of marks, tracing environmental shifts, human behaviour, and layered cultural histories. This visual language resonates with the rhythm and layering found in Arabic poetry, where repeated marks and flowing lines evoke a lyrical and symbolic quality. Like poetic script, my use of layering, deconstruction, and abstraction traces how spaces are formed, altered, and remembered, shaping a visual language that bridges past and present while remaining open, reflective, and poetic.
