Lahore's gallery calendar rarely pauses for nostalgia. This month, it did exactly that.
On October 14, 2026, La Galerie at Alliance Française de Lahore opened Then, Now & Everything Between, a group exhibition bringing together fifteen artists who once sat in the same studios at the National College of Arts. All graduated from the Fine Arts programme in 2001. Twenty-five years later, they are back in the same room, this time as established names in Pakistan's contemporary art scene.
The show runs through October 20, with daily hours from 1 to 6 PM.
National College of Arts holds a particular weight in South Asian art history. Founded in 1875 as the Mayo School of Arts, it is the oldest art school in Pakistan and the second oldest in South Asia. Generations of painters, sculptors and designers have passed through its studios on Lahore's Mall Road, and its 2001 batch is now being treated as a milestone cohort in its own right.
Among the fifteen names on the checklist is Ayaz Jokhio, who was born in Mehrabpur, Sindh, in 1978 and obtained his BFA from National College of Arts Lahore in 2001. He arrived at art almost by accident. He had already made a name for himself in another field first.
Jokhio was chosen as the best contemporary poet by the Sindhi Literary Society in 1999, before painting took over. His practice since has leaned on imagery from print media, the internet and popular culture along with his own observations of contemporary Pakistan. That restlessness across media — text, drawing, installation — has become something of a signature for the 2001 batch as a whole.
Fatima Salman, one of the three curators behind the exhibition, is also among the participating artists. A miniature painter by training, she is a 2001 graduate of National College of Arts who has spent the years since building a practice that moves between personal history and craft discipline. Her dual role here, curator and contributor, reflects how closely this exhibition was built by the batch itself rather than handed down by an outside institution.
She shares curatorial duties with Shah Zaman Baloch and Anne Sophie Français, a pairing that mirrors the venue's own hybrid identity. La Galerie sits inside a building shared by two cultural missions. The space operates alongside the German Cultural Centre; Alliance Française de Lahore shares its premises with Annemarie-Schimmel-Haus, making Scotch Corner on Upper Mall something of a small European outpost inside the city.
The rest of the lineup reads like a cross-section of Lahore's working artist community since the turn of the millennium. 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 round out the group.
Each has pursued a distinct path since graduation, across painting, miniature, installation, and mixed media. None of that is incidental. NCA's teaching structure has long pushed students toward individual visual language rather than a house style, and this show seems built to prove that twenty-five years later.
What makes Then, Now & Everything Between worth attention isn't volume or scale. It's the premise. Most retrospective group shows in Pakistan gather artists by theme or medium. This one gathers them by graduating year, treating a shared classroom experience in 2001 as the organizing idea itself. The exhibition's own framing leans into that, tracking how fifteen separate methodologies, philosophies and lives have shifted since art school ended and real careers began.
That framing matters for how Lahore's art scene thinks about its own history. Pakistan's contemporary art market has grown considerably since the early 2000s, with auction houses and international biennales now paying closer attention to artists trained at institutions like NCA. A reunion show built around one specific class offers a kind of internal case study. It asks what twenty-five years of studio practice, teaching jobs, residencies and exhibitions actually does to a shared artistic foundation.
There's no catalogue essay quoted here, no grand curatorial statement circulating yet beyond the gallery walls. What exists instead is the work itself, hung together for one week, before it scatters back into separate studios and separate markets.
For visitors, the show offers a rare side-by-side comparison. Seeing Ayaz Jokhio's text-driven conceptual pieces near Fatima Salman's miniature-rooted paintings, within the same small gallery, does something a solo show never could. It makes a single academic year visible as a living, branching thing.
Whether Then, Now & Everything Between becomes a template for future alumni shows at NCA or elsewhere remains to be seen. For now, visitors have until October 20 to catch it, with the gallery open daily from 1 to 6 PM. Anyone wanting details on future programming at the venue can check directly with Alliance Française de Lahore, which continues to run language courses and cultural events alongside its gallery schedule.
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