As you know, some informal art communities built around social media across South Asia have begun to evolve into fleshed-out editorial platforms in recent years.
Pakistan has just secured its own place. PakistaniArt, the country’s independent English-language art and pop culture publication, launched a dedicated website this week. The platform launched in October 2020 as a modest Instagram page featuring the work of Pakistani digital artists. It has since rebranded as a complete magazine and news outlet covering visual art, film, music, and design.
I, Awais Shaukat, started the page when I was a teenager, sharing digital illustrations from all over Pakistan. I’m now a painting student at the National College of Arts in Lahore, and I also have more than five years’ experience as a digital artist and animator. The Instagram page became a community of thousands of followers before I announced it as a magazine in 2023.
The coverage of current events will focus on Pakistan, where there has not been a single outlet consistently tracking the country's contemporary art scene. There will also be international art news, partly to expose Pakistani artists to readers based elsewhere. Film, design, architecture, fashion, and music will also be featured, as well as criticism, interviews, and exhibition reviews, but visual art remains the publication’s main focus.
Open calls for submissions from artists and galleries are also available from all over Pakistan. Painters, photographers, designers, and filmmakers can submit profiles of their completed work to be considered for publication. Occasional artists and galleries featuring upcoming shows or acquisitions are also invited to complete a brief questionnaire to pass on details directly to the editors via the submission page.
The website is still under active development, and small bugs are still being fixed. People encountering errors here and there can let the team know about them directly. A separate digital and print magazine extension is also underway, with information to come later.
While the platform entered its beta phase on 11 June, this week marks the official live launch. Visitors will notice that several articles and data sets have already been published; this content was integrated during the soft-launch period to rigorously test the site’s functionality and ensure a seamless user experience for the formal rollout.
Momentum is growing around the project elsewhere as well. PakistaniArt was nominated at the Global Startup Awards in 2025 in the Central Asia region’s Startup of the Year category.
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