Nusra Latif Qureshi: Birds in Far Pavilions

A richly illustrated publication examining the artist’s process, inspirations, and significance

Nusra Latif Qureshi is a Melbourne-based artist best known for her finely crafted contemporary musaviri, or miniature paintings. Drawing on both historical and contemporary references, Qureshi works in the space between tradition and experimentation, in a practice that extends to collage and photography. Born in Pakistan, she trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore, where she learned the painting traditions that had been brought to the Mughal courts from Persia in the sixteenth century and developed in the region.

Nusra Latif Qureshi: Birds in Far Pavilions traces Qureshi’s thirty-year career, from her early reimagining of musaviri painting in Lahore to a new installation that questions histories and processes of collecting cultural material. The volume is richly illustrated with over one hundred artworks and historic archival imagery/photography and accompanied by insightful essays by curator Matt Cox, Art Gallery of New South Wales director Michael Brand, academic Sugata Ray, arts writer Julie Ewington, curator Esa Epstein, and philosopher and psychoanalyst Robyn Adler.

Matt Cox is curator of Asian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where he is broadly engaged with historical and contemporary art from Asia and the world. He recently curated The National 2021: New Australian Art, A Promise: Khaled Sabsabi (2020), Walking with Gods (2019), Playback: Dobell Australian Drawing Biennale 2018 and Passion and Procession: Art of the Philippines (2017).