Hanif Kureshi: sabr, ghar, suroor
For this special exhibition, opened on Hanif Kureshi’s birth anniversary, 12th October, the entire team of St+art India, XXL, and Guerrilla Art & Design have come together to celebrate Hanif’s practice and enduring legacy.
Rutva Trivedi, Hanif Kureshi’s life and work partner, writes:
“I, on behalf of Hanif and myself, am deeply grateful to everyone who has been part of his journey — to all who have supported his wild ideas and encouraged him to always experiment. My heartfelt thanks go to the teams of Guerrilla, St+art, and XXL, and to all of Hanif’s assistants and collaborators, especially Arif, for making this exhibition possible.
The Handpainted Type Project has always been close to his heart, and I would like to thank Kafeel ji and all the other sign painters for making it truly special. And last but certainly not least, I thank Hanif’s parents, his brother Asif, and his entire family for their unwavering confidence in him.”
sabr, ghar, suroor presents four series of work by artist and designer Hanif Kureshi. The exhibition invites the viewers to prod deeper into meanings and perception of typography – its creation, distortion and reimagination – by delving into the relationships that take shape in between form, color, impression, legibility and visualisation of language. Simultaneously, it also invokes for a moment of prolonged stay with Hanif’s vision and philosophy.
These series titled Painter Kureshi, Tetris, Untitled, and Urdu trace the artist’s journey through abstraction, material experimentation, and spatial play. While Painter Kureshi explores the intersections of letterforms and architecture, Tetris transforms letters into building blocks in motion. As the series Untitled pushes this geometry toward new depths of perspective and form, the Urdu series brings language, longform and even cursive to the surface with lightness and rhythm.
The exhibition takes its title from three works within the Urdu series — Sabr (patience and perseverance), Ghar (home), and Suroor (joy or exhilaration). Together, they map and mirror the rhythm of Hanif Kureshi’s life, his philosophy and artistic journey: an enduring belief in creation as both discipline and delight. Through sabr what ruminates is a persevering vision for building one’s own path – extending it for creation of multiple belongings. In this is found a ghar – through his own work, collaborations, and the communities he nurtured. Within this home, what is catalysed are processes and artifacts of experimentation, exploration and innovation – in form and medium – that enables suroor, wherein his faith in art turns into a language of renewals.
These words also echo the essence of Hanif’s vision: to make art accessible, generous, and alive in the public realm. Whether on the streets or within the studio, his work invokes the same intent: to bring the street into the gallery and the gallery into the street, breaking barriers between artist and audience, and proposing possibilities for dilating art spaces.
Each work in this exhibition, holding Hanif’s quiet rigor, luminous humour, and devotion to the handmade and the heartfelt, pulsates with the essence of sabr, ghar and suroor. The space, ultimately invites the onlooker to walk through but also find respite in silently looking at his work – wherein the lines and structures of his type based works become a form for us to believe once more that art, like faith, transforms, as it survives – beyond us all.
Welcome to sabr, ghar, suroor.
