The first time Brampton, Ont., artist Misbah Ahmed experienced dry thunder was in 2020. The door of her maternal grandfather’s house in Islamabad, Pakistan, had blown open, and when she went closer, she saw lightning streaking the sky and heard the quiet rumble of thunder — but no rain.
During dry thunderstorms, rain evaporates before it can reach the ground. And with temperatures rising and a drier atmosphere, the storms could happen more often and increase the risk of wildfires.
The phenomenon is the inspiration for Dry Thunder, Ahmed’s first institutional solo exhibit, at the Art Gallery of Burlington in Ontario. A mix of paintings and ceramics, it explores the Pakistani-born artist’s South Asian heritage.
When AGB artistic director Suzanne Carte invited Sarah Edo to curate an exhibition, the Toronto native and former Gardiner Museum curatorial resident approached Ahmed, among other artists. The pair had worked together on Edo’s first exhibit — 2023’s Within and Without — at Toronto’s Whippersnapper Gallery.
“My curatorial practice is guided by an artist’s attention to materials,” Edo said. “I’m also really interested in artists that work with clay as a medium for storytelling, for archiving and for exploration.”
Last June, Edo visited Ahmed’s studio, where a painting caught her eye. It was a night scene Ahmed remembers on the rooftop of her childhood home in Islamabad.
“There were intense clouds everywhere and lots of lightning — the entire night, every night, the entire summer,” she said. But she didn’t remember any rain.
In one painting, a memory is rendered in a moody palette of blues and greens and punctuated with a striking yellow — artificial light pouring out of an open door and illuminating two people sitting on a rooftop. Below are the silhouettes of stray dogs roaming the street (Ahmed often heard their howls during storms). Above, lightning flashes across a troubled sky.
Ahmed’s memories are sometimes fragmented, and her paintings allow her to put them together, capturing a moment that no longer exists in the way it once did. She says she has witnessed the city change a lot between her visits, and it’s jarring.
Since September, Ahmed has been an artist-in-residence at the AGB, where she crafted works for the exhibit pretty much until it opened. Her oil-on-mylar paintings are now on display, portraying contemporary night scenes of Islamabad centred around her identity. And many of the scenes are of rooftops.
“There’s something about the rooftop that is tied to my perspective as a woman and as a kind of outsider,” Ahmed said.
In Pakistan, she said, she feels hypervisible as a woman in public spaces, which she noticed acutely when hanging out with cousins who live there.
As someone who visits from Canada, she sometimes feels a disconnect with her homeland. She said she can wear the “right” clothes and adopt local mannerisms, but people just know she doesn’t live there.
“I’m left with the rooftop as a place where I can observe life and culture in Pakistan,” she said.
Dry Thunder also includes ceramics exploring folk tales from different regions of Pakistan. The pieces focus on stories about a magical relationship with nature and how that changes over time.
One of the ceramic vessels is inspired by the markhor, a species of goat, which lives in the mountains of Pakistan and was historically considered sacred. Pakistani hunters would leave offerings for the supernatural beings, or djinns, who they believed protected the animals.
“There was this custom that if you were about to kill the markhor and you had it in your sight and you saw the djinn, you would have to stop,” Ahmed said. “But if there was no djinn sighting, it meant that the kill could be made and your family fed.”
Two intricate tigers form the handles of another vessel with a marbled glaze in hues of brown. Here, Ahmed represents the tiger’s symbolic importance as people in Pakistan and throughout the Pakistani diaspora reckon with the aftermath of British colonial rule.
In the 19th century, tiger hunting was a way for the British regime to assert its colonial dominance over not only the people, but also the land. Ahmed uses the tiger in her work to pay homage to her family’s south Indian heritage. Her paternal grandparents were from Hyderabad, in southern India, and Mysuru (also known as Mysore), a city in southwestern India’s Karnataka state.
Ahmed remembers a quote from Tipu Sahib, the 16th-century sultan of the Kingdom of Mysore: “Better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep.” Known as the Tiger of Mysore, he fought several wars against the imperialist British East India Company and was killed in battle in 1799.
“The tiger, when pulled from this reference, is a symbol of continuing to resist colonial structures and colonial powers,” Ahmed said.
“I think for my family, it means doing what’s right no matter what — regardless of the consequences. I would like to maintain that spirit in my life and my work.”