Palo Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Hafsa Nouman’s exhibition Facsimile.
The exhibition takes its name from the dastarkhwaan, a traditional floor-spread used across Central and South Asia for communal eating. Derived from Persian, the term refers both to the cloth itself and to the larger social act of gathering around food. Spread across the ground, the dastarkhwaan creates a shared space of hospitality, cleanliness, and collective presence.
In Nouman’s central artwork, the dastarkhwaan is approached not merely as a domestic object, but as a spatial and social structure. Unlike the architecture of the dining table, which provides preset hierarchies and assigned positions, the dastarkhwaan expands horizontally: elastic in capacity and able to accommodate whoever arrives.
“The work is a 13 x 7 ft acrylic painting on canvas functioning as a facsimile of the tablecloth from my maternal grandmother Bibi’s house in Gujranwala, Pakistan: a gingham pattern composed of black, red, green, and white. Until the age of six, before the demolition of the house, every summer meal was eaten on the dastarkhwaan spread across the floor of Bibi’s lounge. We, the children, gathered on the ground while the elders sat nearby at the dining table. The work returns to this memory not as nostalgia, but as a way of tracing how acts of eating also produce forms of relation, hierarchy, intimacy, and belonging.”
— Hafsa Nouman
Over time, the dastarkhwaan gradually disappeared from many urban middle-class homes, increasingly associated with a perceived lack of refinement. As dining tables came to signify upward mobility, propriety, and modernity, floor-based communal eating became folded into classed ideas of etiquette and respectability. Revisiting the dastarkhwaan at a larger scale, Nouman reflects on the quiet disappearance of vernacular forms of gathering and on the cultural and political values embedded within domestic habits and objects.
Through painting, Facsimile reconsiders the social architectures of eating and asks what forms of community are lost when intimacy becomes formalized through furniture, status, and spatial division.
Inspired by Allama Iqbal’s poems Hamdardi and Jugnu, works frequently narrated and performed within the artist’s childhood home but with Noumans’ father’s voice echoing alongside her grandmother’s, the exhibition considers how allegory is carried through acts of repetition, storytelling, and gathering. The poems speak to knowledge, sacrifice, hope, resilience, and the limits of human perception. Nouman is drawn not toward a nostalgic recovery of the atmosphere they evoke, but toward the changing material and social conditions that once allowed such forms of collective narration and attention to emerge.
The exhibition also includes a series of fruit paintings depicting species indigenous to specific regions once shaped by colonial occupation, including olive, pomegranate, and sugarcane. These fruits function simultaneously as agricultural forms, cultural memory, and political signifiers, accumulating layered associations around resistance, displacement, labor, and survival. Rather than operating as fixed symbols, they appear as unstable images whose meanings shift across historical and geopolitical contexts.
Living within the gallery space is a tree form derived from a Sycamore Maple, a species commonly found in urban landscapes. Constructed from starched muslin glazed with oil paint, it operates simultaneously as index and imitation. Throughout the exhibition, painting becomes a site where memory, ecology, and representation are translated into facsimiles, surfaces that preserve traces of what can no longer be encountered directly.
Facsimile opens with a celebratory reception with the artist on Thursday, June 18, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at Palo Gallery, located at 21 East 3rd Street, New York City.