Abstract: This essay explores the figure of the artist-as-researcher as a contemporary embodiment of polymathy, particularly within non-Western contexts and frameworks of knowledge. Challenging the ideal of the solitary genius – and with it, mastery, and objectivity – the text centres entangled, relational, and intuitive modes of knowing as practiced by artists working across disciplines. Drawing from the author’s personal and editorial work, including research on Pakistani modernist Zubeida Agha and collaborations with artists Bani Abidi, Usman Saeed, and Khalil Rabah, and gallerist Umer Butt, the essay foregrounds practices that resist institutional expectations or linearity. Instead, it proposes a polymathy rooted in complexity and built relationships. The artist-as-researcher emerges as an inadvertent political figure, operating across archives, ecologies, and collaborative infrastructures. This model embraces intuition and failure, offering alternative frameworks for thinking about research, authorship, and artistic labour in the 21st century.
Keywords: Artist-as-Researcher; Knowledge Production; Art and Nation-building; Museology; Artist-run spaces; South Asian Art; Palestinian Art; Zubeida Agha; Bani Abidi; Khalil Rabah; Usman Saeed; Umer Butt.
–
The Artist-as-Researcher: Notes on Entanglement, Relational Knowing, and the Messiness of Process
Traditional images of polymathy have long been associated with a specific kind of genius, and particularly in the western canon, with Renaissance exceptionalism or Enlightenment rationalism. These figures are often framed as solitary masters of multiple disciplines. But these narratives are also deeply embedded in power structures that are individualistic, patriarchal, often Eurocentric. Today, these frameworks feel inadequate.
As students of Pakistani/South Asian/non-Western art and culture, somehow, many still continue to look towards 15th-century Leonardo da Vinci as the archetypal genius, even when our ancestral knowledge and lived experience tells us that many equally powerful examples exist (in complex variations) in non-canonical histories. The failure to recognise this immediately is because ideals of polymathy in non-Western cultural traditions offer different models that can be defined as relational, intergenerational, and often inseparable from social, spiritual, or ecological knowledge. In many South Asian, Arab, or African contexts, the figure of the polymath is embedded within collective memory. We may know of them perhaps as a healer, a teacher, a poet, or a steward of land.
At the precipice of the new century, advanced technologies radically reshaped the ways knowledge could be accessed, produced, and shared. And so, increasingly, digital archives, social media, mobile communication, and open-source platforms have come to challenge the monopoly of academic institutions and state-sanctioned narratives. Distance no longer means disconnection; the boundaries between the personal and the public, the speculative and the documented, are in perpetual flux. As a result, we obtain or make knowledge in completely different systems and social frameworks, together with their own set of challenges.
These shifts have paved the way for a new kind of wisdom. The modern polymath can be seen focusing more on adaptability, collective scholarship, and navigating overlapping systems of knowledge through intuition, speculation, collaboration, and refusal. Not necessarily neat, nor institutionally endorsed, this polymath may move between fields not to dominate them, but to hold things together that are often kept apart. They are messy, relational, and deeply embedded in the subjects they study—less master and more witness, caretaker, translator. One such figure, in the realm of epistemology of contemporary art, is the artist-as-researcher.
This text explores polymathy through the lens of the artist-as-researcher, particularly as practiced in contexts where institutional memory, formal archives, or objectivity hold canonical status and have historically been privileged over lived experience and subjectivity. In doing so, I try to reframe the position of the ‘genius’ in favour of a thinker whose intellectual labour is grounded in subjectivity and entanglement with others.
I have no formal training as a researcher, neither has my auto-didactic journey been free of problems and obstacles1. But my work, recovering and reinterpreting the life and legacy of Pakistani modernist Zubeida Agha (1922-1997), serves as a point of departure here primarily for the fact that it is a polymathy borne of necessity and passion. Alongside it, I turn to the practices of a few that I have worked closely with—artists Bani Abidi, Usman Saeed, and Khalil Rabah, and gallerist Umer Butt—each of whom have mastered their own capabilities by disrupting the boundaries between art, history, politics, pedagogy, as well as research, in ways that feel almost mycorrhizal2 (a model I find myself endlessly fascinated by). My work on Zubeida Agha is deeply personal and born of a frustration with the limitations of my art education. Considered one of the pioneers of modern art in Pakistan, and working across mediums, the artist was a risk-taking, world-travelling institution-builder. Over the course of a highly prolific five-decade career, she navigated and shaped visual culture in the wake of Partition, opening, administering, and curating the first fully programmed art gallery in the country,3 and laying the research groundwork for the National Art Gallery in Islamabad. A textbook polymath, if you will.4
1. Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. “Critical Inquiry as Necessity – A Non-Expert Opinion | A Lecture by Saira Ansari.” YouTube, November 27, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAE19KOJ7PQ.
2. The mycorrhizal network is a symbiotic underground system where fungi (mycelium) connect with the roots of plants and trees, enabling the exchange of nutrients, water, chemicals, and signals. This network challenges the notion of nature as competitive, instead revealing a hidden world of interdependence and mutual aid. It stands as a powerful metaphor for decentralised, relational, and non-hierarchical systems.
3. The Art Galleries, Society of Contemporary Art, Rawalpindi (1961-1977).
4. Charlotte Mui, “Off the Shelf: Zubeida Agha with President Ayub Khan,” Asia Art Archive, December 7, 2018, https://aaa.org.hk/en/like-a-fever/like-a-fever/off-the-shelf-zubeida-agha-with-president-ayub-khan.
Yet in her later years, and especially after her death, much of her legacy faded from view, strikingly absent from the dominant narratives of Pakistani art history. As her grand-niece, I had access to fragments of her inner world—letters, photographs, notebooks, oral accounts—that had never been institutionalized or archived in any formal sense. Traditional research frameworks might dismiss this closeness as a conflict of interest. But within a South Asian context, where family, memory, and knowledge often travel together, I have come to view this subjectivity not as a hindrance, but as a method.
In many ways, my practice sits at the edge of two spaces: personal history and public archive. These are often framed as oppositional—one too subjective, the other supposedly objective—but in my experience, they are deeply intertwined. Personal history offers emotional texture, gaps, inheritances, and memories that formal archives often flatten or omit. Meanwhile, the public archive holds authority and presents a specific kind of reliability. Both forms have their merits and flaws, which is why my practice has insisted on the layering of the two, where memory becomes material and a form of building.
In my work, the archive is not a static repository but a living, shifting terrain. It often suffers from misremembered timelines and moments of rupture. I have had to learn, re-learn, navigate unknowns, and constantly re-evaluate my own process so that I can do justice to the legacy of a seminal artist.
This form of polymathy, then, is not about excelling across disciplines but about moving fluidly between myriad roles and doing justice to each: family member, researcher, writer, editor, administrator, fundraiser, grant applicant, custodian, PR advisor, authenticator, narrator, etc. In doing so, the work resists the logic of mastery and embraces entanglement. Admittedly, I speak from within the work—but an archive exists now, when there was nothing before. 5
5. https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/zubeida-agha-archive
In today’s world, my way of operating is not unusual at all, neither is it seen as exceptional. In fact, it echoes (and is partly informed by) how many artists today are working across mediums and knowledge systems, often using art as a site of investigation, testimony, and critical reflection.
Take, for instance, the work of artist and filmmaker Bani Abidi which embodies polymathy through her layered investigations into statecraft, minor histories, and the absurdities of nationalism. Working across video, sound, installation and publishing, Bani creates narrative environments that draw on archival research, scriptwriting, and documentary aesthetics.
In a recent work The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men (2021), Bani continues her long-standing examination of political performance.6 Drawing on her fluency across photography, performance, research, and visual archives, she assembles screenshots and crop-edited press imagery into a visual index of male political authority. The work reflects how the body language of power remains eerily consistent across time and geography, regardless of who holds office or what ideology they represent. By blending observational rigor with satirical precision, she creates a subjective artistic gesture grounded entirely in the observed.
6. Rappolt, Mark. “Bani Abidi Dissects the Performance of Male Power.” ArtReview, December 17, 2021. https://artreview.com/bani-abidi-dissects-the-performance-of-male-power/.
Her refusal to conform to linear or authoritative forms of storytelling also shaped our collaboration on her monograph, Bani Abidi: The Man Who (Hatje Cantz, 2022).7 As managing editor of the book, I worked closely with Bani to imagine a format that resisted the conventions of the artist monograph. Rather than a survey or chronology, the book became an assemblage of film stills, essays, annotations, and archival digressions that were each tackled with utmost sincerity. We treated it like a conversation, not a conclusion. Most interestingly, Bani invited others in her sphere to contribute ideas or visuals about what they knew best, and not focus on her; the motive being simply to show how Bani’s practice is all the richer as she continues to learn from those in her orbit.
7. Shaikh, Nageen. “Bani Abidi’s Conflicted Ode to Karachi.” Hyperallergic, October 1, 2023. https://hyperallergic.com/847215/bani-abidi-conflicted-ode-to-karachi/.
This approach extends the artist’s ethos of rejecting the romanticized notion of the solitary mad genius—an isolated figure driven by divine inspiration or singular vision. Instead, it embraces a more grounded view of the artist as a unit of multiples: someone who creates with, and alongside, a constantly shifting constellation of collaborators, friends, partners, children, conversations, obligations, and interruptions. This is an artist whose practice is inseparable from bills, illness, caregiving, political tension, or the mundane rhythms of domesticity. Rather than seeing these as distractions or limitations, they become integral to the process itself. This ethos resists the hierarchy of “pure” creativity, instead valuing porousness and interdependence.
Thus, Bani’s polymathy lies not only in her interdisciplinary modes of working, but in her insistence on centering the narratives of other creatives as well as the voices of the common, non-academic public as the true chronicle of our times. She manoeuvres between critical distance and emotional intimacy, extending the possibilities of artist-led research and storytelling, self-aware, and insistently open-ended.
–
Artist, gardener, and educator Usman Saeed blurs the line between art, pedagogy, ecology, and faith. Trained as a miniature painter, Usman’s work has been celebrated for its technical virtuosity. But over the last decade, he has steadily and intentionally expanded the parameters of what it means to make art, immersing himself deeply in gardening, teaching, bookmaking, and quiet observation. Within this framework, his project Gardenfinds has unfolded in multiple phases since 2015, positioning the garden not just as a culmination but as a methodology.
Usman and I have spent years in conversation, thinking through planting cycles, grief stories, project proposals, and metaphors that carry more than symbolic weight. Our exchange is continuous and often intimate: voiced through long WhatsApp notes, shared field recordings, drawings sent as images, messages that arrive at odd hours with updates on tree health or soil composition. Similarly, he tells me, he often speaks with erudite friends and acquaintances—creatives, researchers, architects, conservationists, teachers, gardeners—and the knowledge, or the absence of it, impacts how his thought process evolves. In a way, these dialogues shape the work, and they reflect collaboration and co-tending of practice.
In his Lahore-based Bagh-e-Sadia (a garden named in memory of his late mother), the artist cultivates soil and the rhythms of growth, decay, and regeneration as a form of ancestral relearning. His drawings, particularly his studies of irises, tulips, and trees, reference historical miniature painting; and through his research on the Mughal empress Nur Jahan, he excavates erased histories of women as gardeners, patrons, and sovereigns.8
8. “Usman Saeed, Bagh-e Noor Jahan (2024).” Lahore Biennale Foundation. https://www.lahorebiennale.org/lb03-artists/usman-saeed/.
The garden becomes a site of artistic creation, where conversations about (or with) birds, cats, plants, insects, rain, sunshine, memories, mothers, and loss coalesce into drawings, installations, and publications. The work is also populated with research data that foregrounds heritage work, matriarchal influence, politics of erasure, and knowledge within our culture. The loops and trajectories of immersion are countless for the artist. Throughout, Usman retains his pedagogical form, teaching students and open-minded visitors how to pause and look at the garden. By not fixing a singular meaning, form, or output to his practice, Usman aligns this format of polymathy to the chaos of the garden itself.
–
Artist and architect Khalil Rabah demonstrates brilliance through his speculative approach to Palestinian identity, institutions, and nationhood. His practice spans research, installation, painting, sculpture, and text, but at its heart is a persistent reimagining of cultural infrastructure, especially in the context of displacement and occupation. Khalil subverts institutional conventions by fabricating museums, biennales, and research centres that appear entirely plausible (complete with labels, logos, and floorplans) yet belong to a reality that is constantly obstructed or denied. In doing so, his practice is rooted in improvisation and the radical potential of imaginary institutions.9
9. Abu Eldahab, Mai. “A Conversation with Khalil Rabah.” Bidoun, Fall 2006. https://www.bidoun.org/articles/khalil-rabah-and-mai-abu-eldahab.
Khalil’s polymathy emerges in his ability to shapeshift between artist, architect, performer, administrator, and archivist, while refusing to fully inhabit any one of those roles. For example, Khalil’s After 12 Years (Evidence), 2008-2015 moves across disciplines, blending art with botany, law, activism, fiction, and political critique. In 1995, the artist transplanted five olive trees from Palestine to the United Nations grounds in Geneva as a permanent installation, positioning them as symbols of peace and also as living witnesses to displacement and contested belonging. Over time, four trees were removed, prompting a symbolic legal case filed by his fictional institution, the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind.10 The case argued for the trees’ right to Swiss citizenship after twelve years of residence, invoking immigration law, asylum rights, and the bureaucracies that govern life and territory. By embedding art within legal frameworks and speculative institutions, Khalil was able to echo the bureaucratic processes of migration, naturalization, and the right of return, and draw attention to the absurdities and injustices faced by Palestinians from legal and political systems.
As managing editor of his monograph Khalil Rabah: Falling Forward/Works (1995–2025), I worked closely with the artist and editor Anthony Downey over several years to bring this mammoth book project to life. Despite its 2023 publication date, Khalil kept the speculative, future-facing title …(1995–2025). It was entirely in character: Khalil is a trickster at heart. The publication, like much of his work, does not present a tidy chronology. Instead, it disorients, folds timelines into one another, and proposes futures even as it historicises a present that refuses to settle. In that sense, even the act of making a book became an extension of his logic; playful and deeply intentional, rooted in factual meticulousness and open-ended mischief.
–
Founder and director of the art gallery Grey Noise, Dubai, Umer Butt has a bachelor’s degree in printmaking and a master’s in fine arts, but has long refused the identity of “artist.” And yet, the gallery he runs functions as his artistic practice—an ongoing, durational work of exhibition-making, conceptual framing, and precise material execution. While formally structured with a roster of represented artists and a multi-year programme, Grey Noise defies geographical markers and side steps commercialised notions of what is expected of it.
Umer’s work goes far beyond the role of a gallerist. He approaches exhibition-making with the discipline of a craftsperson and the intensity of an artist. Though he resists the label of curator (often saying, “I don’t write”) his process involves research, persistent dialogue, and a clear vision for how a practice should be contextualised, produced, and shown.
Grey Noise exhibitions are not just installed; they are often deconstructed down to the frames Umer helps produce, objects he contributes (including his likeness on one occasion11), and accompanied by exhibition texts that can rarely be used as a press release. What emerges is a theatre of forms, materials, language, and spatial relationships.
Umer’s insistence on quality and clarity often manifests in difficult, even isolating behaviours. Yet this refusal to compromise is also what sets his work apart. In 2018, Grey Noise paused its regular programming and transformed the gallery space into the ‘Losers Club’, a five-month forum that turned its commercial failure into a platform for dialogue, reflection, and experimentation.12 Rather than hide the challenges of running a slow, conceptually-driven gallery, Umer opened it up to artists, curators, and peers to consider what failure and success might mean in art and life. The gallery became a temporary studio, library, and testing ground for ideas that had no immediate market value or resolution. Wonderful, undocumented, unintentional things happened in this time, giving a glimpse into the gallery that functions as an evolving artwork, shaped by conceptual rigour and a relentless commitment to form.
—
For me, what unites these practices (and what places them within a 21st-century rethinking of polymathy), is not a hyperfocus on advancement itself, but on the coexistence of peoples, ideas, and environs; the work undertaken through extensive engagement and collaboration. These are not artists who merely illustrate research or use archives as props. They generate new modes of knowing by inhabiting the overlaps between roles. They make space for subjectivity, fiction, intuition, and emotion within practices often assumed to be objective or academic.
It’s worth noting, too, that this is not entirely new. History offers us many examples of polymathic figures who resisted neat classification. But what distinguishes today’s polymaths is their critical awareness of power, especially in terms of who gets to write history, access archives, or define expertise. In that sense, the subjective artist-as-researcher is not only a symptom of interdisciplinarity, but also a political figure, reshaping the terrain of knowledge production itself.
In a world marked by ecological, political, and epistemological crises, this model feels necessary. It allows for complexity, contradiction, and care. It defies the demand to always be clear, or correct, or complete. It also opens new futures for how we understand the role of the artist.
The artist-as-researcher, then, is not just a hybrid figure. As I have learnt, they are often one step out of sync with the frameworks they navigate. Oftentimes, their work is considered too subjective for the institution and too research-driven for the art market. But this is their strength. They insist on ways of knowing that do not separate feeling from thinking, proximity from rigour, or grief from inquiry. They build relationships with their subjects, and they allow for doubt and for multiple variations of the story.
In my own work, this reveals itself in slow returns and shows up in collaborative editorial processes. These gestures may not always look like research, but they are. In the last decade, I have worked with archivists, historians, institutions, individuals, curators, advisors, editors and friends within the art community to start to present a lesser-known reading into the obscure life of Zubeida Agha. At times the work may get poetic but make no mistake that every piece of information that has been dug out, from dust-covered cartons in Islamabad to sterile filing systems in the National Archives in Paris, is thoroughly reviewed and fact-checked before being put into a small text. Sometimes all to say how she studied light in her evening strolls. And that makes me very, very happy.
11. Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, The Booth, The Gallerist and The Mausoleum, 2021, Wood, cardboard, votive candles wax, acrylic paint, ashes of press releases, wishes, hopes, metallic structure, carpet, ipad stand, ipad, video 10’, desert sand, art fair booth, gallerist, contract
12. Gronlund, Melissa. “This Dubai Gallery Has Turned Its Commercial Failure into Art.” The National, July 6, 2021. https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/art/this-dubai-gallery-has-turned-its-commercial-failure-into-art-1.738527.
Saira Ansari
Independent Researcher
Writer, and editor, works across art, archives, and publishing, focusing on the slow, intentional production of critical texts, artist books, and alternative histories. She is currently developing a new publishing imprint.