Image: Mahnoor Euceph, The Extinguished Flame, 2025. Digital, moving portrait, 0:28 seconds. Courtesy of the Artist.
The Art Gallery of Burlington in Ontario is showing The Image Remembers: Chughtai Moving Portraits, an exhibition of short moving-image works by the filmmaker Mahnoor Euceph that return to the paintings of Abdur Rahman Chughtai. Curated by Hibah Mian as part of the gallery's Community Generator series, it is on view in the Community Generator Lounge until 3 January 2027.
According to the gallery, Chughtai's paintings have shaped the visual language of modern South Asian art for close to a hundred years. Euceph treats them not as fixed historical objects but as living images that can still produce new meanings. Her moving portraits are shown alongside reproductions of the original paintings, so that visitors can compare the source and its reworking and consider how an artistic inheritance changes as it passes across generations, technologies and places. The exhibition text argues that movement here is a way of thinking through history rather than a decorative effect.
The works on display, all made in 2025, are digital moving portraits lasting between 19 and 40 seconds: The Extinguished Flame, Princess by Terrace, Radhika and Hiraman Tota.
Euceph is a writer, director and producer based in Los Angeles whose work looks at the South Asian diaspora from a female perspective. A graduate of UCLA and the USC School of Cinematic Arts and a George Lucas Scholar, she made the short film Eid Mubarak, which screened at more than 40 festivals and was longlisted for the 96th Academy Awards. In 2024 she was selected for the Proof of Concept accelerator and the Pillars Artist Fellowship, and she is developing her first feature, 11:11.
Mian is a curator, educator and cultural strategist based in Mississauga. Her exhibitions and research deal with migration, memory, language and visual culture, and she has worked with institutions in Canada and with museums in Pakistan, served on public art juries and taught at Humber Polytechnic and the University of Toronto.
The two will discuss Euceph's practice and the ideas behind the series in an online conversation on Zoom on Wednesday 21 October 2026, from 3 to 4 pm.
