In the reverberating hall of the gallery, young visitors swarm around the door to a small adjoining room. Inside is an old television set, and a girl in a skirt is seated in front of it. She is stitching up the gashes in her stockings. Girls in the crowd are wide-eyed and whispering about the performer's outfit but the boys don't mind. The TV plays a recorded conversation between a couple. The girl stitches faster and faster, humming hysterically, rocking back and forth and looking at the TV, then looking down at her stockings and the needle. The audio playback of the conversation reveals the girl's one-sided pursuit for a boy. She seems to be distracting herself from her torment. Sarah Ahmed's performance, the only one at the show, deals with coming to terms with truths that make the ego shrink.

Just outside the performance space are large-scale charcoal drawings on canvas by Maria Khan. Have a chat with her and you'll have a better idea of the linear narrative that meanders with nervous energy along her vast ivory-white canvases. Khan says she dresses up older models in little-girl clothes from her own closet. There are frocks with flower prints and grandma-wallpaper designs and anklets and other depressing accessories. Armed with titles like 'Cotton Candies', 'Robins', and 'Charlie, My Darling', her characters are chubby hags who give shrieks and toothy cackles of delight to the punch lines of venomous jokes. They dwell in gardens with thornless rosebushes and robins chirping in curling money plants.

The scale of Khan's drawings is slightly intimidating. The viewer is unable to ridicule these fleshy 'buds', as Maria calls them with characteristic irony.

In some of her pictures Khan makes corrections without erasing her initial marks. It is impossible to not like the quality of her lines in an age when it is normal for artists to use a projection on the canvas as an aid to drawing.

Amra Khan, who is really a great video artist, gives painting a go in the same space as Maria. Hers are faux naive paintings of naked transvestites and the like. They are edited to resemble greenish aliens with brightly painted lips. Their nonchalant stares come out of gilded frames used to evoke the glamour of the grotesque. Staged in front of elegant wallpapers, these paintings set out to be freaky and confrontational. Their looks accuse us of social complicity in their freakishness.

Amra's videos use the grid to show up to 20 smaller square screens of video portraits with clean white backgrounds. This one shows 20 or so burqa-clad women with the din of many girls reading the Quran in the background. What saves this projection from plummeting into the pit of cliche - there have been hundreds of these videos since the West became interested in Islam, causing well-placed Muslims to suddenly become interested in themselves - what saves this video is its sense of humor. The burqas are kinked with novelties like pink-zipped slits through which girls may lick their ice-cream cones. Others bear the insignias of Louis Vuitton, McDonald's, Playboy and Chanel, and even display exploding cartoon bombs. Happening simultaneously, they resemble a Benetton ad, but in a good way.

Attempts at the macabre are to be expected at every art school's thesis show. They are no more reproachable than the idea of attending art school to "free your mind", or the deeply ironic (and not entirely thought-out) shift towards video art in a country that suffers daily power-cuts. Mizna Zulfiqar puts together rag dolls with stitched patchwork, polyester filling and yarn. They are hung, sometimes upside down, like fresh meat, and are expertly upholstered to create different body types, severed heads, pregnant abdomens and levitating fetuses. They toy with the cliche of creepy dolls. They are hung near a doorway so you have to move between them to get to the next room. With titles like 'Golden Boy', 'Little', 'Head IV', these are fun to look at in their state of three-dimensional suspension in the air.

Irfan Gul's works are just across the wall in the next room. These comprise prints, drawings and pigment on wasli paper. Gul draws confusing tangles of curly lines with black pen to cast foreboding shadows on ordinary family photographs and paintings. His hairy lines congeal savage monsters with features as rigid as hieroglyphs. The disturbing disfigurations on the pleasant faces of Mummy, Daddy, Uncle and Little Daughter warn of impending doom and hint at a chronic paranoia about the end of familial comfort and safety.

Mohsin Shafi uses the medium of collage, whose tired pop art associations he transcends with the quality of his presentation. Framed in finely finished white versions of cheap gilded frames from Lahore's Auriga Market and Raja Center, Shafi's works are placed like precious objects along a creamy white shelf with molded supports. These pastiches are fashionable and random, though Shafi might argue with me about that. What unites them is their size, their pristine execution and their fluffy humor; there is a Victorian music-box quality about all of them. In 'Original Sin', for instance, a faceless black-and-white cutout of a bride and groom (the artist's parents or grandparents?) from an old photograph is glued to an old wrapping-paper print to form the ground on which sits an elegant old typewriter. On the wall behind the figures is a gilded old frame. In the pealing white wall behind the figures, one can see snatches of writing as though the whole stage set had been pasted onto the page of a journal.

Some of them are better than others. The better ones are jokes about the physical attributes of our worldly politicians, who are transformed into effeminate Victorian dandies with high collars and cigarettes. Benazir Bhutto is senselessly punished with a unibrow, a hibiscus in her hair and Frida Kahlo's mustache. This kind of fancy dress is what gives national figures a context in Shafi's colorful imagination.

Imrana Tanveer covers the quota for protest art. There is a pair of slippers stuck across a local arts-and-crafts rendition of the American flag. This is just the kind of thing that - for lack of a better phrase - blurs the already delicate line that separates art and activism in Pakistan. I would simply pass by it if it did not have a story attached to it: apparently on that morning, the American consul general of all people had walked into the Zahur ul Akhlaq Gallery, spotted the work and wanted to talk to the artist. She asked Imrana to tell her a little about that particular piece with the shoes and the flag. Imrana cited the injustice of American cultural hegemony and American drone attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but not necessarily as the reasons that drove her to produce that particular work. The consul smiled and said nothing. Imrana cited "our complicity" in America's cultural dominance as the inspiration for this work. The consul said how much she liked the frankness of the piece, and that Imrana need not explain herself. But Imrana was not explaining herself. Anyway, the American consul kept her smile walked on.

Esmaeil Arbab is an Iranian with permanently shocked eyes made small by the thickness of his spectacles. His mad-scientist hair catches little winds as he fumbles for the right word in his Urdu, which is rich with Farsi flourishes. He is talking about the use of Islamic principles in his art. He says that the NCA is considered a prestigious institution in Iran.

If I hadn't seen the catalog for the MA Degree show I would have mistaken his vast steel sculpture for a permanent fixture in the courtyard garden outside the Zahur ul Akhlaq Gallery. One of these is an eruption of stainless steel pyramidal shards that perfectly reflect the grass and the early evening sky. Their sharp points are projected outwards and aimed at varying angles, threatening to impale anyone who might trip around them. They are finished with finesse: you can't catch a single instance of bad welding or the sight of a nail where it shouldn't be. Their reflective surfaces make them at once invisible and gleaming, like a mirage in the desert of the origins of Islam.

Arbab would have been better off fighting to reserve one whole hall of the gallery for his sculpture, just to give it breathing space, a kind of sanctum that would inspire the awe that it seeks - and deserves - to inspire.

Rabiya Asim's mirror installations are small enough to work inside the gallery. And as with all work involving mirrors, the installations confuse and excite at least momentarily. A memorable piece is a mirror installation that creates an endless horizon in a beach-and-waves projection. The visual impression is of flatness and continuity. Islamic art's special relation to the geometry of infinity is at work here. The relationship of mirrors with geometry and symmetry and infinity creates an exciting context for modern Islamic art.

These artists don't forget the past, and that is a good thing in a country struggling with historical amnesia. The show has much to do with the goings-on of the last decade in the Pakistani art scene: the triumphal mutations of the miniature and varying uses of wasli paper; the grid, first transformed by Zahur-ul-Akhlaq and Rashid Rana's subsequent appropriation of it; the future of collage and light installations in Mehreen Murtaza's and Faiza Butt's musings on sci-fi and modernity in Pakistan (we have yet to see a performance art star); and Huma Mulji's nearly impossible feats of taxidermy. But these works shy away a little from the future. No work in this show seems to strive towards defying classification itself, towards generating new forms. And this is confirmed when you read the artists' statements in the slim catalogue for the show. They don't read much. They think about their work in terms of feeling, but not yet in terms of the starkly lucid art-speak with which art history is being written every day.

Salman Toor is a painter who lives in Lahore and New York