Written by: Sana Shahid
Posted on: April 24, 2025 | 
| 中文
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At Tanzara Art Gallery in Islamabad, a quiet revolution of brush strokes and colors unfolds in the solo exhibition. A Love Affair by Tehmina Durrani, known for her powerful books and impassioned activism, Durrani now opens a deeply personal chapter in her life, told not through words, but through paint on a canvas and the stillness of solitude.
Tehmina Durrani is no stranger to expression. From her trailblazing autobiography, My Feudal Lord, to her co-authored biography of Abdul Sattar Edhi, A Mirror to the Blind, she has consistently used her voice to advocate for the voiceless. However, A Love Affair reveals a more thoughtful Durrani, one whose canvas becomes both a sanctuary and a podium. These artworks are expressions of grief, spirituality, rebellion and transcendence, a gallery of moments where painting became her sole method of expression when words failed or were forbidden. In her own words, art was her “foremost and truest form of expression,” existent even before her writing. It was born “in the silence of (her) soul,” weaving itself through her life like a secret companion. From childhood to adolescence, Durrani painted as an act of rebellion against societal norms, personal pain and the silencing of women’s voices. Her brush becomes the voice she was once denied, and each canvas is a testimony to a rather adamant spirit.
Splitting
The exhibition is thoughtfully arranged in themes that mirror Durrani’s spiritual and emotional evolution. In Freedom, she contemplates the soul’s longing to transcend beyond the momentary. Works such as Celebration (1998), Splitting (1998), and Spirit.Water.Air (1998) bristle with the conflict between joy and rupture, echoing the personal disturbances she endured and resisted.
Spirit.Water.Air
Moving into The Beyond, Durrani’s canvases shift towards existential reflection. Her piece, A Vision of Peace (2005) suggests a longing for serenity amidst chaos, while Gateway (1988) becomes a metaphorical portal, perhaps one she had to cross to reclaim herself. In the thematic section The Journey, paintings like I Will Survive (1996) and No Scar (2017) illustrate her resilience. These are visual declarations of survival and inner strength. A particularly poetic work, The Moon, explores divine symbolism and disillusionment with modernity, through the transformation of the moon from divine to ordinary. This powerful metaphor critiques humanity’s sacrilege of beauty and spiritual wonder.
Gateway
Durrani's spiritual odyssey is especially vivid in Ascendance and Rebirth. Babaji (2011), Wuzu (2005), and Namaz (1998) are not just religious imagery. They are meditative states rendered in oil, not preaching but instead inviting the gaze upon them and offering glimpses into the divine dialogues the artist speaks of, which are intimate, solemn and utterly truthful.
Wuzu
A feminist touch flows distinctly through her collection, especially in her works on womanhood and societal expectation. Eve, The Bride and Shamiana unravel the historical burdens placed on women through religious misinterpretation and cultural stigma. In her haunting note on Eve, Durrani writes: “A gender fell from grace,” capturing the inherited or rather generational pain women continue to bear. Likewise, Sleeping Woman is a call to awaken the Muslim women to rise and claim their rightful place which was given to them from the Divine Being that is rather confused with the societal norms and traditions. Wives (1996) and Love (1994) are a complex dialogue between the audience and the artist on the roles women are forced into, and the quiet suffering that follows. In her later works, we find an artist who has reached profound contemplation. The 2021-piece Static captures a modern, almost digital form of spiritual disruption, while Resilient Blue Burqa reflects the enduring spirit of Afghan women, an echo of her long-standing engagement with the Afghan conflict, also explored in her illustrated book Happy Things in Sorrow Times.
Union
The exhibition closes with The Roses and When I Need You, two pieces that capture the duality of art as both catharsis and celebration. Roses, Durrani says, are the universal symbol of love, pain and prayer. Through her strokes, the flower becomes a vehicle for divine presence, capable of mourning and joy in equal measure.
What makes A Love Affair extraordinary is not just the visual appeal of the works, many of which, in oil and watercolor, reflect technical maturity and emotional intricacy, but the brutal honesty behind the artworks. Each painting is a fragment of Durrani’s story, etched in pigment rather than print. Together, they form a narrative that challenges, consoles and elevates.
Celebration
The curator, Noshi Qadir has given this exhibition the space that it deserves. Step away from the noise of public life and enter the quiet studio of Tehmina Durrani, who has not abandoned activism; she has simply redefined it. With this exhibit, she speaks louder than words again with colors that whisper, weep, roar and cut through the gaze.
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