Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: October 10, 2018 | 
| 中文
Ramzan Transmission by Bibi Hajra Cheema
One of the most baffling aspects of being a sentient life form is being conscious. Consciousness is an ever morphing, many layered phenomenon, its narrative endless and its voice constant. What happens within the human consciousness is perhaps too fast and interconnected for words to even capture at any given time, and this is why the image was created, to give a visual to this intangible yet very real voice in our heads. What happens when all these bits of consciousness floating within many human bodies come together - as groups, as crowds, within clinics and bazaars, forming a collective sentience? This is the question two artists collaborated to answer in the show City of Dreams and Nightmares at Alhamra Art Gallery this week, curated by Anum Lasharie, and drawing inspiration from the city of Lahore.
Awash in intricate detail, Bibi Hajra Cheema's drawings of large sprawling crowds are wonderfully whimsical and yet deeply unsettling in their endlessness. A Lahore based visual artist and cartoonist, who graduated from the National College of Arts (NCA), Cheema creates visions of spice bazaars, local clinics, and eerily lit dinner tables, with droopy eyed figures assembled together in moments of shared consciousness and space. In a painting titled Enflamed, sprawling lines in pen bleed into playful watercolor washes; staircases and mosque minarets are askew in the night sky, while flocks of people merge into one another like a stream of bodies taking over the paper. It is a cacophony of color and form that upon closer inspection reveals itself to be infinitesimal figures going about their business: a vendor selling minuscule rose garlands outside a shrine, women clad in brightly patterned dupattas thronging at stalls under awnings and flag streamers, while a fire roars mid composition, blooming like a massive crimson flower at the center of the marketplace. A ferris wheel stands far off behind a mosque, and banners hang loosely from intensely detailed leafy trees, under which mere hints of softly yet ever so skillfully drawn silhouettes evoke the image of people gathering to share stories. Cheema is enthralled by these ever changing spaces and crowds; a fact made evident by the way each drawing is an ode of sorts, a plethora of narratives coming together to form one many headed character: the city itself.
Also paying homage to the city and its spaces is Sachal Rizvi, who graduated as an architect from the National College of Arts (NCA). His ink drawings are captivating in their fragility and otherworldliness. The quality and detail in his labyrinthine compositions is meditative: the eye gets lost and hurls itself from landmark to tree, from balcony to billboard, all without losing interest. Though visually familiar concrete buildings jut out of the bustling landscape, and foliage and structure of all sorts are crammed into every visible space - there is a sense of calm that pervades these works, while the blankness of the billboards and fleeting flocks of birds punctuating the sky create the feeling that everything is a moving and changing dream. Such is the beauty of the artist's powerful lines, that the ink dictates the narrative, guiding the eye from thickly drawn spaces to lines disappearing from view, making the dreamlike world continue beyond what is visible to the viewer. Every brick, tower and tree comes together as a dot on a surface to form one collective image, reflecting the quality of collective consciousness shared by crowds in shared spaces, with thoughts seeping into one another and words being shared like morsels of food. This image of the city and its people may as well be a mind map, portraying the infinite quality of the many thoughts and ideas that intertwine within the artist's own consciousness.
The city of Lahore, with its thrumming nooks and crannies, is an everyday landscape its citizens have become oblivious to. These works are a wondrous reminder of the many skins this city has grown and shed, as life seeps in and out of its endless spaces, keeping the collective narrative of its people alive.
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