Written by: Saniya Ali Wattoo
Posted on: November 06, 2018 | 
| 中文
Untitled by Anwar Saeed
The show Signature at O Art Space, Lahore fittingly features trademark work from thirteen well-established artists, mostly of Pakistani origin. While all artistic exertion is inherently individual, Nurayah Sheikh Nabi has very pointedly curated the exhibit as a series of thumbprint impressions - singular pieces of signature work, distilled carefully and meaningfully from the overarching craft of each participating artist. The selection of themes and techniques presented is heavily varied, such that any attempt to discern a broad commonality appears futile and even discourteous to the very premise of the project. And yet, the passage from piece to piece, artist to artist, and territory to territory, necessarily evokes a broad, wistful undercurrent of the diversity of the human experience.
Accompanying each piece is a biographical blurb (200-odd words) penned by Nafisa Rizvi, providing a context for each eminent ‘signature.’ Indeed, this is a key component of the exhibit; an extension of the signature itself, shaped not only by the fundamental uniqueness of individual existence, but also by the decision to unfold certain biographical and stylistic details.
The exhibition is dominated by etchings and prints, frequently monochromatic. Adeel uz Zafar’s Teddy employs etching to thoroughly haunting effect. His signature is a gauze-wrapped child’s toy, scraped cleanly into a pitch-black surface; a silvery, juvenile phantom hovering mutely in a hellish darkness. The piece, however, is about more than its subject matter - Zafar’s successful translation of his usual technique into printmaking, speaks volumes about his pliability as a craftsman and an individual.
Equally eerie, but more jarring than Adeel’s stylistic forlorn, is Michael Esson’s Untitled, drawing upon similar themes of an unsettled childhood, albeit more conspicuously, noisily ravaged by tangible externalities, including grenades, wagging tongues, and mushrooming delusions. Like Esson, Saad Ahmad’s Meeting of Mentors depicts explicitly in etched monochrome a slice of Pakistani life, while eschewing overt calamities for more latent, seemingly innocuous realities, such as the stillness of urban living in Pakistan, with its warm sunlight and idle chatter.
Mohammad Ali Talpur’s Photo Etching moves this theme of monochromatic cultural incision towards a hazily polka-dotted, nostalgic imagining, with a transistor radio wafting through the skies of collective memory, floating upwards and away from incoming generations increasingly unable to recognize this all-too-important cultural and political emblem. Afshar Malik’s The Dream Now and Then is another black-and-white etched dalliance with nostalgia, while moving the medium towards the ephemeral, and more widely accessible human experiences, including the clamour of shared reminiscence, woven closely into his own retrospective appreciation for artistry as a collective human exercise.
Meher Afroz’s Untitled uses the monochromatic etch to dismember the illusory, subordinating nature of historical - specifically sub-continental - imaginings of femininity, appended by her own self-sufficient unorthodoxy. Nurayah Sheikh Nabi’s Anemochorous Dragon, on the other hand, brings forth a more celebratory imagining of the feminine archetype, drawing upon some of the same natural symbolism to assemble a more universal, dynamic imagining of the female as the nurturing ‘receptacle.’
Laila Rahman’s I Bloom, Therefore I Am, moves away from the black-and-white to the blacks and blues of all human existence; the blank, all-white slate of man’s newborn tulip decaying slowly within the orb of elapsing time. Encased within the revolving orb is every facet of human feeling and survival, doomed to occur in a chaotic, repetitive ferment, until the end of time. Naazish Ata-Ullah’s LOSS, the final etching of the collection, isolates from within this universal pandemonium the singular experience of loss, shrouded in her signature chaddar leitmotif. The word silences everything around it, bringing human mirth to a screeching halt, but Naazish does not believe in repetitive ferment - she believes those who have been made to lose will be vindicated.
Naiza Khan’s Anatomy of a Toilet is a clever ethnographic exercise in documenting communicative neglect, drawing upon her own work on the island of Manora, south of Karachi, illustrating the callous rift between the powerful and the marginalized. Rabeya Jalil’s Blue Notes extends this island-specific notion of miscommunication to the entire millennial generation, a group so overwhelmed by noise and information that they do not know when to stop consuming empty words penned illegibly onto brightly-coloured notebooks.
The bicycle-pedalling Mughals of Muhammad Atif Khan’s noisy Landscape of the Heart – ix make light of our disjointed, crisscrossing pasts and presents, and our pressing inability to reconcile one set of values with another. Anwar Saeed’s Untitled, meanwhile, takes a much graver, laconic view of our paradoxical selves, and how this mars and debilitates those who fall outside the domain of our perceived acceptability.
The exhibition thus recreates the very tale of earthly existence, a promenade between human signatures that either interact with each other deliberately, or brush against one another by happenstance, giving rise to new narratives, and still newer signatures.
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