Written by: Nayha Jehangir Khan
Posted on: November 30, 2018 | 
| 中文
(L-R) Judai by Naveen Shakil and Flights of Fancy by Scheherezade Junejo
The two person exhibition, “The Temporary Façade” opened yesterday at Satrang Gallery, Serena Hotel, Islamabad. The two female artists, Scheherezade Junejo and Naveen Shakil, are primarily focused on representational figurative works, done in oils and acrylics, on both canvas and paper. There is a harmonious female voice that the artists together are communicating to the viewer. Shakil’s compositions are led by referential sculptural antiquity, a metaphorical avenue that meets at an intersectional street disrupting these high art figurative depictions, through elements of graffiti art and design. Similarly, Junejo’s paintings are armed with a meticulous command over hyper realistic rendering of the human form that overlaps with ideas of an obscure sexuality, obscenity and a muted violence. Together, these female artists across two countries and the patriarchal-multiverse are countering our Pakistani normative conventions of figurative art.
The viewer can see Junejo has placed androgynous figures lying across, standing or seated in the paintings “Daydreams”, “Spotlight”, “Flights of Fancy” and “In Human,” while one pairing of limbs is free to explore their surroundings or glide across the picture plane, simultaneously in the same composition the other pair of limbs is strictly crossed over or clenched together. These poses are acting as a visual curtain behind which Junejo highlights a psychological state of being, and by deliberately decapitating the figure’s head, the result is a cryptic surrealistic moment between the paintings and the viewer. There is intentional distortion of the body’s natural physiology; Junejo is experimenting with a theoretical reality of the body and in that instance politicizing it. There is a blatant social realism in these works, urging the viewer to be inquisitive about the narrative that is purposely removed. Junejo, similar to her literary fictional counterpart, Dr. Frankenstein, is weaving a tapestry of abominations giving her creations the autonomy of contorted anatomical performance. In Junejo’s world of the strange, nightmarish and explicit, these bodies comfortably dance under a pale white light. Knowingly brutalising and dehumanising the body can be considered a commentary and a self-reflective process investigating the representation and controlling of female bodies in our society. In the painting “Daydreams” Junejo’s tactile yet delicate brushwork, creates an imposingly wrinkled porcelain skin, which she contrasts with a velvety textured background. We are reminded of the classic theatrical suspense found in movies by Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, as there is a sense of dread and a pulse of suspense in the painting. “In Human,” similar to her other black and white palette paintings, is framed with a solid red colour that reframes the composition, and the playful interaction of the contrasting planes creates an interesting spatial dimension in the work.
Shakil has an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the arts; her work demands to be outside the conventional parameters of a studio practice. On the side streets of her neighbourhood in New York, Shakil is creating large scale murals of the images she has created on her drawing table and easel. There is a seamless back and forth between the worlds outside her studio and inside these compositions. The alignment of multiple portraits as seen in “Eden,” is echoed in the drawing, mural and eventually comes together as a 3-D sculptural painting. “Eden” and “Judai (Separation)” are layered with different physical acts of creating the same composition repeatedly; there is an architectural exploration of the painting process. Shakil has six paintings, each accompanied by pencil and graphite renditions. She also included photo and video documentation of her street art, sharing the entirety of her process with the viewer. The painterly sensuality in “Khaki Banda (Ceremonial Dust)”, “Sajda” and “Kazi” show her aesthetic appreciation of contemporary Sufi music from Pakistan. These works along with their subtle trigonometrical and nonlinear elements of spills, drips and hints of gold create a push and pull effect between the ominous dark backgrounds and ghostly lit forms.
This gathering of Shakil’s floating portraits and bodies along with Junejos reductive human like entities create a metaphorical purgatory, binding together these two artistic worlds as one.
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