Written by: Jovita Alvares
Posted on: September 25, 2019 | 
Transience III by Kiran Waseem
‘With Compliments’, is a group exhibition which recently opened at Full Circle Gallery in Clifton, Karachi. The show featured various works across a breadth of mediums, by emerging Pakistan artists. These include Haya Esbhani, Kiran Waseem, Samra Kamran Mehkri and Tooba Ashraf.
Haya Esbhani, a recent graduate from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, displayed a series of ceramic pieces. Each piece is unique because of slight changes and mutations in its shape. Glazed with muted colours, Esbhani uses these pieces to reminisce about her time living in a joint family, almost a decade ago. She remakes common household martabaan jars, slightly altering each, and distorting an otherwise symmetrical shape with curves and dents.
Martabaan 5 by Haya Esbhani
These in turn, become tactile reminders of the family’s time together, which was both functional and idiosyncratic. The works speak of a loss and longing for childhood and a way of capturing a moment, however imperfect it may seem at first.
Memory works in interesting ways because, each time the brain recalls a particular memory, it becomes more distorted. Our minds add on, or subtract, what we think the memory was, rather than the actual memory itself. Eventually, and most likely, this results in the problem of false nostalgia, which is what Tooba Ashraf addresses in her work. A Fine Arts graduate from NCA, she uses a mixed media of paint and water soluble materials, in this case cocoa powder, to create a sense of divine history, using both memories and fantasies.
Her colour palette is inspired by ancient Egyptian art, which she then combines with visuals of reality, oral traditions and make-believe. For example, “Memoir 1” showcases what initially seems as the portrait of a mother and child. But closer, and repeated inspections of the piece, makes one question the meaning behind the woman’s expression or the child’s presence. The more details one notices, the less belief they have in their initial understanding of the piece.
Memoir I by Tooba Ashraf
Fellow NCA alum Kiran Waseem takes on both memory and imagination, moulding both in her almost-monochromatic paintings. She creates visuals that appear as though one is looking out from a moving car, with works such as “Transience V” or “When our story is ours”. Waseem’s hazy paintings illustrate the experiential and transient feeling of travelling. Like memories that tend to overlap each other, her layers of black and grey paint merge and fade into each other to make phantom-like images. Through her soft and dream-like works, she questions whether one can truly draw the line between memory and imagination.
In contrast, Samra Khan Mehkri focuses on this generation’s need to have everything photographed, and how they lose the real experiences in the process. Her tiny paintings observe how the world around us becomes distorted through the camera lens, and alienates us from the actual situation or object. Pieces such as “Karachi Through Lens: 3”and “Karachi Through Lens: 5,” capture particular landscapes in frustratingly myopic images. Using only the camera to see something limits one’s perception to its four corners as opposed to seeing it in relation to a wider world. Mehkri’s other paintings feature vehicles like Suzukis and rickshaws to showcase movement in both directions as they hurriedly cross ways, neither party can be made aware of the other’s lives or circumstances.
Karachi Through Lens 1 by Samra Khan Mehkri
The artists put up an interesting display which excavated various ideas and interpretations of memory. As we continue to age, we tend to look back to relive, and sometimes exaggerate, what happened in the past. In turn, both our memory and imagination fuse to become something we cannot so easily disentangle. On the other hand, we are also so caught up with capturing the exact moment through the use of new-age technology, that we tend to neglect the feeling and experience of the time passing. What is important is to strike a balance between capturing a moment, and letting it go. The exhibition will continue at Full Circle Gallery till October 4th.
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