Written by: Tehreem Mela
Posted on: March 15, 2024 | 
| 中文
Bhoom Ka Saya (The Shadow of the Earth) and Gardeen Gossips
ArtSoch is a contemporary gallery in Gulberg on MM Alam Road, where you are welcomed by a fresh graduate Izzah, who is a gallery assistant to a women’s run and led gallery. Mariam Hanif Khan and Somia Naveed are responsible for bringing us Qinza Najm’s solo show at ArtSoch Contemporary, for the third year in a row.
Resilient Roots
As a student of art and an educator in a community run school in the Thethar village, outside DHA, I am eager to engage in conversations centered on accessibility, exclusion and what I consider the class apartheid state of Pakistan. (In)Accessible Gardens is a show that proposes questions about our conceptions of gardens.
The show is composed of 10 steel pieces that are painted on, laser cut and manipulated to create dream-like, almost celestial gardens from the artist’s process of both gestural and representational art. The subject matter includes trees, women and Urdu words. The show includes an installation of a fenced space with grass to sit on, and a steel suitcase open for the laser cut words of Mir Taqi Mir: baghban bagh nahi tera, keh hai wo gulistan mera. Jahan rahoon wahin khazaan, wahi bahar chahiye (Gardener, this garden does not belong exclusively to you, because I too partake of its joys. Wherever I live, autumn and spring become part of my life).
(in) Accessible Gardens
Over the past three shows at ArtSoch, Qinza has worked on steel, manipulating paint on the surface, always creating conversation between colors on the steel canvases themselves. This time again, the artist has shown her skill in achieving moments of paint interaction that signal the coming together of pigments. A piece titled Eternal Ishq, almost creates a womb-like space within which the artist uses gold leaf and images of foliage that beckon these meeting points of paint that I spent most time with. These moments of meeting are in direct contrast to the repeated motif of a chessboard. This year round, the chessboard can be seen in circles around gestural paint motifs on the different steel surfaces. I am always interested in thinking about the rigidity of the black and white on the chessboard, versus the fluidity of the same colors in the paint that pour into each other. Almost like waves, the black and white are crashing into each other.
Eternal Ishq (Eternal Love)
As a student of abstract art and its deep relationship with spirituality, Etel Adnan’s work always colors my view of abstraction. In her recent book Night, Adnan states “memory and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks and constantly merging.” This is the only way I can describe the ways in which the paint coalesces on Qinza’s steel canvas through conversations on change, immigration and spiritual journeys. That may entail the feminine, for the feminine always becomes a part of its environment and space, creating growth and community.
I hope the reader is warned that feminine does not mean sex. It connotes the spiritual manifestation of femininity, a thing that exists in each human: the propensity to grow things, the place where the garden grows. In the artist’s own words, ‘there is so much flora in our own anatomy’, as the mere lining of a stomach is filled with microbial gardens. Where does that garden come from? And is it psychological for the people in our society? This time round, Qinza’s work also includes forms that almost resemble celestial bodies like planets, and in the distorted reflection of the steel that is her canvas, we are invited to reflect on ourselves in the work.
Urban Umeed (Urban Hope)
Gardens are and always have been politicized. In our Mughal architecture, they are a part of Lahore’s identity, as well as symbols of openness, wellbeing and heaven. In many homes, gardens are closed off for privacy for women or children. Public parks are gardens for the public. But the insidious nature of these gardens is visualized in the picket fence that Qinza Najm installs in the middle of the gallery. A steel fence, golden tips to give a warning, as to who is this garden for? Who do we exclude from gardens that are meant to be spaces for recreation, beauty and solace for all. Or perhaps, have gardens only become solace because we exclude people from them?
I spent a lot of time in parks in Defense Housing Authority (DHA), and have witnessed police officers asking children from the villages nearby to leave the park, as if they are not entitled to the park that was possibly built on their ancestral land. Moreover, I am personally appalled by the inaccessibility of parks and gardens, and to see a patch of grass with a picket fence in the middle of the gallery was an installation that invited us into the conception of our picketed comforts and gardens. Or perhaps, it showed the importance of breaking other norms associated with the art world, and to include experiential and discussion-based spaces within galleries that are also very commercially successful. Art was always political, and commercial galleries should never stray away from that.
Mirage Meadows
Perhaps it is essential to quote Etel Adnan again: “places are a part of nature, of the bigger picture. We are interrelated.” The show comprises questions that are personal to everyone, and can be a space for people to talk about where their personal garden is, or perhaps what gardens they may need to tend to, or most importantly to think about the collective garden we could all be free in together.
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