Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: June 26, 2019 | 
| 中文
Reflection by Hira Zubair
“In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what is human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness," said David Foster Wallace.
It is after all the biggest, if not the sole reason one makes art; as a rebellion against the bleakness of mortality and the passing of time. As wave after wave of young artists seeps into the Lahore art scene, twelve extraordinary visual artists have put up a show at Ejaz Art Gallery this week about the existential and social aspects of being human. The show, titled Pensive, is a choir of young voices, all clamouring to be heard.
Ideas of purity and temptation are subject matter for many words. Large figurative works by Erum Akhtar feature young female characters with their faces concealed amidst a jumble of vivid backgrounds of stripes and leaves. Painted in intense detail, these female figures are motifs of worldly desire, partaking in liberating behaviours that might be considered as inherently wrong by a patriarchal society. The idea of privacy and concealment is important to the artist: a face hidden by a gaudy bright beret, a young woman's torso with old, wizened arms wrapping around her from behind, dark skin in sharp jarring contrast with crisp, flat backgrounds. Both the allure and the shame born of temptation are immediately visible in Akhtar's paintings.
Shanzey Mir is another artist who paints the feminine narrative from the perspective of a local woman, her concern being the ghastly nature of patriarchy, and its treatment of women. Realistic portraits of heavily ornamented women have been bedazzled using real emeralds and pearls, and these paintings have been enclosed in decorative gilded frames. A bride, her face half concealed by a translucent dupatta, demurely gazes at the viewer while the gemstones pasted on the portrait act as embellishing jewellery. Beautified and enshrined within a gold frame, the woman has served her horrifying purpose: she has been owned, possessed, and made docile.
The driving force behind Brishna Amin Khan's work is the human need to control and tamper with the natural ways of being. Miniature landscapes are painted within intricate floral borders in painstaking detail. Seeking inspiration from ancient miniatures, these landscapes are stylised, the colour palette dizzyingly bright. But the traditional borders around the works have been painted as if they were flaking off and slowly disintegrating; the natural world within at danger of being touched or polluted. Khan uses this visual metaphor to drive home the downfall of being human, exploring the way we seek to sully one another through control.
Nyla Talpur creates dazzling tapestries of flora and fauna, using natural elements to distract the viewer from the solemnity of the concerns around which she builds her work. Using the miniature technique of gouache on wasli to her advantage, she too uses an illustrative and convoluted depiction of the natural world to build a very human narrative, equipped with social and political concerns. This particular body of work has to do with the idea of constant travelling and moving.
The third miniature landscape painting has been explored by Hira Zubair, who also derives her mark-making techniques and colour palette from classic miniature art. Her landscapes focus on spirituality and its connection to the universe, particularly nature. The bright foliage, floating stylised clouds and curving pathways form a peaceful Edenesque space.
A large, glassy chalkboard is part of the display, with complex ruminations and jumbled scrawling in white chalk, covering its surface. It is only upon closer inspection that one realises the chalkboard's deception; it is a painting in oils on canvas, with minuscule painted figures climbing its surface and ladders leaning against it. The success of Mohsin Shaikh's trickery is in his skill as a painter; he truly manages to dupe his audience into fully believing what they see instead of what is really there. Scribbled amidst a plethora of rote phrases and pie charts, a phrase stands out: Nothing is true, everything is permitted. This, perhaps, is the gist of Shaikh's worldview as an artist.
The idea of truth being many-layered is a complex one, and one that also intrigues artist Muzna Mehmood. Using translucent, multi-layered painted images in blue and white on black, Mehmood creates paintings that look like eerie x-rays. The abstruse nature of the visuals further intensifies due to missing square chunks in these images. Meanwhile, delicately painted imagery of translucent drapery and wire meshing reminds one of curtains and windows. In one painting, a curving spinal cord in aggravated strokes is set against a black background, with a lone safety pin floating next to it. Mehmood's narrative is not only hers, but it also belongs to the viewer, allowing itself to be seen and deciphered in varying ways.
Salman Hunzai's paintings are portraits painted as stone busts cracking to reveal human flesh beneath. Notions of resilience and the strength of stone are derived from the stony mountains of Hunza, from which he hails. Gleaming, realistically painted busts in grey rock and gold depict how trials and tribulations might shape and strengthen one like stone.
Sara Akram's concern is also with suffering, as she explores mental illnesses and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in her mixed media paintings. Using figurative subject matter, she combines femininity and trauma, with the motif of a vulture as the visual representation of society, picking people apart. Working in a similar vein, Qurrat ul Ain creates collograph prints, creating undulating formations consisting of human figures. These repetitive organic forms curl and fall and rise, an abstract depiction of human emotion, ranging from horror to ecstasy.
Hafsa Faryal Khan and Shahid Malik are both traditional miniature artists. While Khan has created laborious, detail-oriented aerial view paintings of the city's urban landscape, each leafy bush and park bench painted in exquisite detail to create an ode to the value of labour based art and the physical mark of urbanisation, Malik used the traditional miniature technique to examine another kind of mark made by human beings: pollution. Creating an amalgamation of still life and landscape art, Malik paints sprawling landfills and vibrant trash bags full of garbage, composed in a manner that is immediately appealing to the eye, a phenomenon that is in odd contrast to the subject matter of the work.
In a world fraught with darkness, it is inevitable that the younger generation is using its creative calling to give voice to socio-political concerns and emotional traumas. For art to be effective, it can be as dark as it wishes and yet create a world that is illuminated, and hopeful, with the possibility of magic always around the corner. This particular collection of works does just that.
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