Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: January 01, 2019 | 
| 中文
Constant Companion by Irfan Gul Dahri
In response to the external world, the resourcefulness of the human imagination knows no bounds. The inquisitiveness of the mind, along with its urgent need to form connections between visuals and ideas, serves the artist well as he makes and remakes his surroundings. While others might merely look, the artist will see. His experience is moulded by who he is and where he has been, and it is through this lens of self that he formulates thoughts and notions of what the world is. In Perceptions, at the O Art Space, visual artist Irfan Gul Dahri exhibited works that traverse his understanding of the world and its beings, particularly the kinship and hybridity of human and animal natures, both as a motif in mythology and as an inherent truth evident in everyday behaviours.
To the layman, Dahri’s paintings can be described as portraits, but they are in fact fanciful, fantastical tales told through the fusion of animal and human forms. In Fence, the hairless and wrinkled head of a disgruntled Sphynx cat, sits perched on the shoulders of a female body, against an eerie backdrop of hazy grey mountains, while a bald male figure in the background faces away from the viewer, shoulders slumped. A dark fence separates the two figures, creating a dystopian air of dissociation.
In Good Girl, a large bird’s head is fused with a human figure, its creviced beak taped shut, a squirrel running down the furry nape of its neck. Dahri’s finesse as a painter is otherworldly - be it the remarkable texture of animal fur, each hair illuminated, or the shadow of a bird resting upon a shoulder, so convincing in its softness and so assuring in its realism that you can hear the flutter of its small wings - the hybrid forms seem to exist in a melancholic, gentle space, one that is hostile and yet oddly hypnotic.
The associations he has devised between the two kinds of beings are enchanting metaphors at times, and at others are direct recreations of the seamless ways animals have become morphed with humans in the acts of existence: a painting endearingly titled Maano portrays a young girl peering out of the dark, her features feline, dark markings around her eyes and whiskers poking out beneath a cat’s nose. The painting is beguiling in its contradiction: the girl who has been lovingly dubbed Maano as per common local tradition, is without any of the playfulness or naivety of a child and instead seems to be trapped within this dark third space, a careworn soft toy barely visible in her arms, her expression almost demonic in the remoteness.
Much of what Dahri perceives and translates into his work has to do with the isolation that comes with ideas of identity. In comprehending and discovering one another in different ways or forms, it seems that human beings create myriad versions of one another, all alive in an incorporeal space where imagination meets perception. In creating these anthropomorphised personas in a different, haunting reality, the artist gives image to a profound notion: does one man’s identity depend wholly on another’s perception of it?
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