Written by: Tehreem Mela
Posted on: March 04, 2024 | 
| 中文
A Murder of Crows by Maryam Irfan
The ‘Mathematics of Composing Pretenses’, is a group show by four artists grappling with ‘nature’, as a word, or experience or a personal belonging. The gallery is housed in Phase 5, Defense Housing Authority (DHA), Lahore, a society where nature is anything but an epistemology. Instead, it is a tamed, decorative and an aesthetic art piece for a housing scheme to enjoy. This show is recommended for anyone who would be interested in stepping out of that pre-decided and controlled definition that plants offer us on the streets of DHA, to spend time with artists who use their art processes to rethink and reimagine.
Art pieces on display at Kaleido Kontemporary
The materials used in Ali Arshad’s work are of special importance and interest. One of the works uses a 20-gm stone of pyrite, which is a stone that comes from fire and is deceptively similar to gold. The artist seeks to show the failures of ‘rationalizing nature’. Deception and rationalization, two both aspects that are politically relevant to every Pakistani citizen. One can spend much time with Arshad’s work, and even ponder upon it pedagogically. For example, Arshad presents a lettered plan by 2 hypothetical men (Sultan and Sukhawant), who seek to separate humanity from nature and inevitably fail. Viewers who are fans of philosophy and postmodernism, can spend a lot of time with Arshad’s work to conceptualize pieces of work that seem to illustrate an academic essay. My personal favorite was an engraved marble slab, labeled ‘What is a Quatrain?’ In a talk that Ayaz Jokhio (another artist in the show) gave to ArtDivvy in August 2023. Jokhio stated that “when he paints, he doesn’t care what art is, and when he makes art, he doesn't care what painting is”. The artist, who is also part of the show, illustrates a point that Arshad’s marble slab has illustrated. The work is not led by medium or even the restriction of ‘art’. Arshad’s marble slab is an excellent illustration of a young artist almost figuring out a mathematical problem, a problem of what a Persian tradition is in poetry, through a piece that illustrates how contemporary South Asian artists create a relationship to mathematics and traditional art.
What is a Quatrain by Ali Arshad
Ayaz Jokhio’s assertion mentioned in the previous paragraph, can illustrate his own pieces in the display. Jokhio’s work has been known to question the confines of the gallery itself: I have spent time with his works, and am inclined to understand how he upends painting as a practice through his series, where he paints the backs of important figures, or halves his canvases in other series. In another similarly driven series, Jokhio’s work is a series of landscapes that the artist might have visited, from which he has collected and brought back trash. The trash is displayed in front of the landscape paintings. Jokhio’s work is often tongue in cheek and very subversive. As a painter, whose job in traditional art is to create beauty, he often shows us the lack of it, through his resistance to mainstream art circles. Jokhio’s painting of the landscape of Dadu, Sindh, depicts sandy and vast mountains. People usually go to this site and make drone imagery: the subjects always seem miniscule in front of the sandy terrain. However, a Coca Cola bottle, or a Sting bottle is presented in a gallery by Jokhio in front of his illustrations of Pakistan’s beauty. In fact, the iconic Coca Cola aptly speaks about the hypocrisy of the gallery space it sits in. DHA is a society that prides itself on achieving beauty by essentially gentrifying, isolating and erasing the histories of the villages that existed before it. As usual, Jokhio’s work reminds us to remember what is forgotten.
Littered Landscape (Shah Godryo) by Ayaz Jokhio
Mahreen Zuberi’s work is a series of paintings, prints on wood and a video piece. The work stays concurrent with the theme of growth. Zuberi’s work intentionally creates compositions and possibilities from grid drawings, using black shapes and forms, as well as color. As an abstract painter, I am inclined towards the choices the artist makes with the kind of forms that she creates in each piece: the basic drawing is the same for each, but different compositions of the same seed emerge. She states ‘the absence makes way to be filled with the more meaningful’. The forms that show also reminds me of work by the late Lygia Clarke from Brazil, or Seher Naveed from Karachi, due to the architectural element in the paintings. ArchThe weeds growing, joined by Zuberi’s handwritten words on the bottom of the page, elicit a conversation on seeds and weeds.
50 Square Yards (4) by Mahreen Zuberi
Maryam Irfan’s color palette also contains much black and white. As she utilizes the imagery of crows, a bird that is quintessential South Asian. One of the works, ‘A Murder of Crows’, utilizes similar shapes that disrupt the representative nature of Irfan’s work. The grid-like shapes and circles disturb and create a target on the head of the crows drawn. The grid around the painting is warped, a feature that the work consistently refers to. Irfan’s representation of birds and flowers almost represent restrictions, barriers (the reference to the yellow and black dividers on the roads), or even a sense of surveillance, through the reference of the crow and the repetition of grid-like forms.
Subha by Maryam Irfan
This show is on till Thursday, the 7th of March 2024: a space that is excellent for citizens of Pakistan to visit the questions and contemplations of the built environment around them. An excellent exercise would be to see art for exactly what it is: something that helps you understand your environment, and the experiences that we have difficulty naming otherwise.
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