Written by: Nayha Jehangir Khan
Posted on: February 25, 2021 | 
| 中文
Remediation of Memory by Ayesha Rumi
With the number of coronavirus cases low enough in the city, Satrang Gallery is back with a new show, while practicing safe social distancing precautions. The novelty of attending an art opening during the post-COVID new normal feels thrilling, especially for art enthusiasts who had been eagerly waiting to get back to visiting the gallery. Satrang has organized a group show at their Serena Hotel space by bringing together four female artists, Ayesha Rumi, Azanat Mansoor, Sana Zaidi and Sahyr Sayed. The high ceilings of Serena Hotel feel open, making it easy to walk through the gallery space to the welcoming lush green garden for some fresh air.
The first works we encounter on our walkthrough are intimate interiors made using collage, photo transfer technique, and elements of drawing. An experimental mixed media stands out called 40 Chenab Block (ii) that is reminiscent of Van Gogh’s painting Bedroom in Arles. Azanat Mansoor is a printmaker and her series of works in the show feel familial and organismic, as if part of the same old photo album lying at the bottom of a forgotten keepsake trunk in the attic.
40 Chenab Block (ii) by Azanat Mansoor
These vacant and desolate frames have rough line work and crooked edges purposely left, creating a kind of imaginary scavenger hunt for Mansoor’s childhood memories. What we see are immediate strokes using pen work, pieces of paper and loosely drawn figures, yet the emotional narrative goes deeper into the past that the artist wishes to capture in these works. Frozen glimpses of a place that we are unable to fully tune in or lock into, create a white noise between the viewer and the artwork.
Continuing with this familiar narrative, Zaidi eulogises her grandfather by putting down thousands of his poetry excerpts in intricately drawn writings formed in a wave-like spiraling direction. These drawing works began with the infinity of the white background, with the grey scales in the foreground floating on the surface of the page. The gold paper folded into a tiny boat is sailing in these scrolls of words as a torchbearer of her grandfather’s memory. The weight of the boat feels heavy, anchoring itself on top of the hypnotic lines.
When walking across the gallery, we spot Zaidi moving the boat into the clouds on a darker night sky, signaling closure to her grief. In her artist statement, she writes “My work is an illusion of conversations between us”, a heartfelt letter that feels therapeutic. We share the artist’s desire to hold on to the fading and changing memories of her grandfather, who was the source of poetry and origami art in her life.
At Night (ii) by Sana Zaidi
Zaidi sees the gold leaf as a symbolic representation of herself in her works. She carries the weight of these memories on what feels like Acheron, the River of Sorrow, connecting the natural and supernatural realms. She is the worldly recognizable object misplaced in a celestial space that feels otherworldly to the viewer.
The collection of small works by Rumi are called “experimental ethnography”. She creates a narrative through an assemblage of earthy material and photography elements. On the surface of these small miniature pieces, there are fading sepia and monochrome photographs, that on closer examination, are created on limestone rock.
The earthy material is interrupted, using photo development techniques that leave an impression on the stone. The weightless images of a busy Lahore city, street view and ultra urbanization is distorted with tones of grey and blue, that oddly feel historical and fossilized. This play between fact and fiction is a metaphor for the living distortion we have in our everyday life.
Overlapping Narrative (iii) by Ayesha Rumi
The artist is hinting at how rigidly constructed our idea of time and space can be without context. She is re-contextualizing her own photography of Lahore to become part of another entirely different era of existence. We time travel through these photographs to an older history of Pakistan or a larger relatable South Asia. We understand rocks to be unchangeable and carry layers of time, yet these photographs on them start to feel soft and gentle. Rumi has sanded down these plates of limestone to a flat surface able to mimic photography paper convincing enough for the viewer.
Between the large scale drawing works by Zaidi and photography slates by Rumi, there are colourful miniature works by Sayed that are immediately eye-catching with petri dish-like presentation. Her collages have an organismic quality, denoting body parts and portrait profiles paired with pop-art styled objects placed into the drawing as paper sculptural elements. She sees the works as a dollhouse that she explores further with each artwork.
The series Female figure I, II, III have a vintage mirror frame enclosing a central figurative creature with an identifiable female anatomy. These surgical drawings subvert ideas of domestication and identity of being female. Sayed is aware of the elements she pairs together as a direct response to her daily journaling, collecting a visual vocabulary that can further her experimentation with a narrative building around herself. These interdisciplinary works have the traditional watercolor rendering that is part of the strict miniature traditional practice. There are elements of puppetry and set design layered into these pieces that activate the space as if you were entering into Sayed’s own variety show, with each painting being a separate act.
Female Figure (i) by Sahyr Sayed
Asma Rashid Khan, Founder Director of the gallery explained, “The artists in this exhibition weave the eternal and simultaneously contradictory ephemeral nature of lived experiences into their artworks.” The show balances scenes of the exterior and interior environment of the artists. We travel into domestic life with Mansoor, watch cityscapes and roadside scenes from the car window through Rumi’s eyes. Then, we enter into a psychological space with works by Zaidi and Sayed, as they draw us into their conscious and subconscious collection of memories, emotions and reflections on past experiences. The show is an art walk that broadens our visual understanding of the living female experience happening for the artists in their present lives.
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