Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: January 21, 2019 | 
| 中文
Nyla Talpur
“The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is, is another question.” - James Joyce, Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man.
Numerous young artists had their thesis works on display at the National College of Arts (NCA) this week, as part of the annual, much talked about Bachelor’s Degree Show. Painters, Miniaturists, Printmakers and Sculptors had all given shape and form to narratives that intermingled and permeated into one another, arranged like a complex maze that led the viewer from room to room, through thin hallways and up rickety staircases, confronting ideas and expressions held forth by young minds.
Syed Ali Laraib’s gigantic, unmounted canvases were an intense play of ink and dye on canvas, creating larger than life figures going through rituals of religious processions. Women clad in black dupattas sat on the floor at a religious ceremony, their faces in despair, an old man hunkered by a doorway amidst shoes left behind by majlis attendees, and a large mass of men, caught in the ritual of maatam, stood clustered together like a human pile of despair and ecstasy, their faces highlighted against the dark washes of the night. The work was impactful not only in its scale and subject matter but in the angst of the artist’s gestural strokes, large patches of ink and soft watered down strokes coming together to form luminous subjects in dark scenes of grief or companionship, identities intertwined through shared religious experiences.
Across from this work, up on the mezzanine, printmaker Abdul Musawir’s artistic concern was also to do with identity, but through the lens of nostalgia and memory. Combining photography, poetry and printmaking, Musawir’s display consisted of tiny prints peppering the walls, reminiscent of old polaroids. His work was a poem of sorts, each small print a new verse: old letters, ancient photographs and envelopes, faces fading in and out and large chunks of images missing, leaving behind white spaces, all arranged and rearranged consistently into a narrative of love and longing. It was apparent that the artist’s greatest strength was his sensitivity, each diffused color, lone bird and crumpled bit of paper coming together as verses in a stanza, forming individual and collective ballads.
If Musawir’s work was a gentle examination of his own solipsism, Waseem Akram’s artistic journey was a foray into the reality of the world. Around sixty small oil on wood paintings hung on the wall, composed in bunches and clusters. Images of warfare and poverty were punctuated by everyday still life objects, mostly painted on newspaper clippings with headlines peeking through. A traditional still life of a bottle and goblet on drapery was painted on an old obituary, the words Namaaz-e-Janazah left behind like the title to a short story. Akram’s work was a playful understanding of everyday banality and violence, with the preciousness of life thrown into greater emphasis by the smallness of each picture and the assault of image after image, commenting on the state of everyday affairs.
The top floor of the miniature studio had at its very end intricate, decorative miniatures by Nyla Talpur. Complex floral motifs merged with geometric Islamic patterns, twisting and turning amidst beautifully painted animals, birds and insects. The wall behind the work had as its wallpaper the same thematic visual, creating a mystifying sense of camouflage. The flora and fauna in vivid gouache pounced at the viewer, and every spot the eye focused on would reveal new details, a persistent magic trick with a reward for the attentive.
Nimra Komal’s oil and graphite renderings on canvas depicted quiet little scenes from old parts of the city, empty yellow staircases snaking upwards and old doors standing ajar, amidst harsh yellow light from hanging bulbs. Blurry dog-like forms could be seen traipsing through these scenes. The artist’s choice of mediums served her idea well, with loose graphite line-drawings flowing into oil paint washes, creating a sense of hazy movement in the stray dogs that she chose as her subject, perhaps as a metaphor for the phenomenological ramblings of the mind at night time, with the crumbling city as a representation of the unconscious.
In the painting studio, Maham Nadeem and Doha Elahi dealt with the very human act of looking versus seeing, especially in relation to other people. Maham Nadeem’s idiosyncratic, larger than life self portrait was a study in exuberance and mystery, with a patchwork face in bits and pieces coming together as a realistic yet illustrative oddity, glimmering gems and stones floating around it. Both the artist’s imaginative sensitivity and her boldness of technique were delightful. Elahi’s portraits were small in size and immensely detailed, with an air of quiet intimacy. Subjects were caught off guard, sleeping or lounging, or were looking straight at the viewer, expressions hovering between surprise and awkwardness. Against the green backdrop of the wall, these small oil paintings in their white frames were like tokens or notes of love, or personal mementos, as if the viewer had walked onto something secretive and shrewd.
Mudasar Rashdi had chosen the city as his muse, particularly its most frequented, everyday places. Painted as an intricate, poignant character, the city became an emblem of life and death, and Rashdi had created a new kind of diptych, with each canvas assisted by a video playing in a loop. The videos were full of the bustle of the city, filmed at the exact spots he had later painted onto canvas, except his renderings were devoid of life, like the remnants of a ghost town. Be it the busy McDonald’s on Jail Road, or the GPO Chowk on a crowded afternoon, Rashdi’s work dealt with the way the artist sees and depicts, and how a lived experience begins to shift and vary with time, losing its initial urgency.
Every year, the degree show transforms young students into new artists, incubating delicate and sometimes reckless works till they are ready to meet the public. The experience is dazzling for the senses, and rarely ever disappoints, as room after room begs to ask the same questions in unison: about acts of creation, destruction, and beauty.
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