Teh ba Teh on display at Taseer Art Gallery

LAHORE: A group show of three young female artists’ recent works titled “Teh ba Teh” was inaugurated at the Taseer Art Gallery here on Sunday.

The artists include Tooba Ashraf, Mavra Khokhar and Ume Laila. Tooba Ashraf graduated in Fine Arts (Painting) with distinction from National College of Arts in January 2018. Tooba’s work revolves around memories and dreams and how your actual and imaginary memory creates a false reality in your head. She paints old family photographs usually dating back to mid 20th century. Taking her inspiration from Egyptian paintings, its colour palette, and hieroglyphs, Tooba depicts her own version of sacred stories through experimentation with coffee, tea stain, cocoa powder and washes of oil paints. Apart from painting, Tooba uses poetry as a medium to express herself. She wrote her first writing in high school back in 2011, since then Tooba wrote various poems including a Letter to her Stillborn sister and a Thank you note to her Lost Friends. Tooba works and lives in Lahore and aims to create a dialogue between her real and surreal memory. About her work, Tooba says: “As an artist I try to create a dialogue through my work. From making artless doodles on the walls when I was a child to growing up creating large canvas with a concept behind it, i learned a lot in past few years. Taking my inspiration from Egyptian paintings, its colour palette and use of text in the form of hieroglyphs, I experiment with oil paints, washes, coffee and cocoa powder, chalk, photo transfer to create layers of my real and surreal memory”.

She says: “Our past plays an important role on how we perceive life, memory whether real or false it creates our reality and future too. I juxtapose my imaginative and actual memory by creating layers of my dreams and old family photographs dating back to 1960s. I use text, stories, people (whom I recognise as family) and objects I lost with time as references for my work. People and places in old photographs seem as dead as a still life and I render them like porcelain dolls, their existence is nothing more than a still life captured in a shot. Time in the picture is dead, and personality in those bodies is dead. My work deals with death and its forms, death of time, personality and memory itself”.

Born and raised in Lahore, 25-year-old painter Mavra Khokhar has quite an interesting and unusual way of perceiving her surroundings. Mavra has graduated from Punjab University, College of Art and Design in 2016 as painting her major. With over 10 exhibitions under her belt in short time Mavra Khokhar is a seasoned professional artist. Mavra is recently working on a new series of work that has more of her surroundings that she lives in. Along her work Mavra is currently studying from NCA, Lahore.

Lahore based artist Ume Laila graduated from Punjab University, College of Arts and Design grabbing a degree of Bachelors of Fine Arts in 2016. Laila has done many exhibitions during her bachelor’s degree and after that she continues her art practice. All of these were organised in Lahore including her show in Ejaz Art Gallery 2016. She was part of “imago mundi” Italy 2017. She participated in Lahore base residency “KARBATH 01” and “Tasweer Ghar” in 2018. Her work revolves around the study of relationships in contact of social life and the aspects that distract them.