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rt exhibitions and fashion shows are not entirely dissimilar, though some differences exist. Both serve as spaces of negotiation between a creative product and a prospective - often prosperous - client.
Artworks in a gallery, whether hung on a wall, placed on the floor, suspended from the ceiling or projected on to a surface, rarely leave their fixed positions. Viewers move around them, drawing closer, shifting direction, and observing from different distances and angles as they choose.
A fashion show, by contrast, places spectators in comfort on either side of the ramp. The order of their seats reflects power, status and wealth. Designers’ creations are carried by slender, elegant figures who emerge from one end and return to the same point with measured strides, under blazing, flickering lights.
Products of imagination are displayed on a luminous runway much as artworks are carefully lit in an exhibition. Yet amid the glitter, the designer’s couture, evening gown or wedding dress, like a painting, sculpture, drawing or photograph, remains a silent entity.
Both visual art and fashion design are vehicles for expressing aspects of human experience: the skin, appearance, physical attributes, material needs, personal observations, cultural phenomena or inherited traditions, as well as responses to the natural and social environment. Crucially, both disciplines deal primarily with the body, the bare body, as in models posing in life-drawing classes. Artists across every age and culture have depicted unclothed figures, from the earliest known stone figurine, the Venus of Willendorf (c. 28,000-25,000 BCE), to the present day. Similarly, the study of contour, colour, measurement, posture, shape and structure remains essential for fashion practitioners and students, who also base their concepts and designs on the naked human form.
Whatever label they bear, creative individuals invariably infuse their work with elements of their personality, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly; occasionally even aggressively. In some instances, these personal traits act as the rope that leads the camel. This is particularly true in societies that are compartmentalised and unreceptive to diversity in gender, ethnicity, class or faith.
A pertinent example is Pakistan’s Zia era (1977-88), when the state suppressed political, social and cultural views deemed unacceptable. In response to the repression, some of the work in those days essentially reaction: once the dictatorship ended, its significance faded, leaving only the historic value. Some other artist, however, developed a language of resistance rather than mere reaction. No wonder, their meaning, significance and contribution have endured. The same is true for those who feel marginalised in intolerant, patriarchal and authoritarian communities.
The recently concluded exhibition by Fatima Faisal Qureshi and Fatima Butt, The Weight of Elsewhere, explored the relationship between the individual and the society. Through Qureshi’s paintings and Butt’s drawings and mixed-media work, the duo disclosed emotions and memories, both recent and distant, as well as reflections on their socio-cultural surroundings. Although the two artists share a studio and co-run an art gallery in Lahore, each pursues a distinct approach to developing content that is, to varying degrees, familiar and relatable.
Fatima Faisal Qureshi presented figures - dressed, half-draped and nude - depicted either alone or in company. Across her work there runs a persistent sense of forlornness, depression and temporality, hinting at separation. Each piece resembles a snapshot of human exchange, either just before or just after it has taken place. An exception is the painting Farewell My Lovers, in which a party is shown in full swing. Even here, however, the central figure sits in quiet contemplation, one arm resting beneath her head, the other stretched across the sofa.
The world Qureshi paints seems to exist beyond the reach of verbal discourse: one of comfort, longing and an inward gaze.
The world Qureshi paints seems to exist beyond the reach of verbal discourse: one of comfort, longing and an inward gaze.
A number of acts can be discerned in these vigorously and sensuously layered canvases. What unites them is the realisation of light. Some of the paintings glow with shades of yellow and green, others are heavy with blues; a few are dominated by reds, crimsons and mauves. Each, however, is a study of light, and its alter ego, darkness.
The emphasis on artificial light in this series recalls Edward Hopper’s most celebrated canvas, Nighthawks (1942), in which four figures are caught in the harsh glow of a city’s reflected lights, a scene of urban alienation at an hour of night when time feels immeasurable. In Qureshi’s paintings, too, the world exists in perpetual night.
Across cultures, the division of day and night has long been linked to ideas of good and evil. Phrases such as “enlightenment” (or “en-nightenment”, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o once proposed), “dark ages,” “dark continent,” “dark soul,” “blackmail,” “bright white day” and “purified self” illustrate the value we attach to the two halves of the 24-hour cycle. Night has often been imagined as the setting for crime, or as the force that prompts delinquency within an individual. Equally, the dark recesses of the unconscious are seen as the source of terrible acts we may neither recognise nor intend, and for which we later seek forgiveness.
Beyond its associations with forbidden pleasure, night is also the realm of dreams, a space where another chapter of personality unfolds. Unexpected, shocking or shameful events occur while our eyes remain closed. What we recall on waking, regardless of the earthly hour, is consigned to night. Dreams, therefore, are shelved as a reality distinct from the routine one. In this sense, Fatima Faisal Qureshi’s paintings are scenarios of a freedom not possible in the openness of society. Whether real, imagined or a fusion of the two, they represent the lens through which the artist views the world and the self, or the self and the other, and the ways in which the self merges into another.
One example is The Crisis of Love, a subject familiar to the artist’s studio: the painter, palette, brushes and canvas on its easel. Yet here, every element is wrapped in ghostly shades of yellow-green, while the model reclines on a chair, legs outstretched. The scene before the viewer is also reproduced on the unfinished canvas within the painting, creating a chain of images within images.
This layering of imagery finds an echo in Fatima Butt’s striking Encyclopaedia Series, four works, each with its own subtitle: The Garden, The Dining Room, The Living Room and The Bedroom. Butt’s photographic prints, mixed media and ink drawings, shown in the two-person exhibition (August 29-September12, Kaleido Kontemporary, Lahore), summon memories of childhood in a specific period. These years are recalled through objects no longer in everyday use and preserved only for their archival value.
In each work, Butt arranges groups of small photographs, fragments of the past, in sequence, linking family members’ interactions with their possessions. A key beneath each piece connects the cut-out of an object to its place in the original family photograph of the artist’s parents and siblings.
In each of these works, the photographs are arranged on a quilted sheet draped over a piece of furniture, often accompanied by other decorative items. The artist captures intimate family recollections, a practice familiar across South Asia. The reminder is clear: it is not the material, condition or cost of these small objects that matters, but the intimacy, fear, loss and desire attached to them. They are expressions of their time, and it is these associations that hold a family together.
As Tolstoy observed at the opening of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The writer is a visual artist, art critic, curator and professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, and can be contacted at quddusmirzagmail.com.