Funparay studio appears on Karachi’s art scene

By Our Correspondent
September 15, 2019

Friday afternoon saw the soft launch of Funparay, an art gallery located in Karachi’s upmarket Defence Housing Authority Phase-VI. The gallery’s owner, Nausheen Tariq, rather calls it an art studio.

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“There are paintings, there’s furniture, there are books — that’s a concept where a lots of artsy things are coming together,” said Nausheen, and vowed to introduce new artists to exhibit their works in her gallery.

Tanweer Farooqi is very fond of Jaun Elia’s poetry. He displayed one of his paintings in the gallery’s very first exhibition that is inspired by one of his verses: Main bhi bahut ajeeb hoon itna ajeeb hoon ki bas / Khud ko tabaah kar liya aur malaal bhi naheen.

Farooqi said he is working on a series about Jaun’s poetry. Explaining the painting in which there is a human face around smoke, he said it can destroy human life.

Then there is cactus around the neck of the human face in the painting like a necklace. There are things that are destroying him, he said, but he is not feeling it.

The person in the painting is destroying him, but according to him, he does not care. Then there is a picture of a happy woman. Farooqi said that he is a student of Iqbal Mehdi, who is a master of realistic arts.

The woman in the picture, he said, is a normal woman from a normal home in society. “This is no prominent face; people don’t know her,” he said, adding that the ordinary woman is getting ready and wearing her jewellery.

“Who is she waiting for? Why is she getting ready? That is what others need to think,” he explained. “I have just captured a moment.”

As for Salman Ahmed, he has his black & white paintings about life in Tharparkar. However, the women in those paintings are colourful. “Life in Thar is very difficult,” he said. “The ladies are in colour because life also has colours.”

His wife Ambreen, who received an MBA from the University of Karachi and was a banker until a few years ago, is displaying her paintings about landscapes in the exhibition. She said that there is a tense environment in the city. “Even on TV the news we see increases our tensions.”

With her landscapes, she said, she wants people to feel relaxed. The colours in her paintings, according to her, are soothing. “My concept it to use colours that can refresh your eyes.”

Arts Council Institute of Arts & Crafts Principal Shahid Rassam also has a painting up at the gallery. His work shows a bull that he says reflects our society.

“The bull has horns and a beard. It is also wearing a cap. It represents the chaos of our society, like we created madrasas and enrolled poor children in it. We’re now reaping what we’ve sown.”

Then there is an egg and the same bull is coming out of that egg. Whatever Islamisation we did in the name of Jihad, he said, we are facing it now.

But then there is a moon with a dancing movement that, he said, reflects the positive forces in society, such as art, music and culture. “They don’t stop dancing; they move whatever the situation is.”

Qudsia Azmat Nisar has a degree in fine arts from the Punjab University, with a gold medal. She said she started modernising the traditional medium of art, which is watercolour.

“For my expressions, the established forms that we see, the visual work all around is too little for me,” she said, adding that she needed more to convey her expressions through her paintings.

She then decided to break away from the visual form. “It was a bold step, boldness to leave all the visual expressions, especially in this medium.”

People used to paint landscapes, flowers, study, etc, according to her. She decided to paint without the established form, about what she feels. Then she created her own forms in her paintings that have no reflection of the visual world around.

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