to cope with what happens when you abandon literary narrative and text as a subject matter,” Aasim states in his analysis of Afshar Malik’s work.
Commenting on Anwar Saeed’s art, Aasim maintained that the artist articulates, through a passionate fidelity to the painterly medium, issues such as gender divide, sexual preferences, aesthetic hegemonies and the paradoxes and realities of middle class living in subjectively loaded representations. “By making bold statements, he confronts and questions sensitive situations, serving up in the process, an emotional history of his own life,” he pointed out.
Mansoora Hassan, according to Aasim, draws upon a vast repertoire of painterly techniques -- smearing, blending, and bleeding -- to convey a strong material presence. She is best known for the impulsive surfaces created in her early ‘stroke’ paintings.
Commenting on Mehr Afroz’s work, Aasim said, she narrates lived experience without the directed specificity of autobiography or storytelling. “She builds surfaces of immense anguish, pairing suggestive language dominated by stamped text, that declares itself a lament,” he stated.
Moving on, Naazish Ataullah’s work is described as one that examines the relations among self-consciousness, subjectivity, and age.
Nahid Raza has once again explored her feelings about female sensibility. Her paintings aim to expand the viewer’s soul by offering beauty of form, texture, and colour. “Painting remains her religion,” Aasim said.
When reflecting on Noorjehan Bilgrami’s work, the curator was reminded of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who wrote: “Each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and means … thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived.” Aasim said, as an articulation of fugitive states, Noorjehan’s ‘fields’ are perhaps best illuminated by Bachelard, who argues for loss as a continual process of recovery rather than an ongoing deprivation. “Noorjehan’s fields, then, become highly symbolic of loss, renewal, and ultimately, transformation.”
Analysing Salima Hashmi’s paintings, Aasim said, “Essential her expression is the highly charged psychoanalytical subtext that holds in balance, her emotional and ideological imperatives as well as her sense of the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. On one side are apocalyptic visions, repressed memories, and realms of myth and fantasy, and on the other, the contingencies of location and context, where issues of globalization and colonization are intercut with the schizophrenic experience of life on the street. The two have merged, separated and overlapped over the years in a complex montage of shifting forms, space and sense of time.”
Shireen Kamran, whose work has been continually described as both abstract and expressionistic, uses representations of the natural world metaphorically, to express states of transformation. “Ranging from spare to sprawling, the process of drawing occupies a central place in her production,” the curator added.
Quddus Mirza, the curator maintained, is far too intrigued by relationships between people and things and how these relationships might be represented on a flat picture plane to be seduced into the metaphysical infinities of the sublime. “For him, abstraction is still an experiment, involving a careful deconstruction in a search for the internal structure that gives an image its emotional resonance,” Aasim said.
Reflecting to the theme of the exhibition, Aasim described it as a “wonderful example of curatorial polyphony.” To this effect, he said, “polyphony in music is the confluence of multiple voices, independent melodies woven into counterpoint. I have tried to internalise the urgency to generate a situation receptive to complex spaces combining the big and the small, the old and the new, acceleration and deceleration, noise and silence,” he explained.
The exhibition, which will continue till November 6, certainly merits appreciation.