Of indoctrination and muffled voices

As conformity takes charge of the society, some artists, on the other hand, are trying to push past the norms dictating our lives by producing works challenging the status quo.

The four-person art show ‘Silent Noise’, currently being held at Studio Seven, seeks to explore the work that results from the limitations and how artists make use of their creativity in challenging them.

“The show is about the idea of expression and how our voices are suppressed by the society’s demands. Due to this suffocation, self-censorship gets indoctrinated as most of us are unable to say what we feel,” said the curator of the exhibition, artist Jamal Ashiqain.

However, he added that over a period of time these suppressed thoughts and emotions find a way out...expressed through some medium. “Here, we have used text as a source because it’s our primary way of expressing, and the world revolves around it.”

Speaking about her work, artist Warda Memon, a graduate of Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS), said her work emerged from daydreaming; imagining scenarios in her head.  

Through her piece titled ‘Mad World’ - symbolising the birth of a wolf from within a wolf - Warda inquires that,, “It is said that when a baby is born, it’s supposed to be pure; an entity that hasn’t tasted blood or flesh. But then it is connected to the mother through the umbilical cord. So does the child enter the world wholly pure or is it affected by the mother’s emotions?”

Another piece ‘This is Not Art’ was symbolic of the show itself as there exist restrictions on what kind of art gets displayed at a show even though the latter is about freedom of expression.

“While I was creating the work, adding meaning to all pieces, I felt like I was being stopped from expressing myself since I had to make use of text in each piece,” she said.   Artist Amna Abbas, a graduate of the National College of Arts (NCA) had used light boxes with images of human X-Rays bearing cryptic texts.

“My work is about how language affects our understanding. The language of a machine would sound Greek to us, yet without those codes, it cannot function. The translation of these codes into media in the form of images or videos, however, makes it easier for us to understand the machine’s language,” she explained.

She added that the juxtaposition of the machine’s language onto human anatomy showed how inexpressible emotions cannot always be put into words, which often leads to misunderstandings.

Another IVS graduate, Feroza Gulzar, who has previously experimented with moving images, used snippets from her travelling experiences to explore the word ‘If’. She focused on how the word leads different people to make different choices.

Sculptor Anam Rani, also from NCA, used resin to reflect fragility. She aims to show how an image can affect global or individual psychology.   

The show will continue till July 15.