Women’s Day group exhibition of art opens today with rich diversity

Islamabad
A compelling exhibition that honours and celebrates the resilience and power of women while simultaneously highlighting a host of social and cultural issues pertaining to violence, opens at Nomad here today (Thursday).
Appropriately titled ‘Women, culture, reclaiming our spaces,’ the exhibition features the work of 12 emerging and renowned women artists of Pakistan, and has been organised to coincide with National Women’s Day.
“The aim is to harness the transformative power of art to promote awareness, provoke dialogue, and inspire action. Through this exhibition, much needed attention is drawn to the violence experienced by women worldwide and specifically in patriarchal, feudal societies with a retrogressive mind-set that marginalizes women and ‘minorities,’ the curator of the event and director of Nomad Nageen Hyatt explained.
The participating artists are Naheed Raza, Anjum Ayub, Sumera Jawad, Samina Ali Akhtar, Rukhe Nilofar Zaidi, Komal Shahid Khan, Farrah Mehmood Adnan, Farah Khan, Ayesha Siddiqui, Saadia Hussain, Tayyaba Aziz, Irun Waani.
Nahid Raza is a senior feminist artist who has envisioned a new interpretation of her work in which the figure represents the intrinsic strength of womanhood and spirituality. Anjum Ayub, a printmaker and teacher who is deeply attracted and moved by the concerns of the soul, has used different techniques to create a sanctuary for the female soul. And then, since the world is mortal, the subjects of her paintings and prints also keep vanishing.
Sumera Jawad has explored various forms of femininity as depicted through the ages in the realm of art. The use of her broad brush strokes evokes a strong sense of confidence, and at the same time, tender vulnerability. Her work is impressionistic and contemporary. Sumera works and lives in Lahore and has a doctorate in fine arts.
“An artist reveals or unveils the world from an angle that the world itself does not present to us. Above all, the artist is someone who exposes a personal vision by rendering it visible. I don’t like painting people if I don’t know anything about them. I do a lot of reading before I start. My works always move around females and their lives and represent the real past and present of their life,” Sumera stated.
Samina Ali Akhtar has gone a step forward in merging history with aesthetic contemporary imagery. The powerful compositions and fine details of her artwork reflect unique elements on a juxtaposed surface of woodcut, calligraphy, natural dyes, stains, and gold and silver leaf. For Rukhe Neelofar Zaidi, painting is like problem solving with colour and line. The artist creates balance and harmony while unravelling the subconscious thought processes. Her paintings are from a series inspired by the brave, resilient, perceptive and dazzling women of Kalash. ‘It is my humble tribute to their strength and liberation,” she said.
Komal Shahid Khan’s miniature paintings express the ‘aura’ and the energy that is within and around her. “I want all to feel the power and energy that ‘we’, women, possess. National Women’s Day is a day to celebrate energy and victory, and to break all boundaries including societal inequalities,” she maintained. Farrah Mehmood Adnan, a senior miniature painter and teacher whose work deals with a range of social and political issues, feels more inclined to talk about what it means to be a woman in the dark parts of the world. In most of her work, the attention is drawn to the abuse of power, which is the root cause of a corrupt system. The emphasis of her art is on peace and humanity.
Farah Khan, who is enrolled in the PhD Studio Practice (session 2013-2015) at the Lahore College for Women University, has a minimalistic approach. “This approach helps me to unveil the true dimension of a person’s identity that unfolds different chapters of association i.e., religious, cultural, and national identity. The visual embodiment of my work intends to deliver a dialogue in a simplified manner with the infusion of a rich colour palette in which gold leaf serves as a principle organ to highlight the prevailing religious identity,” she explained.
Also included in the exhibition are the works of Ayesha Siddiqui. “Through my geometric vocabulary and gestural treatment of the paintings, I explore the ideas of concealment, camouflage and illegibility,” she briefly stated. Saadia Hussain’s work revolves around the collection of her ancestral photographs and photographs from the internet combined with watercolour techniques learnt during her boarding school days. “I am also influenced by the fairy tales and stories I heard on religious themes during the same period,” she said.
Tayyaba Aziz, an abstract cubo-expressionist, works with complex forms of figuration using oil on canvas. “My colours are bright, lively and vibrant to bring the feeling of joy, content and elation. With the geometrical approach, I emphasize a flattened depiction to my paintings. Art is a part of my spiritual soul. Life is very complex and it shows in my work,” she said. Tayyaba’s work is a combination of imagination, reality and some unsaid emotions.
Iram Wani, an associate professor at the National College of Arts, Rawalpindi, considers her work as “a search for finding order in the chaos of yesterday’s and today’s memories and experiences; a chaos that is a pattern within a pattern and a pattern overlapping another. I keep analyzing these patterns, trying to decipher them. This chaos directs me in its weird randomness to a path where I find myself again and again. There is a strange stability in the whirling chaos. The fertility itself lies within this stability. The patterns that I see within the chaos are depicted in my work through the use of elements picked not randomly but rather through keen observations. The existence of these elements always has some symbolic meaning. They sometimes appear in the form of colours, sometimes as lines and textures,” she stated.
The exhibition, which will continue till February 28, definitely merits appreciations.