Pasting cropped ideas to form a picture of our own reality

A four-person art exhibition opened at the Canvas Gallery last week. Titled ‘Seeing and Being Seen’, the show is hosting works by Ahsan Javaid, Arslan Farooqi, Ehsan Memon and Hamid Ali Hanbhi until February 1.

Ahsan Javaid’s practice deals with the ideas of originality, reality and representation. “These are all relative terms and cannot be assumed to form a universal understanding.” He explains that “information that reaches us is a collection of cropped ideas, sometimes by us, sometimes by others. It depends on how well we paste them together to form a picture of our very own reality”.

“But human brain works in various ways and tries to find similar ideas to validate its own; hence, together we start establishing shared realities and conventional understandings.” He uses his practice as a tool to critique and comment on such understandings and to construct a new meaning to generate a dialogue between his works, its viewers and himself.

“I have been using various methods to crop, cut and paste information from a variety of media, including references from newspapers, magazines, popular imagery and history.” As for Arslan Farooqi, he says: “The conscious mind can control the subatomic world. Nothing in this universe is certain until someone makes a measurement which revolves around the state of one’s life.”

He explains that “if one can’t determine another being’s existence, how can one be certain of their own existence; they could also be dead at the same time and not even be aware of it”. “A being’s consciousness determines other beings’ existence, and there’s an infinite chain of people looking at people until it hits the cosmic consciousness. That envelops the universe, which looks at us and says, ‘You are alive.’ The consciousness is an inextricable part of reality; nothing really happens in the physical world unless a conscious mind observes it.”

A man of a few words, Ehsan Memon describes his recent body of work as “a new project”. “It is a mixture of new and previous works. I chose these works on the basis of realistic abstraction, which is part of my work. It is my way of exploring a visual language.”

And then there’s Hamid Ali Hanbhi, who, working with found images and popular lyrics from local movies, often connects them with social events, which provides a departure point for his work.

“My work deals with the re-narration of those ideas. My image making practice revolves around the idea of freezing a moment and generating a new meaning out of moving images.” The subject matter in his work ranges from political imagery to love scenes, and from violent war images to poetic landscapes of a world yet to be experienced as an adventure.