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Thursday March 28, 2024

Fragmented scenes of Swat’s tribal areas

By News Desk
December 31, 2018

Much of the thought behind Saddam Khan Murad’s work stems from early experiences of having grown up in the tribal areas of Swat and the politics that surround the region today, states the catalogue released by the Sanat Initiative, which is hosting his solo art exhibition titled ‘Dyed in the Wool’ until January 2.

Visually, he translates this by creating fragmented figurative and abstract scenes, often painted in a dark monochromatic palette. Playing with ideas of privacy and intimacy, Murad positions bodies close to each other, heightening silence and portraying the physical emotions of vulnerability and desire.

Born and raised in Swat, the artist graduated in political science from the Government College Mingora and then, in 2013, joined the National College of Arts Lahore, from where he graduated in fine arts, majoring in painting. Now he lives and works in Lahore.

“Growing up in any typical household in Pakistani society means being acutely aware of one’s own physicality in relation to space, and especially in relation to the opposite sex, writes art critic Nimra Khan in the catalogue.

She says that the ways in which most communities from various sections of society are structured places a taboo on excessive mingling of the sexes, which is so deeply ingrained from childhood that it forms a part of our psyche and identity.

“While in some households this is subtly felt in everyday interactions, in more conservative spaces it is more overtly present in customs and traditions, where genders are directly separated in public and private spaces.”

The mindset that develops as a result is one that demonises sexuality to the extent that even harmless and innocent interactions can be painted with sexual undertones, she adds. “One is thus consciously aware of words and actions and the ways in which they can be construed, specifically if one happens to be a woman.”

However, she says, human sexuality is not something that can be simply eradicated, so its suppression merely results in an even greater fascination with it, and it instead gets pushed into the shadows.

“A tense environment thus emerges with a degree of confusion and complex emotions attached to certain otherwise normal experiences, and one’s natural urges become laced with a mix of desire, fear, guilt and frustration. It is this mental space that Murad’s latest body of work encapsulates.”

She says that growing up in Swat, Murad was exposed to a conservative patriarchal society where separation of the genders was common. With a keen eye for his surroundings, he uses his works to portray his observations of society, specifically themes of race, gender, privacy, and the complexity of male-female interactions, she adds.

“While the works bring these taboo interactions to the fore, the obscure presentation alludes to their hidden nature, with visuals that contain a level of ambiguity. The canvases thus are at once a depiction of society and a challenge to it.”

She says that while the figures are painted in realism, the monotone colour palette and fragmented application of the paint creating a cubist appeal tames it into semi-abstraction, creating a visual that fuses the subject into its environment, opening it up to multiple narrative threads.

The artist achieves this visual effect by creating a rough textured surface upon his canvas and applying paint through a layer of gauze, which results in an uneven application and a patched appearance, she adds.

“The image essentially becomes filtered, and what we see on the canvas is a kind of veiled truth, representing remnants of subconscious memories and a culmination of experiences of the artist pieced together in a critique of his surroundings.”

She says that the sense of ambiguity created by the fragmented imagery also alludes to the sense of confusion created in social interactions between men and women, where emotions and desires cannot be clearly expressed.

“The image becomes convoluted, and while one can distinctly make out the human form and most of its detail, it remains between representation and abstraction, providing a sense of the image yet making it difficult to differentiate it from the space and environment that surrounds it.”

In this, she adds, one can see the notions of privacy in relation to our bodies that the artist talks about. “Even as the audience intrudes on private moments of vulnerability, the subjects don’t appear to be uncomfortable.”

She says that the process that the artist employs further adds an invisible barrier between private and public, subject and observer, the gauze almost acting as a window screen through which the audience can pry, their vision obscured and not readily discernible.

“Here one is also struck by the ways in which the notion of privacy operates for both genders, especially in works where the male and female body appears side by side in the same space.”