Woman as the protagonist

The identical sound of words ‘eye’ and ‘I’ may be coincidental but the fact is that the moment a person closes his eyes, the world ceases to exist for him, even if momentarily. Henceforth, one relies on the eyes of others, to confirm one’s being.

In our surroundings, being seen by others has other connotations too. Every girl growing up in Pakistan experiences being observed by prying male eyes on roadsides and public places. One becomes aware of this in Natasha Malik’s video installation ‘Not Eye’ currently a part of her solo exhibition ‘A Cage as Elusive as A Shadow’ (Nov 29-Dec 8, 2016, Sanat Gallery, Karachi). The work, created with moving and blinking eyes projected on the shapes, made with silver leaf and watercolour on paper, suggests the fate of a woman. Apart from other existential issues, she has to encounter the lustful gaze of frustrated men who cannot perceive women other than as a combination of alluring contours.

A woman is an entity that must be made invisible in order to maintain the morality and guarantee the stability of society. Thus the notion of women’s body being the site of sin is a major cause for decrees and doctrines -- about covering their bodies, converting them into non-body and non-self. These are implemented in the name of tradition and forced by the state, especially during the religiously inclined dictatorship. But many women have transcended and conquered this condition through their works, which has turned them into personalities with distinct vision and different voices.

In the brief history of Pakistani art, a number of female artists have employed woman’s body as a motif/symbol to proclaim the power and position of woman in a male-dominated society, in their preferred genres.

Natasha Malik alludes to these concerns but, instead of using direct language, opts for an idiom that conveys other ideas too. She constructs her pictorial world through elements which are familiar, yet remind of uncanny situations. A seashell repeatedly used (either attached to a pair of feet or surrounded by historic statues) becomes a substitute for a woman’s body. The depth of a seashell is the characteristic of a woman whose heart is difficult to reach.

Women in the works of Malik are enclosed in house-like constructions, conveying how a society strangles women in the name of security. ‘Cage’ from the title of her show is for a girl who is supposed to enjoy the privilege of protection. In a number of her works, a house is turned into a container of fire and smoke.

These structures, inspired from miniature painting’s perspective, rendering and depiction of detail, confirm the artist’s formal investigations. Natasha Malik had studied miniature at the National College of Arts, Lahore (she graduated in 2012). Her initial training in the discipline of traditional technique contributed towards formulating her distinct vocabulary which is a blend of her concerns and scheme of stylisation.

Her choice of incorporating the aesthetics of miniature to denote the condition of women is visible in a number of works in which a naked girl is stuck inside a constructed space. The woman -- either lying in the middle of arches with a chador on her body and two hands holding a pair of scissors at her feet, or submerged with currents of water -- indicates the plight of women in a culture where presence of females in public domain is discouraged, denied or barely accepted.

Malik strives to reclaim that place but her work also communicates how the society is modelled on patriarchal, religious and cultural customs -- to reduce the significance of women. She makes a mark by reaffirming her position in a larger context. In most cases, woman, her main protagonist, appears in the state God created her -- naked. The woman defies any attempts to control her through clothes, forsaking the prescribed role for her gender.

In the traditional environments, a woman not only has to conceal her face and body but also her hair and other particles attached to body. Malik invents situations in which the ‘dirty’ water left after a woman takes a bath is not acceptable. The spilt bath water in a circular shape gathered under the gate of a house contains the outline of a female figure, and thus reminds of how women are treated as invisible beings in our surroundings.

Natasha narrates the place of women in her art but without taking a position because, like the position of power, the structure of art keeps on shifting. It is the presence of a singular female searching for her idiom and story in that wide world of art. One is impressed by the immaculate skill in describing the detail of her imagery, a tool and device to determine not only the state of women but the situation of a state that does not address gender issue on a deeper level.

The language of Natasha Malik is poetic and personal, yet it is connected to the legacy of Indian miniature painting, in which the world was viewed through a specific vision -- much like the magic-realism of twentieth-century Latin American literature, with its blend of diverse times, distant places, and different events in one narrative or picture frame.

In addition to that, her use of family photographs, domestic videos and other artefacts (like seashell that belonged to her grandmother) suggests how past can also become an invisible enclosure. The infusion of fantasy with harsh reality makes her work distinct due to its content as well as its pictorial construction. Her pictorial references and aesthetic interventions exist between the boundary of present and past -- like all of us.