hildren often state facts so obvious that we fail to register them. Not long ago, Amos, a five-year-old boy, was playing with Lego. I said, “It looks like you’re making a crane.” His reply was instant: “I’m not making it, I’m fixing it!”

The line could well describe the artistic practice of his father, Ehsan ul Haq, who, instead of making in the traditional sense, assembles ideas by joining objects. These objects eventually form compositions that may resemble zoological creatures, vegetation or man-made items such as furniture, machinery or everyday tools. His combinations contain traces of memory, observation, reflection and commentary on disappearance, destruction and dislocation.

Ehsan ul Haq’s recent exhibition, Half Bodies of a Full Circle, at the Martin van Zomeren Gallery in Amsterdam (May 3 – June 7), features work that resists easy categorisation. The artworks cannot be pinned to a single location or tied to one theme. His solo show brings together an artist “who lives and works between Lahore and Amsterdam,” as he investigates the worlds around him. Created in Haq’s unmistakable visual language, these new works reflect his long-standing concerns with life, objects and the shared processes of decay in both.

In the past, Haq’s exhibition System of Organisations (Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, NCA, 2010) in Lahore was an exploration of the link between life and art. Ordinary, dysfunctional and discarded items, collected from various sources, were assembled to form a square (Noah’s Ark), placed next to a donkey loaded with sand standing in the centre of the gallery (God of Reason). In these and earlier works, Haq attempted to redeem objects and animals, transforming them into something respected, enduring and aesthetically significant, a work of art. But more than a formal transformation, it was a symbolic transfusion from extinction to survival. Animals often perish namelessly, leaving no memory; disused objects are disposed of or disintegrate, unless elevated to art, as in Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes or Damien Hirst’s tiger shark preserved in formalin.

Ehsan ul Haq’s strategy, however, is more inquisitive, political, poetic and personal. For years, he shared a studio with Iqra Tanveer, his wife and collaborator on various projects, on the upper floor of a dilapidated old house in Lahore. Peeling plaster, scratched walls, broken furniture and exposed electrical wires formed the backdrop against which Haq produced some of his most significant work. Though he has since moved to Amsterdam, it seems the house has never left him, at least not his art. He continues to collect abandoned items from the streets and uses them to create work, conferring on them a completely new identity, value and meaning.

As with animals in his previous work, Ehsan ul Haq now uses their substitutes, in various forms, to serve a similar purpose. The shift from real to represented transforms their physical presence. These forms, usually assembled from disparate materials, hover on the brink of fragility. Visiting his current exhibition, the viewer instinctively takes care not to disturb or disrupt these sombre entities, composed of raw plywood sheets, threads, baked clay, tree branches, withering roses, shrivelled terracotta fish, expired furniture and photographic prints of broken or half-constructed spaces.

Both animals and objects serve human needs. Animals have long been domesticated; and furniture is created for function and comfort. Yet both are subject to human aggression. Creatures of land, air and sea are kept in cages, aquariums and zoos, made beasts of burden, sacrificed in religious rituals or consumed as daily food. Man-made items are similarly used, discarded, destroyed or dumped at will.

What one notices first is the redness – a hue shared by both beauty and blood; by life and death.

In Haq’s work, the convergence of animals and objects suggests resilience – if not outright resistance. These hybrid forms, bypassing human dominance, become metaphors for survival: cultural, historical, religious and environmental. The camel, a recurring figure in Haq’s imagery after several visits to Arab countries, becomes a symbol of water scarcity and storage in arid landscapes. In Hollow Beasts Drinking from the Mirage, a stylised ceramic camel with an open belly stretches its neck towards a flat stainless steel dish, designed in a way that it cannot hold much water. A similar idea is explored in Hollow Beasts Hanging by the River, which features a drawing of a camel with an open belly, digitally printed on fabric and placed beside a bottle containing water from the River Jordan, suspended by a string.

In recent years, Haq travelled to Jordan and visited the River Jordan – not only a source of life, but also a symbol of divinity and division. Citizens of two different nations collect the same sacred water for baptism, yet the site is marked by political and territorial separation. Water, in this context, becomes both a spiritual resource and a site of conflict. Wars have been fought over water, and in some cases, as with Israel’s current strategy in Lebanon, water supplies have been deliberately targeted or contaminated during hostilities.

The themes of death, decay and disintegration continue in Towering Graves of Half Lives, a work composed of layered images that collectively tell a story of loss. Tied to a simple wooden bench are suspended threads holding withering roses and broken ceramic fish, set against a digital print of a ruined house.

Other expressions of grief appear in Something Other Than a Thing, Echoes of Half Bodies and Half Bodies Have No Shadows. These pieces feature small, unidentifiable creatures – either whole or partially decomposed – placed alongside plain plywood sheets and images of abandoned buildings. Their state of decay and fragmentation further emphasises a sense of dislocation.

This wrenching portrayal of life evolves into a central motif in two mixed-media compositions, where the viewer senses the presence of freshly skinned animals, either bound by ropes or arranged in uncanny settings. In Of Things That Grow and Things That Stay, a strange, creature-like form is trapped within a fusion of chair and table, beside a length of cloth printed with a red rose. The figure’s surface resembles dried meat; it lacks any features or details that would identify it as a familiar species. The juxtaposition of this raw, unsettling mass with the image of a fully bloomed red rose places the two in close visual proximity, yet far apart in meaning. One unsettles the viewer with its uneasy presence, while the other recalls a comforting, familiar cliché.

Haq manages to transform the cliché, as what one notices first is the redness – a hue shared by both beauty and blood, by life and death. (Families often place roses on the graves of their loved ones.) In Reached Half There – his most complex and ambitious work – Ehsan ul Haq assembles materials, objects, photographs and handmade forms to engage with the chronicles of resistance, and, in doing so, asserts the immortality of the mundane.

Aesthetically and structurally, the piece evokes both the Crucifixion and the Ascent of Christ. A low-tech cross, fashioned from un-hewn tree branches, is inserted into a table layered with a digital print of a piled brick wall. From the top of this structure hang dried roses and a rope that drops to the floor, supporting a deep scarlet form – a creature that seems to have been executed not long ago. At the top of the vertical wooden bar, a heart-like shape sculpted in dried clay is visible.

Through its materials, construction and symbolism, the work suggests the suffering of both a historic or holy figure and of ordinary creatures and objects. Just as Jesus Christ transcends his historical moment to endure as an idea, image and symbol, so too do the fragile forms in Haq’s exhibition endure as art.

The writer is a visual artist, an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be contacted on quddusmirza@gmail.com