Art for sale: Fear, old family photos and suffocation

Visitors float into Canvas Gallery on opening day of group show of works of five fresh graduates from NCA.

KARACHI:

Visitors floated into the Canvas Gallery on the opening day of the group show of the works of five fresh graduates from the National College of Arts on Tuesday. Up to 32 visitors at a time crammed into space, some admiring the tour de forces created by Donia Kaiser, Farah Munawar, Fazal Rizvi, Shams Uddin and Suleman Aqeel Khilji, while others propped themselves on wooden benches to discuss the mediums used.

The flowering artists bottled up feelings of excitement and anxiety for one-on-one sessions with visitors, explaining their work and receiving feedback. “Yes, this is our first exhibition after our thesis work was put up,” said 26-year-old Suleman Aqeel Khilji, coffee cup in hand. A spontaneous artist who turns to feelings more than images, Khilji mastered the art of using mixed mediums, including charcoal, acrylic, oil, pastels or whatever he could get his hands on, to put together his ephemeral works. “My painting is never complete. Sometimes I’ll finish a piece and then splash it with paint and turn it into something new and at times I pick up old unfinished works and work on them months later,” he laughed. Khilji was quick to say to admit his current works on display depicted fear and his predominant colour schemes of maroon, black, blue, red and purple reinforced the conversation Khilji said he was trying to have with his audience.

For Donia Kaiser, her paintings literally depicted the absence of family members. Her works, a series titled the Presence of Absence, depicted her father missing from family portraits. “I never thought about it but I just started working and the idea came forth and I guess it was influenced by my father’s death,” she explained. A miniature artist, Donia’s specialty was gouache on wasli. “Most miniature work has a flat, two-dimensional feel but mine has a 3-D effect and my technique is different from most miniature artists so my classmates call it Donia style,” she joked. She took eight weeks to make a single miniature work sized 7.5 inches by 7.5 inches and worked for 14 to 16 hours a day because ‘that is what [her] technique requires.’

Twenty-four-year-old Fazal Rizvi also initiated his work with the idea of family and the nostalgia of old photographs. “I like to refer to myself not as a printmaker, but as a visual artist,” he said. Fazal’s eight works on display were old family photos, depicted using oil on canvas, photo transfers, tea wash and what he felt was an important process behind his work, photography. “The idea is making a picture of a photograph of a photograph,” mumbled Fazal, adding that, “Just the process explains the distance in terms of the medium, which reinforces the idea of placement and displacement within the family structure.” His work titled, ‘Who’s afraid of the Dark’ stood out to him. “All my work has to do with old family photos but with this one is like when you open an old album and come across a bunch of photos together and they form a loose narrative,” he added.

Shams Uddin worked with the idea of suffocation of man. Each of his figures is bound and has something holding him down. “When I arrived at NCA, from Shikarpur, I felt suffocated. When you’re being suffocated, aap neele peele ho jate hain and I wanted to show that in my work,” he said. He used polythane and gouache on wasli in all four of his works.

Lahore-based artist Farah’s work was regarded by the viewers as more abstract. She created dizzy, azure images with dots using water-colour inks on wasli.

Friends and family showed up to support their ‘mind-bogglingly talented artists’, encouraging others to visit the exhibition and buy the works of art, which will be up at the gallery till March 24.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 16^th, 2011.