‘Left-overs’ and ‘stone being’ portray delicacy of art

The work of the two artists consists of 24 pieces which show how they paint their thoughts.

LAHORE: ‘Left Overs’, an exhibition of as many as 24 art pieces by Hira Siddiqui and Salman Hunzai is currently underway at Taseer Art Gallery.

Hira Siddiqui’s art practice is to extract the soul of world famous paintings and deal with the process of decontextualising the world famous.

According to Hira, her work was a commentary on museum quality art which one can access in different derived forms like prints and soft copies, sometimes in a brilliant resolution and sometimes the worst.“Not everyone can access the original masterpiece to experience its originality and the fact is none of us is experiencing the museum quality art. Almost all of us are inspired by ‘second-hand version’ of original paintings,” she explained.



“I also challenge myself to break conditioned narrative of famous images by visually overlapping layers of famous narrative paintings.”

Hira has tried to depict in her paintings the delicacy of print on textured surface (canvas) and textured free surface (Lasani) through watercolours, oils, graphite and acrylics. Speaking about his latest work series titled “Dan-e-jee” or my 'stone being', Salman Hunzai said growing up in the dry mountains of Hunza, the empowering giants have had a strong impact on him and his work.

According to Salman, stone has symbolic meaning throughout the lingual history particularly in Burushaski language. “The work is titled after the phrase used in Burushaski language ‘Dan-e- jee’ which refers to the beings who are surviving continuous encounters with adversities in life and became resilient to them,” he said.

Through his work Salman has tried to address a fact that tough encounters on regular basis throughout your life make one stronger and a time comes when one feels comfortably numb.



“My new series symbolises these beings of stone, who may appear dead in the eyes of the world, yet life still prevails inside them,” Salman explained. The exhibition will conclude on October 31.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 30^th, 2017.