‘Four Rooms’ opens at PILC

Artwork is showcased in four separate rooms

LAHORE: ‘Four Rooms’ an exhibition organised by The Paint Bucket Art Gallery, opened at Punjab Institute of Languages and Culture (PILC), Qaddafi Stadium on Thursday. It features four artists, each with their own installation pieces. The show focuses on the changing nature of cities and urban centres, and how similar its inhabitants are, even though they may not know it.

“In this show we present four seemingly unrelated installations, neighbours who are under the misconception that they have nothing in common,” Anum Lashary, the curator of the show and manager of Paint Bucket said.

Lashary said she had put together the four artists because their work not only stands alone, but forms a unique narrative on our everyday lives and how we interact with our surroundings.

The display is divided into four rooms and each artist takes over one room. Sana Jafri’s installation titled “Seek and Hide” took people through a corridor and into a wardrobe, the most personal of spaces. “The personal and private items in the wardrobe form an intimate portrait of an individual’s desires, dreams, pain and suffering,” Jafri said, describing the concept.



“The closet is a space where one would run away from traumatic childhood experiences, seek refuge and get comfortable with himself. It is the darkness and the light at the end of the tunnel,” she described the wardrobe’s dual nature.

Jafri’s work also included a video piece which showed darkness taking over the room in different forms. Jafri said this was comment on how a safe space could turn into the biggest nightmare based on associations and experiences one has had with the space.

Nairah Sharjeal’s installation used polyester fiber and silicone, showing everyday banal objects wrapped in diaphanous fiber sheets. The items resembled wispy translucent skin shed by a snake.

“My concerns presently lie in transforming spaces and creating experiential art for audiences to walk though. However, currently the focus is more on what is left behind than what moves on in this process of metamorphosis,” Sharjeal maintained.

She said her current installation takes inspiration from the city and the demolition and reconstruction of spaces for building transportation mediums. “My work finds a particular relation in this respect to the items casted and the overall backstory defining them,” she added.

Saad Ahmed’s work titled ‘What seeks you’ used reflective services through which he probed states of being through involuntary and enforced acts in everyday life. “In a sense, I am on a search through pixilated and half visible images showing uneasiness and unresolved questions,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 30^th, 2018.