New names from Rawalpindi venture on to Karachi art scene

3 graduates from Fatima Jinnah Women’s University show at the Karachi School of Art.

KARACHI:

For three young artists out of the relatively lesser known Fatima Jinnah Women’s University in Rawalpindi, Natasha Iqbal, Sumbal Mushtaq and Summiya Khan demonstrate a brave entry into the art world with some measure of maturity.

Their work has gone on display as the aptly titled show, ‘First Step’, at the Karachi School of Art (KSA) Gallery. The curator is an aspiring artist herself, Sana Ubaid, who managed to persuade the art school to host the exhibition albeit “off season”.

She believes that students who are not from renowned art schools have one small advantage; they are less influenced by the work of other artists. The only downside to this, some people would argue, is that we do need to also learn from the Greats and the people around us.

The disappointing part comes in the artist statements that are peppered with words like “self expression” and “self exploration”. But artists should not necessarily be judged on the paragraph or two they write about their work.

Summiya Khan has focussed on printmaking and collographs by developing prints of every day scenes, from transformers and telephone wires. She is always surprised with what happens to the paper after she pulls it from the press. Her work heavily features the urban aethetics of lines, poles and complex towers. “These objects seem so much like visual clutter that we mentally tune them out,” she writes in her statement. “But when we look closely, the structures and intersections and looping lines can be beautiful.” She wants people to look up at these poles and lines again and to reconsider “the meaning of our desire for connection and to wonder at the patterns we have made to get there”. This is perhaps the begining of a rich conversation she is about to have.

Sumbal Mushtaq has mined a somewhat similar vein with highly intricate and finely composed images. Her drawings of thin, intertwining string or rope, some tightly wound and others loosely linked to seemingly metallic objects also play with connectivity.

Natasha Iqbal’s eight canvas collection of oil and acrylic on canvas display great tension with warped checkered squares collapsing and emerging from each other. She believes we are as humans caught up in the voluntary and involuntary series of events that bind us invariably towards our existence and development. “We are living in an edifice of infinity where one action is quite often directly or indirectly linked with the other one. We are just a life living in between these array of events and are living in a world of infinite series of thesis and anti-thesis.”

For VM Art Gallery director Riffat Alvi, the work is “very strong” and “sensitively done” and a few of the pieces would be incorporated in the upcoming ‘Emerging Talent’ exhibition as well.

First Step will continue till August 1. Gallery timings are 10:30 am to 6 pm and it is closed on Sundays. The address is ST-2B, Block-17, Gulshan-e-Iqbal and the telephone number is 021 3498 4167.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 25^th,  2011.