Aisha Khalid captures the present by transforming an ancient vocabulary

KARACHI:

Like her paintings, Aisha Khalid is dramatic to look at with her Cleopatra eyes, geometric jewellery, white shirt.

A hard worker and scrupulous-she even cares how you write her painting titles, she prefers the upper case-she has astounded the world.

Khalid and her neo-miniature contemporaries such as Shahzia Sikander, her husband Imran Qureshi and others, have reimagined an ancient form. From its small scale, it is now a field of inquiry into the North-South divide, global exploitation, and our present condition. In a department blessed by Zahoorul Akhlaq, and under the tutelage of Bashir Ahmed at the National College of Arts (NCA), the neo-miniature band, have stretched the field to sound, video, fabric, façade and more.

The middle child among five, Khalid was raised in a home with embroidery and stitching. Her family suffered setbacks, relocating to Punjab from Sindh, which she says was nothing less than a migration. Inspired by an art show, she abandoned dreams of pursuing a career in medicine and applied to the NCA. She took her embroidery along with her drawings for the entrance interview and stated “this is also art”.

Flash forward and you see Khalid, mother of two, a tiny figure, gazing at one of her fabric odysseys suspended from a museum ceiling. Commissioned by Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Khalid’s ‘WATER HAS NEVER FEARED THE FIRE’, is epic in motif and scale. Phoenixes, dragons and a ship fleet float on gold and deep sapphire. Paneled in various fabrics, from velvet to army camouflage, it epitomises the neo-miniature movement, interweaving visual pleasure with protest. As the ships enter the scene, a school of fish exits. Khalid ‘draws’ with gold and steel pins, creating glittering linear forms that tell a murderous story on the reverse, sharp points protruding in a gold fur. She alludes to global politics, there is the symmetry of the Mughal Charbagh, but the meeting point is a circle of weapons, and the mythical animals are devouring each other.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 16^th, 2021.