KARACHI: As soon as you enter Canvas Gallery, a sprawling collage of a sketch of a woman’s face surrounded by crimson contour hearts and hummingbirds catches your eye.
This piece is part of the launch of Nida Bangash’s ‘Black sheep’s wool’ and Noor Yousof’s ‘Up in the air’ exhibition. The National College of Arts and Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture graduates have worked to create a feeling of anticipation for autumn and a new appreciation of life.
Yousof quotes American author and literary journalist Joan Didion in her statement: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” She is preoccupied with time and change as they merge to become personal experiences. “Fragments float, displaced by sudden change, it is final, chaotic and silent. Death comes unexpectedly, with it familiar sounds disappear and memories get mixed up,” reads her artist statement. “This mix of thought and memory creates a strange vacuum where emotions rearrange every day. The only thing which remains the same is the realisation that something has changed. I find things lost and dear to me in these pieces.”
These pieces come together as mosaics on fibreglass on wood for Yousof, who is currently working as an art instructor at the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology. In order to explore love lost and breaking away, she sketches a man’s ear and a woman’s eye across water with hummingbirds carrying their hearts back and forth amid trees swaying in the autumn wind.
In comparison to Yousof’s work, Bangash’s pieces are more daring and different. They range from photographs of children flashing the victory sign and daily life in Madagascar to dried fish and shrimp and graffiti of a man with a gas mask. The work is powerful, symmetrical and colourful and brings a certain energy to the gallery space.
In her statement, Bangash claims that the core-weave of her installations seemed to owe its origin to the shifts among mankind, led by travelling in and around modern times. The works focus on the primary human quest: to chart and inhabit similarities and differences of skin, race, language and appearance.
The vehicle is thus the letter and postcard. For Black Sheep’s Wool she created two installations, A and B, that are made up of twelve diptychs and eleven singular pieces.
Installation A constitutes 12 four-by-nine inch envelops with painted stamps. Installation B is a series of photographs displayed as eleven stamp-sheets and printed on A3 archival paper. The postcards bear stamps for royalty, cocoa and even King Julian from the animated ‘Madagascar’ cartoon. They contain short quips to people from the artist.
In a letter addressed to A, for example, she mentions that she was known as the ‘gooree’. In another she questions the government’s motives. The envelopes are green and white striped.
Small wonder that Bangash draws so much from travel. After she graduated from NCA, she decided to work, live and hop between Lahore and Mashhad, Iran.
The show will continue till September 15.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 7th, 2011.
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