The unbearable likeness of being: Two artists take on reality and boundaries
The show opened on Monday, was titled ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, a play on the famous Milan Kundera classic.
KARACHI:
If you put a pair of contemporary visual artists in one room, there is bound to be a certain level of confusion that ensues. In an attempt to appease their baffled audience, Iqra Tanveer and Ehsan ul Haque preceded the launch of their two-person show at Canvas Gallery with a talk with moderator Gemma Sharpe. The artists were glad they had a chance to explain the mainly conceptual work that they do, and “articulate their work for the layman who may walk [around] feeling clueless otherwise.”
The show, that opened on Monday, was titled ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, a play on the famous Milan Kundera classic. It consists of three works by each artist. The pair had very different takes on illusions, reality, preconceived ideas and the blurry line between ‘what we know’ and ‘what we think we know’.
Installation art was a genre that came to prominence in the 1970s. It mutated from a mix of visual and performance art, inspired by the work of artists such as American painter Allan Kaprow. The art form focuses on a broader sensory experience, working towards capturing actual three-dimensional situations rather than flat objects or points of focus. The point is to disregard everything other than space and time, bringing art as close to reality as possible.
Beaconhouse National University graduate Tanveer decided to use this realistic art form to depict just how blurred the line between illusion and reality has become in our eyes. “The idea of illusions and reality exist parallel in nature,” reads her artist statement. “The beauty of nature is such that one may mistake an illusion for reality, and simultaneously with time, reality also may appear as just a mark in the memory, hence transforming into an illusion.”
Her ‘Paradise of Paradox” installation is meant to be an almost three-dimensional piece which allows the viewer to actually see light reflecting off particles of dust in the immediate surroundings. She tried to ‘show’ the audience the air around them in an attempt to challenge the subconscious notion that reality is defined by people, objects, and volume. For her, “the particles show you what space really is and how the idea of reality is restricted to the physical senses that we have.”
Trained as a painter all through college, Tanveer was never satisfied with how she would simply recreate photographs. “While I was painting I wasn’t really sure why I was painting,” she told The Express Tribune. “I was just translating photographs into oils and acrylics and it didn’t really make sense to me because if a photograph can capture that then why paint.”
Eventually she moved on to photography and installations. She remembers the turning point in her career during an artist residency she worked on called ‘Tazza tareen’.
Her work does not have any subtle messages as she prefers to leave it open-ended and up for interpretation. “For the longest time my influence has been serene and natural places, I feel those are the ultimate areas where one can go and understand how the world functions,” she explained. “Most of my works are just an act of experience, I see a certain object and when it inspires me or really intrigues me I work on it.”
Tanveer’s fellow artist, Ehsanul Haque took a slightly different approach to the space around him. He decided to focus on boundaries rather than spaces, and used a set of three installations and photographs to depict how we have become dependent on the borders that we ourselves built.
“I am interested in the temporal nature of the systems we live in, the cities, the countries and the boundaries,” he told The Express Tribune in a phone interview. “We rely so much on them that we don’t realise that we are the ones that created them.”
His installation ‘chicken feed and a rooster’ was probably the most thought-provoking piece at the show. It shows a rooster tethered to a nail in the centre of a room carpeted with corn. The rooster has eaten every bit of feed he can reach, forming a circle around him. “It is meant to be ironic,” Haque explains, “that he only eats what he can reach, but as he eats, he starts creating his own boundaries. It is also a comment on your life circle, what you are defines your boundaries.”
His second installation is that of live finches perched in a death tree. The almost surreal installation warps the connection between time and space. The tree is dead but the birds don’t seem to have noticed. Haque claims the tree is the past and the birds are memories.
He means to highlight how things that we feel are set in stone. For example, places we use as landmarks can change. “If you were at Boat Basin and someone calls you and asks you where you are you will reply Boat Basin, but what if that area didn’t exist, what if someone asked you where you were when you were in the middle of nowhere, what would you reply?”
His concept is simply meant to make people aware of how their surroundings can change, even if they do not.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 5th, 2011.
If you put a pair of contemporary visual artists in one room, there is bound to be a certain level of confusion that ensues. In an attempt to appease their baffled audience, Iqra Tanveer and Ehsan ul Haque preceded the launch of their two-person show at Canvas Gallery with a talk with moderator Gemma Sharpe. The artists were glad they had a chance to explain the mainly conceptual work that they do, and “articulate their work for the layman who may walk [around] feeling clueless otherwise.”
The show, that opened on Monday, was titled ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, a play on the famous Milan Kundera classic. It consists of three works by each artist. The pair had very different takes on illusions, reality, preconceived ideas and the blurry line between ‘what we know’ and ‘what we think we know’.
Installation art was a genre that came to prominence in the 1970s. It mutated from a mix of visual and performance art, inspired by the work of artists such as American painter Allan Kaprow. The art form focuses on a broader sensory experience, working towards capturing actual three-dimensional situations rather than flat objects or points of focus. The point is to disregard everything other than space and time, bringing art as close to reality as possible.
Beaconhouse National University graduate Tanveer decided to use this realistic art form to depict just how blurred the line between illusion and reality has become in our eyes. “The idea of illusions and reality exist parallel in nature,” reads her artist statement. “The beauty of nature is such that one may mistake an illusion for reality, and simultaneously with time, reality also may appear as just a mark in the memory, hence transforming into an illusion.”
Her ‘Paradise of Paradox” installation is meant to be an almost three-dimensional piece which allows the viewer to actually see light reflecting off particles of dust in the immediate surroundings. She tried to ‘show’ the audience the air around them in an attempt to challenge the subconscious notion that reality is defined by people, objects, and volume. For her, “the particles show you what space really is and how the idea of reality is restricted to the physical senses that we have.”
Trained as a painter all through college, Tanveer was never satisfied with how she would simply recreate photographs. “While I was painting I wasn’t really sure why I was painting,” she told The Express Tribune. “I was just translating photographs into oils and acrylics and it didn’t really make sense to me because if a photograph can capture that then why paint.”
Eventually she moved on to photography and installations. She remembers the turning point in her career during an artist residency she worked on called ‘Tazza tareen’.
Her work does not have any subtle messages as she prefers to leave it open-ended and up for interpretation. “For the longest time my influence has been serene and natural places, I feel those are the ultimate areas where one can go and understand how the world functions,” she explained. “Most of my works are just an act of experience, I see a certain object and when it inspires me or really intrigues me I work on it.”
Tanveer’s fellow artist, Ehsanul Haque took a slightly different approach to the space around him. He decided to focus on boundaries rather than spaces, and used a set of three installations and photographs to depict how we have become dependent on the borders that we ourselves built.
“I am interested in the temporal nature of the systems we live in, the cities, the countries and the boundaries,” he told The Express Tribune in a phone interview. “We rely so much on them that we don’t realise that we are the ones that created them.”
His installation ‘chicken feed and a rooster’ was probably the most thought-provoking piece at the show. It shows a rooster tethered to a nail in the centre of a room carpeted with corn. The rooster has eaten every bit of feed he can reach, forming a circle around him. “It is meant to be ironic,” Haque explains, “that he only eats what he can reach, but as he eats, he starts creating his own boundaries. It is also a comment on your life circle, what you are defines your boundaries.”
His second installation is that of live finches perched in a death tree. The almost surreal installation warps the connection between time and space. The tree is dead but the birds don’t seem to have noticed. Haque claims the tree is the past and the birds are memories.
He means to highlight how things that we feel are set in stone. For example, places we use as landmarks can change. “If you were at Boat Basin and someone calls you and asks you where you are you will reply Boat Basin, but what if that area didn’t exist, what if someone asked you where you were when you were in the middle of nowhere, what would you reply?”
His concept is simply meant to make people aware of how their surroundings can change, even if they do not.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 5th, 2011.