Exhibition: In bursts of colour, IVSAA Fine Art students turn themselves inside out

The graduating batch take on disintegration, suppression and dreams as themes.

KARACHI:

Beauty may indeed lie in the eye of the beholder, but the students graduating from the Fine Art department at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture have worked assiduously to ensure that any eye cast upon their work would meet a sight to remember.

The theses of this group from the class of 2011 went up on display at the Fine Art gallery on Thursday. Each portfolio was worked on a depiction of the student’s innermost thoughts pertaining to a particular aspect of their lives.

Sara Najum, for instance, chose to focus on the confusion and anxiety that some students are immersed in during their time at college.

One of her works included a bitterly scratched out blackboard to exude the frustration of grappling with mounds of academic work. In ‘The Book’ she drilled a hole into an old paperback. “People are constantly told how they must conduct their lives and [they] are shackled by the rules drilled into their heads by others, including teachers,” she said. “I created this to show how a person’s psyche is grotesquely torn up by the pressure to conform.”

Jahangir Miandad focused on the malignant forces that have been wreaking havoc on the country’s socio-political environment and how citizens dream of a more tranquil future. One of his paintings, titled ‘The Strike’, showed carnage and violence that residents of Karachi have become all too familiar with. “The government must be shaken out of its avariciousness,” he said. “The callous bureaucrats must show empathy, otherwise the people of this city will witness more scenes like the one I have painted.” In ‘Sharing the Dream’, he shows that all people have one thing in common - they all aspire towards a better future for themselves. Yamna Maqbool also addressed the theme of degradation albeit from a different vantage point. She said that her work attempted to encompass the struggle required to recuperate her own living space. It was during this attempt to repair and restore that she began to look at these personal concerns in a larger socio-political context.

In her untitled work, she has painted aesthetically pleasing images on fragments of tiles. “I hope people will see my work and realise that preserving the environment is a continuous effort,” she said. “The images that I have painted on to the discarded shrapnel will begin to fade soon. In fact, as we speak, they are already starting to go back to the condition in which I found them.” In other work, she has used pages from old magazines as a canvas.

Sahar Ghanchi created paintings which only showed traces that are left behind by human activity. Her work forces viewers to extrapolate from the elements embedded within and construct an image of the person who was there.

The students will be graduating on Saturday, December 10, and their work will remain on display at the gallery till Sunday, December 11. The work of the graduating groups from the other departments, such as ceramics and design, will also be going up on display.

Alumni art show

The work of the IVSAA alumni will also be open to the public at 7:30 pm on Saturday, December 3. “The alumni from all of the departments have returned with rather exciting exhibits. They have innovated and tried to push their work beyond what people have already encountered,” said the gallery manager, Anbrin Naz.  The artists include Bilal Maqsood and Amean J. Sivim Naqvi will also attempt to paint scenes from the event.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 3^rd, 2011.