Beneath the Surface opens at Rohtas 2

LAHORE: An exhibition of new works by Faseeh Saleem and Mohsin Shafi, entitled Beneath the Surface, opened at Rohtas 2 on Friday. The exhibition featured 13 experimental prints by the two artists.

Faseeh Saleem showed five prints from a series named Everyone Carries a Shadow. The medium was embroidery and print on canvas. These works questioned the gender binary, and explored whether the male and female attributes are naturally endowed or socially acquired. Saleem’s work also included a sculpture titled Heat Transfer and Hand.

Explaining his current body of work, he said, “We are born with gender specific features, but in this era of post-modernism, one is compelled to investigate such issues.”

Two of Mohsin Shafi’s pieces were embellishment prints of archival paper, one was mixed media and another an installation comprising personalised printed fabric covers for laptops and notebooks.  One of his pieces entitled When I Model I’m Pretty Blank . . . You Can’t Think Too Much Or It Doesn’t Work was a satirical take on the kind of sloganeering prevalent in contemporary Pakistan.

It showed a statement asking for new fashion models that bore the stamp of an organization called Aalmi Rohani Tehreek-i-Anjuman-i-Sarfarooshan-i-Islam.

In the background it showed a youth confused between the stamp and the copy.  “In my attempt to break down social constructs, I draw inspiration from my own experiences as a young man from a conventional background. Through illustrative dialogues, I expose the grey areas that tend to become overshadowed by our stark moral codes,” Shafi explained.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 7^th, 2010.