Recent NCA grads exhibit pieces at Taseer Art Gallery

Themes include flying and fleeing, fragmented personality.

LAHORE:

‘In a room I trap the absence of the Room’, an art exhibition, by Madhya Leghari, Ramzan Jafri and Yasir Waqas opened at the Taseer Art Gallery on Tuesday.

Waqas, Jafri and Leghari graduated from the National College of Arts in 2013.

As many as 17 art pieces of digital print on canvas, oil on canvas, modified objects, mixed media on wasli, gouache on wasli, gouache and pencil on wasli, ball point and pencil on wasli and gouache wings on wasli were displayed.

Madhya Leghari told The Express Tribune that her work symbolised a sense of fragmented self. “It shows how our ideas about ourselves are informed by something intrinsic as well as by reactions to stimuli,” she said.

Leghari’s pieces included Prologue: Flutter I; Prologue: Flutter II; Prologue: Flutter III; The Other: Floaters survive; and Epilogue: Train to Karachi, 3am, not arriving.

She said that she was interested in the process of making art and the ideas and processes that went into it.

Yasir Waqas said, “My work tries to focus on the difference between flying and fleeing. One can argue that while both are mechanisms of escape, the stimuli that induce either and the resultant feeling vary.”

Waqas’s pieces include Disembarked and Dismembered; Outlay of Being With; Useful Parasites; You need enough light to see shadows; Wings and Weight; and Incomplete Conversations over Blank Maps.

Waqas said, “Socially constructed ideas of action and effect view flight as conformity. I am trying to explore the notion of being caged for one’s own good.”

Sanam Taseer, curator of Taseer Art Gallery, said, “The artists all have their stories of hardship. They have not only survived dark periods but have adapted to produce work of outstanding sophistication and elegance.”

Published in The Express Tribune, November 20^th, 2013.