Artists daring to fill the ‘Void’

Eager to contextualise information within visuals and techniques specific to time, the critical eye studied art through the periods. 

Today, contemporary artists address this rhetoric with a certain curiosity. Patterns are drifting courses and dodging focus. Art that was once ought to have belonged to a certain period alone, is re-emerging and reaffirming as experiences of today. We see that the ‘process’ is the pivotal concern of the artist’s occupation. The skill lies in translating the sentiment through this process and the result, the artwork stands humble before this artist in performance.



Keeping the process of conceiving and creating as the quest, a two person show titled ‘Void’ at Gallery 39k invited visitors to view works by Rabi Georges and Abdullah Qureshi. The exhibition set out to draw an artistic parallel to the ‘Annual THAAP Conference 2014’ centralising the theme of culture, art and architecture of the marginalised and poor.

Gallery owner of the show and exhibiting artist, Abdullah Qureshi retorts that the installation of his work in the form of stained sheets and pieces of clothing is deliberate. The installations of garments are actually a mutually agreed upon collaborative extension of the work of Georges’, a Germany based artist of Syrian origin. Georges is better known for his rather uncomfortable performances, addressing notions of incapacitation, displacement and injury, where he uses his body to depict the many traumas of war.



“I chose to show costumes from Georges’ performances as separate transgressing works of art. This decision was a direct result of the artist not being physically there but at the same time digging parallels between the oppressed; political, personal and sexual,” said Qureshi. The process of the performance artist edifies more effectively in a photographed series of his performance itself. The visuals lament suffering as a shared act between the subject and the witnesses, alternating between actions of the aggressor and pain of the oppressed, perpetuating in essence, the lingering aftermath,” he added.

Regarding fellow artists that comments on Qureshi’s abstract paintings as that, do not belong to today’s time, Qureshi responded, “Abstraction situates itself; while the representational collide. I do not (even) title my paintings because of the burden of context that comes therewith.”

The performance part of his work is formidably private and eventful, certain to collapse before the image itself, but he speaks of it in a very nonchalant tone. “The process is simple, one painting leads to another. Structurally, each canvas is divided and layered into spaces that take depth and dimensions from what I’m feeling at that very moment. I gather the energy to do it fast and not stop until it’s done,” Qureshi explains.

His canvases hold the recognisable hostage, re-appropriated with visual hints of shadows, dominance of a certain presence and objects of spatial interiors construed into horizontal landscapes.



Abdullah’s practice is consistently rooted in relationship aesthetics and informed by habit of research and reason. “When comparing painterly practices, it is imperative to understand links from art history. Fewer painters from Pakistan today deploy an attuned practice that articulates with the past,” he says.

He furthers the context of curatorial ground of the show through the title ‘Void’, which echoes the inflicted violence and oppression of the marginalised, where the boundaries between personal and political have subverted and convoluted. “Void is not necessarily absolute absence but also a potent space waiting to be filled,” Qureshi explains.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 7^th,  2015.

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