Artwork from three countries on display

Artists from India, Sir Lanka and Pakistan feature their works.

ISLAMABAD: An exhibition, titled “Re-constructing Home”, by four contemporary artists opened at Satrang Gallery on Wednesday. The show features artworks of artist Gopa Tridevi from India, Pradeep Thallawatta from Sri Lanka, and Javaria Ahmed and Sundas Azfer from Pakistan.

Sri Lankan High Commissioner Air Chief Marshal (retd) Jayalath Weerakkody inaugurated the exhibition. “I am delighted to see multiple countries featured together in a single exhibition.

Art builds bridges between people and cultures,” said the envoy.

“The artists are all working together on one idea — of belonging and control over space and home, investigating such overlaps about the dichotomy of existence and taking this dialogue further,” said Asma Rashid Khan, director of the gallery.

Azfer, who is also curating the show, said her own work is about the territoriality and unsaid demarcation of personal space in shared accommodations. “Sharing domestic spaces can be joyful, but it can also become an act of repression and discrimination at the same time,” she said.

Thalawatta’s performance art video traces the unseen boundaries that people create in public spaces. “My performance derives from the important usage of an everyday household item like toilet paper rolls.

It depicts me dropping long strips of toilet paper tolls and wrapping them through people’s activities while they carry on with their daily routine in the marketplaces or wherever they are out and about.”

Tridevi reads into spaces, particularly, domestic spaces. Her series of work, “Safe Haven”, traces spaces people mark by repetition of acts or habits to develop a comfort zone. “My work mostly deals with time and fragmented spaces and what constitutes them,” wrote Tridevi, who was not present at the exhibition.

Through repetitive ceramic houses, Ahmed explores the meaning of home, which is better understood when one has to live elsewhere.

“My ceramic house symbolise temporariness and home sickness, further formed into various experiences and expressions,” said the artist. Her artworks are a manifestation of the nostalgia of one’s roots and a feeling of déjà-vu that certain faces and spaces evoke.

The Indian Deputy High Commissioner J P Singh, who was also present at the exhibition, congratulated the gallery on this initiative under which four young artists from the same
region were showcasing their work.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 14^th, 2015.