KARACHI: It’s again homecoming for artist Mansoora Hassan, who is these days living in Turkey, but as it always happens she hasn’t come empty-handed. She is here with two video installations and a few specimens of mixed media, which are on display at Canvas Gallery until the 30th. The exhibition is titled Metamorphosis & The Dialogue Project: An Installation.

Art enthusiasts will discover that the exhibition is in two parts.

One is a political statement. It is an artistic and violent reaction to violence, which pervades all over the world but nowhere as much as in Pakistan. The other has compositions carrying multiple images of the whirling dervishes. The one that appeals to me the most is where she has, in circles of varying sizes, shown the dervishes blissfully unaware of the world outside their own emotions, performing the Sema which is, according to the artist, the Turkish word for whirling.

This is not to mean that other images, including the lovely shots of Jalaluddin Rumi’s shrine in Konya, are any less attractive. The play of light and shade and the silhouetted view of the minarets and the domes make the viewer give an extra minute or so to enjoy its beauty. There is no manipulation in the imagery.

Back to the part of the exhibition where she has depicted terrorism at different levels, Mansoora told one of the viewers at the exhibition that she was going to Antalya Museum when she heard about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

The relief carvings on a sarcophagus also depicted violence against women. That set her thinking and the multimedia that she created was a blend of the reliefs from sarcophagi and the assassination of a woman who was well set on her way to lead the country. One of the images is in particular quite heartrending.

A man is stabbing a woman with one hand and pulling her long hair with the other. The artist has superimposed a picture of the leader and a photograph of her son, who appears to be in great pain, but he doesn’t seem to take it lying down. He is protesting and that is what Mansoora wants all of us to do. “It’s time we fought back against the terrorists. We may not be able to pick up guns and hurl grenades at them but we certainly can garner support on a very large scale, which would hopefully scare them away,” says Mansoora with genuine emotion and not rhetoric, as anyone may seem to believe, for in the world today rhetoric has got ascendancy over conviction.

The National College of Arts graduate, who did her Masters from Pratt Institute, New York, had last exhibited her work in the UK and is preparing for yet another exhibition on March 7 in Istanbul, where she will put on display images relating to water issues. They are part of the project that she has imaginatively titled Take Me to the River.