KARACHI: That’s how today’s artists view society — a circus of sorts, not a single dull moment, and not many moments of mirth. A phrase from Ghalib’s couplet ‘Tamasha Merey Aagey’, meaning a whirling display in a children’s playground, is the title of an exhibition of artist Naveed Sadiq’s latest body of work that opened at the Koel Art Gallery on Tuesday evening.

The name of the show is important for a few reasons. To begin with, the artist is clearly perturbed by the socio-political upheavals that the country has been witnessing for the past many years. The artist has tried to be subtle about his disgruntled attitude to the situation at hand. However, it is evident from his characters’ occasional bleeding and their heads covered in fuzziness of the most suffocating kind that there’s a touch of crassness to the stories he’s telling — the stories that have been told often but don’t seem to lose their relevance. So much so that even angelic creatures in his gouache-on-wasli artworks have a vicious trait in them. And it is readily noticeable.

Then there is this strand of the loss of innocence in an unexpected manner. Using a toy that, according to him, he used to play with when he was a child, Naveed Sadiq analyses the growth of not just his own self, of society and of the things that have grown alongside him. Unfortunately, they have assumed an ominous form. The artist qualifies all of that by supplementing his paintings with text. The line ‘khoon safaid ho gaya’ (cold-bloodedness) used in one exhibit is a testimony to the observation.

Naveed Sadiq throws into the mix a work of art which points to his spiritual side. It is an engaging piece whose greyness, not to mention the square geometric patterns, hints at the fact that he perhaps likes to meditate on issues that are not easy to question.

The show will continue till Aug 15.

Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2014