KARACHI: A two-person show titled Silent Conversation began at the Art Chowk Gallery on Tuesday. Both artists — Asif Ahmed and Atif Khan — have done a striking job in terms of conveying their message loud and clear. What’s more interesting is that the technique that they use in doing so is subtle and refined.

Ahmed uses gouache on wasli and creates a series called ‘End of an Era’. It is understandable that he is examining (read: revisiting) certain important phases of our history. The first piece of the series is a give-away as the princely appearance of the protagonist is marked by a mask-like contraption. The dour look on the face speaks volumes for a transitory period, a period about which nothing much can be done. Now if the viewer is still not clear what the artist is up to, looking at the ninth exhibit in the series will suffice. Here two worlds are juxtaposed, one of which is placed on the shoulder of another, and the latter looks a tad ungainly. That’s how the artist wants us to see it. And yet, on closer inspection, it is the former which doesn’t cut a favourable picture. It’s an incisive way of suggesting the coexistence of mutually exclusive worlds.

Mr Khan changes the mood of the show by bringing in nature as a metaphor of the constancy of change. He too speaks of contrasting worlds in ‘Fragmentation’ (archival inkjet print on hahnemuhle paper) but with a difference. As he himself says in his statement, he does ‘a kind of recycling of images’ and this recycling creates the illusion of difference. The created two realms are the same — it’s how we view them which distinguishes them (from one another). Khan also pays a lot of heed to craft, and the ‘Labyrinth’ series is a testimony to it.

The exhibition will run till Feb 28.

Published in Dawn, February 15th, 2017