October 25, 2003

The Canvas gallery has introduced the work of several notable young artists to Karachi audiences; some of these artists have gone on to establish individual reputations. Sharing an exhibition with their peers gives younger artists the opportunity to gauge public reaction to their work, particularly important in the case of courageous young sculptors and installation artists who may work for weeks on a single piece.

Recently an exhibition titled ‘Primary Truths’ saw the coming together of four young artists who expressed their concerns on thoughtful issues, each unrelated to that of their fellow exhibitors. Rehma Iqbal, Afsheen Sajid Ali, Naseer Ahmed and Amir Raza shared space rather than sentiments and the mix of irony, mysticism, inner striving and disillusion that perpetrated the individual pieces and offered a piquant experience to viewers.

A graduate of the Indus Valley School, Afsheen Sajid is a practising artist and editor currently teaching film editing at the Karachi School of Art. In this exhibition, her ‘primary’ concerns were for the dangerous chemicals used in the so-called skin ‘whitening’ cosmetics and the deeply rooted discrimination propagated by the media. ‘Use for X number of days, lighten your skin, be a bride’... promises the clever campaign. ‘Dazzle your friends, capture hearts...’ And so it continues: ‘life-long happiness comes with a fair complexion...’ Afsheen begins her series with an arrangement of three mirrors that reflect the image of the viewer and carefully arranged ‘magic’ jars.

“There is a particular formula in the market with a basic purpose to lighten skin and it has a very dangerous component,” says Afsheen. “Most of the girls using it really believe it will improve their hopes of getting married.” Paintings showed densely textured ‘moon’ images decorated with wedding flowers, the last in the series with sharp nails emerging from red rose petals.

Script and bridal symbols were the subject of another surface representing well known matrimonial ads. ‘A girl, fair, graduate, aged 26, height 5’ 2”, seeks a suitable match’. “This is like selling a commodity,” says Afsheen. “It is demeaning to the girl and contains the seeds of destruction. Education has not succeeded in broadening our mental horizons...”

‘Fake Realities’ was an intriguing construction. Photographs of pale looking starlets were lined up on a board and illuminated by bright bulbs that bleached them further. A single sculpture in the form of a free standing silver ball was made of empty cream tubes painted silver. It was to be seen through a telescope that showed the ‘moon’ with a border of glamorous, ‘white’ faces. A melding of irony and seemingly genuine concern.

The gifted sculptor Rehma Iqbal showed her latest work, a group of three-dimensional, elegant representations of glass and metal on wood creating airy suggestions of cone, sphere and circle. The warm metal tones juxtaposed with cool-coloured diamonds of glass formed a pleasing aesthetic combination that was completed to the artist’s satisfaction just one day before the show. Teaching sculpture at the Karachi School of Art, Rehma is one of the emerging group of new sculptors who are adept with their medium and committed to their chosen discipline regardless of market demands.

Working in a different mood the new work was inspired by the mystic philosophy found in the poetry of Omar Khayam and the concept of all life forms springing from a single source. The sculptor’s interpretation incorporating hues and lines is founded on traditional Muslim art. “We are no more than a moving row of visionary shapes that come and go...”

It will be interesting to see where this exciting analysis of philosophy expressed in the third dimension leads the artist. Among the memorable pieces Rehma exhibited in past displays, her contribution to the National Visual Arts Exhibition that was held in Lahore earlier this year, took the form of a gracefully fashioned tree with spreading branches and roosting birds and stands high among Pakistan’s contemporary art pieces.

National Collage of Arts-trained Naseer Ahmed showed a sensitive use of graphite in his work. Incorporating pastels and acrylic paint on paper he produced a visual language that incorporated barbed wire, organic materials, fragmented forms and water images. Ostentatiously portraying ‘barriers’, he feels they hamper many forms of creative expression. On studying his statement closely one realizes the barriers come from within the artist. Confronting the ‘ready made’ tribal norms inherent in human beings, images used by the artist and his handling of the media speak of a figurative artist; one who in a different era or society might focus his art on classic genre of the human form.

As with Naseer, Amir Raza graduated from the NCA in 2000. Currently teaching art at Fixon School of Art and Creative Techniques, Amir focuses on what he sees with confusion as the changing values of society and the place he feels, of women in particular. His disillusion he blames on the lure of the modern trends responsible for women losing their identity and direction. Illustrating his subject with suggested female forms and subdued colours, his symbols include draperies topped by a crown with a suggestion of a female form within which, he contends, is actually a lifeless facade; the drapes and the crown are all there is.

Amir approached the media with delicacy, his palette and composition dominated by the subject, but there were glimpses of a fine draughtsman in his work.