December 20, 2003

Naiza Khan’s work manifests a significant awareness of the possibilities of mass media techniques and concepts, challenging perceptions and analyzing the standard interpretations that represent female identity and form in art traditions, says Marjorie Husain

Always objective, her art is often confrontational, questioning ‘stereotypes’ with issues that are intuitive as well as deeply thought out. “I feel that when I get into the studio I’ve been thinking about the work for so long that it’s like you take a bow and arrow and shoot it out and the arrow hits the bulls-eye. And it’s, how did I get it right?

“I know that it’s the tip of the iceberg the way my work gets structured over a very long period of time, and that’s the way I have to cope with it. Ideally I’d like to work six to nine hours a day. When I did my residency at the Gasworks (the London workshop of the Triangle Arts Trust Initiative), I worked in the studio up to ten hours a day, and it was fantastic.”

So explained Naiza Khan when we met in her studio where one finds drawings, prints and paintings from her art student days in London till the present time. We talked of the problems women artists face, notably that of organizing studio time. True, Naiza does not ‘churn them out’, as she wistfully put it, but her work is of rare, recognizable quality with on-going connotations.

Currently she is working with mixed-media techniques and imagery, juxtaposing dramatically contrasting visual impressions, but these have yet to be seen outside the studio. A recurring, sharply defined image appeared in several instances, these the artist explained, were drawn from a 13th century Chastity Belt seen in a Museum in Venice.

“My work over the last few years has been using the body as a primary signifier of its cultural politics. I have been exploring the ambiguous and complex relationship between the female body and female identity. What evolved as a linear investigation through the core activity of drawing has grown as a concern through a number of traditional and non-traditional materials like silk organza, henna pigment, latex and the use of text. I feel these materials rely on the gestural, the temporal, and the conceptual. I am involved in examining a number of possibilities and a lot of work is being thought out in my studio, but it’s not ready to be shown yet.”

This year has been a milestone in the artist’s career. She was the recipient of two National awards; an Award for Excellence from the 8th National Visual Arts Exhibition, held in Lahore in May by the PNCA, where she displayed a watercolour triptych from a ‘sieve’ series. Painted with subtlety the three images were embellished by text.

In Italy, Naiza’s contribution to the 43rd Premier Suzzara, Exhibition was titled: ‘Body and Soul — between tradition and cybernetics’. This work is now in the museum’s permanent collection and earned her the second prize. The concept of the work ‘Henna Hands’, was first seen in Karachi in 2000, when using ‘mehndi’ as medium, she figured with rollers on to gallery walls. Taking her work outdoors at times when the locality was sleeping, Naiza stencilled figures on walls and then returned to witness the various reactions of passersby.

“For the ‘Body and Soul’ exhibition, I wanted to work a bit more spontaneously and respond to the space, which is exactly what happened. I was not exactly sure what I would do, so I took the henna pigment and some of the body stencils and it felt good because the work was very substantial, but it did not feel precious. I decided to work in a site-specific way, in that, I worked with the corners of the walls, the space where two walls joined.

“So I placed the body of two women, with arms stretched out to the sky and placed the bodies horizontally, so it felt like two women gravitating towards each other. They did not touch, but floated towards the corner. The second piece I made was again seen as the viewer came up the stairs, first the head was seen emerging out of the floor, then in the next frame the torso appeared and finally in the third, the whole figure was seen... and it was like ‘nude ascending the staircase’, and the viewers saw this as they were ascending themselves.

“Alongside the actual work I had about several very large photographs of the work done on the walls in different locations in Karachi, and these were 3ft x 4ft each, with the address of each location from each specific site on the photo.”

Naiza’s art education began with a foundation course at the Wimbledon School of Art, and in 1990 she joined the Ruskin School of Fine Arts, Oxford, where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art, majoring in printmaking working in woodcut and copper engraving. Her work was included in several student exhibitions in England before she married and made her home in Karachi.

The aesthetic stimuli generated by the unfamiliar environment of her new home was expressed at her first solo exhibition in Karachi held in ‘93. Attending a ‘Milad’ for the first time, she was fascinated by rows of seated women; anonymous, shrouded, mysterious appearing, the timeless element evoked by the figures inspired a series of drawings.

Calligraphic symbols referred to the excitement found in exploring classic poetry; a description of Mughal miniature paintings led to a sequence of watercolour pieces, smaller than the miniature format. Here, it was obvious that an artist was enjoying the experience of experimenting with form, media and scale. Her involvement at that time concerned the problem of getting beyond the obvious surface to grasp reality, not through description, but by feeling the essentials.

The ensuing years were full. Naiza joined the faculty of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, where she taught drawing and printmaking and is currently head of the Fine Arts department. Two children were welcomed into the family, and at the same time she kept abreast of contemporary developments in art. She is one of the founders of the Triangle Arts Trust in Pakistan, known as Vasl, established after considerable networking and organization, bringing together artists from several countries, from East and West.

In 2002 Naiza Khan was one of a group of Pakistani artists who contributed to an exhibition in England titled: ArtSouthAsia, held at the Harris Museum, and described as the ‘First exhibition of visual arts of its kind showing the work of artists from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka’. Naiza, from 1997 on, had begun to incorporate text into her work. For this particular show had placed floor-based light boxes inscribed with text, across the room so that the visitor was placed in the centre of the installation. At the show it appeared as if a wave of light fluctuated across the room, the lights raised and dimmed in a particular rhythm so that, as the artist explained, “standing amongst them, one’s breathing calmed taking on the beat of the light”.

The catalogue that accompanied the exhibition observed: ‘...The ‘word’ fraught with meaning embodies more than just that, its ‘look’ implying other lives in other places. Transformed further from ‘word’ to ‘sound’. Khan worked to muffle ‘sound’ back to silence... She creates unbearable tensions and boundaries, which she relieves by astute interventions.’

“I’d love to exhibit my light-boxes here. I feel I’d like to get a whole body of work together and get it over. At the Gasworks residency in London, I felt I wanted it to be an ongoing thing, the drawings started happening, and the watercolours and I added text. I took a roll of paper to fix high up on the wall and the paper slipped down and rolled out and spread across the studio space, I thought ‘great, this looks like a drawing that’s not going to end and I’m not going to cut this.’

“I started drawing from the top, detailed drawings and using photocopies of the mesh sieve, and a Palestinian artist who was there pointed out: ‘it was as though these objects are being filtered through your unconscious’. On one level a very formal kind of issue for me to deal with this issue, but on another level it was the mechanics of accessing information and what was happening, representations of the reality and what is actually there, so there were all these sort of mufflings of the truth or the reality... it happened through a very tangible thing.” On a large paper surface there was a drawing of a chair, an everyday object drawn with precision on a full size scale: In front of the drawing was placed a similar chair covered with a latex binding.

“Here’s a chair”, said Naiza; “You can’t see it but you know it’s there. For me it’s about a fundamental kind of understanding of the information we receive daily. We sense what is happening but it is muffled by our environment.”