March 08, 2009

An exhibition of Adeela Suleman’s new pieces at Karachi’s Canvas Gallery reaffirms that sculpture, no longer as marginalised as it once was, is gaining a new palpability in the expressive content of female artists.

A departure from the male defined perspective, the womanly approaches, applications and treatments, especially on gender issues, are insightful and refreshing. Suleman located new metaphors in her ‘Salma, Sitara, and Sister — Motor Cycle Workshop’ in 2002, when she pointed at women pillion riding on motorbikes (a precarious balancing act) to define the detriments and underprivileged status of the average female in urban society.

Loyal to her premise of examining gender travails and equations, she still continues to explore the issue technically and conceptually at various levels. Her oeuvre is best known for its novel use of stainless steel hardware and kitchen utensils as identifying agents of female trials and tribulations. Funnels, metal bowls, tongs and measuring spoons as well as drain covers, screws, nails, bolts and fasteners have been variously crafted into elaborate safety helmets, jackets, seats and foot rests.

In a later exhibition, ‘Confinement’, it was ingenious use of bathroom fittings, shower heads, water pipe chain connections and steel silencers that enabled her to suggest provocative references to the human body to highlight intimate gender politics. Evoking images of private body parts, confining rib cages and contorted spinal columns, her sculptures were disturbing and pointed.

Comfortable with an illustrative language comprising fixtures and fittings, Suleman has concentrated on joining, welding and soldering domestic hardware and kitchen objects to create teasing, discomfiting and confrontational images. The emphasis has always been on producing a structured form like an in your eye, uneasily tiered or awkwardly protruding skeletal object.

The latest work, comprising three wall installations, is remarkably pliant and lyrical in contrast. Setting aside her penchant for artificially ‘assembled’ or ‘constructed’ forms, she opts for rhythmic nuances of the human figure and natural organic forms to build her narrative. She is still crafting in rust proof steel but her emphasis now is on creating intricate pattern formations as story elements. Mimicking the detailed ornamental designs on beaten silver platters, ewers, ‘paandaans’ and jewelled objects of yore, she has embellished her metal sheets with repeat border patterns, foliated and floral arabesques and vine creeper imagery.

Acknowledging the assistance of skilled artisans whose services she availed at various stages of her work, Suleman’s elaborate wall installations comprise faceless female forms named ‘Khalida’, ‘Hajra’ and ‘Hawwa Bai’. Each has an avian reference of peacocks, dead birds or parrots accompanying it. The main piece consists of a tree laden with fruit and the ubiquitous red apple on the floor. A Garden of Eden recreation is an instant reading but the peacocks guarding ‘Hajra’ instead of ‘Hawwa Bai’ throws the storyline in other directions.

The parrot as spectator enlivens the atmosphere but is its exotic reference related to the exoticism of the figures, similarly the ‘dead birds,’ specifically eighteen in number, also raise several questions. The lotus rose and vine patterns again allude to contradictory ritualistic practices like entombment or glorification and veneration. The works can also be interpreted as explorations of the boundaries between spirit and matter, the spiritual and material components of womanly existence.

The artist has accessed her own memories to create these characters, but has deliberately left them relatively anonymous and the intricate finery enveloping them also lends itself to speculation. Symbols in western and eastern mythologies enjoy diverse meanings and keeping in mind the ‘mixed’ nature of the work it is best to assimilate this art in a broad rather than a specific perspective.

When Adeela Suleman came forth with the ‘Salma Sitara’ Workshop exhibit, she had broken fresh ground. An old problem was addressed in a novel manner — she had a tightly knit concept but her creations were stilted and mannered. Presently her concepts have loose ends but her expression is most engaging. Technically her aesthetic sensibility has matured; the ornamental, mythical nature of the work is visually appealing even if the substance emits multiple readings.

 

Suleman opts for rhythmic nuances of the human figure and natural organic forms