It is always the personal in art that leads to the social or the political. But who and what determines the boundaries between the self and what is outside it. Equations between the self and other, self and history, as well as narratives into ‘otherness’ in contemporary times have stemmed from a need or realisation of artists to identify or extract the personal from the social.

Recent paintings and mixed media work on paper and canvas, in a two-person show by Sheherbano Husssain and Ayesha Shariff, at Chawkandi Art, Karachi, convey a certain degree of detachment from current art discourses; the current in art is obsessively centred around the rhetoric of the post-9/11 terror, or some kind of an exploration centred around or stemming from discourses of disruption, dislocation and rupture.

There emerge issues of the relevance and role of dominant discourses that bestow value on a certain direction, imagery or material and the same that push others towards a peripheral space. However, the relationship of the dominant to the peripheral and vice versa is an important one; of how and why certain material and imagery become more accepted or appreciated.

Some recent examples, such as that of miniaturist Imran Qureshi’s prize winning courtyard work ‘In situ’ at the last year’s Sharjah Biennial or Rashid Rana’s extensive work in the digital, establish notions of excellence in art.

The nature of self and its connection to society is a significant aspect of current discourses. How artists are looking at representation and how much of it is revealed or masked amid the clutter of what is already out there, is related. Mixed media works by Hussain, monochromatic prints on paper, acrylic and collage on canvas and board, either framed or in a box construction, challenge us to enter the art through a non-conformist route.

The works illicit an almost naive manner of working, as the artist opens the window to a personal history: fragments of places lived in her formative years, such as the airbase in Chaklala Cantt, Rawalpindi, the Officers’ Mess in Peshawar, references to aviation also present in her earlier work. The use of imagery from classical Western art history such as Rodin’s ‘Kiss’ or of Constantine conveys an ownership which disregards hierarchies of representation or the need for translation or justification.

Looking inwards, the artist says that the external are merely triggers or affirmations of an internal reality. But the questions that surface are how to read those elements of disconnect in a space connected by the artist. What are the implications of historical imagery in a contemporary frame? Whose history and which history are we seeing?

Shariff’s paintings show the yearning for an inner, more private language of space where white plays an important role. The base or the prime become important spaces, signifying a return to the basics of both colour and thought. Uncluttered and meditative, the white invites us simply to ‘be’. Imagery of the flower, the open window speaks of the need to communicate and to heal.

Hussain and Shariff both speak a language that is removed from the predominant packages of artists pushing the ‘socio-political’ in an overt manner. Hussain is a more private and serious discourse, whereas Shariff’s paintings take the viewer back to the basic enjoyment of painterly form, which has perhaps been lost in the imagination of artists looking for the ‘right’ form to market their product.