KARACHI: An exhibition of Abdullah M.I. Syed’s latest artworks titled Substitute — The Untold Narrative of Mother and Son opened at the Canvas Art Gallery on Tuesday.

The mother and son relationship has been a subject of discussion for writers and artists from time immemorial. There have been paintings made by the European masters on the topic just as there have been novels and short stories written on it. At the heart of it all there lies the idea of the purity of the mother-son bond which requires a strenuous effort to pull through the vicissitudes of time.

Syed has not used it as a multifarious metaphor. His concept is simple, but the presentation is elaborate. The reason for it is that it’s a personal story — the journey of his mother and her children. There’s a symbol that the artist has put in the middle of it all, the money plant, which she nurtured while dealing with the migration of her sons. Apart from the potent symbolism, it would be a mistake to lose sight of the fact that the show is an artistic triumph as well. Here’s why:

Syed’s art is about diminishing the distance between craft and feeling. The exhibition opens with two artworks (pure pigment print on platine rag paper) about a school jacket and a winter coat that two of her sons wore. In the two exhibits, filial association is being highlighted by making an inanimate object turn into an animate thing from which one can retrieve remnants of the past.

Similar goal is achieved in ‘She stores ear-buds in their old prescription medicine bottles’ with the same medium but by fragmentising memory into smaller, yet significant things. It’s a series of images which come across as different phases of the mother’s life. The one image that does carry ‘ear-buds’ is a striking piece. The viewer can readily identify with it because the object is a reminder of that part of the past, of our collective past, which doesn’t leave us.

The exhibition will continue until Jan 12.

Published in Dawn, January 4th, 2017