KARACHI: Though the word omen does not necessarily have negative connotations, in our society it’s often taken as a warning sign. Looking at an exhibition of Babar Moghal’s artworks titled Omen, which commenced at the Full Circle Gallery on Thursday, you get the feeling that the artist, too, does not take it as a positive indicator.

But then you have to try to come to grips with the world that he has created. It is not the world we, physically, live in. It is something that exists in our subconscious, and perhaps we know it unconsciously as well. No matter how much we shy away from it, we can never deny that that particular dunia has a presence.

Moghal makes his intention clear at the outset with ‘Lords of Necropolis’ (oil on board). The necropolis is the realm of the dead. So, the artist is not dealing, at least in exhibit number one, with the living. At this point one of Shakespeare’s lines comes to mind: “The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures.” Exactly. Pictures is what Moghal is making for art lovers, the pictures that you sometimes see while hallucinating or while trying to relive a moment.

This becomes evident in a piece called ‘A Picture for Dreaming Over’ (oil on canvas). It’s a scene that has more to do with the imagination than vision. Not the artist’s imagination, but the viewer’s. You can sense that Moghal wants his viewer, or us, to look for an apparition. Interestingly, the entire image of the building and what surrounds it is an apparition. So, the metaphor assumes a larger meaning: what’s imagined is not always a fabrication, it’s indicative of an event/incident that you do not want ever to happen.

‘Juggernaut’ reinforces this idea. The vehicle belongs to the real world, what gives it an identity, does not. Its identity can be traced somewhere else, on a plain that only artists and poets can make us discover.

The exhibition will continue until March 30.

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2017