KARACHI: A multidisciplinary show of artworks by Naila Mahmood titled Scattered Leaves — Bikhre Auraq opened at the Canvas Art Gallery on Tuesday.

There is a reason for the bilingual rubric of the exhibition: to emphasise the glory of the Urdu language in relation to other languages and its present-day usage.

The artist calls her photographs an ‘affirmation of morality’ and the ‘process of fading’ which simultaneously celebrates and laments ageing. It is interesting that she discusses ageing, because she is trying to point to a physical reality — the reality of the artworks that she’s made out of books with “topographic rivulets of stains, coloured threads peeking out of undone spines, moth-bitten patterns and crinkled covers”. Doesn’t that sound poetic? Indeed, it does. And that’s where the artist’s interest lies: the (lost) poetics of a language which has changed its course like a river does after a powerful rainstorm.

Naila, almost with child-like excitement, puts up images that are varied subject-wise but have a single feel that smacks of nostalgia — sweet nostalgia for words whose efficacy has waned over the years. The best example, perhaps, in that context is the series called ‘Zalim’ (pigment print on Hahnemühle cotton rag). Imagine the phrase ‘zalim phuphi’ (cruel paternal aunt), and it will evoke a gamut of familial emotions which cannot come to life without using language.

The show begins with ‘The Army Breakfast’ and with some other similar stuff, such as ‘Cheese Sauce’ that has a familiar resonance to them but is lost in the cacophony of contemporariness. As the viewer moves on, the inherent poetics of/in the exhibits becomes inescapable, an evidence of which can be had by viewing ‘India Ink’ or ‘Akbar Allahabadi and Election Commission’.

The juxtaposition in the ‘Akbar’ piece is done rather intelligently since it goes with the theme bikhre auraq: the process of fading in a world where lots is happening at breakneck speed.

Therefore, the photographer has no choice but to act like an ‘interlocutor of spirits from another time’.

The exhibition concludes on Aug 24.

Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2017