KARACHI: The tussle between body and soul: an age-old topic for those who grapple with the existentialist question: what are we doing in this world? The title of a four-person show, The Skin We Live In, that’s under way at the Canvas Art Gallery has a lot to do with this tussle, though ostensibly it may come across as a subject that pits the creative domain and the circumstances that compel creative people to express themselves against one another. Essentially, it’s about body and soul — let’s change the latter to ‘spirit’, the spirit with which creativity and circumstances face off.

Ahmed Ali Manganhar uses slate to drive his point home. Slates take us back in time when for many of us life was less rapid, and time didn’t travel at the speed of light. The images on these slates are the ones that have stayed with the artist for as long as he remembers. The reason for it is that there’s a conscious effort on his part not to let those images fade away, because they have played a major part in enriching his ‘soul’ as a painter, which in turn has enabled his physical self to gain recognition.

Amna Rahman makes the above-mentioned binary by describing it in two episodes: the world inside and the world outside. In the former, she tries to blur the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and in the latter she expands on it by analysing the symbiotic relationship between her characters and animals or the ambience around them. However, it would be unjust not to praise her remarkable insight into human faces; for example, ‘Shanaz and Jenny’ (oil on canvas). They are stories unto themselves.

Yaseen Khan takes the above-discussed gap to a societal level where ‘communication’ between human beings, that too belonging to the same geographical milieu, is becoming increasingly difficult. He has successfully tried to resolve the communication issue by creating art (‘Noise’, acrylic and chamakpatti) with strong indigenous mediums and genres such as truck art that emerge from ‘spirited’ replies to life’s vagaries.

Anusha Ramchand rounds off the debate by bringing the extremely important element of ‘identity’ into it. She keeps things as contemporary as they get because in her works what echoes is today’s socio-cultural trends which make people and situations seem apart from each other. She wants to cut through the cacophony for clarity to say that it might not be the case — through artworks such as ‘Dear World Hold On’ — since there are no differences, no binaries, as long as we keep the channels to communicate open.

The exhibition concludes on Sept 12.

Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2019