KARACHI: They say time and tide wait for none. This proverb seems to be apt for the 21st century where technological developments happening at a rate of knots aren’t allowing man to step back and breathe for a moment to get a sense of what’s happening around him (the current goings-on in the Middle East being a case in point). The advancement in the field of visual media, call it electronic media if you like, is especially worth examining because, in a way, it has introduced us to terms such as ‘post-truth’, blurring the line not just between truth and lie but between truth and fact.

This is the theme of Aroosa Rana’s exhibition titled View Within that’s under way at the Canvas Art Gallery.

The noteworthy point that the artist has raised in her examination of the subject is the association of artists with their works, and the part that the viewer plays in connecting the former two. Rana, as the curatorial write-up suggests, “attempts to investigate this post-information age grey-area, navigating the new horizons opened up by an ever-shifting reality — a thoroughly conceptual and intriguing array of videography displaying the act of creation occurring in real-time, yet at a degree of separation from its creator.”

The choice of videography is of the essence here: what we see in the exhibition is a variety of images shown on screens as well as the images of those who are watching them. Now Rana, rather intelligently, focuses on the image-makers, the noise around their creations, and on those who are more than willing to consume them. The very act of consumption makes the characters distinct from the generations that existed in preceding times, because for the people in the past it was to do with utility items. And nowadays, we consume ideas as reality. Doing so, we ourselves become both viewer and that which is being viewed. Isn’t it a fact? Single channel videos on display, such as ‘Superman’ and ‘View Within’ say so.

The exhibition concludes on Jan 16.

Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2020