KARACHI: Stranger Things is one of the most famous sci-fi series on Netflix released in recent times. It focuses on certain paranormal activities in and around a fictional town. So when a group exhibition curated by Emaan Mahmud is given the title Why Do Artists Do Strange Things — which can these days be seen at the Full Circle Gallery — the mind wonders about whether it has to do with the show. Well, it does not. The name of the display has a literal meaning but not without its figurative dimension.

Let’s go back to the rubric because of one more thing: it also says that the show is ‘produced by Champa and other Intellectuals’. It is a bit of a tongue in cheek where the hint is being presented to the viewer that art is an intellectual activity, and yet the word ‘intellectual’ is understood in a different context, not necessarily related to imaginative practices.

Work of 11 artists on display at Full Circle Gallery

Now things become lucid: the 11 artists who are taking part in the exhibition are trying to put on view that side of their creative beings which are deemed ‘strange’ by society. In reality, it’s part and parcel of their personalities as well as of their routines.

What are those things? Well, they are pretty simplest, perhaps done a tad differently than how a normal person with no artistic bent would do. For example, the concept of a ‘bad friend’ or a human being treated as a ‘piece of meat’. For the creative souls these aspects do not just have a single feature to mull over; they carry a societal collective component that is often overlooked.

The following are the artists whose works are on display: Asad Kamran, Aleena Sharif, Ammara Jabbar, Faizan Riedinger, Haya Zaidi, Jaffer Hasan, Laila Pathan, Maryam Arsalan, Numair Abbasi, Rabia Ali and Shanzay Sabzwari.

The exhibition concludes on Nov 3.

Published in Dawn, November 1st, 2022