KARACHI: In 2020, a film titled Nomadland directed by Chloe Zhao won three Academy awards, including that of best picture. The movie was based on a book by Jessica Bruder about the adapted nomadic lifestyles of certain Americans in contemporary times. This suggests two things: one, the word nomad, despite having an archaic air about it, is still relevant; two, man’s adaptability to life’s challenging demands is still unwavering.

A two-person show titled Artists of the Manifesto of Nomadism that’s under way at the Art Chowk Gallery, in its own way, speaks of the same but with an artistic twist that aims to revisit limitations in art.

The artists whose works are on display are Paul-Mehdi Rizvi and Manizhe Ali.

Rizvi has been advocating the manifesto for a touch more than a decade. He is a learned man who has a deep affinity with philosophy and philosophical notions which he tries to instil in his art practice. The gist of the exercise, however, is to make art lovers warm up to the idea of a nomad-like ambience where he and his co-artists could alter things to fit their creative concepts.

In the statement on the ongoing show, the viewer will get to read words such as ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘polymorphic’ but the concern is, again, to ‘seek the renewal of boundaries in art if not outright rejection of highly prescriptive models’.

In doing so, both Ali and Rizvi give the viewer some astounding exhibits. Ali’s graphite on acid free paper work, especially ‘The Crows’ is a sensitive study of the symbiotic nature of living beings’ existence on earth, reminding one, to a believable degree, Ted Hughes’s poems on crows that have a mythological connotation.

Rizvi, on the other hand, goes uber imaginative with his ‘Object’ series (plastic, paper, metal, Perspex, cardboard, drawing board and pigments etc) creating artworks that sometimes give off a Kafkasque vibe in the visual language of lyrical abstraction. He knows how to push the boundaries in art.

The exhibition concludes on July 25.

Published in Dawn, July 23th, 2023