EXHIBITION: TENSIONS BETWEEN OBJECT AND SPACE
A recent show at the Koel Gallery, Maidaan, curated by artist Nurayah Sheikh Nabi, brings together nine emerging artists “showcasing trends and direction of the thought processes guiding younger visual practitioners in their current spaces”. Maidaan — translated as an arena or congregation ground for the public — is embodied by the gallery itself as a space for these young talents to initiate their practices in front of a receptive gathering. The works that emerge are presented through an exciting array of visual languages, and even the traditional medium of painting is interestingly handled.
The credit goes to the curator for the fluidity of display. It is instantly striking how the artworks interact with each other and sit harmoniously within the space. The selection of works contributes to this and facilitates the emergence of a trend of sorts — an emphasis on object and space, through which human emotions, ideas, phenomena and psyche are reified, but with the conscious removal of the human itself.
The only exception is perhaps Noor Butt, whose reflections on self-perception and portrayal utilise the image of her own face to a great effect. The eerie floating faces projected on to blank 3D heads at once objectify the person, and brings the object to life. Presented execution style, the faces are disembodied and depersonalised, hanging as ghostly iterations of the self.
Ameerah Shoaib Motiwala, Sanaan Khalid Shamsi, Sanya Hussain and Shanza Raza Khan present spatial explorations through their paintings, with purposeful exclusion of the inhabitants to objectively critique and comment on society. In Motiwala’s works, the human presence is felt through subtle gestures of the inanimate objects she uses as perhaps placeholders for the characters she is referencing, yet hiding from view.
An exciting exhibition treats the gallery as a space for emerging artists to initiate their practice in
Khan’s extensive row of dramatic postcard-sized paintings comment on the rampant violence in society and our subsequent desensitisation to it due to constant onslaught in the media. The auratic paintings hold a strange beauty, depicting stills from various movie scenes, which register almost as instances of déjà vu; familiar yet nonspecific enough to evade recognition — which perhaps serves her narrative.