Art that provides solace to a chaotic society
ISLAMABAD: An art exhibition highlighting conflicting theories, chaos on roads and other public places as well as on a personal level opened at the Nomad Gallery on Saturday.
Titled Chaos-Conflicting Confluence, the show includes works by four artists.
“The artworks revolve around the viewers’ perception when absorbing the imagery, symbolism and aesthetics as well as a tremendous understanding of cultural diversity and art principles,” said Nageen Hyat, the curator and director of the gallery.
“When the whole society is in conflict and chaos, it’s art that provides a space to find solace and peace,” she said.
Sidra Ashraf, a multi-talented visual artist in miniature painting and calligraphy, gave a talk and conducted a workshop on the dying art of Islamic ornamentation, tracing its history and evolution through Fatimid, Ottoman and Abbasid periods. She said that in the 7th century, the figurative artistic traditions of Spain and Greece influenced Islamic art. The resistance to drawing living beings according to Islamic belief, led to the creation of ornaments.
She also explained the four components of ornamentation- calligraphy, vegetal pattern, geometrical pattern and figural representations- of manuscripts and objects. Kemaluddin Behzad was the pioneer of Islamic ornamentation art, she said.
Ms Ashraf works in mix-media including printmaking, pointillism, pastels and digital painting. But miniature technique is very dominant in her work. Some of her art pieces on display such as ‘Bird’ and ‘Flying Simurgh’ series, ‘Majnu in Land’ ‘Dream land’, ‘Sleeping Lady’ done in gouache on wasli, pointer on paper, debunks superstitious about black and white colours as shown in ‘Freedom Inside Out’ showing both negative and positive sides of life.
For Ms Ashraf, animals and birds are symbols of intelligence, strength, victory of life over death and freedom.
Iram Wani has explored the strength and inner emotions of women. She believes that living in a patriarchal society, the time has come for existing viewpoints to be replaced by adopting personal fundamental ideas and values and channelling and extending them into the realm of limitless opportunities of self-growth and self-dependency.