Ms Fernandez’s miniatures of thorns greet you the moment you enter the gallery. Not a very welcome sight in real life, the thorns have been made to look attractive. One can’t help appreciating the textures and the colours of her subject. They captivate the viewers’ attention, reminding me, at least, of the famous line from Urdu poetry – Gulon se khar behter hain jo daman tham lete hain.
Vying for attention are the three paintings with indecipherable words in microscopic sizes. Nothing is white or black is the name of the amazing works by Aisha Hussain, who also has on display four block-like works, an inch-and-a-half thick made of several layers of wasli, the traditional hand-made paper.
If there is anything which is closer in appearance then it is Larkana-born Rehana Mangi’s geometrical designs made of human hair, her own. How she has pierced them into wasli is what only she can explain. For her thesis she had done similar work on a large scale, and two of her friends, with hair long enough to reach the back of their knees, were the donors.
The girl from Abbotabad, who answers to the name of Ammara Khalid, has painted in black-and-white and has also put up on display an installation measuring 5 feet by 4 inches, a number of houses, which are all empty. When speaking to me she said that at the back of her mind is her own family home in Abbotabad. “There was a time when all of us were together. Now my mother and only two siblings are there. My father is working in Yemen, and I am in Lahore,” said Ammara, somewhat wistfully.
Isbah Afzal has depicted her own thought-process, by showing finely painted strings and knots. Her miniatures show her strong command over the movements of her minute brushes.
Iram Khan, whose work appears on the cover of the attractively produced catalogue, hasn’t got over the shock that she suffered from when her father had a massive heart attack. One of her works is done on the ECG paper. It’s her father’s ECG, she said. Her trademark, if one may use the word, is polka dots. They are not just on the frock of the little girl, which presumably is her own self, but all over, even on the ECG paper.
Sana Mehmud’s paintings depict scaffolding and other construction material. “I have always maintained that there is not much difference between constructing a building and the building up of your thoughts,” is what can be called the artist’s statement. Curator Aamna Tirmizi Naqvi, who is based in Hong Kong, where her husband is posted, saw the works of these young graduates, on one of her trips to the National College of Arts, Lahore, and was, to use her own words, “absolutely stunned”. The girls were persuaded to display their work in Karachi by their mentor Imran Qureishi, a leading miniaturist in the country. Naqvi also runs an online art gallery, which shares the name with her gallery in Clifton.
The exhibition will remain open till June 8 and while Naqvi will return to Hong Kong the gallery will be in the safe hands of young Sara Bakhtiar, a fresh graduate from Karachi ’s Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.
