Unraveling as an existential encounter between the artist and her art the recent Canvas exhibition in Karachi, ‘Hermeneutics of the body’ by Roohi Ahmed, with curatorial guidance from Nafisa Rizvi, brings a new understanding to the act of transmitting thoughts. Giving visible definition to intangible observations and feelings, with minimal recourse to narrative content or pictorial indicators, can be a challenging exercise. For artists like Ahmed who constantly question the purpose of human existence, answers to such dialogues with self are the essential stimuli that fuel their art practice. In the current show, Ahmed has tried to translate the journey of a thought/feeling from its origin to its production as a piece of art. She focuses on her body as a vital intermediary between perception and its physical manifestation.

As an artist Ahmed’s oeuvre is underscored with a sculptural sensibility but she experiments freely with assorted genres like printmaking, video, installation, drawing and painting to articulate her views and in this series also it is improvisatory approaches to the act of ‘transferring’ through which she elucidates how the body can be an agent of transmission. Initially brainstorming with hero euvres oft-used and most expressive icons like the needle, thread and eucalyptus leaf image, she concentrated on locating mediating agents through which a process of interpretation could be established.

Earlier, installations, composed of needles, suspended apparitions woven with silk strands and figurative forms stitched around leaf veins espousing her preoccupation with the body and soul, under duress and in harmony with nature, were brought to a new head with the emphasis on the hand image. The 20 minute video, ‘Sew and sow’, depicts the artist stitching the heart, head and lifelines of her palm with red thread. As if metaphorically retracing her life stitch-by-stitch through the linear streaks, she alludes to the exercise as accumulation and erasure.

Here, the outer epidermal membrane, covering the lifelines and the palms of her hands, as a part of Ahmed’s body, has been the essential intercessor that has made visible her intangible concept of taking stock, restructuring and reclaiming life. In ‘Hands on’, ‘Perception’ and ‘Recognition’ series, the hand (palm and fingers) is once again instrumental in the creation of these drawings but it is the outmoded stationery adjunct, the carbon paper, which is the translating agent this time. Instead of working through the skin membrane she now draws, a wrapped bundle image (a gathrie), through the carbon paper. Since she is drawing blindly the final product on the paper is a mix of the bundle image and the pressure marks of her hand. The bundle signifying human belongings, all that we need on our passage forward, is a visual expression of her thoughts about life’s ultimate journey.

Continuing with the series she goes full swing into hand and body force interaction with the paper to create deep hand pressure rubbings of coloured carbon papers. The end product is large red and blue carbon impressed paintings. Incidentally, the red and the blue imply colourations of body fluids—arterial and venous blood. Instead of throwing away the used carbons, abstractedly pock marked with thumb rubbing imprints, Ahmed stitched them into individual panels titled, ‘The red and blue fields’. Mimicking the Sindhi craft of ralli making where recycled remnants are stitched into age old story patterns Ahmed reconnects these by-products of her art with the thematic structure of her show.

Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, each artwork by Ahmed is a record of an intense mental and physical encounter between her body and her materials. Other than this, a number of parallel contexts relating to materials and concept diversify and re-link with the show like pieces in a puzzle. The use of carbon paper reinforces the artists act of reproduction as the carbon itself is a replicating agent. Similarly the idiom ‘carbon copy of so and so’ also suggests duplication. The tightly wrapped bundle image carries fetal/womb connotations which reiterates the internal and external body and life and birth and death connection weaving through the show. Curator Rizvi points out that, “The allegorical allusion to cloth is also vital to the image especially when fabric and skin become equivocal and interchangeable in the interpretative scheme of things.”

Detailing the process of interpretation and transference by sharing her thoughts and body impressions Ahmed makes palpable the imperceptible and the invisible. But in spite of the mind, body and physical space interaction this series is not a soul baring exercise. Ahmed does not reveal her innermost feelings—she just focuses on a universal truth about life. Her performance identifies a practice or procedure and this is what singles her rare insight and unusual ability to perceive and devise novel techniques and strategies to translate that which cannot be easily quantified.