Khod Kooza Gar o Khad Rind-e-Sabookash

Mapping Waters: an exhibition of print and paperworks | January 22 – January 27, 2015 | Embassy of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Washington DC

Sabah Husain’s art practice takes shape within a diverse sphere of media, process and iconography. A lengthy tenure of intense training in painting and printmaking conditioned much of her pictorial predilection. Husain’s MFA from Kyoto University of Fine Arts and Music including a study of language and paper making contributes an additional perspective for the BFA degree she completed at the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan. Japanese aesthetic informs South Asian artistic and cultural modes throughout her career, spanning twenty-five years and also in her current series of. Inspired by Urdu and Persian poetry, Husain’s 2015 exhibition at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington DC, entitled Mapping Waters, reveals itself in both realistic imagery and in abstraction. Prints, handmade paper, paint, mixed media, photography and digital media carry the narrative.

Jalaluddin Rumi, Persia’s 13th century poet as well as Noon Meem Rashed, 20th century pioneer of modern Pakistani poetry inspired Husain’s intellectual exploration and consequently, the visual representation in Mapping Waters. Paper boats made from drawings, paintings, prints and writings from Husain’s previously unrevealed portfolio, have been cut and folded into vessels to take an aquatic journey through time and place. Swirls of liquid color staining marbled sheets of handmade paper emulate ripples and waves of a turbulent current. Husain’s iconographic content finds visual manifestation in dialogue with the poetic ideology espoused by Hassan the potter in Rashed’s mystical poem Hassan Koozagar.

Journey II

Mapping Waters, the river is narrator of ancient history and present times, with stories of violence and tragedy as well as love and beauty navigates two symbolic shores — one in Pakistan and the other in Iraq. The Ravi River that skirts Lahore, the city where the artist lives and the Tigris ‘Dajla’ at Baghdad, where Hassan the potter begins his creative journey, have deposited eons of historical knowledge into the riverbed sediment. Memory from the incessant flow of the rivers conflates and seeks visual response in Husain’s intellectual transmigrations.

Clay pots, ubiquitous in Mapping Waters, are symbolic receptacles for such accumulated knowledge; they derive from antiquity and transpose into the future. They have taken shape from ancient Indus Valley sites like Harappa or Mohenjodaro, situated along the Ravi River and like Hassan’s pots they contain centuries of wisdom, poorly appreciated, but unlike those of Rashed’s potter, they give up treasure willingly.

In Husain’s series, pots function beyond their common purpose. They hold and withhold and, like the paper boats, transverse alternative realities. A clay vessel morphs from one to many, from realistic to abstract and ultimately transforms into a double helix, the DNA of all knowledge.

Light upon Light

The saddri (garment) another iconic image within the evolving milieu claims personal identity with the artist herself. Like the ceramic pot, the saddri has multiple guises. In Light upon Light, it implies violence and destruction and, perhaps, the fires of Partition that burned Lahore — a scene that could be viewed from the banks of the Ravi late at night — this light is as well, a beacon of inspiration. Like the phoenix reborn from its own ashes, Lahore’s cyclic destruction simply invites its next resurrection.

In the painting Khod Kooza o Khod Kooza gar o Khod gil e Khooza Khod Rind-e-Saabookash the saddri, cross-marked and transparent, seems to dance across the surface of handmade paper. In their deconstruction the overlapping garments give birth to a pattern of connecting pots. The multi-faceted pots, an archive for centuries of knowledge, become in turn the helix — Husain’s symbolic representation of history as DNA.