"Sugar, spice and all things nice, that’s what all little girls are made of.”

Perhaps not. Perhaps little girls are made of sturdier materials — ones that clichéd nursery rhymes cannot even scrape the surface of.

As is obvious from its very title, Soft Bodies highlights just that. It stresses how important it is for women to unapologetically assert themselves; how vital it is for them to share their inner most thoughts, observations and views as a way to secure their rightful position in a complex – often hostile and unforgiving – world.

Highlighting the twin focuses of the exhibition – the female body and the place of women in society – curator Sophia Balagamwala emphasises in her curatorial note that the “sheer performance of visibility becomes a radical and political act” for women in the circumstances they face today. She then points out that “it is perhaps within these circumstances that the practitioners in this exhibition negoti­ate, claim, and reclaim their [artistic] space”. The works displayed at the exhibition, thus, explore taboo subjects and insecurities – as well as anxieties – associated with being a woman. While doing so, they also combine humour and foreboding in their compositions.

The show features artefacts produced by three writers, three illustrators and seven artists. Their works touch upon a variety of subjects — ranging from the acceptance and appreciation of all body types to various social constructs around gender roles.

Nisha Pinjani’s work, for instance, challenges the patriarchal conditioning that women are subjugated to. Through larger than life, yet relatable, images of women trying to negotiate confined spaces allocated to them, she probes as to why women must adhere and adapt to certain roles expected of them. The artist shows women bound to their flowing braids that look heavy and appear to hinder their movement — as if they are being weighed down by their own hair, their own existence. They also twist and turn seemingly in an attempt to break out of this confinement and to reach out to other female figures — symbolising an obvious effort to create a sort of sisterhood or a bond of shared experiences.

Areeba Siddique’s work, too, explores how women have to try hard to become socially acceptable. Her quirky illustration, Desi Men Tears, shows a dusky woman who is wearing a headscarf and is surrounded by American fast food. By appropriating popular images from consumer culture and marrying them with religious symbols, the artist seems to suggest that this fusion of the West with the East could be the result of how desi men want to see their women. It could also be a manifestation of their failure to understand the social and cultural dilemmas facing women.

Saba Khan’s body of work deploys traditional cross-stitch needlework – a skill used for teaching young girls patience in yesteryears – and, thus, offers a look into the tedious lives that women live even within seemingly glitzy and glamourous environs. Her work, The Silent Series, delves into the suffering of women silenced by their experiences of harassment — whether it is the old grand aunt who witnessed the carnage of Partition in 1947 or those women in workplaces who, in order to avoid confrontation and backlash, choose silence over their right to speak out.

Bibi Hajra Cheema’s illustrations show a crowd of raucous women of different ages swarming a canal — an unlikely place for them to be at. They can be seen sitting arm in arm, dipping their feet in water, swinging off trees and diving in the water in gleeful abandon. Her 27”x38” drawing on paper cannot be absorbed in its entirety at one glance. The images invite the viewers to study them from up close, with every inch of the illustration offering a visual surprise.

Cheema’s work is replete with a sense of humour and suggests that there is a possibility to reclaim spaces that have been taken over by men in real life. She also helps viewers contemplate, albeit wistfully, on how a woman’s place in society has been restricted in ways that we have not even learned to question due to entrenched gender biases.

Some other artists look at the female figure itself.

Among them, Mariam H Qureshi’s work, Poppy Polka, celebrates the female body with all the fat and flab. The artist deploys quick washes of watercolour and the occasional aggressive brushstroke to highlight the various contours of her subject’s figure. As a result, Poppy’s pudgy stomach rolls and her thick thighs and heavy breasts burst out. Undeniably, the painting is a tribute to women of all shapes, sizes and colour. It inevitably evokes familiarity among the audience and elicits knowing smiles.

Sara Pagganwala’s sculpture, Spark & Fuse, is also about the female figure and is so tactile that it appears almost edible. Showing a crumbling and deformed face beautified by an alluring and subtle shade of pink, it tempts the viewers to at least run their fingers on it. Created through the process of crystallisation, the work explores shapes and forms that result from multiple pressure and heat tests applied on various materials. There can be many interpretations of it but one that appears to be the most pertinent is that women manage to maintain their identity even when they have to endure countless trials and tribulations that seek to distort and restrict their social and personal spaces.

Amna Rahman expresses her fascination with the female form in a tried and tested manner — through traditional oil paintings. What makes her work look fresh is the affection that envelopes her subjects. Her paintings portray a group of women content in each other’s company. They seem to challenge the viewers to infiltrate their space. These paintings, the artist points out, are a tribute to the strength instilled in her as a child by her mother and grandmother.

Neha Mashooqullah’s work similarly harks back to her mother. “My mother and I share the same hair, fingers, and handwriting. These are parts of myself I try to keep most beautiful,” she writes in her artist statement. From talking about a dupatta – an object often associated with a woman’s dignity – to recalling the comfort of a mother’s voice, her work traces the paths taken by the two women together, connections they formed and the conversations they had with each other.

A card Mashooqullah is fanning herself with in the gallery invites viewers into her personal space. It carries text written in small typeface, requiring the audience to bend their knees and angle their heads in order to read the words on it and, thus, pry into the artist’s privacy.

Female figure and female sexuality is also often blacked out and censored in mainstream media. Writer Sanam Mahar examines this in her work that consists of images of naked and skimpily clad women censored from newspapers and magazines distributed in Pakistan. She questions the role of government authorities and pressure groups that want to impose their moral views on others and that seek to define what constitutes ‘respectable’ media content and what does not. She explores how the presentation of a young and healthy-bodied woman is liable to censorship but grotesque images of human bodies mutilated by acts of terrorism are allowed to be distributed without any restriction.

The writer is a fine art graduate from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture with a major in printmaking and a minor in ceramics.

This was originally published in the Herald's September 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.