Focus on the self

i # i, Group show

Nairang Gallery

Lahore

October 14 – 21

i # i is the product of a two week workshop with final year students at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, conducted by Kathrin Becker, who is a curator and art historian from Berlin. As the title suggests, the 19 artists in this show indulge themselves in authoring, narrating and acting the self, investigating the subject of embodiment and the embodiment of subjectivity, interrogating the subjective dimension of ‘being’ and examining the dislocation and fragmentation of that ‘being’. Though, autobiographical self-representation has throughout history been the subject of art but this autobiography, while expanding the modes of self representation through a process of self-knowledge and self-telling, reveals the conception of the self as an imaginary construct, “fragmented, provisional, multiple and continuously in process”.

Demonstrating the permeability of the self’s physical and symbolic boundaries, the works in the show reflect on memory, negotiate the past, engage aspects of gendered selves, lived experiences and popular culture and critique socio-political and cultural narratives, all of which co-exists in the same space. Mirza Ruknuddin Ahmad’s I Love Art, is a site of conflicting social definitions and a ground for examining the constructed and mediated roles. Hanifa Alizada redefines her gendered Afghani identity with a fine balance of humor in Who We Are? Rabia Anwar’s work Split, in an investigation of similarities and differences between her mother and herself as brides, becomes the articulation of female subjectivity.

Zeb Bilal’s I Am The ‘Other’, traces the history of hybrid identities exemplified in dresses of the colonisers and the colonised. Sadaf Chughtai in Three Views of Lahore Fort traces the history of modernity and progress. Her final image is a hybrid of old and new Lahore exemplified in the architecture of her Fort. Umair Iqbal’s representation of identity is also associated with a city and culture but to something more tangible, perhaps ‘only’ tangible. Lying somewhere between rebellion and submission, Raihatul Jannah’s works address her gendered identity, difference and the politics of representation.

Saleem Abbas’s Identify??? is a short video, in which the artist, who is easily identifiable because of his long black hair, has used himself as a site and a metaphor for the representation of the self. The screen, split into two, shows Abbas from the front and the back combing his long dark hair, wearing a pair of jeans and no shirt. Diminishing the distinction between front and back by covering his face with hair and wearing the pants and the belt inversely, Abbas confuses his audience, even if only for a few seconds, and makes them ponder over the process of identification.

Similar in aesthetics, Komal Naz’s presence in her almost three minute long untitled video shows a wooden stool lying on its side and confined in a close frame with Naz trying to fit into it. While Naz struggles with this seemingly meaningless task, illustrating an existential crisis, one waits for nothing to happen, as if stuck in motion for time immemorial, which could be further highlighted if the video didn’t fade into black every time before restarting. It could easily do without marking the starting and the ending especially when there was no starting and ending and could have worked better if used as a metaphor for the space which the mind occupies. Nevertheless, this video was one of the most engaging pieces in the show.

Use of family snapshots opens reservoirs of memories, but it is certainly the objects and not the people in those photos that Zaib Haider is after; household details, toys, shoes, bags, fraught with meaning, besieged by domesticity, drained of life as mundane objects, a very important feature of family albums. Haider intends to appropriate, disturb and manipulate images that look simple, naive and sacred, resulting in distortion, disorder and disintegration by highlighting certain details while blurring the others.Amber Hammad, unlike others, is not directly the subject of her work. Her digitally manipulated Hum Keh Thehray Ajnabi is an image made with photographs of bazaars from both Lahore and Delhi. The uncanny resemblance between the sister cities is further highlighted by baring the image off any bodily differences and reducing the people to black silhouettes. Pointing out the similarities more than the differences between the two, Hum Keh Thehray Ajnabi while negotiating between self and other is a comment on close familial ties, shared histories, displacement, nostalgia and unfriendly relations, calling into question the true status of seemingly fixed categories of identity and our reliance on socially, politically and culturally assigned identities.

The artists challenging the notions of prescribed identities, however superficially, have at least begun to analyse the reality of their own fiction.