Body Memories

A gentle murmur,

the thrashing ballet of the bear,

a hair swung across the harmonium,

falling like slippery goosebumps into a perennial pool

of lime and salmon..

A recently concluded two-person show at Art Chowk Gallery titled Body Memories was curated by Noor Ahmed. The artists both create works that simmer from their own experiences, funneling from the psychological into the physiological and undulating into the tactile. The metamorphosis of self, frothing into the fictional and the residual void of the intermittent. Rabia Ali and Marium Habib both work within the trajectory of the human and the episodic, converging into the frisky theatrics of the everyday memoir. Ahmed’s choice of the artists functioned on a placid equilibrium; both artists working across different medium perform the didactic and the digressive playing with their apparitions of the representative and the visceral.

A crisp stroke of a grinning green,

Ali’s work stems from the familiar and condenses into the anecdotal. A memory left prey to the subconscious, colored in with the springing wear of age. Like blanched memoir, left to toy with the mind’s mind, her work is a mighty chasm of color, riot, brazen quip..her strokes hung in sumptuous poise, like a pandemonium in repose. Form, color and qualm rendered from memory, like the lithe wand of bygone tales; quiet like the first shadow cast by the morning sun, feisty like a gust of broken breaths. Her work is executed with flair and undisturbed frenzy. Her colors converge into giant sentient scapes of lasting whimsy and crippling charm held together by her masterful strokes and delectable palates.

the silent gaze of her sprawled across the couch.

Marium Habib’s work remarks upon human experience; the lurid sanctimony of flout and the capricious sensibility of doubt. Habib’s use of the medium is evocative and unabashed. She titillates the gaze and conspicuously objects to cultural cues. Her idea of the female is marked with indignation as she arrests the viewer with her nonchalant fervor. Her work flippantly contends reality with allegory; the presence of animals in her work skittishly punctures the wayward sensibilities of human experience. Her work provokes with restless agility and peculiar frivolity.

Ahmed’s choice of the artists allowed for a riveting dalliance within the realms of the body and mind; coquettishly slipping in and out of the contours of the experiences of one’s self and the agency that recreates. Body memories or as she put it “bawdy memories” allows for the retelling of human experience like an epigram; a cat-call to the cognizant as it trifles and tickles while it rebels as it rearranges memories as frothy offsprings of the vagrant scape of the human mind.

Of flesh and balmy strokes

all gathered in slippery haste.