Curated by Quddus Mirza, Back to Basic is a collateral event to the Lahore Biennale 03 that offers a distinctive direction to its audience. In his
Curated by Quddus Mirza, Back to Basic is a collateral event to the Lahore Biennale 03 that offers a distinctive direction to its audience.
In his evocative poem “Kubla Khan,” Samuel Taylor describes a powerful and dynamic scene. The exotic and dreamy imagery was written during an opium-induced state, and this cast a pathway for him to tap into these subconscious neural circuits. Should we attribute the poem to the writer’s creativity or the influences shaping his thoughts? Creativity is a mystical force that generates altered states of mind and making, enabling us to access our deepest selves.
The voices in our heads are physical, which makes our thoughts and visuals more ephemeral and ineffable. Almost all of our beliefs can be traced back to the intuitive sense that informs a maker’s sophisticated yet contentious view of the situation. A comparable insight is witnessed at a group show “ Back to Basic” curated by Quddus Mirza at Articulate Studios, Lahore. The opening, a collateral event to the Lahore Biennale 03 offers a distinctive direction to its audience.
The curator presents the works of eight participants through the lens of rediscovering the cube, formulating its contextual, historical, and religious contents while allowing the shape to transit through multiple definitions and sensibilities.
In sacred geometry, the archangel of life supervises the flow of energy in the mystical Metatron’s cube which essentially encompasses all of the geometric shapes in God’s creation and represent the patterns that form everything made by God. Haris Qayyum’s site-specific installation, Submission, presents an uncanny all-white cube, gleaming with intangible and celestial energy. Walking upon the white sand particles, the sound-based artwork incorporates the rhythm of the heartbeat, while a projection of circular light at the center beams with an illusion of a cavity through the ground. As viewers stand around the circle in silence, experiencing the soundscape, the cube appears to synchronize everyone’s heartbeat into a single rhythm. The artist’s observation demonstrates the interplay between sensory and cognitive analogies while repositioning a man’s philosophical conception of the universe.
Wrapped in a haze of darkness Kishwar Kiani constructs a stainless steel sculpture positioned carefully on top of a white pedestal. The sharp edges of the steel protruded through all sides of the semi-hollow cube, looking like branches, roots, or even a cluster of human arteries. The mathematical and structured construction of the work seems to contemplate fears, dreams, and troubled emotions. The work embodies secrets and unravels between the tangible and the ethereal. The rigid forms move around with harsh contrast and subtle glow as you circle the cube to witness all its sides, only to arrive at its contemplative nature. As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” (Jung, 1953)
If you unfold a cube, the six faces of the shape form a Latin cross; the cube has not only traveled through our linear space and time but has also identified itself as an object of permanence and numinous energy across religions and diverse doctrines. Mohammad Ali Talpur’s luminous smoke drawings on paper serve as a mythological archive as the artist stencils the buraq, the holy kaaba and the two pillars. The elements drafted by Talpur narrate the relationship between faith, devotion and earthly bounds but also question the dichotomy of ideologies within religions and civilizations. These silhouettes also examine the stimulus of visual illusions through dogmatic histories providing a nuanced critique.
Visual artist Jovita Alvares evocative video titled, (non)rooted, is a visual documentation where she revisits her family’s collection of photographs as a means of understanding displacement. Her archival imagery establishes a series of concerns regarding the nature of selective history and how it lingers through generations. The memory of archives and personal histories is deeply rooted in the emotions and values of the violated and forgotten. The piece interrogates the forging of the past and the long-durée effects of colonization.
In the series Security, Territory, Population, Michel Foucault talks about biopolitics, where the state exercises power over life itself, regulating bodies and managing life processes. Safdar Ali’s print of men in white uniforms behind a podium is an illusory comment on the structures of state, doctrine and power. The podium induces and guides the initial perspective of the viewer, offering a calculated selection. The movement of the viewer reshapes how the print can be read. The use of white and black in material, imagery and shape conveys regulation in theme as the work conveys specific judgment within a considered medium.
Reality is not informed by information alone, it requires perception and context just like the human heart and soul require subjectivity to regulate the brain. Ammar Faiz’s video projection contests its mysterious and dreamlike quality. The running shadows of men engaged in a popular game are confined within square boundaries on a desolate landscape. The ariel view provides the viewer with a peculiar documentation of order and unity. The display is vividly embodied with aesthetic realism is, as it is the formal properties of the subjects and their connections that elicit aesthetic emotion.
On the contrary, Anila Quayyum Agha’s intimate representation of the cube formulates a minimal approach towards image, idea and medium. By stitching together four pieces of drawings her work emerges into a map-like formation, with geographical information only known to the artist. The transparency and treatment of paper resemble human flesh, with pores and textures, as her work explores the relationship between body and land.
Fatima Haider’s graphite drawing recalls an ancient scroll, utilizing the medium’s potential to suggest layers of information. Her thematic concern demands a non-representational interpretation as the work actualizes the cube beyond its shape.
Ayaz Jokhio’s literal representation of the cube stems from the artist’s history of questioning philosophical aspects of contemporary art. The artist presents the shape with different views of a cup with efforts to question ideas around art consumption.
Visual artists often theorize their practices with paradoxical characteristics that limit the capacity of objectivity for the viewers while others manifest intelligent phenomena which translate into practices that are more porous and flexible. For practices to go beyond their maker, we require a major shift in the world of art and the gatekeepers of it, and such exhibitions are crucial in raising cultural and aesthetic didactics, where public, institutions and artists mediate the praxis of gallery education.
