By Anil Datta
Karachi: The somewhat overly compact but tastefully decorated Koel Gallery in the city’s swank Defence Housing Authority was host to a unique book launch Friday evening.
There was no chief guest, no speeches, no histrionics, no sermonisation. It was just an exhibition of two books by two Lahore-based artists, Aisha Khalid and Imran Qureshi, who were there to answer the visitors’ questions on their books and impart further information on them.
Aisha Khalid, whose book, “Name, class, subject”, was on display, is a graduate of the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, and has pursued post-graduate courses at the Rijksakademie in The Netherlands. Her book is a collection of individually painted pages According to the author, each ruled page encapsulates the imposed hierarchy of languages which has divided and ruled society. It is a commentary on the way language and the medium of education have come to be socially divisive and confusing factors. It reflects on a society shaped by a bilingual culture experienced by the artist as a child growing up in Pakistan. The book is produced from over three-hundred original paintings of ruled pages painted in the traditional miniature Mughal style.
Imran Qureshi’s “Side by side”, brings together two books, “The true path”, and “Moderate enlightenment”, both rendered in the traditional Mughal style of miniature painting. The True Path is a concertina book, its pages rather than being separate, open up like the bellows of a concertina. Containing about forty pages, it is a meandering of five-hundred and sixty-six dots which have to be joined together to produce a complicated picture of a landscape depicting various themes from the voyage of life.
The other book, the smaller of the two, is titled, “Moderate enlightenment”. These are paintings in miniature Mughal style with characters attired in the traditional Islamic garb. In contrast to the stereotypical notions of Islam from a western perspective, a natural piety and a sense of devotion brings alive the religious subjects of Moderate Enlightenment. The red, white, and blue that dominate the paintings are supposed to be connotative of the US flag, an allusion to the ever-fluctuating views of the US on the subject.
The project has been commissioned by Raking Leaves, a UK-based organisation that promotes art projects that use publishing strategies to explore how art can be created, viewed, and owned. It was set up by Sharmini Pereira (who was present at the exhibition) in 2008.
Source: The News
Date:5/15/2010
