In the last year or two, Lahore has seen a number of galleries open their doors to the public— in terms of curation some of these galleries have attempted to offer somewhat offbeat and exceptional shows. In the July of last year (2023), the June Collective selected twelve artists through an open call to participate in their artists’ residency. In the intensive three-week residency that followed, artists produced works that were exhibited at a fairly new and upcoming space, HAAM Gallery.

The gallery space of HAAM is the epitome of what most mainstream, contemporary art galleries in our cities today aspire to in terms of offering a ‘white cube’ experience: a sleekly designed exhibition space meant to accommodate artworks in varying mediums and sizes. Unlike many gallery spaces in Lahore that tend to be limited in terms of size and capacity, and are more suitable for an intimate viewing experience, HAAM appears to offer a more spacious, customized space to both visual artists and curators. Spread out over multiple floors in the building, it is aimed to facilitate an easy flow of visitors as well.

On the face of it, the show titled Consolidated Spaces seems to build on this notion of space— yet there is a twist. In addition to the finished works on display that are located on a separate floor, the exhibition also offers viewers a glimpse into the small studio spaces of each participating artist that have been painstakingly recreated as part of the exhibition.

Viewers can actually open the door and “walk-in” to witness a “curated” reimagining of the participating artists’ chaotic and messy work spaces as one would have seen them over the course of the residency (Title Image). The pervasive randomness of sticky notes, reference images, doodles, drips and palettes with coagulating pigment that one becomes privy to is offset by the disconcerting notion that the viewer, at some point in time, start wondering whether this environment is a “faithful” reconstruction or a defiant snub aimed at the perceived notion of authenticity that is sometimes emphasized in museums where the artist is projected as some sort of mythologized genius and his/her belongings become historicized artefacts.

The question of how one can spatially transgress through curation is also embedded as a paradoxical pun in the title of the exhibition, Consolidated Spaces. The bric-à-brac of an ordinary artist’s daily life is presented as a sort of a curated visual diary that is sanctified through display: a brand-new unpolished table, documents barely legible notes that are evenly arranged on its tabletop, a pair of thick-rimmed reading glasses, an empty glass, the quintessential collection of money plants artfully tumbling down a rusting stepped stool in the background.  Whether it is sketches, documents or notebooks, each of the spaces acknowledges the importance of the archive in some way. However, a variety of visual cues, mediums and objects allow the viewer to encounter a more humanized glimpse of an artist’s daily process as it was transformed into artistic practice. In this way the exhibition aims to enhance the viewer’s understanding of the stages of creation.

Or, perhaps a more nuanced postmodern reading is also in order for the more discerning viewer: should one meander through this experience as an indifferent voyeur who will passively acknowledge it as a museumized “slice of the real” experience or do these little tableaus that represent different artists’ thought process transgress the meaning of “real” in postmodern art with its concomitant debates?

In his text on ‘Relational Aesthetics’, curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud   writes that “Artistic practice is always a relationship with the other, at the same time as it represents a relationship with the world.”¹ If we consider this, then the curatorial approach also asks the gallery visitor to consider the space in which the exhibition is exhibited and the double-bind that comes with it: if the display serves to place the finished work of art and the artist both on equal footing then what does it mean to curate with this non-hierarchical intervention in an elitist, upscale gallery?

The “aura” of a contemporary work of art as rightly critiqued by Walter Benjamin is no longer contingent upon debates about artistic autonomy. The idea of the artist as a “strange, different, exotic, imaginative, eccentric, creative, unconventional, alone…prophet and above all the genius and new social personae, the Bohemian and the pioneer², labels that were put into motion as early as the Enlightenment with its emphasis on the artist as an emotional Romantic³ are now redundant and perhaps this reification in a posh gallery space in a non-Western part of the world IS the intervention. The more discerning viewer who can read beyond this intention and identify the collages, experiments and gestural scribbles as the narration and product of a sociological process can push this argument further— there is a change in our “collective sensibility”⁴ and the everyday is now the most “fertile terrain.”⁵ Such a display relays the importance of the idea and insinuates a rather contentious question “what are the right exhibition methods in relation to the cultural context and in relation to the history of art as it is being currently updated?”⁶

Arguably the latter half of the curatorial note of the exhibition does in fact lay this groundwork, but its point of departure is a series of pressing questions that leans more towards a fascination with semiotics: “…what is a space without its “idea”? What is the idea without a referent? What is a referent without its experience? “⁷

Such concerns take on more cogent meaning for example in the recreation of Zoha Zafar Malik’s studio space which is dominated by the presence of painterly iterations of a pizza, one that is painted in a graphic style on canvas and the other rendered in realistic detail. They are surrounded by signs that relay a painterly struggle to arrive at this resolution. Symbolic value and illusion vie for meaning in a context that supplants the aesthetic object with the process of production.

Mediating between the experience of being in a spatial setting that has been “constructed” vis à vis considering how the postmodern has engendered the breakdown of sign structures where the referent can contain a multiplicity of meanings or none at all becomes the linchpin for this exhibition that creates a dialogue between the finished works, their “imagined” space of creation and the viewer’s imagination. The “finished” works displayed on a separate floor are all diverse and explore various mediums and formats. Many works also expand on the idea of empty signifiers and a free play of meaning.

Interplay, by Zoha Zafar Malik and Hasan Furqan Faiq, is a collaborative work that depicts images of childishly painted logos, objects and figures (signifiers culled from popular culture, media and corporate entities) “float” literally and linguistically across a vast horizontal plane, perhaps a wall that resemble a barren landscape punctuated by cracks and crevices. A KFC sticker, a Hello Kitty Bag, a glass bottle of Pepsi…: the objects read like a bucket list of a daydreaming ten-year-old drunk on the magic and ubiquity of consumption with its visual cornucopia as constituents that assault our senses, drive our desires but also carry us back to a nostalgic past that is naive, innocent and untainted by an awareness of this fetishization of culture.

Hira Asim’s painting Hold Me Close examines the relationship between people and environment. Animated by an ebullient colour palette and figures that elongate, hide and move in tandem with abstract forms and paths, Asim’s dreamscape is playful and celebratory. In Haunsla Rakho, Asim’s skill as a printmaker exploring line and tactile texture comes through to evoke the anticipation of an unearthly magic, a sort of pervasive mystery-of-the-moment that is captured in the representation of bare feet in anklets that pulsate with a mysterious energy as a vine with a singular flower peek through.

Rebirth (Fig. 2), is reminiscent of a divine or transcendent encounter where light overshadows the experience. It is also a more subtle and careful exploration of line as opposed to Asim’s carefree painting. The delicacy of her minimal line and form is accentuated by the fragility of the mirror surface.

Khadija- Tul Kubra’s Yesterday’s Radiance, Today’s Obscurity (Fig. 3) carries the ambiguity and transience of a photographic moment. Characterized by visible gesture, the haunting painting just stops short of resembling a fading photograph. It shows the interior space of a kitchen containing a solitary female figure with her back turned towards the viewer. The washed-out layers with their translucence colours are devoid of life. Kubra replicates the surface of a weathered wall on which she transposes this morbid scene, transforming it into a sort of simulated representation of a tabula rasa⁸ that meditates on the finality of decay and erasure.

Ayesha Naeem’s cynical take on the utopia of home as refuge and paradise is also inflected with a reference to multilingualism, globalization and the use of English as a global language that carries currency.  The three words “asal” (real), authentic, “ghar” (house) embody the complex relationship between spoken language and meaning where Urdu calligraphic font is fused with English spoken language. (Fig. 4) The emphasis on and reinforcement of claim to originality and a “real” experience i.e asal, (authentic) uses irony to expose the deception of this claim exposing tensions within the private home space. The recontextualized presentation and display of these three words as an unassuming wall hanging inside a gallery blurs the boundaries between the private and public that have been encroached upon through this intervention.

Aymen Alam’s ghostly and fragmentary imagining of a quintessential outdoor space in a home piques the viewer’s interest (Fig. 5). Individual objects are exemplified by their basic forms that contain or waver nebulously between dreamy and corporeal existence: The scene is ordinary; almost banal but not quite. White chairs, a flowerpot with wishy-washy, vaporous layers of colour that resemble leaves offset by an incomplete form hastily drawn in in the background all connote impermanence.

Anusha Shahid (Fig. 6) translates and distils photographs into abstract compositions that capture the containment of space, their essence and aura. Her paintings encapsulate visual cartographies represented as arrangements of colour.  The titles tell us that we are looking at different parts of Lahore but the daubs, gestures and strokes could signify the accumulation of different kinds of territories and energies onto a painted surface.

Shehrbano’s series titled Neither Sleep Nor Patience defamiliarizes recognizable objects by realistically filling and colouring in with soft pastels in the space that surround them. This leaves the objects themselves as empty white forms set against the busy pattern of a chips floor. This inversion of a solid recognizable form into an indexical semblance of it becomes a transformative experience of observing the uncanny presence of absence.

Maryam Moinuddin’s line drawings are enveloped in wispy, amorphous forms that are painted in watercolour. The compositions are akin to foggy memories   she calls “vague echoes of nature” that she remembers navigating as a child. Her Field Studies (Arrangement of Objects) recreates an actual object to evoke a more tangible memory. It is a sculpture in china clay that resembles a nest of loosely arranged twigs.

Amina Jameel’s perforated drawings and compositions are presented as a set of iterations on lightly tinted squares of paper. In each square, a permutation of the bodily form of her domestic house transforms itself through the technique of perforation which is repeated till resemblance to the original form is sometimes dissolved. One can identify part of a shirt, a form of a figure without arms or legs, abstract forms that morph into maps. The process of reading these sensitive drawings becomes an exercise in witnessing repetition, dissolution and rediscovery but one that engenders the invisibility of the figure.

In Asjad Faraz’s short film Don’t You Read the News?(Fig. 7) he seeks inspiration from modern life and everyday experiences to narrate unassuming, seemingly banal anecdotes that are absurd and push the boundaries of what constitutes truth and fiction.

Aptly titled Ghosts (Fig. 8), Amna Suheyl’s reliefs in plaster hover between mere plaster casts to indexical representations of some fragmentary experience. One could interpret them as lost or random pages torn out of the notebook of memory that read like haiku poetry. The surfaces carry spare compositions with few impressions. Some forms are familiar such as a balanced arrangement of pebbles with tiny plants peeping through while others feel familiar but are actually uncanny. The negative space in these reliefs carries a pregnant silence; it partially derives from the materiality and weight of the medium itself. The reliefs look like tablets with inscriptions on them or perhaps fossil reliefs recovered from an archaeological site. Anecdotal glimpses of life appear to be “frozen” in time on their surface such as elongated forms resembling bamboo reeds that swish and slice but also intersect in an empty silence.

The curation and display of Suheyl’s photographic series titled Ephemeral captured as prints on photo-paper is worth mentioning (Fig. 9). Suheyl’s concerns that tackle narrations of migration, displacement often resemble fragmentary evidence of a half-forgotten trauma of journey and survival. For this particular display, instead of frames Suheyl’s prints are displayed suspended in the air in the form of open books. The materiality of the medium is subverted with each page bent and “shaped” to mimic the form of a book. As one moves closer to the display, the intimacy of viewing and being a voyeur is only transitory. Each print is a photograph that depicts hands painted with images in henna. The authenticity of what constitutes as a visual documentation in this narration of events is also brought into question. Is it the photograph or the body that bears witness to history?

Since many of the works were produced for a residency, the choice of medium too is experimental. The need to “impress” buyers is offset by a curation that is sensitive and eschews the hierarchy of medium and what goes into a glass box. It is rather unusual and refreshing to see a pristine, upscale gallery display where drawings are exhibited unframed (Fig. 10), glass vitrines protect ephemeral material and pedestals display unmounted sheets laid flat.

Given the paucity of unique gallery spaces, in many ways Consolidated Spaces attempts to surmount that gulf between “commercial space” and unconventional subject matter. It even facilitates a more embodied experience where art-as -commodity and space-as- site-of-transaction confront each, sometimes overtly and other times minus the frills. Perhaps such shows can pave the way for more unconventional, transcendent experiences in ideal gallery spaces.

‘Consolidated Spaces’ was a Group Show exhibited at HAAM Gallery, Lahore and curated by Ghazala Raees. It opened on 3rd September 2023 and remained on display till 13^th September 2023. ‘Consolidated Spaces was a collaboration between June Collective and HAAM Gallery, Lahore.

Images courtesy and copyright Haam Gallery & Ghazala Raees

Title image: Re-creation of Artists’ Spaces, 2023

References

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Essay. In Relational Aesthetics, 37. Dijon: Les presses Du Reel, 2002.
Gruber, Cole. “The Contemporary Historical Avant-Garde: Integrating Art and Life with Rirkrit Tiravanija and Santiago Sierra.” Bowdin Journal of Art, 2016, 8.
Haam Gallery. Artist Statement for Consolidated Spaces. Lahore: Ghazala Raees, 2023.
Mary Amacher, “The Autonomy of the Artist : The Road to Artistic Independence ” (2013).
Parker, Rozika, and Griselda Pollock. “God’s Little Artist.” Essay. In Old Mistresses Women, Art and Ideology, 82. London: I.B Tauris, 2013.