Marium Agha’s visionary embroideries are overlaid on carefully selected tapestries. The transformation of the original tapestries— from found object into artwork with personal meaning— has become a hallmark of her process. By unpicking, emphasizing, and adding on to sections of the original tapestry, Agha adapts the pre-existing narrative imagery to fall in line with the message she wishes to convey on the reworked surface. And there is always a message. Themes relating to gender and psychology are usually implied by her interventions.

Agha’s most recent solo show at Aan Gandhara Gallery explores psychological realms as underscored by its dichotomous title, Beautiful Nightmares. To resolve this dichotomy, we need to peruse the artwork in a mood as deep and dark as a moonless night, when the world is quiet, and the imagination is untethered by outer stimuli.

The beauty of the reconstructed tapestries is evident in the floral compositions depicted by Agha. She borrows imagery from 17^th century Dutch still life painting with particular reference to floral arrangements. The rich design and vivid colors of the tapestries make a strong visceral impact on the viewer. The silk-and-cotton thread mix gives extraordinary luster to the finished tapestries. But unlike Dutch floral still life, which reflected the growing wealth and urbanization of Dutch bourgeois society through trade, Agha’s borrowings serve to express her deliberations on the nature of subjective reality.

Given the completely subjective nature of the mental zones explored in this body of work, namely the subconscious terrain of the dream state, Agha has chosen to state her artistic intent in the form of a poem composed by herself:

Where dreams and darkness intertwine,
A realm where fears and fantasies release,
Creating visions that are both divine.
Oh beautiful nightmares, enchanting sights,
Within the realm where shadows bloom,
Where stars ignite ethereal lights,
And moonbeams pierce the inky gloom.

Silent whispers echo through the night,
Unveiling secrets, untamed and wild,
Unleashing terrors, yet with pure delight,
For even in darkness, beauty is compiled.

When we dream, we immerse ourselves in a zone with no conscious control on what we see or feel. The narrative structures of our dreams follow mysterious rules that contradict what our rational, conscious mind perceives as a logical flow of thoughts and emotions. Just as Agha reconstructs old into new, so too does our dreaming mind reconstruct our recent and buried feelings. Old memories, anxieties, and forgotten joys mingle in a soup of subconscious sensations in our physiologically altered state. In a sense, our sleeping mind liberally “borrows” its narration from a buried archive of experience. In our hallucinatory condition, we renew the past in pleasant as well as disturbingly nightmarish visions.

Marium Agha evokes this subconscious realm through her art in which beauty and terror are equal partners. The enigmatic combination of beauty and terror is unified by surrealistic touches in the artwork. These touches, even as we consciously absorb the images before us, remind us that beyond the world of rationality, there is a subconscious zone of unresolved fears and joys where irreconcilable opposites are sublimated into resolution.

The ornate bouquets depicted in Beautiful Nightmares show a mix of flower varieties arranged in vases, as in the aforementioned Dutch still life paintings. The arrangements are centrally placed against an indeterminate brown background which serves to emphasize their color and form. Flower arrangements, unlike dreams (or nightmares), are essentially controlled objects as the hand of the arranger has deliberately selected the number and varieties of plants on display. Agha’s depictions are quasi-realistic— there is a definite tendency towards the surreal which once perceived by the viewer, begins to dominate the interpretation of the artwork. She achieves this by the treatment of the ‘eye’ and the ‘droop’.

In each of the five tapestries on display, selected flowers have exaggerated centers that form eye-like structures. The “eyes” are round and glassy, with a dark pupil and pale iris. They seem to pierce through the tapestry as if gazing back at the viewer with subliminal transfixiation.

The flowers, and even the tabletops upon which the still life arrangements rest, seem to droop as if caught in the process of melting. The objects change from representations of real objects into morphological chimeras, which evoke Salvador Dali’s surrealist works in the 1930s such as the iconic The Persistence of Memory (1931). During the surrealist period of his stylistic evolution, Dali tapped into the subconscious to evoke hallucinatory mental states in a process he described as “paranoic-critical”.

The phrase ‘paranoic-critical’ embodies a similar paradox as “beautiful nightmares”.

The irrational but psycho-dynamic activity of the mind complements the analytical side of our thinking process. The dual intertwining of irrational and analytical elements becomes a basis for the production of psychic knowledge. The liquid nature of the mind allows beauty and terror (nightmares) to amalgamate.

Agha plots a trajectory from found object to transformed object. Her meticulously detailed creations do not dictate interpretation. We can extrapolate, from the melting flower with its bird-like eye and from the table edges that curve like thick lava, that Agha is drawing attention to a layered interpretation of her art pieces.

In a Q&A published in the accompanying catalogue to Beautiful Nightmares, Agha has stated: “The work heavily depends on viewership to complete it and that is where the dialogue begins.” This reliance on external interpretation breaks out of the interiority implicit in the psychological realm of dreams. The solidity of fixed meaning is destabilized by the possibility of plural interpretations. The haunting inner dialogue that reconciles beauty with terror in Beautiful Nightmares concedes to the externality of viewer interpretation.

Marium Agha invites us to step out of normative frameworks of reality and give space to investigatory modes of thinking that rely on intuition. Her method, one may conclude, is one of restrained symbolism. Her range of imagery is quite narrow, staying as it does with floral still life. Her nudges into the surrealistic dimension through distortion and exaggeration of form are highly controlled. Whereas nightmares may emerge from a zone of unfettered fear, the beauty is measured and deliberate.

‘Beautiful Nightmares’ was displayed at AAN Art Space and Museum from November 16^th to December 10^th, 2023. The show was curated by Scheherezade Junejo.