Nature of an Afterthought: A posteriori

NATURE OF AN AFTERTHOUGHT: A POSTERIORI

Artist Statement

Consciousness is subjectivity at any given point in time. It is the expanse where sensations, thoughts, and sounds appear and meet in a singular moment, to produce experience and construct our reality. We assign meaning to these experiences through learnt perceptions and values. Memory – the nature of which is an afterthought, also resides as an appearance within this space of consciousness. Memory is an attempt to form meaningful narratives of what one remembers of past moments. Today, our relationship to memory has changed owing to technology and imagery. In making sense of the story of the past, we now also have available tangible remnants of the past to support that memory, which come in the form of photographs, objects, videos, and recorded sounds. The integration between the digital and human consciousness now evokes sensibilities that mimic game simulations and lucid dreaming, blurring the lines that might distinguish memory from a dream and perception from reality.

Stemming from my interest in meditation and understanding consciousness, this series of work explores the idea of memory, meaning, and lived experience as appearances within consciousness that live on as a continuous process or a story that is ever evolving and never quite complete.

My own subjective experience and the digital remnants of a time when I lived in Karachi have been used to recreate this process. Color plays the role of emotional memory in the work, giving a feeling tone to these experiences as remembered. Layered images, referring back to national events, cultural and religious narratives, as well as personal associations, hide behind clothing and objects, obfuscated and screened but recognizable when closely examined and paid attention to. A number of hypocrisies and contradictions hide in plain sight, revealing connections between the personal and political, and a larger collective consciousness that blankets all South Asian female experience. The role of the army, partition, Bollywood and Lollywood, the media, and global transformations such as the internet, as they relate to each other and relate to my everyday experience of being a woman in Pakistan, have been highlighted in the work. A historiography of this trajectory is traced in the likes of three South Asian women.

Mah Laqa Bai Chanda; a highly regarded courtesan, nautch, poet, and political advisor to the royal court of Deccan from the early 19th century,

Sara Shaghufta; a young poet in the 1980’s who was ostracized and disregarded by her (mostly male) peers for her bold words and colorful lifestyle (eventually shamed and shunned by her family she committed suicide at the age of 29); and

Qandeel Baloch; who was a social media star, murdered by her own brother for family honor in 2016.

This work ties into my larger practice and interest in the South Asian Female experience. Through two-dimensional mark-making and my own bodily movement, I try to capture the flows of knowing, seeing and embodied intermingling specific to the Asian female and their everyday environments. Playing with surface, colour and texture is a process of subversion and protestation, enabling me to explore their physical and psychological interiorities.

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Enroute K2

Acrylic, Oils, and Transfers on Canvas

44 inch x 54 inch

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Lalazar 2

Oils, Acrylics and image transfer on paper

60 inch x 48 inch

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Sundays at French Beach

Oils, Acrylics and image transfer on Canvas

66 inch x 48 inch