A Fair Vision, Fiercely

Mina Malik

‘Fair, Fierce, Fleeting’ is Michelle Farooqi’s latest show, curated by Nashmia Haroon for her Tagh’eer Gallery.

Michelle Farooqi is a multi-hyphenate artist, with training in eighteenth-century classical drawing and painting techniques. As a miniaturist, she brings a particular restraint to her work, a carefully observed landscape of the imagination that is executed with a deftness that inhabits the form with ease and a lush exuberance. Her part of the show consists of four contemporary miniatures (the scale is not the traditional one), showing four women in four different landscapes—Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Each painting features three elements in equal measure: a woman, a tree, and creatural life, often two different birds.

The artist, Michelle Farooqi at the opening

Haroon asked two musicians and a visual artist to respond to Farooqi’s work: four delicate representations of the seasons. The result was Haider Rahman, playing Raag Bahar on his baansri; Aizaz Sohail responding with Raag Megh and Sehr Jalil contributing Sukh Chain aur Skanjbeen, an audio-visual piece.

The four seasons are an oft-ruminated upon movements of time and space, but take on a story-like quality under Farooqi’s hand, supported by snippets of poetry from Parveen Shakir:

The jasmine spray, once dimmed by Autumn’s grey/Now holds the entire garden in its sway

As well as a Jaun Elia ghazal:

You infuse my verse with colour and joy/An endless spring, of radiant eves and crystal nights

Perhaps this scribe’s penchant for poetry is to blame, but the poems give the paintings a delicious piquancy: no longer are they merely depictions of fair ladies in gardens, they are the shaakh-e-yasmin, the autumnal branch bursting into bloom; they are the desiring, the quest that abides without urgency, but with the slow and sure passage of time: the spring that is sure to come, the fruit and fecundity of summer, the snap of the cold, serene in the moonlight. All things belong in the hands of the rang e taraz, whether that is the poet with words or the painter with pigment.

'Summer' by Michelle Farooqi (tea wash and watercolour on wasli)

The seasons are experienced again with the sound installations. Raags are famously tied to nature; there are movements for different times of day and different seasons. The seasons of South Asia are also unlike western ones, being more complex and nuanced. This nuance is represented in Aizaz Sohail’s raag megh, from megha, rain; a raag for the monsoon. There is no rainy season in Farooqi’s work, so the audio is a pleasant addition, a space for the imagination to wander through one of her forests while clouds rumble. Haider Rahman’s bamboo flute is a yearning one; a spring that comes with an undertone of longing, quickly developing into a full-bodied, fierce kind of desire—echoed by the flowers bursting across the garden of Farooqi’s summer, the ‘hot gaze’ of the sun. In a way, the piece bridges the warmer seasons.

Detail from 'Autumn' by Michelle Farooqi (tea wash and watercolour on wasli)

Sehr Jalil’s piece, ‘Sukhchain aur Skanjbeen’ (‘Indian beech tree and Lemonade’) is a video accompanied by a narration that muses on another tree, the sukhchain her paternal grandmother planted in her home. This Indian beech tree has branches that spread out into a lovely shady canopy, thereby earning its name: rest, and peace. All the women in this show, real or imagined, are finding a peaceful moment under a tree. In Jalil’s piece, the tree’s shade transcends into other gestures of care, including Jalil’s daadi’s recipe for lemonade. As a diasporic artist, Jalil’s piece explores a different kind of seasonality; that of life, and that of someone whose roots exist in a multiplicity of raags—but for whom the experience of the seasons is of the more ‘western’ four seasons. There are moments in the video when an English neighbourhood or house transposes itself upon the glass of skanjbeen, with its echoes of home; these moments impress upon the viewer many layers: of belonging to a culture with deep roots, while living in a land that does not share the same ethos.

‘Fair, Fierce, Fleeting’ is an introspective moment, a gathering to experience quietly, taking the time to connect the various pieces that have joined their fleeting filaments together.