Elemental Gestures
- 11 hours ago
- 4 min read
Hassan Tahir Latif
Our Managing Editor reviews Traces: Drawing Practices Now, curated by Hassan Sheikh. The show is on till 30th June at COMO Museum of Art in Lahore.
Millennia ago, our ancient ancestors traced their pigment-dipped fingers across cave and rock walls, enshrining hunting scenes, rituals and the minutiae of their lives to the memory of deep time. This practice of tracing and mark-making continued down the centuries of human evolution and remains an elemental aspect of creative work and behavioural development. Whether it’s a child learning to draw stick figures or a bored mind doodling, the simple act of mark-making elicits a primal instinct. It is an intuitive gesture, where mind and body meld with atavistic instinct.
For creatives, mark-making is a foundational act that documents the purest versions of our ideas at the moment of creation. There is an immediacy involved as wisps of nebulous, fleeting thoughts need to urgently take form, lest they escape into the ether. While writers convert these discrete thoughts into words, visual artists expand upon their initial concerns and use them as either preparatory material for paintings, sculptures and prints, or remain within the confines of paper, converting these traces into more considered drawings.
Traces: Drawing Practices Now—Hassan Sheikh’s curatorial venture for COMO (Lahore)—ponders upon exactly these concerns. Nineteen artists with distinct practices were invited to contemplate upon drawing and mark-making with respect to their work. The resulting exhibition is a showcase of the myriad ways drawing informs the practices of these artists and their changing relationship with this elemental form.
Works that cut through more sharply than the rest were those that played with lines. Perhaps this is a consequence of the years I spent being immersed in mathematics (before ultimately substituting numericals for letters) but standing in front of Ayesha Jatoi’s ‘Mountains, Minarets & Missiles’ or Babar Gull’s ‘Resonance/Resilience’ was a trancelike experience, brought on by their distilled geometrics. I was also strongly reminded of a memory from my A-Levels when the Further Mathematics instructor told us how to draw a straight, unwavering line: hold your breath and move your hand as you exhale. Unsurprisingly, Jatoi and Gull both credit drawing lines to be a meditative experience that deepens their situational observations. (To this day, I hold my breath whenever I draw a line under headings or otherwise; it becomes a quiet meditation regardless of where I am.)
Many artists played with form more liberally than those that engaged with geometrically straight lines. Musawir Shabbir’s dry-point pieces and Maryam Ali Moinuddin’s oil pencil works on paper, for instance, are imbued with a frenetic energy that recorded unstable internal landscapes. Where Jatoi and Gull used tracing lines as a means to observe the world around them, Shabbir and Moinuddin’s works took them inwards, probing the possibilities of scattered thoughts and the archives of memory. Shabbir’s ‘Fragments I and II’ are reminiscent of prehistoric cave drawings, even as they invoke Surrealist fantasies excavated from the deepest recesses of the mind.
Similarly, Moinuddin’s colourful exploration of memory and inchoate thoughts, especially ‘Otherworld’, resemble depictions of psychedelic or mystical experiences, where words fail in the presence of the ineffable. In the worlds of both these artists, figures and objects are barely discernible, hidden beneath overlapping layers. Or perhaps they are not there at all and it is simply a pareidolic trick. Spontaneous mark-making and tracing practices are often linked to entering deeper and altered states of consciousness and it was a delight to encounter works that were approximations of this.
Examining the memory held in sites and spaces remains a central preoccupation of many artists, and naturally that finds its way in this show. Much of this examination is concerned with interiority and the literal architecture of memory. Mina Arham’s architectural pen on film pieces (Documenting Gates) and Nisha Hasan’s spare mixed media works (Room – pretext (i) and (ii)) prompt conversations around materials, erasure, loss and grief. Whether it is the former’s studies of residential gates or the latter’s use of photographs, we are led to question the durability of memory, of spaces, of relationships that are often taken for granted.
In a group show, especially one featuring nineteen artists, thematic overlaps are to be expected, which makes digressions even more exciting. Mohammad Ali Talpur’s ‘Alif’, for example, portrays the type of mark-making I am most familiar with as a writer: asemic scribbles. The fluidly rendered black ink on paper resembling a forgotten script stand in stark contrast to the more geometric works. Abdullah Qureshi’s ‘Lihaaf Utarna (Undoing the Veil)’ in the same vein, offers a unique take on the central conceit of the show, playing with form, scale and meaning. Seven raw canvas panels of differing sizes, with patterns imprinted upon them using fabric dyes, hang at the end of one corridor. Taking the moral judgement placed upon homosexuals in Ismat Chughtai’s renowned 1942 short story Lihaaf as a point of departure, Qureshi pulls back the curtain on queer bodies in Pakistan, offering a glimpse at intimacy that thrives often under the cover of darkness, in direct opposition to hetero-patriarchal anxieties and moralities. The dye figures on the canvas recall shapes of bodies left behind on beds, formed by pressure and traces of sweat, marks of their own kind.
Mark-making, being elemental, yields itself to numerous possibilities, however, Hassan Sheikh’s astute approach allows Traces to coherently bring many of these together in one show, allowing the viewer to experience the breadth of mark-making and drawing as art form.
Gallery photos are courtesy of the author; hi-res artwork photographs via the catalogue, courtesy of COMO Museum. Link thumbnail features ‘Portrait of a Floating World (II)’ by Maryam Ali Moinuddin.
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