The last show of the season at Islamabad’s Khaas Art Gallery ran on the 20th of May this past month. The show, titled ‘Kit and Kaboodle’, meaning a collection of things, featured the latest works of Islamabad based artist Saima Ali and Karachi based Ali Karimi. The show was put together by the Khaas Gallery team of Zishan Afzal Khan, Alia Bilgrami and Babur Gull.
While Ali Karimi’s work showed silhouettes of human figures on vasli, a traditional handmade paper used in miniature, it was Saima Ali’s work, also in miniature, that really drew the crowd.
The theme of her work was about the personalization of objects. There are many objects that become an extension of the human self. Clothes, shoes, the phones in our hands, the purses we carry, the tables we lean over and the chairs we sit on.
Saima Ali’s work, as she herself puts it, is about ‘objects becoming human to relate a story’. Human beings occupy space, what kind, and where, often dictate our interactions with other people and the external world. Much of our lives are conducted through objects and even the simplest images of them, like a wooden chair overlooking a scenic landscape, can evoke memories and emotions that go back decades, so strong are the associations between our feelings and the personal spaces that frame them.
Saima’s best work depicts a long trail of chairs, some stacked on top of each other and falling down like lemmings, others forming a surreal queue of furniture, all facing away from the gaze of the viewer, sitting over the ironic title, ‘I’ve got your back’. This congregation of chairs, this ‘cutting and collecting’, for her, ‘becomes a way of preserving, much like holding on to memories’.
Very much in line with this theme, Saima Ali uses the traditional form of miniature for her contemporary ideas; modern sensibilities encased in an old aesthetic. The miniature form was first used centuries ago in sub-continent to document lives of royalty and the important events of their times. They were the equivalent of modern illustrated books and carried narratives next to the illustrations.
These traditional stories often depicted people on palanquins and thrones. By using the imagery of chairs in the miniature form Saima Ali has a started a dialogue with both the past and the present.
The 31 year old Saima Ali is a graduate of NCA Lahore with a major in miniatures and now teaches at the fine arts department at the NCA Rawalpindi campus. She’s one of the more promising contemporary artists emerging in Pakistan.
The writer is an artist.
