Gandhara-art @ ArtHK10
Gandhara-art is participating in the prestigious Hong Kong Art Fair 2010 and show casing the works of leading contemporary artists from Pakistan; Aisha Khalid, Attiya Shaukat, Faiza Butt, Imran Mudassar, and Imran Qureshi.
Art Space
Events
Sailaab
This monsoon, diverse narratives have organically gelled, though through very different routes, concerns and contexts. Poignant vignettes of loss, displacement, retrieval and transformation provide multiple layers of viewing and meaning. There is an underlying urgency in coming to terms with floods today. There is a focus on rural and remote areas of coastal Sind, as well as in urban centres such as Karachi. The curatorial intention has been to draw into the work of practitioners whose response to water patterns has been ongoing, moving away from commissioned art, into spaces that engage you to reflect and in which you may incidentally find yourself. These are shared narratives of memories of places and people lost, where we arrive often after a traumatic shift within our surroundings: land, homes and belongings lost or submerged, also providing a critique of polarities within lifestyles and social realities.
There is a predominant archival presence, and simultaneous opening of trajectories/arteries which the viewer can experience and navigate through. Ideas that allow you to drift into spaces of beauty and stillness amid the obvious references to inundation and torrent. Disruption is part of the process, whether it is in the depiction of a space or in the installation of the works, evoking the ongoing process of land reclamation, and water reclaiming the land. This imbalance seems integral to the curatorial reading. There has been no desire to conceal, but rather to enjoy, akin to an unedited conversation, an unfinished painting; to find comfort in the subtle nuances and shifts from one body of work to another. The spaces in between and the viewer in it become integral to the reading.
Curated by Amra Ali
Aisha Hussain Karachi
Aisha Hussain uses the Wasli with a great deal of dexterity. The Walsi is a resilient surface and is constructed with layers of paper. Aisha takes it to the extreme, and her creations are made on surfaces which are made with multiple Waslis. It moves away from being a flat surface imprisoned behind glass, but has weight and depth. She calls it ‘raised wali’, therefore a new medium. The work is black and white, but scarlet enters as the new character and makes its own place on the surface.
Aisha Khalid at the Pao Hong Kong
Gandhara-art's contemporary focus will be on showcasing the works of the pioneers of the neo-contemporary miniature painting in Pakistan, Imran Qureshi & Aisha Khalid. This will be their 2nd exhibition in Hong Kong. Their work is instrumental in the contemporary resurrection of this traditional art form. Their oeuvre is all encompassing. It include paintings, sculptures as well as large scale installations which are exhibited in galleries, museums, art fairs and Biennales in Europe, Asia, the UK and the US and has also been shown at the MOMA-Oxford(2007), Fukuoka Museum(2002),Belvedere Museum(2009) and the Asia Society Museum New York(2009) and the 'Venice Biennale (2009).