Metamorphosing the Self

This is the first in Taimoor Shahid’s two-part review of the two-person show titled Two is a Company, featuring works by miniaturists Madiha Sikander and Ahsan Jamal

Madiha Sikander’s work is primarily concerned with books. However, in her work Sikander successfully transforms the book into a visual space by dissolving the demarcation between image and word, texture and text. This makes the task of perception simultaneously sensory and cognitive, a process of meaning-making that is as much a part of the art work as the art work itself. Perception becomes laborious and consuming and thus akin to the backbreaking process of miniature painting. Parallel to this unifying process of meaning-making we find a process of unification at the conceptual level in which different ontological domains – the different categories of being – are fused into one.

In her work Jinnah to Zia, we see the present merging into the past (or the past merging into the present) and three different instances of time flattening into a moment. The founder of the country, the notorious dictator still blamed for most of the country’s problems, and the protagonist of the painting all coexist in a single moment which itself has several possibilities of being in time. Has the protagonist transcended existence and taken Zia to Jinnah and made the founder present a decaying yellow rose to the General? Or has she brought them both to the present moment? Is this happening in Zia’s rule? Or is it some future moment of possibility? Or is it a moment in our infinitely possible histories? In whatever instance of time this moment exists, we know that the reference is to the politico-social dilemmas this country has faced from its very beginning, and yet there is no political agenda here.

What does the yellow rose signify? Is it the color of the sun, signifying warmth, joy, and friendship, as the yellow rose has come to signify? Or is it the color of jaundice and disease (complemented here by decay), as the yellow rose was historically understood to signify? But is it really about this, after all? Sikander challenges this and other possible interpretations by the choice of her medium and technique. She successfully uses miniature to situate the rose in a way in which it might well be interpreted as just an incidental occurrence in the book – a rose pressed into a book merely for the sake of preservation. And this is precisely why the technique and the surface both become necessary and essential to this work.

In this way – challenging the apparent interpretation by painting the image as a chance occurrence – Sikander necessitates the choice of her medium, and the use of books in all of her paintings. Try imagining the image in any other technique, or try visualizing it out of the book; and the work is destroyed – it is stripped of the possibility of interpretation as a chance occurrence and hence denuded of an important layer of meaning. It is this kind of perfection that is qualitatively required of an artist: the impossibility of other possibilities; and Sikander achieves that wonderfully well. In attaining the highest level of mimesis – the act of representation, she disturbs the boundaries of the real and the imitated , a fairly daring act, but another successful act of fusion. We see this well done in the paintings titled Conversation With God, Roses Are Red , Doing The Math, and Artist Statement I among others. In all of these paintings mimesis forms the core of the painting’s conceptual frame.

In Conversation With God the conceptual nuance and subtlety have been achieved through mimesis. The invitation to the Circus does not become an angry rant, like that of the famous Punjabi poet Sai Akhter Lahori, who yells: “Allah Mian Thallay Aa!” (“God come down!”) but remains in the domain of poesis by presenting itself as a bookmark, a chance occurrence rather than a planned event. As soon as the viewer begins to take notice of the mockery inherent in the intelligently designed ticket – the banner shouting ‘Circus’ complemented by the audacious man with his mouth agape, hair standing on end, wily eyes, and ludicrous expression, all signifying the planet and its happenings – the image is metamorphosed into something else. The image uses its other parts – the serial number of the ticket, the torn paper at the top left, its placement on the page, the perfection of mimesis – to transform itself into a real ticket incidentally placed on the title page of the book. This allegory thus exists on the same conceptual level where Shakespeare saw the world as a stage. And at the ontological level Sikander is successful in challenging the hierarchal demarcation between the abstract and the concrete.

In Roses Are Red Sikander dissolves the sublime domain of aesthetics into the ordinary world of a common man, while at the same time alluding to the basic lessons of the imaginative world and reminding us of The Treachery of Images , the famous work by René Magritte. Roses Are Red is a compassionate piece. In the painting the protagonist places a rose in a book and assumes an angelic, God-like role, granting an unsaid wish to an ordinary man, who once wished to draw this rose. If we closely examine the context in which this painted rose exists we see that it has been placed on top of an innocent drawing of a rose plant – the outline of the stem has been sketched with the help of a ruler, and the thorns have taken the abstract geometrical shape of a triangle. The calculations we see on the right – clearly the primary concern of the ordinary man – affirm the innocence of this sketch by pointing to the fleeting wish of the ordinary man responsible for this pencil and pen drawing. The painter looks at this attempt and transforms this drawing into a real rose. We immediately feel that this is exactly how the ordinary man must have wished to paint (and indeed wishes to paint). The protagonist of the painting grants her the wish, and by doing that, she grants this wish to all ordinary men. Sikander ingeniously employs mimesis to achieve this feat and it is in this way that the ordinary and the sublime begin to exist on the same ontological level in her work. However, in doing that she ironically labels her yellow decaying rose Roses Are Red , and thus symbolically hints at two important principles of the aesthetic domain – roses are not always blooming and red, and things are not always what they seem.

Sikander’s work is an eclectic selection of existential concerns and everyday human experiences. It comes off as a living being with a life of its own. This person of the work is not the painter herself; this is a character who can be, is, everyone. It is a being who is concerned with the fundamental questions about existence and the nature of reality on the one hand, while on the other she is unconcerned with anything – corporeal or ethereal – except the granting of a wish. She sees the ‘other’ of the society in a mirror ( Using Mirrors ), and urges us to use them. She reminds us of the parochial mirrors we use for introspection and hints at our insular attitudes towards the ‘other’ of our society.

Whether it’s the otherised children of this society, the ‘ Afghani Children hopeful of their future’ about to be razed by the coming times ( Back to the Future) , or a burnt city, this being, who lives in the narrative created in these works, sees everything from a Child’s Eye View . She is concerned with the history of a nation while she’s interpreting Psalm(s) of life at the same time. She’s flying a politically loaded plane ( What We Saw ) while she is venturing in the purely aesthetic field of an empty page ( Artist Statement I ). She is a complex being. And in the life of this complex being Sikander intervenes as a successful artist to give her angsts and concerns an aesthetic resolution, while giving us new angles and ways to look at them.

Taimoor Shahid is an art critic

February 25 - March 03, 2011 - Vol. XXIII, No. 02