On entering the residency space of Colab Creative Collective (CCC) in Lahore Cantt I had the assumption of seeing a typical artists’ studio space
On entering the residency space of Colab Creative Collective (CCC) in Lahore Cantt I had the assumption of seeing a typical artists’ studio space filled with paint, scattered brushes, discarded plasters, pieces of carved stones, raw blocks of wood, uneven floors, unkempt rooms, broken window pans, disjointed electricity wires, dysfunctional doorbell, and other such usual scenarios. But none of these were waiting for me; instead, it was a clean, clear, big, and bright hall with freshly laid tiles, and pristine walls, within a modern building complex under ultra-high security, a small trendy café next door, and the participants busy working, some on their laptops, others drawing or painting in their aprons.
The same clarity was visible in the body of work produced by 6 artists of different backgrounds and practices. Their works culminated in an exhibition, Seen from Another Life, opened at Colab Location in Lahore (January 31–Fb 16, 2025) with a panel discussion among the participating artists and Zarish Shahzad, the curator of Residency and exhibition.
Artists’ residencies in our surroundings proliferate with their distinct features, aims, facilities, spaces, and geographies. Yet one prominent aspect observed in several such programmes, whether organized by Vasl Artists’ Association Karachi or Articulate Studios Lahore, is to create bridges among artists and their practices (bridges always have two-way traffic!). Metaphorically, these are attempts to reconstruct the Tower of Babel, gathering speakers of diverse tongues to communicate in a common language among each other. However the word common by no chance means sole or supreme, but a channel of translation that brings expression, thus individuals nearer to each other while residing on separate, opposite – even conflicting sides.
At the CCC Residency artists include emerging and recent graduates from art institutes of art and design, and Lahore and Karachi, besides one (Unza Saleem from the UK). This diversity is a vital invitation for the participants to step out of their regular workspace, as well as their comfortable abode of mindset, practices, materials, imagery, and mediums and to experiment with a new, unexplored and different diction. Anyone looking at their creations chronologically can detect the long, troublesome, and hard aesthetic journey made in their artworks in a limited period of a few months.
Ubaid Tariq, continuing with his concerns about faith, its manifestation in behaviours, practices and physical objects has fabricated several pieces which remotely remind of a prayer mat, a tombstone, and metallic tops of mosques’ domes and minarets. The works, immaculately executed, allude to the way matters of spiritual significance eventually transmigrate into market goods. Unza Saleem in her impressively rendered paintings has portrayed a female’s relationship to religion as a symbol of identity and a link to tradition. Canvases depicting two palms with or without henna marks in praying posture signify religion as a mark of cultural identity, a continuation of history and a mirror to gaze at ourselves and our forefathers. Her other, sensitively produced paintings, for instance, a girl representing a cultural product, an exquisite jewellery piece and wearing a blue outfit suggest the sublime, since in many societies blue is believed to be the shade of spirituality, hence the domes of Sufi saints in southern Punjab in blue tiles.
Both Aleezah Qayyum and Roheen Ghauri have portrayed personal histories of their internal selves However these narratives are not limited to self-portraits or private articles. Focusing on an imagery that encompasses a multitude of people, and surroundings, their works look like dreamscapes. Roheen Ghauri’s paintings have an element of description and fiction– surrealistic to some extent, managed through manipulation of the chromatic scheme, whereas Aleezah Qayyum’s works on a range of surfaces appear as pages of a personal, intimate journal. One can locate the presence of human bodies, but it is the act of mark-making that eventually takes over. The fluidity, freedom and flow of her brush which leaves traces of identifiable imagery in its path, contributes to turning her canvases into a blend of personal and public, of interior and external arena, of looseness and control. What is produced through plan, but emerges intuitively are fictional worlds that transform a person from being a viewer to a visitor of those intimate and exciting lands.
Moin Rehman’s fictional worlds comprise buildings, plazas, places of worship, and blocks of residences, but detached from a normal town plan, these are packed in a metal trunk, floating in the air inside a sand clock, or placed on top of one another in a web of strings against a darkened backdrop. Reminding of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, these paintings present a simile of today’s urban alienation. An alienation that compels a person to revert to his/her internal self and transcribe the pulse of the moment. Visible in Ali Hamza’s canvases, an eruption of brush swirling in repeated and rhythmic directions. Here Hamza displays his skill in replicating identical configurations of an abstract motif in a sequence.
What is viewed, experienced, and picked from the exhibition, superbly and intelligently curated by Zarish Shahzad, is the confirmation that artists’ residencies – like CCC residency – are more than an opportunity to produce similar works, offer an occasion to jump out of oneself, and see the scenes from the other side, never ‘seen from another life’.
