‘Power of Image’ explores images as vessels of memory, identity, and human connection, shaped by history, place, and personal experience.
Human beings are unique in their capacity for creating images. Since prehistoric times, images have remained a means of communicating within a community, across tribes, with the divine, and with nature. These earlier attempts at conversation further evolved into shapes, now generally recognized with specific meanings attached to them in diverse linguistic systems.
Images are produced, replicated, multiplied, distributed, and preserved in multiple formats, surfaces, scales, and for different reasons, functions, and usage, from being a tool to discover one’s identity, to becoming a universal code. These could be flat, three-dimensional, static, moving, permanent, transient, huge, tiny, shaped by shamans, priests, mothers, professionals, children, artisans, mentally disturbed individuals, criminals, fugitives, doctors, instructors, etc.
From this expanse of images, which all of us own despite the differences of ethnicity, faith, colour, gender, sexual preferences, age, political views, locations – a maker of visuals draws inspiration, for deciphering, experiencing and enjoying the power of image. An entity that has compelled people to sacrifice their lives, shed their comforts, abandon their families, forsake their friends, to pursue a higher goal, an almost unachievable ideal, an unreachable idol.
Articulate Studios’ current exhibition, Power of Image, is the outcome of a four-week artists’ residency. It is an archive of what the participants have explored regarding the possibilities and potential of images. Situated in a specific site of Lahore, where different streams of history merge and diverse neighbourhoods meet, the artists worked independently, extending their ideas and images through various techniques, mediums, and formats.
Inspired by the surroundings of the residency space, Shameen Arshad has used references of old buildings, balconies, metal railings, overlapped and layered to communicate the way we interact with a structure, once it is collected in our memories. Arshad has added lines of red thread to stitch a link between brick and mortar (constructed by men) and tapestry (usually executed by women).
Memory as a major motif appears in the art of Tazeen Fatima. Her paintings, rendered like the pages of a diary, recall the past, forgotten views, distant beings – all securely placed in the crumbling cabinet of private memories; the text written with/in black threads suffices a sense of intimacy, longing, and loss; which we associate with handwriting – a tool to transform universal into a personal possession. Some sort of personal memory.
Likewise, the fabric (and thread), once rubbed against a human body, becomes a substitute for its former users in Abbas Ali’s mixed media works. Collected from labourers, who left their highlands to work in urban centres, their once-worn shirts are joined to canvases, along with the traces of their tools. The beauty, delicacy, and delight in elevating a mundane piece of clothing, into a poetic image, distinguish the practice of Abbas Ali, as well as glorifies those men who had put these shirts, or handled these tools, in the course of creating a new version of their surroundings – for others (buildings), and for themselves (their lives).
The interaction of tool, machine and human is playfully evident in the sculptures of Waheed Latif. Whether interactive or moving, his sculptures have replaced the significance of human presence, an experience that reminds the phase of COVID-19. His works also indicate mankind’s dependency, pleasure and bondage with machines.
Produced with a strong sense of openness, inquiry and experiments, the works created in multiple formats, during the Articulate Studios Residency, strongly make one believe in the power of images, as well as in the power of human beings. More than that, these suggest images and humans perhaps are not separate entities, but two sides of the same self.