Canvas Gallery’s “The Geography of Memory” features four Pakistani artists who reside overseas: Ruby Chishti, Usaydh Agha, Mustafa Mohsin, and Noormah Jamal.
Their methods involve memory as something that is intensely embodied, fluid, and porous. The show is a multi-layered meditation on displacement, identity, and the emotional fallout from lived experience. Although each artist uses a different visual language to address memory, taken as a whole, they create a complex map of the individual and the group.
Jamal’s oil pastel drawings have a playful, dreamlike sensibility, vibrant colors, and simplistic forms that at first glance seem almost infantile. However, this seeming innocence gives way to a more nuanced situation. Mountains, fires, heavenly shapes, and household items cohabit in unclear relationships in her creations, which function as symbolic constellations.
Figures vacillate between states, torn between silent authority and weakness. Jamal uses cultural elements and oral traditions to create images that are both intimate and mythic, with memory appearing disjointed, multilayered, and unresolved.
Memory may be reinvented and remade, according to a very reflective four-person exhibition in Karachi.
Jamal creates a private and ceremonial scenario in Masharaan (Elders). Elderly men are seated shoulder to shoulder in a row, their eyes closed and their faces halfway between solemnity and relaxation. A rhythmic chromatic sequence is created throughout the composition by each person wearing a different colored kurta, such as purple, yellow, pink, ochre, green, or red.
