Ayesha Jatoi / Art Berlin Contemporary
September 13 - 16, 2012
Berlin, Germany
GREY NOISE Dubai is pleased to announce their participation in art berlin contemporary with a solo presentation by Ayesha Jatoi.
PRESS RELEASE
The five ‘paintings’ presented are contemporary studies of Persian Miniature paintings. This is an extension of an ongoing practice since Jatoi’s graduation from the Miniature Painting Department of the National College of Arts in Lahore. She ‘studied’ the compositions and divisions of space in four miniature paintings form but left out the figures and ornamentation that her minimalist aesthetic rendered unnecessary.
Of particular interest to her are these spatial divisions and the flattened multiple perspectives that traditional miniature or manuscript painting employ. But interestingly, even though these paintings have been destructed and stripped bare, Jatoi, in her partiality for text, has retained the titles of the paintings, namely: A Father's Discourse on Love, Scandal in a Mosque, A Fickle Old Lover Falls off a Rooftop and Bath-house Scene. So these very descriptive, narrative titles contrast the ‘barely-there’ work.
Ayesha Jatoi couples, or rather contrasts these “handmade” works with a more mechanical genre in which she was also trained. But we see her interest in spatial divisions of the manuscript page extend to the large panoramic photograph presented. She photographs enigmatic views of architectural spaces, focusing particularly on the play between light and shade therein. Abstract and ethereal, the viewer may be at a loss when trying to make sense of what in fact the photograph reveals.
Just as Jatoi turns paintings based on observation- be that not naturalist observation known to Western art history but a “suggestive” observation in which artists took liberty to, e.g. add multiple perspectives to relate a narrative on a single plane- into abstract geometric compositions with loaded titles, she, in this photographic series turns real spaces into ones that may be imagined.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
b. 1979, Islamabad, Pakistan.
Ayesha Jatoi’s practice comments mainly on art making and questions the relevance of traditional modes of working today. Trained as a Miniature painter, and photographer at the National College of the Arts in Lahore (between 2002 – 2007), Jatoi’s work shares a fascination with manuscripts and the spatial divisions of the “illuminated page”. Of late, text has started to play a very dominant role in all her work, often freeing itself altogether of the image. Jatoi is also the founder editor of Sohbet, Journal of Contemporary Art & Culture.
She lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan.