rtists’ residencies are about bridging the gap between image makers and the inhabitants of their surroundings. Either working with the community and incorporating local expertise, or aiming for a public interaction, these programmes are clear and conscious of their physical backgrounds. But in some instances, the existing locality is not important, because in this age of highways and high-speed internet connections, the line between local and global has blurred. Now what you do in your tiny room, in front of your smartphone or at a family wedding, could connect you to millions out there, depending on its worth and potential for spectators to identify themselves with.

A recently concluded artists’ residency, Art Saraye, was aimed at linking the individual with the public outside the art crowd. It was held at Shalimar House, a spacious and fabulous place in Lahore. It’s a huge compound of well-kept historical structures that start to unfold and impress the viewer before they even look at the works emerging out of a month-long venture. The venue, not being a regular gallery space but a house, contributed to the ethos of the residency which had invited eight artists from Lahore and other cities to stay and work at the location, managed by Eisha Liaqat and her family.

Though the exhibition opened in December last year, the actual residency, a project of Art Otaq, had begun as early as September 1. It involved artists from different backgrounds and having varied skills. Being there, detached from the discourse of art and in the vicinity of fruit sellers, mobile shops, stalls of reconditioned garments, plastic crockery stores, the artists produced works that responded to their surroundings, the neighbourhood, and simultaneously contributed to a general discourse on contemporary art.

Perhaps, the most impressive work in the show was a group of paintings by Riaz Ali. Platters of fruit presented on his canvases were not different from what was offered on sale on the main road. In his work, Ali seemed to negotiate between the real and the imagined. The reality of fruits spotted at a vendor’s makeshift stall which he had arranged following a sequence of colour, size and shape) offered an aesthetic parallel to art.

Responding to the residency’s site or the subject of traditional still-life in art with fruits, Ali painted fruits in simplified, yet immaculately rendered compositions. Surfaces with their major areas covered in deep red alluded to the presence and connection of historic canvases. But the artist approached his imagery through the lens of a disinterested onlooker. The clinical scheme of transcribing his objects — fruits on a plate, or a bowl, or just a single piece — served to distance the viewer from the maker, thus leading them to believe in the absolute and disinterested reality of the visual.

A number of participants dealt with personal, societal, political and art issues in their works created in multiple mediums and dimensions. Apart from hosting practicing artists, the organisers of the residency had collaborated with a local school whose students also displayed their work.

Dark depictions of objects against red backdrop in Ali’s work could be reality as well as its reduction, a concern best observed in the art of another practitioner, Nairah Sharjeal, with her units of small houses to create a large (imaginative) community. Various combos of tiny pieces (based on the elementary form of a house) addressed the distance between what you have and what you recall or desire or fear. Her perfectly manufactured and replicated miniature houses could be understood as a scenario for a dystopian setting in which individual taste, necessity, position and preference had been substituted for a homogenous model and standard solutions.

In that situation, one tends to question as to what is individual taste, or position, or for that matter, a cultural one. Anusha Ramchand in her works (fabricated in engraved and laser-cut plexi glass with lights) opted for a synthesis between varying faiths in a culture. In her powerful pieces, she blended religious identities and practices: Muslim sacred geometry with motifs of opened lotus, the symbol of Buddhist and Hindu reincarnation.

A number of other participants dealt with personal, societal, political and art issues in their works created in multiple mediums and dimensions. Apart from hosting practising artists, the organisers of the residency had collaborated with a local school whose students also displayed their work.

It was an unusual experience to gaze at children’s drawings: spontaneous, imaginative, unconditioned and honest exercises in image-making. Kids, presumably, when making a drawing, are not creating art but fabricating a world — regardless of how magical, fantastic and transformed it is. Amazingly, they believe in their creation.

Artists (at least some) are often inspired by the freedom demonstrated by children in their artworks. Some mature painters pick colour schemes, others follow brush strokes, a few study their stylisation, and several others get cues from the system of abstraction in kid’s imagery. A participant of the residency, Feroza Hakeem, who is a trained miniature painter, seemed to be using childlike vocabulary in some of her large-scale works on paper. Hence combining and creating a synthesis between high and low art, between the educated eye and the innocent hand, and between multifarious ways of looking at the world (like miniature paintings) and translating those into pictures.

This appeared to be the prime aim and activity of many artists’ residencies happening around us, including the Art Saraye.

The writer is an art academic and a senior columnist