he title of Farida Batool and Masooma Syed’s exhibition Akhir-i-Shab kay Hamsafar (Fellow late-night travellers) is a fabulous example of appropriation. “The title borrowed from Qurratulain Hyder’s novel” (as mentioned in the artist’s statement) was originally part of a verse by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Reading through the book by Hyder, the great Urdu novelist, one realises that the two visual artists used Faiz’s phrase only as an initiative, an inspiration, a point of departure, to deal with their concerns; concerns which sometime converge, at others stand independently. Through a strange twist of fate (not chance), the two artists are linked. They were fellow students in the painting major course at the National College of Arts (1989-1993). They were also colleagues at the Beaconhouse National University for a brief period and held a two-person show in 2004 at Rohtas 2, Lahore. However, more than their student years, teaching stints and joint exhibition, it is their art, and their approach to artmaking that bring them together.

Along with the visual appearance and formal solutions, there is another feature that joins the work of the two artists, recently viewed at the Canvas Gallery, Karachi (March 2-30). From their college days till now, both of them have been known to defy the norms of regular art-making, either in subjects, forms, mediums, techniques or genres. Batool executed a mural painting in ceramic tiles for her degree show; Syed produced a number of canvases, which in their imagery, composition, treatment and sensibility were at odds with usual examples of art pieces.

Masooma Syed possesses the incredible capacity of picking anything and turning it into (high) art; Farida Batool has the potential to choose an issue, cause, crisis and transform it into art. Many artists perform similar tasks, but Batool and Syed share a tendency to surprise even their fellow artists. Each at some point in her life has discovered and adopted a technique not usually practiced/ preferred by the majority. Since 2004, Farida Batool has been producing work in Lenticular prints (followed by experiments in AR), and Masooma Syed since her residency at the University of South Wales, Sydney, Australia (1996-1997) has been constructing small sculptures in uncommon materials and unexpected arrangements. This includes making of intimate objects and the most extraordinary jewellery.

In a sense, the Canvas Gallery exhibition was a documentation of their various excursions. One came across Batool’s prints on half-baked ceramic tiles, graphite on archival prints and prints on glass; next to Syed’s oil paintings with mixed media work on pure silk and handcrafted items, all that denoted something beyond what could be read/ registered on the surface. The two artists explored something new in their imagery/ technique. Farida Batool created large scale prints on glass and Masooma Syed composed her oil painting with wings. This was not the first time the two used oil, canvas, mixed media, print, glass, but the aesthetic position in the work was different, distinct and distinguished from previous pieces.

Farida Batool installed a sequence of graphite on archival prints, Erasure, in which drawing by a human hand and the image captured through a mechanical tool became indistinguishable. These small squares (6x6 inches) were layered with varying marks, devoid of a reference to some location, incident, accident; hence perceived as elaborations in grey – only if detached from their title, Erasure.

Erasing is a simple, rudimentary and daily exercise at an art school. Students are instructed to bring small erasures along with pencils, papers, boards to their drawing classes. An individual rubbing out his/ her lines on paper, may not necessarily realise they are joining a legacy of elimination. Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, talks about a dictatorial state’s strategy in deleting the memory of a population. The English translation of Czech novel was published in 1996. In the present era, the mechanics/ mania of the social media has replaced the power of a dictatorship in annihilating memory. What you share as fact, comment, critique is swallowed by a swamp of later posts on a social network site.

We live in an era of erasure. Batool has tried to describe the situation. In an autocracy or on pages of social networks, deleting is not forging a void, but a replacement, in which other content takes the centre stage. In Farida Batool’s work, one glimpsed the removal as a reminder of what was lost, thus inviting an individual to connect dots and guess the situation of his/ her surroundings.

Batool represented that state in her large pieces too – prints on glass (titled Undulated Hues and Black Hued Monsoon) with reflections of barbed wire in the water. In the past Batool, has created a body of work comprising clusters of barbed wires, eventually, and ironically, looking like symbol of love, but in her latest work, she has diffused, distilled, decreased the presence/ prestige of this instrument of exclusion; by rendering its essence/ outline/ reflection in the fluidity, hence uncertainty of water. Puncturing the power of a tool of repression accepted widely for its attachment to security and safety.

Farida Batool has also produced two other prints on glass, titled, The Landscape of the Last Night I & II, which convey personal as well as social observation of the external world: black and white, saturated, unknowable. In a way the state of confusion, searching and uncertainty is more desirable in the realm of art (because once you are unsure you can be relaxed, but if you are certain you are always in agony).

Like Batool, Masooma Syed has refrained from pointing out a specific scenario: political social, historical. Instead, she has alluded to her content through titles (colours), Siah (black), Surkh (red). For a Muslim devotee, the tragedy of Imam Hussain (with whom Allah was pleased) at the battle of Karbala is an episode of darkness and blood. In the Islamic belief system, a martyr is not dead, but alive, and elevated to heaven, received by angels. Syed’s large rectangle in blood red, named Surkh, has two huge wings attached to it on both sides of the canvas.

Killing the innocents, or quenching the resistance is not limited to distant past, it can be a story of the present or of now. Syed, in her magnificent painting, From the Library of a Gypsy Lover III, has pasted printed texts about historic wars, and added layers of luscious red, enticing ultramarine with strokes of white paint denoting flowers in bloom. An absolutely remarkable painting in terms of its content and pictorial solution, that could be deciphered in depth if seen in relation to the work sharing the same title (From the Library of a Gypsy Lover II); in which old pages of Pakistan military’s newsletter were glued on the surface; illustrating the military manoeuvres of the British in India, Americans in Vietnam, and Russians in other parts of the globe; particularly the picture of a soldier taking aim.

It is obvious that Masooma Syed and Frida Batool are concerned with cruelty in their times as well as in past eras. They follow the example of Michelangelo, who is depicting death in The Pieta, employed the superb language of art, a diction that remains serious, relevant and exciting – all at the same time and all the time.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore.