ccording to certain religious sources,Eve was not the first female created by God. “Some accounts hold that Lilith was the woman implied in Genesis1:27 and was made from the same soil as Adam. Insolently refusing to be subservient to her husband, Lilith left Adam and the perfection of the Garden of Eden.”Subsequently, Eve was carved from Adam’s rib, and according to some monotheistic texts the human race traces its genealogy to Eve.

Nobody today can claim to have seen Eve, Lilith, or any other primordial mother, but archaeologists have identified the earliest known representation of a woman – approximately from 28,000-25,000 BCE – a small limestone sculpture (4” high) in Willendorf, Austria, labelled asVenus of Willendorf. Along with this figurine, other depictions of women of prehistoric eras have been discovered. Most of the earliest bodies remain nameless and are faceless.

Women in ancient times were independent, powerful and heads of clans. Later, they came to be treated unequal to men in many spheres of life. There have been examples and exceptions. Only in the recent past have they reclaimed the current position, prestige and place in patriarchal societies of which Pakistan is one. Studio RM’s project of organising three exhibitions, featuring women artists, is a means of reminding viewers of this reality. Its third and last exhibition Eve’s I/Eye III is underway (till April 21) at O Art Space, Lahore.

Since the exhibition is taking place in Ramazan, the show’s title is Fasting Eve.

In Dialogue, by Kiran Saleem, the artist has combined two phases of our history, two faiths, two genders; thereby creating a conversation between the living and the dead, the viewed and the viewer, sacred and secular. The complexity of her concept appears in the way she renders a modern day female looking at the stone sculpture of The Fasting Buddha. In her diptych, this woman is gazing at a male body thus reversing the entire corpus of Western art history which projected the female as a model, muse and object of awe, seen and drawn by men.

The blend of multiple perceptions, traditions, narratives and contents is a continuous quest for another participant, Saira Wasim. Initially trained in the discipline of miniature painting at the National College of Arts (NCA), she now lives in the US. In her work, she sews together the two worlds, her place of origin and the environment of her residence. Wasim addresses the issue of marginalisation and misrepresentation of women in a male dominated society and of Muslims in the West. In her painting I do Exist, she portrays Madonna and Child, a subject normally associated with the West and the European art history. She covers the female’s face in a veil, and draws the child with a bandage on his head revealing blood stains. The work could be read as an extension/custom of concealing features of holy personages, and the recurring motif of depicting Jesus on the cross with blood on his forehead till one locates the length of red chequered Keffiyeh, under the figure of infant Christ. In that context, the mother could be a Muslim woman of our times, and the child might belong to our surroundings.

Individual situations transformed into complex concepts can also be witnessed in the art of Attiya Shaukat. A promising student of miniature painting, she unfortunately had a terrible accident during her studies at the NCA that damaged her spine and confined her to wheelchair. Yet for years, Shaukat has continued to produce work that addresses her peculiar condition, uncommon suffering and unusual encounters. For an individual of feeble will, the fall would have been the end of her profession, the break in life.However, Shaukat turned this misfortune into a subject for investigating ideas about fate, chance, pain – as well as exercises in formal concerns. In her work for the Fasting Eve, she has identified with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who was bed-ridden after her back injury sustained in a road accident. In To Be or Not To Be, Shaukat appropriates Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas (1939) in which a body is tied to another through lines of blood vessels. Shaukat replaces herself with the second Frida.Thus, the Mexican artist is seen providing the life blood so that the younger painter draws strength from the other side of the globe.

The presence of material, motif and situation connects Arshad’s work to the art of Bushra Waqas Khan. Khan, literally, fabricates female dresses by gluing together pieces of official documents, alluding to female oppression in the form/name of customs,traditions and rules.male-dominated society caption Attiya Shaukat: The Wound is Where the Light Enters.

In another work, one spots a shift in the artist’s aesthetics, as Shaukat incorporates two X-ray sheets of her back (from April 26, 2009), showing the rupture as a blank mark. She calls the painting:The Wound is Where the Light Enters. The artist weaves a plant/floral motif and superimposes it on two sheets, documenting the broken part of her body.

The duality of self or the other is also observed in the work of Mariam Arshad, an artist possessing extraordinarily skill in naturalistic rendering. With this advantage at hand, Arshad creates visuals that refer to reality but do not repeat it. In herUntitled canvases, she captures a specific hour of the day, of bright, blazing and blinding light, casting crisp shadows. Two characters, a boy and a girl are joined as both are partially wrapped in a sheet of white and grey stripes. Another element which binds them – and liberates the work from replicating reality – is the presence of foam on their faces. Unnecessary, because women do not shave, and a man supporting a beard hardly requires to apply it on his chin.

In Arshad’s other canvas too (with the same set of characters), the introduction of atmosphere,background foliage, stark shadows and foaming spray on faces convert the narrative into a matter of believability. The presence of material, motif and situation connects Arshad’s work to the art of Bushra Waqas Khan. Khan, literally, fabricates female dresses by gluing together pieces of official documents, alluding to female oppression in the form/name of customs, traditions and rules.

Khan assembles her The Leftover Dress with silk, organza and Swarovski crystals – a sign of woman’s place, power and prestige through items associated with comfort and opulence; but the body is absent, rather invisible underneath the dress. Khan quotes a Jewish text, the account of Rabbi Joshua about the creation of Eve. God, after considering all options, decided upon an organ from Adam “which is hidden, that is the rib, which is not even seen when man is naked.”

The imperceptible state of absence or presence for a woman in history, in art, in life is suggested in Sadaf Naeem’s paintings. She places a diminishing female figure (resembling the artist) in-between a grid like formation and a cluster of entangled ropes. The body, a soft, volatile and vulnerable mass, overpowers the two structures, behind and in front. The painterly quality, pleasure of mark-making and sophisticated ideas found in Naeem’sKnotting are also apparent in Saulat Ajaml’s monochromatic surfaces. Her two canvases are supposed to deal with the theme of Eve, but she picks an idiom that is more poetic, hence potent and permanent. Her Balancing Act suggests an hour glass behind a swatch-like form, which could be a narrative of a woman’s hemisphere contained within routine, repetition, regulation – like time. Ajmal’s other canvas, Between Acts, offers a different and daring possibility: disturbing the equilibrium, challenging the status quo and threating the norms. In that sense,the work is a mark of freedom; freedom of a thinker, a writer, a painter, a dancer, more importantly of a dissenter – to move away from conventions, as her brush strokes disrupt the convenient formation.

Like the mark of freedom, experienced in Ajmal’s canvases, women of today and their chores, duties, roles and responsibilities, are as free as their primordial ancestors, i.e., mother-goddesses, Venus of Willendorf, Lilith and Eve, who had the courage to defy the divine decree and tasted the fruit of knowledge – of self-awareness.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore.