In the meena bazaar that remains of Lahore Literary Festival, the English-medium youth of Lahore gather for a dearth of cultural/ intellectual/ social stimulation. Alive on the Indus is the only shighlight of the event otherwise featuring lacklustre panel discussions (and even more lacklustre qawwali). It weaves visual poems of mangrove ecosystems that survive all odds; fish that walk on land; and murdered river dolphins.

The impending demise of LLF can be attributed to several interlinked political, cultural and economic factors, including a lack of a cohesive publishing industry; the inability of the intelligentsia to create one; elite capture; censorship; repression; stagflation; and the near-impossibility of hosting and securing high-profile foreign delegates.

But one must make the perfunctory appearance to the only literary festival that, after steady decline over eight years, still survives on wobbly legs, if for no other reason than to hobnob with the writers, editors, publishers, artists and musicians that are left around here, and whom one doesn’t run into much otherwise; even, in the wide-eyed hopes of forming a community of creative types, who must by definition, fill the empty space left by the death of journalism, in a post-truth society and under the cover of metaphors.

In a country where a woman was almost lynched a few days ago for wearing a kurta sporting some non-denominational calligraphy, one walks into the gallery to a small-scale Kaabah; adorned with postcards for Kashmir, the imagery of blood and chaos and destruction, hanging densely on loose canvas paper just behind it, evoking the atrocities and oppression faced by Muslims in Palestine and Kashmir, which have been in the backdrop of everyone’s mind for the past few months and images of the most brutally grotesque that humanity has to offer flooding newsfeeds and screens.

The milling crowd of less-than-enthused audiences and mela-goers congregates outside the Alhamra Art Gallery, around a travelling musician, officially not a part of the programme. In a particularly uninspiring iteration of the LLF, severely deficient in both literature and festivity, one of the few things worth seeing is the exhibition. At last year’s LLF, Wardha Shabbir’s solo show, If a Tree Could Wander, was the showstopper in an otherwise stopped show. It was a mesmerising and immersive experience, drawing crowds upon crowds for all three days of the festival.

This year’s exhibition was muted in comparison. It seems, just from walking around Alhamra over the weekend, that there is not much public enthusiasm left for the event, after so many disappointing runs. But The Path of Metaphor, curated by Asad Hayee of Rohtas 2, brought together the work of four prolific female artists, all academics in the Lahore art scene, and invited you to the subtlety of the feminine gaze.

Faiza Butt evokes the dimensional ratios and the black and gold aesthetic of the Kaabah in a digital light-wall installation, titled Paracosm, a departure from her usual, more traditional 2D practice. It features a paradisiacal landscape (Faiza is Kashmiri), adorned with flowers (more on this later) bordering Postcards from Kashmir, English translations of poems by Agha Shahid Ali (a Kashmiri poet) and Faiz Ahmed Faiz (reminding one of the Faiz Mela that happened recently at the same venue, and was far better planned and attended than LLF) in Kufic script. There’s a merging of genres, East and West, modernity and tradition, techno/ sci-fi minimalism and extravagant adorning, but is there a theme uniting all these disparate references? I ask Butt what she feels about being seen as a woman artist, she is defiant: “In this day and age, belief in oneself is the biggest act of rebellion.”

Farida Batool, whose work features a dizzying collision of the masculine and feminine — barbed-wire frames evoking pre-Partition garden fountains, still to be found in public buildings and gardens on The Mall — has treated the question of femininity in her art as political. She argues that not to do so would be to “deny a history of oppression. Considering oneself a woman artist is about identifying with the history of political struggle.”

Batool is the dean of NCA’s Department of Cultural Studies. Her work is always communal in nature. She tells me that the barbed wire reflects the fear of terrorism that has recently resurfaced as a consequence of Imran Khan’s version of the hybrid-regime’s pro-Taliban stance: “Violence has become a part of the culture.”

There are photographic displays that morph as you walk across them, showing the artist’s garden, lovingly tended to and cherished, slowly being destroyed over the course of monsoon. The artist acknowledges that while she was inspired by the devastating floods of last year and the anxieties of the looming climate apocalypse, she wanted to be humble and zoom in on her own destroyed garden.

There are other stand-alone projections, photographs and montages; all symbols of fecundity, fertility and archetypal femininity being consumed by fear and strife and violence.

As one walks through The Path of Metaphor, one is subtly reminded of fears and anxieties that have been in the collective consciousness for the past few years. In my chats with all four women concerns about censorship and freedom of expression; fears of public outrage and mob violence; and the fact that the art world is still controlled by men, are common themes. But as one reaches the end of the gallery, the divine feminine takes over. Masooma Syed and Risham Syed’s work evokes feminine elegance, grace and simplicity.

There are gilded frames sporting jacquard weaves of a city constantly destroying and rebuilding itself in increasingly grotesque ways; pink quilts telling patchwork tales of trade routes and transformations; scarlet veils and red roses; delicate glass chandeliers and small, delicate found-objects — beauty in the domestic, as envisioned by women.

Masooma Syed’s installation of rose-tinted chandeliers features old found liquor bottles, beautiful and adorned. She tells me that she “was asked to treat the labels” because alcohol is prohibited around here. The chandeliers echo a roaring 1920s’ prohibition-era speakeasy aesthetic, nudging lines of public tolerance (which have slowly been eroded by decades of building radical, fundamentalist and sectarian narratives), as does Butt’s work, without directly evoking the debate around the blasphemy law.

She hesitates to be “boxed in” as a woman artist, but says “I am a woman, and I do like flowers,” with a spritely twinkle in her eyes. She reminds me that the female in art is not just for aesthetic or pedantic consideration. There are fewer opportunities for women artists, a sentiment echoed by all four artists.

Risham Syed, the heart and soul of SVAD at the BNU, who has been extremely prolific over the past few years and currently has several concurrent shows going on in London, Dubai, Sharjah, Karachi and Lahore (and is extremely difficult to pin down), explains the ubiquitousness of subtlety, in opposition to the patriarchal, ideological and dogmatic, as “questioning fixities by allowing the viewer to create his/ her own narrative.” Her display of old silks, with patchworks depicting rain, buildings, social media ecosystems sewn onto old maps and trade routes, unashamedly evokes the feminine in all the ways it’s most necessary: the nurturing and maternal, the delicate and pretty, the spindle and the loom, heirlooms and fabrics. In a society where last name, identity, legacy and inheritance are all patriarchal, the work reflects a female legacy, built upon old silks that her mother used to buy from travelling salesmen from China, indicating an alternative, if undercurrent, female lineage and legacy that runs parallel to the patriarchal traditions.

Like Batool, Risham says that while she doesn’t deny the feminine social consciousness in her work, she is cognizant of her privilege and the fact that she has never had to “fight for her rights” in a country where millions of women cannot.

The Path of Metaphor navigates the collective fears of an increasingly brutal, dogmatic, warring, destructive, intolerant and masculine (in the Jungian sense) world, through the nurturing resilience of Mother Nature — the eye that notices beauty in small things and chronistic historical linkages — the female gaze.

The author is a writer and academic based in Lahore