he venue of Unum Babar’s recent exhibition – determined by a chance occurrence – complemented her sculptural structures and significantly contributed to their comprehension.

The show, Thin Cities, curated by Sundas Azfer and organised by ArtNext Gallery (June 22-28), was originally planned at the gallery’s DHA XX, Lahore location. However, due to a prolonged road reconstruction, the space was inaccessible, hence the substitute: the Shakir Ali Museum, Lahore.

This shift from the site originally planned for the show to another added context to Babar’s small-scale sculptures. Houses one could hold in one’s hands or pack in a postal box – were on view now inside a dwelling that became a museum after the death of its owner, the painter Shakir Ali. The building, designed by Nayyar Ali Dada, is not revered because of its association with one of the major artists of this country alone. It is also admired for its unusual design. The legend goes that the architect and the client had agreed to buy the over-baked, if slightly deformed, bricks because they were more affordable than the standard issue. The layering of the structure, initially an economic compromise, eventually became an architectural sensation. A number of larger and more expensive houses imitated the burnt brick finish so that at one point these defective blocks became more expensive than the regular ones.

Shakir Ali Museum is a house and an art museum, but also a work of art created in brick and mortar. In this context, Unum Babar’s work had a different, flipped connotation/ connection. Her art pieces were linked to actual houses encountered and documented in Lahore and Karachi. The process included a few alterations as well. These dwellings, unlike a conventional place of residence, are solid masses. Many consist merely of facades or a corner or a sidewall. They are also much reduced in size. Like the marble (or plastic) replicas of Taj Mahal on domestic mantelpieces, – they represent the memory of a building once noticed, viewed and visited.

The act of transformation is somewhat similar to having one’s picture saved in a mobile phone’s photo library. A living, moving and breathing person is turned into a mute, still, and static image; and flattened. The image is typically much smaller than his/ her actual measurements. Ironically, this version of reality is viewed more often; will last longer; and end up being the real person. Unum Babar’s houses have similar attributes. The houses fabricated by her will be seen more widely than her source buildings. People cannot live in these houses, but the houses will live long within each viewer of the exhibition, mainly due to the way these sculptures are formed.

Baber produced this body of work in 2013, during her last year of MFA studies at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. Her method of making them in Plaster of Paris, Hydrocal and paper and digital residues attached these to existing buildings, a part of routine surroundings; since she is no different from billions of South Asian, described by a writer living away from his birthplace: “I have always been a big-city boy – Bombay, London, New York. Stories of the cities were my story too. Here again was my preferred ocean, a sea of concrete and steel in which I had always preferred to swim.”

In many cases, the photographs the artist used have left their imprint on the plaster casts. Occasionally, one senses the scent of the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s sensibility and style

For Babar, too, being almost 11,000 kilometres away, places related to past experiences have acquired more prestige and value; emotionally rather than materialistically.

Anyone who has spent time far from his/ her homeland, before the era of online shopping, can recall the immense joy of receiving a package from home. The postage package bearing stamps, handwritten address and the family/ familiar stuff contained in the sealed box, brought great joy and excitement. The packet was a route to home. In a sense, the packet was the home.

Unum Babar, studying in Boston, mixed houses from her homeland with postal boxes, to make this combo a symbol of one’s identity, location and life. She prepared intaglio reliefs of facades and other sections of houses she was familiar with. After fitting them on the sides of an opened cardboard container, she tied the box and poured plaster of Paris. Once the outer layer was removed, there were segments of buildings, loosely joined and looking like distorted/ disfigured representations of places rather than accurate replicas.

The warped, contorted, and squeezed structures remind one of how things are stored in memory. A physical object, forged in solid substance is converted into a piece of meat in our brain: soft, imperfect, intimate and warm. An attempt to match items from our recollections and their initial prototypes is therefore inherently ambitious. It should be no surprise then that it ends up being frequently disappointing if not always futile. What is real in my head is real for me and for those who believe/ buy my vision.

Unum Babar’s houses are quite personalised. It does not matter whether the artist ever spent much time in those or quickly passed them by. For all practical purpose, these are internal islands. The order of display reinforced this feeling since all her small structures - either placed on the floor, put on a block or a pedestal, attached to walls on varying levels and groups - appeared to be personal belongings, though scattered; a lot like travellers’ suitcases on the carousel of an airport. Manufactured industrially, once owned, used and misused, these products start looking like unique articles; faded, covered with thin transparent plastic sheets, identification marks (ribbons, reminding of fabric cuttings believers tie on a tree or the metal fence of a holy shrine).

Titled Thin Cities – each with a different subtitle, all her sculptures were enclosed homes. Yet, they offered glimpses of human inhabitation, such as an air conditioner’s outdoor unit, electricity wires, barricaded fronts, partially opened windows, painted doors, walls in decaying colours, details of decorative motifs, etc. In many cases the photographs the artist used have left their imprint on the plaster casts. Occasionally, one senses the scent of the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s sensibility and style in these works, although Babar’s unusual blends are not monumental reconstruction of actual spaces, but miniature memories. They are takeaway pieces of the familiar buildings one might quickly forget.

Being monuments to the ordinary makes these sculptures extraordinary.

The writer is an art critic, curator, and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore