t its core, art making is an act of transformation that reveals the vitality of our lives. No matter how brief the illusion or how profane the statement, art is a celebration of human consciousness. At the Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design, BNU, Lahore’s Annual Degree Show 2024, a bevy of 17 new graduates conceived ideas with their minds and transformed materials and tools with their hands, traversing personal and cultural histories along the way.

Each student had produced artwork that was unique in some way. What brought them together was their experience of being young, creative artists in a rapidly changing environment. The energy around them was mirrored in their continuous exploration of new ways to tell their stories, and to manifest their ideas. The forms that these manifestations took were energetic, hyper and contemporary.

The young artists saw themselves trying out new methods and ways of expression including the use of LED, video and digital art. While international art forms and methods of art-making were readily incorporated into their work, their creative expression was rooted in their national and personal identity. Inspiration came from many sources including childhood, home and displacement, notions of dream and reality, the social environment going beyond visual relief into a zone of discomfort and frenzy — to another level of artistic truth.

Art could be everywhere. The work on show was a testimony to the glue that binds and supports this idea. Aimen Amin’s work was deeply connected with the experiences of Baloch women who rarely find a voice, and are often subdued under societal and political pressures. Whether it’s women who share their embroidery over songs, compassion and sisterhood or congregate in a majlis, Amin juxtaposed images presented mostly through video to comment on women and their roles, their freedom and desires. In the process, she questioned patriarchy, striking a powerful chord with the women of Nushki, Chagai.

Azeen Bilal and Aamish Zahra Malik contemplated the latencies of quotidian objects, images and phenomena revealed in the quietude of their childhood home. Their interdisciplinary approach engaged with modes of art making that allowed for the sustenance of paradox. Often working from abstracted autobiography towards a documentative impulse, their work anticipated loss. The work was attentive to time, and incorporated its passage through a selection of the ephemera.

Tatheer Raza and Rida-i-Zainab mined the visual and metaphorical potential of mannequins. As objects meant to mirror our own world in terms of facial expression, movement and gesture, they playfully and painfully suggested in almost mocking pointedness the fragility of our stable definitions of what is solid, permanent and important. In their body of work, the artists had composed a series of ‘dolls’ taken from actual faces. The blurred boundaries between the specific and general, the real and fabricated were made manifest in the configurations whose painted, portrait-like, plaster faces contrasted with the non-descript body. This humorous yet poignant juxtaposition reflected the figures and proliferates on many levels, creating an extremely layered play of allusions that blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction, defying any fixed meaning.

Zahra Batool presented her fascination with illusion and reality in the form of mirror fragments that reflected the beams of light and created windows. As a symbolic object, the mirror always functions as a passage between the spheres of reality and dream. It stands between perception and illusion, and the artist knew exactly how to use this ambivalent spectrum in her work. There was a sense of having entered into a forest of illusion and possibility. Pierced by the light of infinity, her work confronted the viewer with a sense of what lay not only beyond the immediate surface, but also past the realms of our experience, after visual perception and mental comprehension have exhausted the limits of inquiry.

The energy around them was mirrored in their continuous exploration of new ways to tell their stories, and to manifest their ideas. The forms that these manifestations took were energetic, hyper and contemporary.

Sehrish Adil and Haleema Kamran remembered their past into visual repositories such that the ‘inanimate objects’ became symbolic of piecing together an inherited memory of dispossession. The identity sutured through their practice is constantly in transit and not merely representational of their perceived history. Displacement and externalisation of memory thus allowed them a sense of perspective and agency.

The sensibilities associated with fabrics pervaded many aspects of Maham Waqar’s work where durrie (or the cotton rug) appeared as a recurrent leitmotif throwing light on the mundane and the domestic. Colour and texture played a central role in evoking aspects of an individual soul. Yet, although inspired by autobiographical concerns, the work was hardly bound by them. The play of forms in their linearity and curvilinearity created both a tension and a balance between structure and fluidity; stability and instability; and by extension, order and chaos. These values were not presented as opposites but rather as companions that co-existed as integrated components of a larger whole. In this way, they indexed both the process of life and the quest for transcendence.

Depictions of eerily perfect domestic interiors, the so-called ‘safe’ settings — places supposed to nurture, protect or safeguard — began to feel menacing. Swaliha Farrukh and Rida Zahra Kalyar comprised a mélange of imagery that was both inviting and unnerving. They were adept at heightening this atmosphere in their scenes by reinforcing their ‘normality.’ The domestic interiors pulsated with tension. Moving back indoors, charged interiors hovered between the realms of the strangely familiar and melancholic nostalgia. Their interiors could be described as fragile containers of the past and appeared to preserve memories by protecting vulnerable materials that would otherwise be dispensed with in our culture of obsolescence.

The anxiety of displacement is a constant in contemporary life, and the artists seemed to tap into this angst by focusing on life’s ordinary things that have begun to feel under siege.

Kanza Ejaz explored the psychological space of her ancestral home built by her grandfather by creating neon blueprints. The geometry of architecture framed the spaces in an environment that seemed more akin to a set than lived-in space, while a performance of power between the subject and the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer played out. A filmic sense of narrative made the viewer a constant witness to the moment before and after some unspecified event, creating an oddly charged atmosphere that hovered between a banal vision of domesticity and something more visceral.

Excessive information appears to be impure and disturbing. On the contrary, when viewers are placed in an environment with a bit less information, their imagination is unleashed. Muhammad Idrees commented on the political jargon and reiterations that infest our society, establishing links within language, image, symbol and narration, creating fables filled with contradictions and discrepancies. It was an approachable kind of foreignness, explored with the help of video art, treading the path of what could be referred to as mysterious agreement.

Idrees is rather adept at using his understanding of an information society as his artistic material. This imbued his work with two distinctive languages: the symbolic meaning behind the medium and the ideas the work sought to express. The work could be seen as a guarded critique of the media machinery.

Osama Ghouri’s photographic work was a critique of the notions of masculinity and machismo, orchestrated through the gym culture where men flexed their bodies to conform to societal pressures and social norms. It also reflected, however obliquely, on the creation of a self-image that celebrates physical power and strength as an ideal of perfection. The physically weak are almost always compelled by the society to ameliorate their public-image by working on their outward appearance. This phenomenon has resulted in a reinforced notion of self-respect and confidence.

The vast body of work created for the degree show demonstrated how the young and upcoming artists express self-identity and thoughts with unconventional media, transcending the academic boundaries.

The writer is an art critic based in Islamabad