Across from the Lumieres exhibition, there is a painting by Zahoorul Akhlaq in another room of the National Art Gallery, Islamabad. Titled A Radio Photo of An Un-Identified Object, this canvas from 1973, contains light: strands of rainbow hues turned into dark patches entering a manuscript page-like frame. Akhlaq suggests that light is not always bright, luminous and white, it can also be dull, dark and depressing.

An emotional reading and representation of light discerned in Akhlaq’s canvas, is also witnessed in the works of artists participating in Lumieres, the exhibition curated by Zara Sajid and Stephanie Borsa, and supported by the French Embassy in Islamabad. The show includes artists from Pakistan, France and Morocco; all women, who approach the idea of light in their works, distinct for their formats and genres as well as interpretations of something as common as light. The exhibition is being held from December 9 to 20 at the National Art Gallery.

Light is familiar, ordinary, accessible – and ancient. After God created the heaven and the earth, He said “Let there be light: and there was light (Genesis 1:3)”. At the exhibition, one experiences lights of different nature, histories and connections: Natural, man-made, real, virtual, political, poetic and ironic. Speaking at the inauguration, Gilles Garachon, the French charge d’affairs, commented on the division of gender in terms of aggression and violence connected with men (reminding one of Susan Sontag: “…war is a man’s game –the killing has a gender, and it is male”). In today’s world, where males are busy spreading darkness at noon, imposing blinding ignorance, extremism, militancy, women comment and critique on human calamities.

Light, more than a physical phenomenon, is associated with ideas of liberation, hope and salvation. Just the mundane act of opening our eyes in the morning, rids us from our demons of darkness/ nightmares. Yet many recall the moment when light meets the darkness, day glued to night. That threshold, that no man’s land we carry every day with our shadows, a self that is part of us, yet so disconcerting. Marcel Duchamp described a shadow as the fourth dimension, but the existence of shadow is a sign of the presence of light. Farida Batool, participating in the Lumieres, has produced a number of works about shadows. Most of her titles refer to shadows, some recalling the verses of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Like Awaz kay saye (2020), a video that captures the impossible scenario of sound’s reflection. Batool rendering the shadow of shifting foliage on earth with sparse leaves, stems and some leftovers, manages the unimaginable because the entire rectangle starts looking like ripples of a fluttering body of water.

Batool, extending the term as unreal as the shadow of sound, has created a VR (Chand kay saye talay) which takes you away from the well-lit hall of the PNCA to congested houses and a patch of sky with a moving moon. Moon travels in another of her works as well. The lenticular print Chand kay paar extends a full moon across the five frames. Almost the cycle of moon, but it also makes us realise how light affects us, accompanies us and transforms us. The power, presence and play of light is visible in Christine Ferrer’s Les Corps Lumineux (2015): human bodies without heads, holding hands and forming a circle on the gallery floor. Fabricated in burlap with LED lights inside, these can be identified with migrants struggling to survive on the shores of Mediterranean. It also echoes Henri Matisse’s iconic painting The Dance), except that Ferrer’s bodies lack heads, hence corpses floating on the surface of water or lying on the ground.

Memories of loss, of immediate and distant pasts (political too), can be deciphered in the art of Risham Syed. Her two installations incorporate different connotations, use and observation of light. A disconcerting variety of light is observed in a work, in which a dysfunctional lamp and a heat meter are combined with a picture postcard of black and white image of fire and smoke in a city. Another of her installations consists of a metallic beast, a palm tree emanating orange glow next to a small painted surface (as casual as a polaroid or a small picture) showing a military man in battle outfit enveloped in smoke and clouds of red/ orange. Both her works suggest the darkness of light; how light is a prelude to a long reigning shadow. This could be translated into political or personal terms, a hint of what one gets from Genevieve Gleize’s work. A combination of photographs placed on the gallery wall. Using the site of an old establishment in Madrid, Teotro Cervantes, she documents the interplay of light on stage, in architecture, and rows of seats, all in varying accents. But the entire body of pictures, installed as one (or a series), suggests a time that survives in memories – or memories in the form of photographs. Because in any case, when we take a picture, we are anticipating and preparing our personal memory bank, with images stored that remind and reconnect us to locations visited once, perhaps for a few seconds (duration required to click on our cameras or tap our smart phones).

Somewhat like Marcel Proust’s monumental novel In Search of Lost Time, Gleize’s work documents an abandoned place of magnificent light spreading, defining, veiling and eroding the details of chairs, stage – in fact, the entire setup of grandeur, using the language of chiaroscuro from Renaissance. Not only the distribution of light and dark, but also the setting of her subject, the centre stage, in its structure, reminds the viewer of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with its illusion of perspective.

History diffused in light, or even disfigured through it, is seen in the work of Marium Agha. In her thread on fabrics, she recreates portraits from the past, like Byron’s muse, Francoise Boucher, Thomas Gainsborough, Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Duchess of Beaufort. These images are weaved with their lower parts dripping out of the picture frame – literally; like the time in The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali, melts and drips down. Along with the presence or passage of time, Agha introduces sequins on the faces of her subjects, thus transforming their heads into various creatures such as a wolf, a white rabbit, a wolverine, a horse, which interestingly do not seem out of place, because the elaborate attire of these figures is complimented with the glittering material on their altered identities, small disk-shaped shiny beads that reflect light.

Like Agha, another participant of the show, Safaa Erruas, has chosen needles to execute her art. Both of her Parallel Paths, with metallic thread and ink on cotton paper, suggest maps of human body as well as of land. Poked holes in perpetual lines with protruding metallic ends divided into two halves allude to human diaphragm with a gap in the middle. Whatever the reading, Erruas’s works delve into the pain of human experience, of a territory, body, since she amazingly combines hair with rough vegetation on a desert like plane. The white of her preferred surfaces conveys light, but it is the light of the soul that one relates to like all other artists, because being at this extraordinary exhibition one experiences the unbearable lightness of being – again and again.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore