Artist StatementPlaying on a contrast between intricate detail and flat patches of colour, between a tumbling together of texture and pattern and pallid faces, these works borrow from ancient and modern family photographs to create compositions that are reminiscent of dreamscapes. The skewed compositions and natural elements seek inspiration from Mughal and Persian miniatures, while the night has been used as the backdrop for these strange scenes, of personal introspection and human interaction, ranging from acts of everyday familial intimacy to events that hover between the past and the present in their quality of universality. Visual elements from memory and dream come together to create a patchwork of imagery, with the motifs of windows, screens and archways acting as a visual device to create tangible layers within the works, as if every setting were a stage. Like most dreams, oddities occur - slight instances of glitches in the fabric of the narrative, and strange birds, animals and flora make an appearance, as if magnified and eccentrified by memory. Each work is a nod to some aspect of human interaction and behaviour, and elements of family, love, longing, transformation and introspection remain at the forefront. Displayed with us in 'The Spark'
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Artist StatementMy main focus is on social constructs and challenges to gender stereotypes. I explore female sexuality, desire, patterns and behaviours. I paint the female body in safe spaces, as I question the existence of the body - how the body navigates, how it is perceived & how it makes its place in this patriarchal world. Society has tried to separate the female body by defining it by gender, class, heteronormative structures, but the body is beyond all that. Hence, the paintings are a narration of my lived experiences of multiple realities, depicting the traits of female beings, their complexities and how they perish in the searing heat of a myriad of emotions. Recurring themes in my work draw on personal memories charged with emotions, duality, subconscious machinations of the human psyche as well as self-reflection. Displayed with us in 'The Spark'
Artist StatementMy work characterizes itself as mostly figurative by nature. I take inspiration from the everyday, the happenings and the mundane experiences. My work revolves around translating compositions I find interesting from my observation of the everyday into paintings. My professional practice was moulded during my thesis, I worked on a series of paintings titled, ‘the Ordinary’. The need to make my work accessible and easily readable for all sorts of audiences motivated me to get into representational art. I started focusing on the everyday happenings we all are familiar with, in even simpler words, art for the layman. The figurative nature of my work is complemented by a few odd characteristics such as breaking the traditional way of painting a landscape horizontally, I have resorted to painting it vertically. Moreover, a very odd saturated color of the sky and a very off perspective makes the paintings somewhat surreal but also portrays how I connect to my surroundings. Displayed with us in 'The Spark'
Artist Statementمحفوظ شدہ دستاویزات
Dastan kisa kahani Archival or Archives consisting of records that have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation on grounds of their enduring cultural, historical, or evidentiary value. Such records are normally unpublished and almost always unique, unlike books or magazines of which many identical copies may exist. A feeling or an affection that one develops with such personalised paper, letters, envelopes. We have a strange bond with these archival papers and the fact that we are slowly moving away from them . Memories have a strange tendency of fading away with time yet many fragments are always there lurking within the depths of our minds and heart. At time are Memories are etched within ourselves like writing on paper , perhaps that is why paper becomes so important to us . My work revolves around a feeling or an affection that one develops with such personalised paper, letters, envelopes. We have a strange bond with these archival papers and the fact that we are slowly moving away from them . Elements in my work represents different sets of our society and its norms. Each image is telling us a different story/ Dastan, or lessons of life and is presented in the form of visual poetry which needs to be deciphered.
In Search of the Miraculous
I paint Blackboards in which I portray phenomenon that happens in classrooms as well as in society. Its very expressive medium as I use it to highlight the disparity between what is taught to us and what exists. Through these visual poems, I aim to render tangibility of intangible semotions and the innate richness of the human soul. I accomplish this by using a combination of emphatic circular rough strokes or drawings symbolizing the movements that culminate in mystical ecstasy. Decade
Artist StatementAkram Dost’s imagery serves as an impetus of such visual delights involving metaphors, dreams, delusions, emotions, ideas, and personal sensibilities in a new way. The water-based paints, granulated and treated with ink on paper display transcendence of intangible force, with delicately fine textures and creative outpourings. Dost’s previous work was thematic - identifying the unidentifiable but he still could not find himself. However, this time he wanted out of it. He is deliberately in search of something innate that we all behold within our nature, how we grow from struggling to searching. The style evolved is new and entirely different from his previous work. It is this search that helps Baloch elicit his transformative process- educing his wistfulness to return in thought, to a former time. It is of immense remarkability, how each artwork communicates to you, so deeply than before that it reinforces the collective impulses from one’s primordial forms of life; his growth, struggles, joys, fears, illusions, questions, beliefs, and acquisitions, to his experiences. When you look at his work, you will see depth, character, and wisdom. These along with personal sensibilities and natural phenomena serve a conundrum of drawing out three-dimensional entities or landscapes, reminding one of the beginnings of time, assimilation of nature’s elements with life, biotic and abiotic subsistence, fossils or rocks, submarine life, or forests, storms, waves or scattered raindrops. All these constituents fuse into tonal layers and varying textures keeping their sensational relevance intact. Call it a retrospective or prospective, Baloch leaves it to the viewers to think. These new insights also set out the landscape of the ‘self’ with many valleys and peaks. How deeply the caverns and caves of the self extend into the moment of impact, where you crave more and keep searching. Most phenomena are unsayable yet it is awe-inspiring how Akram has provided an arena to think of the unseen and see it subsequently as if time slows down and beauty emerges with stillness. He says he was conquered by the way he would render surreal, nonlinear yet linear imagery that one can think of but not explain or the mind cannot capture yet see. Things are explicitly eloquent, even when they are not. However one’s journey is summed up, conforming the idea of existence and what makes the whole thing going is the will of thoughts and imagination, withstanding the weariness of the living ones, resiliently.- Durrie Baloch A Decade
 Bio Makoul completed his PhD in 1995 at Manchester University in the UK. He has exhibited his work widely in Britain and internationally, including the Hayword Gallery, London , Tate Liverpool Harris Museum, Preston, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, the Liverpool Biennale and many more. He is co-author of several books/publications including Identity Theft, Return , Ibrahim Noubani, Outside the CAMP and Return in Conflict. A retrospective monograph on Bashir Makhoul’s art has been published by Al Hoash. He was the Head of Department of Art and Design and the Director of the Research Institute of Media, Art and Design at the University of Bedfordshire He was also the founding Head of school of Media Art and Design at the same University. He was the Rector of the Winchester Campus and Head of Winchester School of Art. Additionally, he is the founder and Co Director of the Winchester Center for Global Futures in Art Design and Media. He was the Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Birmingham City University, UK, and professor in art and design. Currently he is the Vice-Chancellor for the University for Creative Arts. Statement Bashir Makhoul is a Palestinian artist based in the UK. Over 20 years of work he has developed a body of work in a range of media which explored aesthetics of modernism and post-modernism as well as offering nuanced political critiques on topics of economics, nationalism, identity, war and torture. Scapes From Far and Beyond
 Artist Bio (B.1984) in Mashhad, Iran, Bangash earned her BFA in 2006 from the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, Pakistan; two years later she received her MA in Visual Arts (with Honors) from that same school. In 2010, Bangash received a NCA/Charles Wallace Arts Fellowship, which allowed her the opportunity to study at the The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London, England. In the past six years, Bangash has worked as an educator, hosted Miniature Painting workshops at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, been featured in over two dozen solo and group and exhibits, and won awards for her interdisciplinary vision and multimedia works. Bangash’s artist statement offers the following: “Trained in the traditions of Persian and South Asian miniatures, she employs these techniques through contemporary art that explores themes of abstraction through deconstruction or reconstruction, to cross-cultural experiences of the political, cultural and social.” Statement Confluence (Nov.) Through the process of Mashq, an interdisciplinary practice, loosely translated as exercise, repetition or circumambulation- I utilize both references from my immediate surroundings, as well as Indo-Persian art histories to investigate institutions as a continual colonial legacy. Coming from a tradition of Musawri and carpet weaving, I am interested in the formal and conceptual underpinnings of the grid - a binary structure of power that bears, gives form to, and disappears into the composition itself. The complexities of my concerns are explored through a cross disciplinary approach of painting, sculpting, performance and video installations. I explore the relation between contrasting mediums, aspiring to mediate static and moving images through an aesthetic that embodies the essence of my painting practice. The exhibition brings together selected works from three bodies of work, War Rugs with Love, I Am a Tree and This Bridge called my Back. These works continue to evolve and influence each other over the years examining the image of my childhood drawings of triangular-roofed, western archetype of a house as a structure. This symbol represents both a private space from inside and an institution that translates its power source, radiating outside its parameters.
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