Controlling the narrative – Part 4/6
Pakistani Female Figurative Artists Series
These women are the ‘joie de vivre’ of the Pakistani Figurative Art Scene.
By Anum Lasharie
With great pride, I present to you 6 female artists who are changing the narrative and shooing away the cultural stigmas attached to figurative artistic expression in Pakistan.
These 6 brilliant artists who will be introduced to you over 6 individual features, ignite a unique dialogue, ripe with debate and controversy. Challenging love, angst, and society, with awe-inspiring abandon.
Welcome to part 4/6 in our series of introducing some of the coolest female figurative artists Pakistan has to offer.
Heraa Khan
Raised in Pakistan in the bustling city of Lahore, Heraa Khan’s work was greatly influenced by her intrigue and observations of societal and cultural norms. Particularly focused on the affluent, and their distinct divide from the reality and poverty that which surrounds them.
Khan, trained as a Mughal and Persian miniature artist yet faced the challenge of transforming the technique driven art form into a more personal extraction. Khan’s process includes recording and capturing fragments of reality around her by observing the ostentatious via social events and tearing out pages from copious social magazines. Using symbols and articles from the mundane, she started reinterpreting them into her paintings, using middle-aged women, bright colours, patterns and different postures that comment on the consumer-ridden lifestyle. Her work is not only relevant to one segment of Pakistani society but perhaps, is more so a commentary on the result of empty indulgences and the loneliness in consumerism as a whole.
Khan’s refreshing approach to experiment and blur the boundaries of miniature and its centuries-old technique has us excited to see what she observes next.
