Emerging Pakistani Artists You Should Know

Emerging Pakistani Artists You Should Know

Part 2 – Discovering Contemporary Artists

By Anum Lasharie

1. Dua Abbas Rizvi

Dua Abbas is an award-winning visual artist and writer based in Lahore, Pakistan. She is a graduate of National College of Arts, Lahore. Her practice, which is greatly informed by her interest in world literature and folklore, addresses the liminality, polarity, and cyclicality associated with the feminine in natural and imagined contexts. Abbas’ approach to drawing, which involves constructing images with pastels on faint washes of ink and paint, is integral to the ambiguity of space and time in her work. Her subjects and their worlds are tenuous and anachronistic, as they are made of cultural narratives, mnemonic fragments, and motifs from private and collective mythologies.

2. Inaam Zafar

Inaam Zafar is a graduate of Beaconhouse National University, Pakistan. He is a painter that questions the very idea of painting and art institutions. Through his painting process he conforms to the political efficacy, complicity and potential of the referential image picked from the highly accelerated image economy. Zafar sees his work as  tributary theatrics, that would speak about general disquiet of the world. When asked about his inspirations, he talks about emotions and memory, commemorations and denouncements as subjects. He talks about how delicacy and bliss exist simultaneously along with the catastrophe.

3. Kiran Saleem

Kiran Saleem graduated from College of Art & Design, GC University Faisalabad in 2009 with a distinction in painting, continuing with an MA Honors in Visual Art from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2013. A highly skilled artist in oil & acrylic painting, her attention realised through her works unmask the truth behind the actions of our everyday lives, revealing our selective ignorance, probing notions of reality vs. perception. Saleem’s recent exploration continues with highly experimental site specific works, which explains the importance of ordinary things we so often ignore.

Awarded the best young artist award by Arts Council Lahore in 2013, soon followed by first prize by the ARJUMAND Painting Award in 2015. She continues to exhibited her work in solo and group shows in Pakistan, Dubai and Italy.

4. Natasha Malik

Natasha Malik received her BFA in 2011 from the National College of Arts, Lahore and her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2015. Malik’s practice incorporates various modes of representation examined during her training in Indian miniature painting. Through printmaking, painting, photography, film and installation, she explores thematic concerns such as female identity and sexuality developed within the constraints of patriarchy. The imagery of architectural structures explore an intimate inner landscape grappling with nostalgia, displacement and psychological transformation.

The work acts as both psychological and archival documents. The artists home, in varying forms, is ‘collected’, becomes part of a personal archive. Materials found within the home, be it family footage, objects belonging to family members who have passed, or the architectural plan of the house itself, are pieced together in the works. In combination with the female form or symbolic references to it, space and its confines, is used to explore wider tensions between intimacy and societal surveillance, the imposition of control versus the desire for choice and independence.

5. Irfan Hassan

Irfan Hassan graduated from National College of Arts, Lahore, majored in Indo-Persian miniature painting in 2006. Over the years, his practice is highly captivated by classical European portraiture and figurative painting. The artist uses a technique that is derived from traditional Mughal miniature painting as “Tapai”. Having received numerous awards, “Distinction” award for his graduate thesis project, “Best Young Painter” from Punjab Arts Council consecutively (2007 and 2008), which was then shortly followed by the Commonwealth Connection International Fellowship. Currently teaching at the National College of Arts, Hasan has held several solo projects and group shows nationally and internationally.