This performance/installation was part of a public art workshop in which I was looking at how the private and public realms collide. I became fascinated by laundry and in particular with the clothesline. In our society where privacy, honor (and shame) are so intensely guarded, a household gives us a peak into it’s life through the clothes hung out to dry. I began trying to guess who lived in the houses (young, old, men women, children, etc.) by studying/spying on laundry drying.
This led to a parallel examination of public places and public monuments, which a nation gives a peak into its psyche. Instead of great heroes, patriots or great thinkers, we have erected missiles and fighter planes at our public intersections. One such tribute to violence is a fighter jet mounted at ‘China Chowk’. This for me became not a source of pride but in a sense ‘the nation’s dirty laundry’.
I took both these investigations and decided to hang garments dyed red on the fighter jet at noon (rush hour in effect), to contrast this small private act of love(washing someone’s clothes) and juxtapose it with the public barbarism of war and killing. Macbethian in that the blood of those killed should still be on our collective conscious.
An intelligence officer was there within the twenty minutes of this hit and run piece and tried to interrogate me, as to what was the meaning of me trying to desecrate this public monument but I swiftly escaped.
A big mound of white clothes encounters the audience. It contains clothes of all sizes, of the young and old, female and male... But all of them are white, the color of mourning in the Indian Sub-continent- what is worn to funerals. In this work the clothes serve as a symbol of the residue of those lost in terror attacks the world over, including the artists’ native Pakistan. Attacks in spaces which include innocuous sites such as school, parks, markets, hospitals to name a few.
Leaving behind fear, uncertainty and hopelessness—a void unable to be filled or consoled, and deep psychological scars. The clothes serves as the physical residue of loss. The artist tackles this mound by carefully and painstakingly folding each item of clothing with the delicacy and care that is the signature of her training in Miniature Painting.They are arranged in the given space and become an act of putting away the remnants of love, of longing and an attempt to bring some sense of order in the senseless.
First itineration
50 kg white garments
Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid
1h 20 mins
Second itineration
100 kg garments
4th Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka
2 h 30 mins
Third itineration
150kg garments
Concrete Gallery, Dubai
3 48 mins
Ayesha Jatoi presents a text-based intervention referring to the notion ofhome and away. It takes its inspiration from the classical Indian musicalcomposition of “thumri,” which is a light romantic form. By layering itwith the site of a haveli, the work laments the lover that has left the oldcity of Lahore, to make an abode further away, thus pushing the bound-aries of the city outward. The constant migrations within the city createmany foreign lands within itself.
On the surface, the smog and pollution have rendered the horizon line unseeable. At a deeper level the global pandemic has challenged us to question our inner horizons. Life, as we knew it, has been recalibrated.
The Lockdown Drawings are an extension of Jatoi’s explorations of the Indo-Persian Miniature paintings. She deconstructs then reimagines these traditional paintings and forms of documentation using graphite on small dark surfaces to create these “studies”.
By unravelling and retelling hundreds of these composition in the past few years, she has developed a practice embedded in memory which is becoming less linked to the originals yet simultaneously reverting to a more traditional technique of making through fine rendering.
Her works are quiet yet bold transformations of the spatial and architectural divisions of traditional compositions into new enigmatic spaces. Geometric forms are used to evoke a sense of landscape, becoming a distinctive feature in her oeuvre.
In collaboration with Gulzar Niazi
The Lockdown Posters series was created at the end of the intensive lockdowns during the recent global pandemic when people were forced to come to terms with isolation and being separated with loved ones.
It forced us to look deep within and question ourselves and our relationship to the world around us.
The posters were produced at an offset printing facility next to the shrine of Lahore’s patron saint, Data Darbar. The posters routinely produced here advertise local gatherings with a roster of speakers at festivals or death anniversary commemorations of local saints. These public announcements are pasted around the vicinity of the shrine where there are many supplicants and visitors, and also in many other locations in Lahore.
Jatoi’s posters deliver a more personal message.
These do not offer any concrete information to the viewer. The tone of posters is uncertain—transcending the ambit of its form and meaning into a more cerebral and affective landscape marked by absence and longing, and riddled with questions of finding “a way back home.”
The text is a call to go beyond vertical power structures, away from the histories that burden us. It beckons us to the metaphysical space where the sky and the sea unite. The Horizon line serves as a metaphor for a horizontal axis without hierarchies.