February 22nd to 30th March 2024.

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Rohtas II in collaboration with the Lahore Literary Festival showcases the work of Ayesha Jatoi, who was trained as a Miniature Painter from the National College of Arts.

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Her recent work comes in reaction to the ongoing suffering in Gaza. The title of the show refers to the 20,000 orphans therein. This text piece weaves its way through the gallery and connects to the lamentful thumri sung in the voice of Zainub J Khawaja— “mora piya, ghar aaa”... here we have the first evocations to the Beloved and the idea of Home.

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“Miniature Paintings were a part of historical Manuscripts, recording chronicles of the rulers and significant events. I feel as artists today, we also have a duty to record our times. I share some of my conceptual-minimalist-miniature studies to give an opening to how I have been deconstructing and unpacking the originals until they are often reduced to very sparse lines and text- which is often ignored but was an integral part of the historic Illuminated Manuscript.

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The focus then shifts to Land, another echo of the idea of Home, to landscapes and Nature- the geometry of nature...The play between the tangible and intangible aspects of this “scared space”. Landscapes are also abstracted and laid bare on the two-dimensional surfaces. These various strands of history, memory, home and longing come together full circle in the 2024 text piece Motherland”.

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February to May 2024

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"In the Night"

Curated By Geraldine Bloch

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"Each drawing by Ayesha Jatoi is an “object lesson”, a humble and powerful exercise for the eye and the mind. In the simple lines and cutouts that she constructs hide a thousand barely perceptible hatchings and pencil lines which enhance the black paper with their metallic reflections. From this dialectic of full and empty, on a very small surface, she manages to construct, from gradients to contrasts, fragile landscapes which vibrate like the air. Here her practice of photography and miniatures converge: in the constraints of the page as well as the frame, it is a question of spatial division, of balance to be found. Text and image, pattern and background sometimes combine and sometimes contradict each other to be as close as possible to the feeling. As if torn from a notebook or an old photo album, these scattered views form a chronicle, a discreet hymn to the pleasure of feeling and feeling with all our strength the mysterious language of what surrounds us." 

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Geraldine Bloch

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