Acknowledgements
Naeem Pasha, Gallerist
Saquib Hanif, Collector, Art Writer & Editor
Quddus Mirza, Artist, Curator & Critic
Meher Afroz, Artist
Hamraj Singh, Student
Her work is so intricate, intense, and immensely uncontainable.
On my second visit to her retrospective,
I was reminded of a couplet in *Shah Jo Risalo.
“One palace, one million doors
countless windows in between…
Wherever I have turned to look…
my Sahib is before me.”
*Collected works of Sindhi poet, scholar, and mystic, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (1689-1752).
Salima Hashmi, Contemporary Art Historian, Curator, Educationist, Gallerist & Artist
Essays
Reflections
What is light?
Aqeel solangi
With a feeling for place comes reflection. What is light?
If you are working in a place like Sukkur, light is insistent, you cannot ignore it. As a painter, one experiences it with intensity. In summer afternoons, the light is so harsh you must lower your gaze. It is so sharp. You see this in her work, where she uses bright white. Or how light pours from a high roshandan into a shadowy room. She renders the feel and frequency of that potent light.
Perhaps at first Ms. Mirza was painting what she observed, and then in time, deeper reflections began to grow in her art. Place became an emblem, in her work. Birds, her pigeons and kites and ababeel, these are of her environment. But as she says: “[Their rendering is] an expression of flight for me.” If it is so, what manner of flight is this, what is this soaring quality she shares with us?
Or, how important is the hidden geometry in her work? The triangles, and the rectangles, the startling verticals, the horizontal depths…rendering front and back and then further, further back. As a painter, must she not have thought about where this line is moving?
There is a view, that we carry places within ourselves. Say we travel to a place, feel a sense of déjà vu, one has already been here, or known this room, this city, this ground. It is as though you already contain something of it, within yourself. With Ms. Mirza, perhaps that “place” already exists within her, and her art is to bring it out, render it in visual form.
For Sukkur is not a static place. Ms. Mirza has not painted Sukkur’s historic Ayub Gate. She has not painted the modern structures or urban densities of Sindh’s third-largest city. I think here of the Freudian terms heimlich and unheimlich, the lens of homely and unhomely. What brought forth a rendering of this earthen world in her art? One may ask: What is this therao in her work, what is this knowing of home?
Ms. Mirza has often shared, “With mitti, solitude.” Here, we enter the realm of the poetic. And further. With solitude, our conversation turns towards the light and hues of Sufi philosophy, ma’arifat. We are no longer able to place her work within a fixed genre.
The weathering of space
naiza khan
What does it mean to perceive the world through a dust storm, what feeling do these wind lines carry. The weathering of space—registering atmosphere, the presence of the weathering condition on personal experience, on the space of the city in which she lives—this is a powerful, deeply situated current in the art of Mussarat Mirza.
It forms a set of questions that the artist examines throughout her work. How to create the presence of atmospheric conditions which are not in themselves tangible. The inquiry extends as a way of looking at how aspects of the invisible world may be generated, and how they are given autonomy on the canvas. Perhaps its significance has to do with building the plausibility of certain things, that are not “standard,” or which a viewing public may not easily or necessarily register.
We often think of the painter’s observation as purely a tool in service of realism. In Mirza’s work though, one is reminded of other senses, of feeling, and of touch. How sensory experience other than vision can contribute to the construction of reality itself. Perhaps it has to do with this embodied sense, a way in which she renders the experience of dust, in both more experiential and conceptual ways. Through her work, we see weathering not as a static process; and the storm, as moving, eroding, concealing and reshaping lived environments.
Mirza’s images are anchored within specific locations and built structures, within the geography of Sukkur and Upper Sindh. There is a realism to her work in this way. Her dwellings orient space. When I look at her paintings, I feel they are pinned to a particular moment, and they register a particular sensation. At the same time, they seem to hold a quality of timelessness. There are certain moments of recognition, as visual perception, spiritual consciousness, political concerns, in the way of a line perhaps, internal feeling, light. These are powerful alignments that her canvases sustain—one could call them ephemeral moments of recognition.
Within contemporary art practice there is a strong presence of urban issues. In Mirza’s own urbanism, the weathering motif persists, as an encompassing force within which all appears subservient. And then there is the artist’s tactile response. The harsh reality of the city is countered by the sensuality of her art making. The painting process that she crafts is through its surface, a counter-force, making things more bearable, love-able, and ultimately, more livable.
Over five decades of work, Mussarat Mirza’s politics include her commitment to this painting process. Through it she is witnessing, documenting and offering testimony to more contained narratives of place and locality within Pakistani art.
sensing the feminine
Naazish atta’ullah
It is in the small detail. Just a shaft of light from somewhere. Just that corner in a place that becomes significant for her. One solitary alam in the distance. Mussarat Mirza’s entire sensibility is sensitive to this kind of atmospheric detail.
It is so whether her gaze is cast outwards upon architectural space or is turned in towards rendering domestic space. Mirza creates atmosphere in her work. And she does so in a way you may never otherwise notice. This is something the artist is living.
I reflect on her alongside two other icons of art-making in Pakistan, Zahoor ul Akhlaq and Khalid Iqbal. All three are masters in the way of paint application. Mirza’s subtle tonal gradations, her rhythms of application and removal. Zahoor in his exceptional strokes, and his purposeful use of pardakht. Iqbal, employing thin paint with such finesse and delicacy in order to build up his surfaces.
In terms of intent though, Mirza’s art is not purely intellectual in the way Zahoor interprets his work. Nor is it observational in the way Khalid Iqbal interprets his art. She is engaged in a very different kind of practice.
Mussarat Mirza looks, and she feels what she sees. There is a kind of softness and sensitivity in that gaze that is selecting detail, or working out perspective. Mirza’s art is not concerned with building up an archetypal narrative. Hers is an immersive space. She is really engaged with expression. And feeling. And hence, there is a kind of felt truth to her work.
Reflection on Mirza is also about renewing language. A way perhaps of speaking of the feminine. This aspect is inherent in all her work: in its intimate detail, in responsiveness to environment and spaces personal to the artist, in the minor narrations. This sense of the feminine rests, also, in the tremendous strength one experiences in her canvases.