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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Masooma Syed | Travelling without moving
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Masooma Syed | Travelling without moving

In her new show, the artist continues to experiment with scale and media

Artist Masooma Syed in her studio in New Delhi. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/MintPremium
Artist Masooma Syed in her studio in New Delhi. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

Masooma Syed, born in Lahore, Pakistan, and based in New Delhi, is known for using organic material, such as fingernail clippings and hair to create art. Cultural critic Salima Hashmi described her practice as “contemporary miniature"—a phrase Syed seems to have thoughtfully reappropriated in her latest body of work, Sublime West.

Several large-scale drawings, executed mostly with charcoal and dry pastel against a background of newspapers, form the centrepiece of the exhibition. Interspersed with these are three-dimensional sculptural works structures made of cardboard and pasted over with images cut out of magazines, newspapers and advertisements.

“In the last few years, I felt a need to move beyond my earlier style, which was quiet, solemn, minimal, even pristine," Syed says, referring to the exquisite objects she had made using body parts (in Crown, she created the eponymous object using her mother’s hair; tiny chandeliers were made of a friend’s fingernail clippings). “I was feeling the necessity to be loud, to say something by cheekhna (screaming), to make sense of all that was happening around me," she adds.

A drawing from the ‘Sublime West’ series
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A drawing from the ‘Sublime West’ series

Indeed, the newspapers on which Syed makes her spectacular drawings are filled with information. From terror attacks to fashion shows, the universe speaks out of these surfaces in many voices—dissonant, fragmented, importunate. From the newsprint, the faces of film stars stare out, conjured up with a wild abandon by the dusky elegance of charcoal.

“I wanted to break free of the idea of what is perceived as the cutting edge," Syed explains, “which seems to involve opting for a certain stark ‘look’ that says this is ‘contemporary art’." Her drawings, in spite of the restrained colour scheme, convey a lush excess—there is no hint of asceticism or starkness in them.

Although references to Federico Fellini’s movies recur in the drawings as well as the dioramas, Syed says the choice is determined not by the intrinsic content of the films she alludes to, but rather by their visual appeal. “I find Fellini’s cinematic language full of arresting imagery," she explains, pointing to an angle of a face adopted from Fellini’s Casanova and another moment from 8K.

Bengali actor Supriya Choudhury’s face, made iconic in the poster of Ritwik Ghatak’s masterpiece Meghe Dhaka Tara, appears in another drawing. The circumstances she was trying to evoke in these drawings, Syed says, were no less dramatic than film posters—the tragic, comic, saturnalian and severe energies of these cinematic classics inform the themes of her drawings.

Syed returns to the miniature mode in the three-dimensional structures that look like a cross between a doll’s house, pop-up books and an architect’s model—a collage of sorts on cardboard. She describes these objects as “theatres", and appropriately so.

If the drama of her drawings is contained in the explosion of cloudy colours, these sculptural works become theatrical in their concision, in their pursuit of trapping entire worlds into a tiny box. The delicate-looking structures, which are going to be displayed on plinths raised above floor level, hold within them stories that yield their meanings surreptitiously—in sly whispers unlike the scream of the drawings.

A chapel, a mosque, a simulated stage for a musical performance, sites of conflict from the two world wars—these vignettes revive memories of places far and near, perhaps also inspire longing for those we have left behind, and take us back to time past, or transport us to the future. “I think of this work as travelogues," says Syed, investing them with a narrative charge that surpasses the realm of the visual.

Sublime West will be on show from 31 August-5 October, 12-8pm (Tuesdays closed), at Galleryske, First floor, Shivam House, 14-F, Middle Circle, Connaught Place, New Delhi (65652724/25).

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Published: 30 Aug 2014, 12:21 AM IST
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