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“If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you... If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction...”― Chuck Close How an artwork transforms and transcends its derivation into something enigmatic and captivating is a fascinating process. The beginning of most artworks; the foundations are an assemblage of visions and realisations, encapsulated within notes, scribbles and sketches. These revelations exist within these explorations and exclusively belong to the artist alone, free of any elucidation. They are a celebration of the novel unaltered thought that precedes the artwork, sometimes acting as a structure underneath, while sometimes becoming a part of the work itself. These spurts of captured inspiration are like the artists’ private conversations, weaving their way through these documents. These are honest concerns, uninterested in making sense to anyone, only striving to understand the complexities of the riddle at hand. Quietly debating solutions, presenting different forms of inquiry and alternative processes. ― Sara Mahmood
Faizan Naveed
Fawad Jafri
Idrees Hanif
Irfan Channa
Mahbub Jokhio
Sadqain
Tahira Noreen
Flow-ing Narratives: Point of DepartureWhat can we learn about aesthetics by studying the creative process of art-making? In his seminal publication on the precious state of consciousness known as "flow", Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi extrapolates on iconic viewership and its vessel, the gathering of pulsing points of thought as tangible objects: "…visual representations are really signposts to this beautiful machine that has been constructed, unique on the Earth, and is not just a rehashing of visual elements, but is really a new thought machine that as an artist, through visual means and combining his eyes with perceptions, has created. What one sees is not just a picture… but a "thought machine" that includes emotions, hopes, ideas - as well as the spirit of the culture and the historical period in which [they] lived" (Csikszentmihalyi, 118)(1). These selfsame constructs and hidden narratives constitute the complex neuro-aesthetic diversity of artists in 'Point of Departure', encapsulating an arrested snapshot of "flow", the harbinger of creative choice and direction, and the ephemeral ingredient in the recipe for excellence.
The state of flow arises from the creative process itself, as well as the percolation of ideas intermingling with the material. Chance encounters, the artists' respective milieu, strains of thought and ideological preoccupation constitute the conceptual domain of this process, a fascinating conglomeration of points of reference merging in a harmonious and unique inspirational vector seen by the shamanic vision of the artist. As these references take tangible form, a collation, gathering, sorting, and re-organising of chosen mediums allows birthing of vision. At times, the medium itself may be the spark, which sets the flame of inspiration alight. However, the process manifests, multiple iterations are common in the quest for expression, a vital improvisation and recalibration. Ultimately, the thought machine enters the stage of the audience as a 'finished' piece, yet the evidence of its production remains unseen. It is with this aim that 'The Point Of Departure' premises the modus operandi, the inner and outer, workings of a group of highly talented visual practitioners, as works of art unto themselves.
For Faizan Naveed, displaced space and errant fragments of memories rendered as an ebullient movement in sfumato-esque environments celebrate the rawness of production. Light and colour, twin muses in the Modernist vein of formalism, shape throngs of vibrating figures, delicate waveforms patterning photographic impasto. The documentation of physical and ephemeral subjects in this manner requires a fine-tuned sensitivity to a host of natural and technical variables, including the magic of time-based four-dimensional imagery and its translation to the two-dimensional frame. Photographic reels and process images evidence the laborious persistence required to emotively render a peopled procession in flux, ultimately sieved into perfection in print on silk, acrylic, and glass.
Linear elegance is Fawad Jafri's forté, commensurate to his love of Minimalist Expressionism, where binaries and gradients allude to the indecipherable rumination of study, intellectual grapple and noetics. The enigma of digital language transformed into space is intensely materialised, with undertones of restrained elegance. Jafri's meticulous attention to detail during creation: measuring, taping down negative space, and painting carefully between these demarcations, is what allows for the briskness of form. Equally enigmatic is the detritus of this process, wherein balls of pigmented tape form playfully sculptural odes to the paintings they midwifed.
Idrees Hanif's concerns with materiality combine tongue in cheek nods to consumerism with the restraint of an archivist curating a pre-Industrial Cabinet of Curiosities. These simulations of object-lust are anthropological museum-grade displays of possession as a means to self-actualisation; Their symbolic worth and reverential quality deal in the currency of privacy, publicity, economy and identity. Searching, gathering and modulating relationships between object-hood, simulation and reproduction, characterise Hanif's methodologies, arriving at a dialogue between craft and concept, maker and viewer, consumption and the consumed.
Irfan Ali Channa's 'documentation', on the other hand, attests to the fluidity of identity in the language of travelogue: assemblages of monochrome landscape and textual intervention photo-realistically evocative of home as a psychic construct. An anthropologist's eye for knife-sharp detail contrast with seemingly disparate scenery, yet on closer inspection, determine a unified memorialisation of a haven. In order to arrive at this frequency, Channa navigates a somewhat dialectal approach to image and its translation. An immeasurable skill is required to draught lifelike scenery, a meditative building of layers of medium. Conversely, the written word requires a channelling of thought into its abstract representation. Choreographing a successful waltz where these two thought-machines complement each other is a challenging yet rewarding practice attesting to ontological maturity.
Tahira Noureen's self-reflective investigations of the wasli as a sculptural, malleable medium reference a contemplative experimental and methodic mapping of the psyche as well as physical space. The tussle between epiphany and disciplined routine shapes the modular patterning and errant tangential change in her distilled cartographies. The tensile strength of the wasli as a modulator of space rather than a vessel, imbued with centuries of imaginal history, impresses a dynamic new direction in cross-disciplinary methodology. Noureen's tactile processes invigilate her conceptual concern, giving shape to each bend, twist, or frayed portion that follows the next step in a fluid sequence.
The investigation of iconic viewership and image-making is incomplete without a critique of various modes of visual dissemination, which Mahbub Jokhio is adept at. Jokhio's expanded psychological studio encompasses analysis of authenticity, illusion, visual reproduction, and its ramifications for escalating digital representations, as well as appropriated content. A vast interlinked web of philosophical enquiry permeates the reasoning behind artistic intent, use of medium, and references. The affirmation of intellectual property through legal proceedings wherein witnesses must attest to the veracity of the work of art, and document this verification through signing affidavits is a complex web involving multiple 'makers', or their signified symbols. This especially holds true for Jokhio's proclamatory statements, which once digested, prove to be significant contributors to the intrinsic value of the artwork.
In the seeing, thinking, contextualising, deconstructing, and reconfiguring: vital modes of perception for the artistic process, Sadqain channels human intellect and corporeal being through the memories held by water. Ablution as a ritualised performance of at-one-ment (being one with the universe or a higher power, rather than repentance) is materialised spiritual detoxification; thus, its environment is sanctified through means of the body. Moulding, casting, sculpting and shaping each three-dimensional piece contributes to the labour-intensive processes of the artist, particularly the deconstruction and 'staining' towards the appearance of worn objects in common use. 'Labour' as a symbolic bodily function and as an artistic pursuit coalesce as Sadqain explores the sacred and profane, associative and situational, existential and relatable, through Conceptual rigour.
Artists irrevocably alter the creative vision of represented objects through offerings of mediation – the spectacle of production: journals, sketchbooks, collage, paraphernalia that project the reality of realised image-making. In doing so, a necessary link is established between art-maker and art-appreciator, and the work of art constitutes a meta-narrative of participation and creation. Each artist in Point of Departure extends their locus towards this goal, allowing a rare glimpse at the fertile ground of ideas sown and creation harvested, departing from (un)common points of reference and arriving at holistic excellence comprised of the length of creative journeying.
~Marvi Malik, 2021
(1) Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, HarperCollins, 1990.
The state of flow arises from the creative process itself, as well as the percolation of ideas intermingling with the material. Chance encounters, the artists' respective milieu, strains of thought and ideological preoccupation constitute the conceptual domain of this process, a fascinating conglomeration of points of reference merging in a harmonious and unique inspirational vector seen by the shamanic vision of the artist. As these references take tangible form, a collation, gathering, sorting, and re-organising of chosen mediums allows birthing of vision. At times, the medium itself may be the spark, which sets the flame of inspiration alight. However, the process manifests, multiple iterations are common in the quest for expression, a vital improvisation and recalibration. Ultimately, the thought machine enters the stage of the audience as a 'finished' piece, yet the evidence of its production remains unseen. It is with this aim that 'The Point Of Departure' premises the modus operandi, the inner and outer, workings of a group of highly talented visual practitioners, as works of art unto themselves.
For Faizan Naveed, displaced space and errant fragments of memories rendered as an ebullient movement in sfumato-esque environments celebrate the rawness of production. Light and colour, twin muses in the Modernist vein of formalism, shape throngs of vibrating figures, delicate waveforms patterning photographic impasto. The documentation of physical and ephemeral subjects in this manner requires a fine-tuned sensitivity to a host of natural and technical variables, including the magic of time-based four-dimensional imagery and its translation to the two-dimensional frame. Photographic reels and process images evidence the laborious persistence required to emotively render a peopled procession in flux, ultimately sieved into perfection in print on silk, acrylic, and glass.
Linear elegance is Fawad Jafri's forté, commensurate to his love of Minimalist Expressionism, where binaries and gradients allude to the indecipherable rumination of study, intellectual grapple and noetics. The enigma of digital language transformed into space is intensely materialised, with undertones of restrained elegance. Jafri's meticulous attention to detail during creation: measuring, taping down negative space, and painting carefully between these demarcations, is what allows for the briskness of form. Equally enigmatic is the detritus of this process, wherein balls of pigmented tape form playfully sculptural odes to the paintings they midwifed.
Idrees Hanif's concerns with materiality combine tongue in cheek nods to consumerism with the restraint of an archivist curating a pre-Industrial Cabinet of Curiosities. These simulations of object-lust are anthropological museum-grade displays of possession as a means to self-actualisation; Their symbolic worth and reverential quality deal in the currency of privacy, publicity, economy and identity. Searching, gathering and modulating relationships between object-hood, simulation and reproduction, characterise Hanif's methodologies, arriving at a dialogue between craft and concept, maker and viewer, consumption and the consumed.
Irfan Ali Channa's 'documentation', on the other hand, attests to the fluidity of identity in the language of travelogue: assemblages of monochrome landscape and textual intervention photo-realistically evocative of home as a psychic construct. An anthropologist's eye for knife-sharp detail contrast with seemingly disparate scenery, yet on closer inspection, determine a unified memorialisation of a haven. In order to arrive at this frequency, Channa navigates a somewhat dialectal approach to image and its translation. An immeasurable skill is required to draught lifelike scenery, a meditative building of layers of medium. Conversely, the written word requires a channelling of thought into its abstract representation. Choreographing a successful waltz where these two thought-machines complement each other is a challenging yet rewarding practice attesting to ontological maturity.
Tahira Noureen's self-reflective investigations of the wasli as a sculptural, malleable medium reference a contemplative experimental and methodic mapping of the psyche as well as physical space. The tussle between epiphany and disciplined routine shapes the modular patterning and errant tangential change in her distilled cartographies. The tensile strength of the wasli as a modulator of space rather than a vessel, imbued with centuries of imaginal history, impresses a dynamic new direction in cross-disciplinary methodology. Noureen's tactile processes invigilate her conceptual concern, giving shape to each bend, twist, or frayed portion that follows the next step in a fluid sequence.
The investigation of iconic viewership and image-making is incomplete without a critique of various modes of visual dissemination, which Mahbub Jokhio is adept at. Jokhio's expanded psychological studio encompasses analysis of authenticity, illusion, visual reproduction, and its ramifications for escalating digital representations, as well as appropriated content. A vast interlinked web of philosophical enquiry permeates the reasoning behind artistic intent, use of medium, and references. The affirmation of intellectual property through legal proceedings wherein witnesses must attest to the veracity of the work of art, and document this verification through signing affidavits is a complex web involving multiple 'makers', or their signified symbols. This especially holds true for Jokhio's proclamatory statements, which once digested, prove to be significant contributors to the intrinsic value of the artwork.
In the seeing, thinking, contextualising, deconstructing, and reconfiguring: vital modes of perception for the artistic process, Sadqain channels human intellect and corporeal being through the memories held by water. Ablution as a ritualised performance of at-one-ment (being one with the universe or a higher power, rather than repentance) is materialised spiritual detoxification; thus, its environment is sanctified through means of the body. Moulding, casting, sculpting and shaping each three-dimensional piece contributes to the labour-intensive processes of the artist, particularly the deconstruction and 'staining' towards the appearance of worn objects in common use. 'Labour' as a symbolic bodily function and as an artistic pursuit coalesce as Sadqain explores the sacred and profane, associative and situational, existential and relatable, through Conceptual rigour.
Artists irrevocably alter the creative vision of represented objects through offerings of mediation – the spectacle of production: journals, sketchbooks, collage, paraphernalia that project the reality of realised image-making. In doing so, a necessary link is established between art-maker and art-appreciator, and the work of art constitutes a meta-narrative of participation and creation. Each artist in Point of Departure extends their locus towards this goal, allowing a rare glimpse at the fertile ground of ideas sown and creation harvested, departing from (un)common points of reference and arriving at holistic excellence comprised of the length of creative journeying.
~Marvi Malik, 2021
(1) Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, HarperCollins, 1990.
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