The light of days and nights | Art & Culture

[sharminsultana]

Farida Batool.
Across in the Lights exhibition, there is a painting by Zahoorul Akhlaq in another room of the National Art Gallery, Islamabad. Title A radio photo of an unidentified object, this 1973 canvas, contains light: strands of rainbow hues have turned into dark spots entering a frame in the form of a manuscript page. Akhlaq suggests that light is not always bright, bright, and white, it can also be dull, dark, and depressing.

An emotional reading and representation of the light discerned in Akhlaq’s canvas can also be found in the works of artists participating in Lumières, the exhibition organized by Zara Sajid and Stéphanie Borsa, and supported by the French Embassy in Islamabad. The show includes artists from Pakistan, France and Morocco; all women, who approach the idea of ​​light in their works, distinct by their formats and genres as well as by their interpretations of something as common as light. The exhibition is held from December 9 to 20 at the National Art Gallery.

Light is familiar, ordinary, accessible – and ancient. After God created heaven and earth, He said “Let there be light: and there was light (Genesis 1: 3)”. During the exhibition, we experience lights of nature, stories and job function email database different connections: natural, artificial, real, virtual, political, poetic and ironic. Speaking at the inauguration, Gilles Garachon, the French charge d’affaires, commented on the gender division in terms of aggression and violence linked to men (recalling one of Susan Sontag: “… war is a game of men – murder has a gender, and it is a man “). In today’s world, where men are busy spreading darkness at noon, imposing blinding ignorance, the extremism, activism, women comment and criticize human calamities.

Light, more than a physical phenomenon, is associated with ideas of liberation, hope and salvation. Just opening our eyes in the morning gets rid of our dark demons / nightmares. Yet many remember the moment when light meets darkness, day glued to night. This threshold, this no man’s land that we wear every day with our shadows, a self that is part of us and yet so disconcerting.