Untitled
Digital collage and enamel paint with paper and found object/folding screen
120×120 inches
2014
Available
Human existence is inescapably relative; dependent on a mixed-palette of things. Space and time are parallel, one decides for the other. It’s fascinating how we make choices of where and who we want to be. Many a times circumstance supersedes and decides everything for us but the yearning is a constant…as a people…are we ever content? Is tension the only state and movement the only answer?
Sehr Jalil’s practice does not dwell on closure and seeks resolve through direct confrontation with it. For this recent piece a partition screen with portraits (done by her grandmother) found rotting in a family store since thirty years and later soaking-wet with rain in the backyard is fumigated and brought inside to wonder. Marks of abandonment, time and place have done their own art on it. The works loses its edges, forgets and remembers its previous self and travels to a new destination in the making. How, when, where to and why is left to the onlooker. Enamel paint and digital collage are excitedly and recklessly swept into magical communion. An uninhibited and ardent interplay with mixed media has continually supported Jalil’s practice.
This dilemma of the perfect place/utopia…has recently turned her attention back to interrogating the notion of paradise. From questioning the text on a withered charity box outside a small mosque in walled/old city Lahore (2006) that read “masjid ke leay chanda daalein aur janat hasil kerein” it translates “put charity for the mosque and earn paradise” to documenting arrivals and departures of international flights at the Lahore airport (which led to the work Promised lands, 2013) – it is a mind-altering pursuit …
Sehr Jalil is currently pursuing MA (Hons) Visual Arts and did her BFA (with Honors) from the National College of Arts 2006. She also teaches O-Level Art and writes for ArtNow Pakistan and Artorca.
Image Courtesy | Sehr Jalil