Tag: ali zaidi
Authenticity in art and life
At a recent gathering of fellow artists, someone asked if our art practice is authentic and seen as such. It made me wonder if too much importance was given to how others judge our authenticity or are are we the observer and judge of our own truth? Continue reading Authenticity in art and life
intimate self-portrait
As I kissed last of the guests good night after my birthday gathering, I could sense cold creeping up, my light and my shadow sentinels, stood motionless.
I felt weak and exhausted, torn between self-preservation and self-harm. Continue reading intimate self-portrait
What could’ve I been?
Stories of the flying carpet and genies of the lamp are more real than real thanks to the WIFI and 4G. Love it or hate it, the concept of time, distance and proximity continues to be reimagined each day. Mars is on the horizon!
Gratitude to the blessings of WhatsApp, I was catching up with a dear friend and artist from Lahore. He’s been meticulously photographing his painting and drawings and has chronologically published them online. In a conversation with him over this holiday season, I congratulated and thanked him for that sharing. I had sent him an article Continue reading What could’ve I been?
1001 UnMasked ~ hyper-real portraits of gender
1001 UnMasked ~ hyper-real portraits of gender brings together individual perspectives on gender and sexualities aurally and visually. What does it mean to be a man or a woman in the 21st century? What are the spaces in between these binaries? What is masculinity or femininity other than a culturally specific performance?
Till early last year I was calling this body of work Mas(k)culinities for reasons that seemed right at the time. Masculinity is stigmatized and problematized and I sought different sexualities to explore the breadth of being male. During this period voices and images of women were included to elaborate masculinity from their perspective. Soon I realized that fissures and scars caused by these simplistic binaries run very deep within all of us. Obliged to play out the ‘normative’ roles assigned from the time of our births onwards, is a patriarchal hegemony that has to be challenged. Individual point of views that encompass realities beyond dictates of the mainstream is the only way to disrupt this control. We have to create safe spaces for celebrating the ‘human’ in all its manifestations rather than be threatened by difference. Continue reading 1001 UnMasked ~ hyper-real portraits of gender