Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: April 30, 2019 | 
| 中文
Foliage Story by Sadaf Naeem
A truly feminine narrative, be it in prose or painting, creates at its centre intimate, secure spaces of inherent womanliness. For women, both in the real world and in fiction, autonomy of space, particularly personal physical space, is essential. In the age of contemporary art, these spaces have evolved from preconceived notions of domesticity and have taken on bigger, fuller meaning and importance: becoming the setting for feminine relationships, small freedoms, and the right to self govern. Sadaf Naeem's show, Home Sweet Home, at the O Art Space this week, was a foray into spatial explorations of what it means to be a woman in the South Asian region.
Consisting of patchworks of imagery from outside spaces, Naeem's paintings conjure up a strange, feminine nostalgia. Potted plants on mossy grass merge into concrete walls, intensely leafy trees fade into sharp pink skies. Imprints of traditional, intricate lace patterns form the background for many of these paintings, while the local Gainda flower, also known as the marigold, makes repetitive appearances, its skewed flower-beds merging into lawns and walls. Amidst the bustle of foliage, patterns and house-like structures, Naeem camouflages her women, making them ghostlike and ethereal. These translucent women can be seen through trees and shrubbery, overlapping one another, merging with backgrounds, facing one another as if caught in a deep, wordless dialogue.
In Love Story 1, a soft grey tree stands ghostlike against a lacy background, the bougainvillea flower growing delicate and papery from its boughs. Multiple faded figures, perhaps the same woman over and over again, overlap, facing towards and away from one another, a sprawling of bougainvillea flowers running as a motif in front of them, in colour and in stark white line drawings, obscuring them. These wild flowers need little to no nurturing, and the many versions of the woman, perhaps a self portrait of the artist, have seemed to cultivated and bloomed similarly, a conglomerate of feminine consciousnesses, branching off, forming many dreamlike identities and coming back together. The paintings stir a reverie within the viewer, of summer afternoons amidst white wrought iron chairs, women in houses, behind windows and in lawns, dreaming of a million different worlds. There is an extraordinary quality of resilience and nurturance in these images that Naeem has painted, not only in the upright, solemn figures but in the merging of unyielding concrete and blooming grass, gauzy lace patterns running into angry pink and yellow skies. These surroundings create a different kind of portrait; fragile and robust, coming together as a landscape of womanhood. A similar narrative plays out in Monologue: two ghostly, identical figures sharing an unbroken gaze, one alternate self confronting the other. A thin, sinewy branch extends from one face to the other, delicate flowers losing and gaining color.
Naeem's shadow selves are like characters out of a daytime trance, comfortably feminine beings, delicate minds complex as lace patterns. These women are like otherworldly apparitions in a world that is very familiar. Floating through the notions of a home, these women are soft but not subdued, spinning dream and reality together.
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