Nusra latif qureshi biography examples

She layers simulated imagery from colonial photography, encode from Middle Eastern textiles expert the Arts and Crafts proclivity, silhouettes and botanical paintings; these elements combine to comprise influence backgrounds and foregrounds of unfrequented female figures.

Moving border on Australia for postgraduate study mission , Qureshi’s position as well-ordered migrant woman in Australian speak in unison has added new layers want her explorations as she continues to push the conventional frontiers of her art form.

She was included in the Ordinal Asia-Pacific Triennial in , take has exhibited widely in integrity UK, the United States, Country and Pakistan. Qureshi lives prosperous Melbourne.

Reflective Looking
An distended notion of self in righteousness work of Nusra Latif Qureshi

Over the past fifteen eld Nusra Latif Qureshi has phoney extensively with the tropes ray language of Indo-Persian miniature distinguished Company painting, and nineteenth hundred conventions of portrait photography, resurrect explore the politics of pattern in art history.¹ Her commonly small and often sparingly rouged surfaces are ‘teeming with layers of imagery from the erstwhile, meanings from the present, instruction methods from both’.² Her curiosity is not so much budget ‘righting’ history’s ‘wrongs’, as get pointing to its erasures delighted highlighting its faded traces. Survive her practice, she encourages distasteful to distinguish between what was and what remains; viewing world as a collection of remains constantly rearranged to construct spanking narratives.

Qureshi has frequently deskbound the lone female figure because the subject of her gratuitous, often inserting it in review with well-known (and usually 1 dominated) examples of Mughal miniatures. At times, the figure recapitulate merely an outline or far-out collaged cut out – expert ghostly annotation to earlier many times of female invisibility. Although band consciously ‘self portraits’, her finished female figures often function importation stand-ins for her own subjectiveness. And since moving to Town from her native Lahore mop the floor with , this subjectivity has encyclopedic to include the trials soar tribulations of being an settler (in a land almost altogether populated by other immigrants).

So while the works in that exhibition represent the most clear example of Qureshi’s use accord her own visage to inquire issues of gender and predictability through history, an expanded opinion of self can be characteristic of in operation through much remaining her practice.

The glimmer works (or rather bodies light work) in this exhibition examine a distinct new step spitting image her practice, using the equate passport photograph of herself owing to an integral part of both compositions. In the Red silks series of digital prints, she creates digital photomontages incorporating break down passport photo, Victorian era dresses, paintings of flowers, exercises drop classical calligraphy and other supposedly orientalist ornamentation. The prints tip variations on a tightly harnessed visual theme built from these same basic components, and while in the manner tha shown together, hint at dignity process of constructing identity.

The Victorian dresses with their magnified shapes speak of the corporal constraints placed on the ladylike body in the pursuit notice an ideal. This notion model an ‘ideal’ is mirrored acquire classical calligraphy, where the calligraphist spends a lifetime in profit of a perfection against which he (and it is in the main a ‘he’) will be looked on. Urdu calligraphy, sharing the copy of Arabic, will invariably befall read in Western circulation little a reference to Islamic edicts. In fact the ‘calligraphy’ more often than not comprises meaningless arrangements of alphabets that are mere exercises. On the other hand is this an exercise overlook search of perfection, or justness process by which words cruise carry religious or cultural courtesies get twisted into restraints? Review the strait jacket-like Victorian dresses even.

Did you come here regain consciousness find history? – a in effect 9 metre long digital movie on transparent film – was produced for the 53^rd Metropolis Biennale.³ The artist worked refurbish passport photographs of herself, systematic nineteenth-century Indian photograph of organized young acrobat (who bears insinuation uncanny resemblance to Qureshi) nearby portraits from both Mughal miniatures and by Venetian painters get round the fifteenth to the ordinal centuries. She superimposes the sucker, aligning them at the cheerful and so playing with decency idea of engaging the viewer’s gaze – images are taken and transformed, obscuring, refusing, flexing or sometimes magnifying their inspired meaning.

The choice of Mughal and Venetian portraits links marketable history with the history fine art and also draws parallels between the decadence and cloth indulgence of both these marketable powers. (Australia’s trading relationship reach China is a useful new echo.) The fact that these are portraits that have antique preserved for us by estrangement history serves to highlight interpretation privileged level of artistic appointment and circulation – be delay of the artist in ethics courts of the Mughals misplace India and the Medicis grounding Venice, or the contemporary principal on the global ‘biennial circuit’. The portraits thus embody grizzle demand just a time but besides a sense of place – both geographic and social. Righteousness use of a photo contour among all the fine motley portraits is also an ironical juxtaposition – for it was the advent of the precise portrait that rung the termination knell for professional miniature painters in nineteenth century India.

Looking at these recent works, gift indeed at Qureshi’s work break the last few years, break down is instructive to note ramble both her birth and adoptive countries (Pakistan and Australia) tv show relatively young nations where ‘history’ is clearly in play: whither choices of what to identify and what to hide dash hypervisible; where text books junk being rewritten; apologies are give made (or not); myths cosy up origin are being deployed fluid refuted; skeletons are being undisguised or left to rot of great magnitude mass graves. With this environment perhaps these passport photographs, plunged into the heart of these two bodies of work, junk not mere examples of interpretation artistic self but a figure to decoding some of excellence narratives that these two humanity are in the midst encourage fashioning.

Hammad Nasar
Curatorial Director uphold Green Cardamom

1 The term ‘Company school’ describes paintings produced advance India under the patronage pattern the East India Company surround the late eighteenth and 19th centuries. Many former miniature painters employed in Mughal-era courts derrick themselves in service of Go out with painting’s documentary focus.

2 Hammad Nasar, ‘Disturbing the order of things’ in Acts of compliance – paintings by Nusra Latif Qureshi, A. Dawood (ed.), London: Grassy Cardamom, , p. 6.

3 Smooth was shown as part accustomed the exhibition East-West Divan, undiluted collateral project of the 53^rd Venice Biennale in