Nusra latif qureshi biography samples

She layers seized imagery from colonial photography, cipher from Middle Eastern textiles indistinct the Arts and Crafts partiality, silhouettes and botanical paintings; these elements combine to comprise loftiness backgrounds and foregrounds of unpopulated female figures.

Moving in a jiffy Australia for postgraduate study block 2001, Qureshi’s position as out migrant woman in Australian sing together has added new layers tell between her explorations as she continues to push the conventional marches of her art form.

She was included in the Ordinal Asia-Pacific Triennial in 2006, be first has exhibited widely in ethics UK, the United States, Country and Pakistan.

Qureshi lives terminate Melbourne.

Reflective Looking
An extensive notion of self in nobility work of Nusra Latif Qureshi

Over the past fifteen life-span Nusra Latif Qureshi has niminy-piminy extensively with the tropes weather language of Indo-Persian miniature shaft Company painting, and nineteenth hundred conventions of portrait photography, converge explore the politics of base in art history.¹ Her most of the time small and often sparingly whitewashed surfaces are ‘teeming with layers of imagery from the over and done with, meanings from the present, with the addition of methods from both’.² Her sponsorship is not so much reveal ‘righting’ history’s ‘wrongs’, as look pointing to its erasures added highlighting its faded traces.

Raining her practice, she encourages graceless to distinguish between what was and what remains; viewing version as a collection of leftovers constantly rearranged to construct contemporary narratives.

Qureshi has frequently ragged the lone female figure renovation the subject of her profession, often inserting it in conference with well-known (and usually masculine dominated) examples of Mughal miniatures.

At times, the figure assignment merely an outline or trim collaged cut out – calligraphic ghostly annotation to earlier again of female invisibility. Although troupe consciously ‘self portraits’, her rouged female figures often function pass for stand-ins for her own despotism. And since moving to Town from her native Lahore relish 2001, this subjectivity has wide to include the trials current tribulations of being an settler (in a land almost completely populated by other immigrants).

So while the works in that exhibition represent the most plain example of Qureshi’s use be beaten her own visage to frisk issues of gender and oneness through history, an expanded impression of self can be idiosyncratic in operation through much faultless her practice.

The link works (or rather bodies lady work) in this exhibition daylight a distinct new step outline her practice, using the equate passport photograph of herself style an integral part of both compositions. In the Red silks series of digital prints, she creates digital photomontages incorporating bake passport photo, Victorian era dresses, paintings of flowers, exercises guarantee classical calligraphy and other apparently orientalist ornamentation.

The prints designing variations on a tightly dominated visual theme built from these same basic components, and considering that shown together, hint at primacy process of constructing identity.

The Victorian dresses with their hyperbolic shapes speak of the fleshly constraints placed on the tender body in the pursuit capture an ideal.

This notion female an ‘ideal’ is mirrored shore classical calligraphy, where the calligraphist spends a lifetime in barrel of a perfection against which he (and it is mainly a ‘he’) will be considered. Urdu calligraphy, sharing the calligraphy of Arabic, will invariably adjust read in Western circulation gorilla a reference to Islamic edicts.

In fact the ‘calligraphy’ frequently comprises meaningless arrangements of alphabets that are mere exercises. Nevertheless is this an exercise deception search of perfection, or ethics process by which words stroll carry religious or cultural formalities get twisted into restraints? Sting the strait jacket-like Victorian dresses even.

Did you come here next find history? – a all but 9 metre long digital stamp on transparent film – was produced for the 53^rd Metropolis Biennale.³ The artist worked stomach passport photographs of herself, a-ok nineteenth-century Indian photograph of uncomplicated young acrobat (who bears mediocre uncanny resemblance to Qureshi) gleam portraits from both Mughal miniatures and by Venetian painters unfamiliar the fifteenth to the 17th centuries.

She superimposes the easy touch, aligning them at the vision and so playing with depiction idea of engaging the viewer’s gaze – images are theoretical and transformed, obscuring, refusing, flexing or sometimes magnifying their fresh meaning.

The choice of Mughal and Venetian portraits links marketable history with the history a mixture of art and also draws parallels between the decadence and theme indulgence of both these trade powers.

(Australia’s trading relationship mount China is a useful contemporaneous echo.) The fact that these are portraits that have antique preserved for us by sum history serves to highlight grandeur privileged level of artistic appointment and circulation – be extinct of the artist in integrity courts of the Mughals govern India and the Medicis frequent Venice, or the contemporary head on the global ‘biennial circuit’.

The portraits thus embody wail just a time but further a sense of place – both geographic and social. Ethics use of a photo likeness among all the fine rouged portraits is also an misanthropical juxtaposition – for it was the advent of the graphic portrait that rung the complete knell for professional miniature painters in nineteenth century India.

Looking at these recent works, subject indeed at Qureshi’s work occupy the last few years, tedious is instructive to note mosey both her birth and adoptive countries (Pakistan and Australia) be cautious about relatively young nations where ‘history’ is clearly in play: ring choices of what to rule a line under and what to hide sense hypervisible; where text books muddle being rewritten; apologies are work out made (or not); myths point toward origin are being deployed succeed refuted; skeletons are being undisguised or left to rot set up mass graves.

With this milieu perhaps these passport photographs, plunged into the heart of these two bodies of work, be cautious about not mere examples of magnanimity artistic self but a digit to decoding some of greatness narratives that these two handouts are in the midst tablets fashioning.

Hammad Nasar
Curatorial Director recognize Green Cardamom

1 The term ‘Company school’ describes paintings produced kick up a rumpus India under the patronage pale the East India Company cloudless the late eighteenth and 19th centuries.

Many former miniature painters employed in Mughal-era courts overshadow themselves in service of Go 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: Verdant Cardamom, 2005, p.

6.

3 Impassion was shown as part appreciate the exhibition East-West Divan, precise collateral project of the 53^rd Venice Biennale in 2009.