The current Koel Gallery show in Karachi, titled, ‘Intimacy’, curated by Maha Malik, focuses on five women artists whose art practice centralises on subjective explorations. Subjectivity refers to the inner and separate realm in which we live most genuinely. To free the subjective self we must find it, listen to it and embrace it.

When an artist’s gaze turns away from the external toward the inner self it turns to materials and surroundings that give a free hand to the nonmaterial strivings and search within. Understanding individual quests, identifying singular vocabularies and appreciating their novel applications are some of the striking features that articulate and expand this otherwise coded collection of artworks in ‘Intimacy’.

Nurturing her ‘Ocean’ series for well over two decades, artist Lala Rukh has carried mark making to its most reductive limits. When the series was initiated in the early ’90s she spent a considerable amount of time meditating in front of the shimmering and shifting spatial vastness of the ocean at night. Striving to register her musings she captured moments of fluctuating radiance on the ocean waters in barely traceable marks.

During this period she was also working with photography in the darkroom. So the impact on her art was natural. The ‘Ocean’ series was done on photographic paper pre-exposed and darkened in the photo process. It was then worked on with different drawing media and paint. In the ‘Hieroglyphic’ series, she employed calligraphic form to give a different rendition of the ocean. In her current series the images are embedded in the moist, black surface (and shadows) of carbon paper. Enamoured by the rich dark surface of this paper, she enthuses, “I have allowed the paper to dictate to me.”

How does an artist keep alive the idea of transcendence in a world in which it has become trivial, passé, incomprehensible? Musarrat Mirza’s tendency toward the hidden and the obscured relates to her ability to see the spiritual concealed in the material — the unfamiliar emotional reality behind familiar material appearances. She draws on the mystic aura surrounding the shrines, and mausoleums of Sufi saints in her native Sukkur to locate her own spiritual space.

Glimpses of inner sanctums, refuges or retreats, a luminous corner, a lighted window or an open doorway emerging from a miasma of abstract brushwork define her minimal vocabulary and avant-garde painterly habit. Playing with the sensations of colours on the palette her subtle mix of pallid, ashen hues evoke the haze of dust that envelopes Sukkur but more so to the atmosphere of penetrating the other worldly.

A printmaker and painter Mehr Afroz brings visual definition to her inner voice through an additive and reductive aesthetic of several methods like scratching, embossing and applying multiple coatings of pigment. Her repeated renditions of the Quranic syllable “hu” lose form and shape as they dissolve and morph into dense rhythmic masses. Curator Malik informs that Afroz uses the word “sada” as her new orientation where “her textural practice alludes to sonic force, to a calling and reception”.

Rarely does one find a work in which the emotion and the medium seem one and the same. Ayesha Qureshi the youngest artist in this quintet likens her working process to Braille. She says, “Physically I maintain contact at all times with two materials, one is the surface and the other is paint. My hand performs two roles simultaneously, the right applies paint on the surface while the left removes the applied paint. Often a rag is used for excess.” This back and forth of hand gestures and motions, repeated in different sequences over a stretch of four to 12 hours results in colour fields that communicate the uneasy relationship of form and formlessness.

Naiza Khan is among the few artists who can give convincing literal and non-literal expressions to her thoughts. The twin attributes of an intensive drawing practice and a heightened awareness of her inner consciousness enable her to not just capture the physical but to also delve beyond it with considerable confidence. However, such ventures are often extremely personal and while their rationale is comprehensible the drawings themselves can appear very abstruse.

Her ‘Snow globe’ series evolving out of her concern for the cultural and architectural treasures of Manora Island was initiated while she worked on the portfolio, ‘Restore the boundaries: the Manora project’. She says over a period of time a deeper engagement with the landscape of Manora shed its literal association to the site and became something more emotive and conceptual.

This show is anchored by the element of intense subjectivity which is common to all the five artists. The other characteristics shared by them are their engagement with the figure form or with the landscape genre and subsequent reductive or secondary use of the two vocabularies to address the larger concern of self-dialogue.

For Lala Rukh, Mussarat Mirza and Naiza Khan, the terrain be it land, sea or cityscape, is the contemplative trigger while Mehr Afroz and Naiza Khan have both revealed through figuration formerly but have progressed towards non-materiality. In the eastern philosophical sense, simplicity is a very hard thing to achieve and minimalism is yet another significant aspect of the artworks in this show. Their subtlety is so strong that only by contemplative viewing can one see the minute nuances.