LAHORE: ‘Knit Your Home, Unravel Your Memories’ -- a conceptual art installation show by Hamburg-based artist Munza Malik -- was an inspiring experience for many visitors and visual art enthusiasts on Monday. “The exhibition is the narrative of my memories, the places I lived and the association I developed with those places,” she said explaining her work.

Ms Malik graduated in architecture from the National College of Arts (NCA) from 1991 to 1996.

The exhibition was arranged at a house in Gulberg which had two galleries offering different set of works. The exhibition was different from run-of-the-mill kind of stuff, for it had a unique idea behind it of knitting memories through literal knitting. It was complex too because knitting itself is a complex process. Flowers, buds and leafs of memories and the very essence of the show the tree of nostalgia were the highlights of an experience the artist successfully showcased through her installations.

The materials used in installations were wool, wire, bamboo sticks, visuals, sounds, video projections method, knitting and crochet. The artist explores the notions of home and displacement and seeks to draw attention towards four specific sites, where she has lived such as Lahore, Zurich and Hamburg.

She unveils the links between memory, place and architecture and creatively reveals and revises the sensations and the spatial memories of her past and uses metaphorical knitting as a tool to unravel the past.

Ms Malik said that the memories she had metaphorically knitted through this exhibition began from her childhood days.

The exhibition was also the outcome of artist’s research in architecture.

The journey of memories, thoughts, feelings and nostalgia are the wheels the exhibition moves on and it is still a continued journey. One art piece od installation the artist has knitted, she literally knitted that piece which somewhere had holes, somewhere small shapes and somewhere it had borders, which reflect the very thought process of the artist and the memories she has of different phases of life.

Ms Malik was born in Swat in 1972. She also studied Spatial Design at Zurich University of Design and Arts in 2012 and Urban Design at Hafen University in Hamburg in 2015; she lived in Munich in 1998 and Zurich from 1999 to 2001. She is now living in Hamburg, Germany. She continues to explore ways and methods to find appropriate expressions.

It was an interactive art show where the artist also asked the visitors to knit and refresh their memories.

Published in Dawn, July 16th, 2019