Chawkandi Art Gallery opened its doors in the post-lockdown season this November with a solo exhibition by Farrukh Adnan, titled Khaamosh Qadam. Translated as Quiet Footsteps, this body of drawings and paintings is reflective of an inner journey that speaks to the artist in moments of isolation. Farrukh’s imagery, in the form of mark-making, evolves from his musings of the ruins at Talamba, located in southern Punjab, at the edge of the River Ravi.

Myth has it that two nephews of Data Ganj Bakhsh, Mehmood Shah Bukhari and Mahmood Sher Bukhari, were passing by Talamba after meeting Data Sahib. Washerwomen saw the back of two men on horseback with big turbans from afar. As the women announced that they had seen headless giants, the men turned their gaze back on Talamba and they say that the city turned to ruins. The mausoleum of these Sufis is within a kilometre of the site that Adnan has been exploring. His imagery is derived from viewing the physical formations in the land, within the richness of the stories it holds.

The artist recalls it as a carefree time of discovery, coming across broken pieces of clay embedded within the sand dunes, when he and other children would slide down the slopes. Revisiting the site later as the subject of his graduate studies at Beaconhouse University, Lahore, Adnan photographed it extensively. Thus began the journey in which the land formation, texture and the visual materiality of the place aided an understanding of the artist’s own connection to his past.

Farrukh Adnan’s art manifests the strength of the solitary and the power of the human spirit to endure isolation

As a surveyor and storyteller, he processed his memory of the place to form mesmerising visual conversations. The pictures that formed connected arbitrary shapes from the shadows and ridges. Irregular lines and dots depicted the landscape. There was a reassurance provided by the earth as it were, and the artist simply and effortlessly attuned to its whisper in devouring the magical pull of the site.

The marks take the shape of drawings on paper and canvas, and some of the canvas and stitched together in the shape of books, with rugged and untrimmed edges. These pages hold the lines that form not letters, but an intangible script of lines and dots, dancing about in an endearing symphony. There is no doubt that the viewer is invited by the artist to sense an inward illumination, where script and image merge into one. The illusion to a mirror has been a recurring element in Adnan’s imagery, but the symbolism is so subtle and faint that it can only unfold in a quiet discourse. Words become faint, and they also become dust. They have been shed to the extent that we are left with the unprimed pages to meditate on.

The journey of a dot of dust is internalised as a sign of the transformation of matter, from night to day and life to death, and rebirth. In the khaamoshi or the quiet of Farrukh’s surface, the earth of Talamba continues to transform, this time with an awakening that reminds the artist and the viewer of this verse by Data Gunj Bakhsh:

“Farid, you have grown old; your body has begun to totter Even if you live for a hundred years, yet you have to perish to dust.”

“Khamosh Qadam” is being held virtually at Chawkandi Art Gallery in Karachi from November 3, 2020 to November 15, 2020

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 8th, 2020