Gallery 6 in Islamabad recently played host to a collection of works by well-renowned contemporary artist Tabinda Chinoy. Not quite a retrospective, and focusing on her paintings rather than her sculptures, the exhibition included works from the late 1990s through to pieces completed this year, giving a wonderful insight into how Chinoy’s painting style continues to evolve.

Central to all her works is the theme of hope. Chinoy is the eternal optimist: “My work is not how the world is, but how I want the world to be,” she says. And so, we see in My Beautiful World — I Chinoy bend the world to fit her vision of it. Church spires coexist with minarets and temples, mud huts side by side with skyscrapers. Warped lines belie the underlying reality, but we’re taken in by the vision Chinoy hopes for.

The central figure seems to know her vision of the world is not quite realised, staring with melancholy at the textured play of colour on her skirt. The strokes of paint on this skirt are a foreshadowing of Sea, Sand and Sky, one of Chinoy’s latest works and quite a departure from her signature style. The swirling circle of abstract colours represents the mixing of elements in our world, the small accompanying insert acting as a thumbnail. Chinoy is reminding us: how we understand our world depends on our perspective. If you look from close at hand, even the curves of a circle appear as straight lines.

In Live and Let Live — II, we might be looking at a detail of the city from Beautiful World — I, with the spinning sun hinting at the emergent style we see realised in Sea, Sand and Sky. The sweeping arc of the sky seems to give the impression that the world is spinning, and we’ve caught a glimpse of it as the rotation continues. Here we can clearly see a checkerboard floor — a repeated symbol in Chinoy’s work.

The vibrant artworks of Tabinda Chinoy paint a vision of what she wants the world to be, not what it is

When asked about it, the artist’s face lights up and memories flood her eyes. Rather than the complex duality of human experience this symbol so often represents, for Chinoy, it’s much more personal. “This is the floor of my childhood home,” she says with a smile, seemingly transported back in time. “It makes me happy to include it in my work.”

The evidence of her upbringing as the daughter of a diplomat and United Nations representative can be seen in her work. “My father,” she says, “used to take me to see the masters in Italy and exposed me to art and sculpture wherever we went.” Her vision for a world where everyone is free also stems from this childhood, where exposure to different peoples and cultures impacted deeply on her sensibilities about the unity of mankind.

While Chinoy is exploring new ways of expressing her hopefulness through a more abstract application, her signature ladies are still well-represented in this exhibition. White Bird — II shows a woman in profile, overly large eyes trained on a white bird flying free through the window. Intense reds and blacks mark the interior, where our lady is sitting, her golden jhumka earring giving the impression that maybe the white bird has escaped a gilded cage.

Scratchings on the wall and the familiar checkerboard floor tell a tale that maybe all is not so well in the interior, that struggles have been had and overcome but the dream of this lady is still one of freedom and hope. Maybe the bird is just a reflection of the light we see in her eyes.

At the heart of all of Chinoy’s paintings is an intense sense of the possibilities of this world. Lines are bent and colours amplified to show the viewer what is possible: a world where we can coexist in harmony, where we, like the birds, fly free.

‘Through the Veil of Dreams’ was on display at Gallery 6, Islamabad from October 25-30, 2024

The writer is an Australian based in Pakistan. She is an avid enthusiast of contemporary Pakistani art and culture

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 17th, 2024