ISLAMABAD, April 30: What can art be about? It can be about the personal and the political, about the East and the West, about memories and beliefs.

And in no surprise, these were the themes that three artists, all hailing from Sindh, had explored in the latest exhibition at Rohtas Gallery.

Aqeel Solangi, who is now a teacher at National College of Arts (NCA), Rawalpindi had taken physical objects from his memories, like the water well so essential to the people of Sindh, or the fishing net embracing centuries of fishing tradition, and put them in a completely different context to see what resulted.

For Solangi, this was an exploration of textures and symbols taken out of context and reformed as much as art. “I take elements from actual location/the physical world and transform them in ‘another’ location, believing that every place carries an enigmatic aura itself,” he explained.

Imran Channa’s series was similarly abstract and gave a unique form to memories and histories to create graphite works that seemed like nothing more than chalk shading on canvas.

Channa took histories and memories to deconstruct and erase them. “These large graphite drawings are a deliberate act of making and erasing records from history, until it emerges onto a single plane by compressing time and motion,” expressed Channa in his statement. And what resulted were layers about layers of graphite that came together to form a final image that was confusing and not distinguishable into anything understandable.

Finally, Ahmed Ali Manganhar’s work took a more impersonal approach and took on the East and the West by combining “the repertoire of received images from art school education – mostly European” with “vintage film posters of Pakistani cinema from its hiatus in the 80s.”

According to Manganhar, the point is to “paint scenes of fraught domesticity and the turbulent world out there.” And in his series of work a dynamic series of paintings become visible with many elements invoking things that we know from our local history as well as those from our foreign awareness.

Manganhar’s paintings, with their bright colors and large dimensions managed to have a lot happening in them using a variety of elements and were perhaps the most interesting series in the exhibition.