Artist Hamra Abbas is one of the most versatile of installation art practitioners. Residing presently in Boston, she has lived for extended periods in Lahore, (studying at the National College of Arts) Islamabad and Berlin, and has travelled to and worked in Istanbul so frequently that she considers it a home away from home.

Her itinerant life informs her work and reflects in her use of eclectic mediums that include paper, plasticine, wood, clay, silicone, stained glass, fibreglass photography, digital imaging, performance, video and sound.

In 2009, Abbas travelled to Thessaloniki, Greece where she visited the Ottoman bath-house built (circa 1444) known as the Bey Hammam, which translates as Paradise Bath. It stood as a “symbol of the country’s Muslim past” and in it she organised a performance during which she ritualistically bathed a white woman, creating a context of colonisation with Orientalist gleanings and addressed issues of power structures as well as Islamic ideals of cleansing and purity.

In 2011, Abbas explored the stained glass window found commonly in churches since the Middle Ages. Titled ‘Woman in black’, it comprises three window panels, each three metres high anomalously depicting a gory act of battle instead of the customary devotional scene — with decapitated bodies and swordsmen. At the centre of the battle stands a woman attired in black robes, depicted in profile in miniature tradition with kohl-laden eyes and flowing black hair, a sort of Eastern Joan of Arc. The soldier’s uniforms are intrinsically Islamic in their geometrical patterning, subverting the Christian iconography and the sacral Catholic context. The black-robed super-heroine had already been investigated by Abbas in 2008 in the form of a shiny voluptuous six-foot fiberglass figure wielding a menacing stick which she had titled ‘Adventures of the woman in black’ and though the figure invited comparison with the female students from the Lal Masjid debacle, Abbas’s intention was to offer the persona of a strong, majestic Athena-like woman of grace and strength rather than a deluded, militant seminary student. She compels us to decipher the wit and humour that lies at the core of her practice and makes her work so enjoyable and so cerebral.

Using large-scale photography as her medium Abbas’s series of portraits from 2012 are far removed from any kind of portraiture we may have seen. The 120cm x 80cm photographs are narratives of ordinary people, whom she encountered, sometimes on the streets.

These brief encounters led to an exploration of behaviours, responses, manners and reactions and she recorded these by making tiny plasticine replicas of their faces, some as small as two inches high. When she photographed the ‘sculptures’, she revitalised them by enlarging the scale ten-fold — so much so that we are able to see her finger prints on the sculpting material. Through this kind of intervention Abbas controls how we view her subjects — small and ordinary or larger than life.

These are only some of the innumerable projects that Abbas has created and shown to appreciative audiences around the world. She is distinguished by her diversity and her inventive modes of engaging with art and people.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, April 26th, 2015

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