LAHORE: The solo exhibition of artworks of Ghulam Mohammad from district Kachi of Balochistan will open at the Rohtas Art Gallery, Model Town, on Saturday (today).

The painter will put on display about 12 collages on paper.

Ghulam Mohammad, born in village Zardad of district Kachi, encountered the confinements created by language very early in life whose circumvention was a daunting, mammoth undertaking. The making of images offered a friendlier framework, which could challenge the supremacy of the alien written word and its immutable meaning.

Studying in the village school, he was in the 6th grade when he found pleasure of drawing. He came to Quetta to sit the Matriculation examination and discovered that his passion could actually be a part of education. The Arts Council Quetta was a revelation where he began to draw under tutelage of Kaleem Khan.

His arrival at the School of Visual Art and Design at the Beaconhouse National University in 2009 can only be described as the intervention of Lady Luck. The artist commenced his probing into possibilities of language, first Urdu and then English. But there were other intersections of image, investigation, process and materials along the way and many other experiences to be absorbed. The question of language remained in the shadows. Eventually, it reappeared as a matter of substance waiting to be addressed. Memories of suppression and suffocation came to the fore.

The title of Ghulam Mohammad’s show, Chhaan-Been (Investigation), leads the viewers into these tiny visual installations which are a bewildering forest of ciphers. One returns to them again and again searching for pathways. The works are curiously seductive besides investigations into the tactile, rich surfaces can be conducted at two levels, the appraisal of the purely formal, rigorous strategies of ‘making’ and the more ambiguous, intangible indicators of intention.

The exhibition will remain open till April 30.

Published in Dawn, April 9th, 2016