The Way You Look At Me
When
08 July 2011 -
20 August 2011
Location
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Haymarket
The Way You Look At Me, takes place over two floors over 4A with new work developed especially for this exhibition. Central to the show are ideas of looking and being looked at and feelings of invisibility in adopted spaces. The ground floor galleries will come alive with site-specific works, including a digitally printed large scale wallpaper, and a new work by Naeem Rana commissioned specifically for 4A’s front window (the Urdu text translates as: ‘my shadow will be with you’ ) This work is constructed entirely within the digital space, incorporating poetry based on classical Urdu poems to express loss and the experience of living in adopted places.
The exhibition will also include a 13 metre digital print by Nusra Qureshi’s 25 x 1333 cm digital print, combining the eyes of women from Mughal miniature painting, advertising and women from her own circle of friends. The eye is a central motif in her work, one which relates not only to superstition and omens but intimacy, metaphors of love, surveillance and vision, trickling down to the doe eyed heroines in twentieth century Indian cinema.
Naeem Rana and Nusra Qureshi are Melbourne-based artists who trained in sculpture and the Mughal miniature tradition at the National College of Arts in Lahore. Nusra Qureshi is part of a generation of traditionally trained artists who have revived and innovated Mughal miniature painting traditions through the incorporation of contemporary ideas, a transition in scale and new subject matter. Naeem Rana combines traditional Urdu calligraphy, popular culture and advertising within a digital space. Both of their practices reflect on contemporary society, culture and politics.