Ahsan Memon, Sameen, 2025 Oil on canvas
ways of being
foreshadowing imagined pasts /recalling untold futures
12 June - 28 June, 2025
Ways of Being embodies a cultural sensibility wherein temporal boundaries collapse, as artists draw from imagined or ancestrally felt memories and recall futures that are intimately sensed yet remain elusive.
In our current culture subsumed by the NOW! - one that exalts immediacy, literalism, and transparency - the artists in this exhibition reclaim ambiguity, suggestion, and metaphor as vital to cultural experience, the human experience, and to our sense of self. This exhibition articulates a burgeoning movement in ultra-contemporary figurative art within the South Asian context: nostalgic foreshadowing through figuration. What emerges is a layered, pervasive sense of what can and should be, couched in the washed tones normally associated with nostalgia. Nostalgia not as a simple yearning for the past, but a dynamic, non-linear grappling with time and memory hinged to the current moment.
Recalling the traditions of art house and poetic cinemas - directors such as Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa and Sergei Parajanov - here artists linger over a distinct mood. Scenescapes are imbued with emotional atmosphere, figures shaped by a softness of line, and a pervasive sense of tenderness suggests at layers beneath the literal. The figure serves as a mirroring space for artists to reveal the ineffable textures of the human experience. In so doing, the artwork offers a tender, poetic counterpoint to the current cultural moment - elevating nostalgia not as mere longing but as a generative force.