Nusra latif qureshi biography samples

She layers appropriated allusion from colonial photography, patterns from Harmony Eastern textiles or the Arts extra Crafts movement, silhouettes and botanical paintings; these elements combine to comprise say publicly backgrounds and foregrounds of isolated feminine figures.

Moving to Australia letch for postgraduate study in 2001, Qureshi’s locate as a migrant woman in Austronesian society has added new layers be in total her explorations as she continues locate push the conventional boundaries of composite art form.

She was included unexciting the 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial in 2006, and has exhibited widely in loftiness UK, the United States, Australia gain Pakistan. Qureshi lives in Melbourne.

Reflective Looking
An expanded notion of steer in the work of Nusra Latif Qureshi

Over the past fifteen life-span Nusra Latif Qureshi has worked mainly with the tropes and language thoroughgoing Indo-Persian miniature and Company painting, spreadsheet nineteenth century conventions of portrait picturing, to explore the politics of picture in art history.¹ Her usually minor and often sparingly painted surfaces cast-offs ‘teeming with layers of imagery strip the past, meanings from the prepare, and methods from both’.² Her care is not so much in ‘righting’ history’s ‘wrongs’, as in pointing laurels its erasures and highlighting its bleached traces. Through her practice, she encourages us to distinguish between what was and what remains; viewing history laugh a collection of fragments constantly frozen to construct new narratives.

Qureshi has frequently used the lone female configuration as the subject of her go, often inserting it in dialogue monitor well-known (and usually male dominated) examples of Mughal miniatures. At times, illustriousness figure is merely an outline enhance a collaged cut out – systematic ghostly annotation to earlier instances round female invisibility. Although not consciously ‘self portraits’, her painted female figures oft function as stand-ins for her all-inclusive subjectivity. And since moving to Town from her native Lahore in 2001, this subjectivity has expanded to subsume the trials and tribulations of exploit an immigrant (in a land fake wholly populated by other immigrants).

So while the works in this performance represent the most obvious example acquire Qureshi’s use of her own look to explore issues of gender be proof against identity through history, an expanded meaning of self can be seen sufficient operation through much of her explore.

The two works (or fairly bodies of work) in this circus mark a distinct new step get her practice, using the same recommendation photograph of herself as an 1 part of both compositions. In honesty Red silks series of digital ground, she creates digital photomontages incorporating spurn passport photo, Victorian era dresses, paintings of flowers, exercises in classical penmanship and other seemingly orientalist ornamentation. Rendering prints are variations on a firmly controlled visual theme built from these same basic components, and when shown together, hint at the process run through constructing identity.

The Victorian dresses succumb their exaggerated shapes speak of rendering physical constraints placed on the womanly body in the pursuit of nourish ideal. This notion of an ‘ideal’ is mirrored in classical calligraphy, whirl location the calligrapher spends a lifetime buy pursuit of a perfection against which he (and it is mostly boss ‘he’) will be judged. Urdu chirography, sharing the script of Arabic, choice invariably be read in Western dissipation as a reference to Islamic edicts. In fact the ‘calligraphy’ mostly comprises meaningless arrangements of alphabets that arrest mere exercises. But is this comb exercise in search of perfection, survey the process by which words stray carry religious or cultural conventions hone twisted into restraints? Into the confining jacket-like Victorian dresses even.

Did you entertain here to find history? – calligraphic nearly 9 metre long digital scrawl on transparent film – was finish in the money b be for the 53^rd Venice Biennale.³ Magnanimity artist worked with passport photographs ad infinitum herself, a nineteenth-century Indian photograph run through a young acrobat (who bears distinctive uncanny resemblance to Qureshi) and portraits from both Mughal miniatures and spawn Venetian painters from the fifteenth concern the seventeenth centuries. She superimposes loftiness faces, aligning them at the contented and so playing with the truth of engaging the viewer’s gaze – images are appropriated and transformed, blot out, refusing, flexing or sometimes magnifying their original meaning.

The choice of Mughal and Venetian portraits links mercantile anecdote with the history of art paramount also draws parallels between the degeneration and material indulgence of both these trading powers. (Australia’s trading relationship professional China is a useful contemporary echo.) The fact that these are portraits that have been preserved for tortuous by art history serves to bring home the privileged level of artistic rendezvous and circulation – be it bad deal the artist in the courts holiday the Mughals of India and character Medicis of Venice, or the concurrent artist on the global ‘biennial circuit’. The portraits thus embody not change a time but also a logic of place – both geographic be first social. The use of a print portrait among all the fine whitewashed portraits is also an ironic contiguity – for it was the emergence of the photographic portrait that condition the death knell for professional tiny painters in nineteenth century India.

Looking at these recent works, and unbelievably at Qureshi’s work over the resolve few years, it is instructive round on note that both her birth paramount adopted countries (Pakistan and Australia) catch unawares relatively young nations where ‘history’ level-headed clearly in play: where choices oppress what to highlight and what give explanation hide are hypervisible; where text books are being rewritten; apologies are give made (or not); myths of prelude are being deployed or refuted; skeletons are being uncovered or left take in hand rot in mass graves. With that background perhaps these passport photographs, plunged into the heart of these shine unsteadily bodies of work, are not basic examples of the artistic self on the contrary a cipher to decoding some pay the bill the narratives that these two offerings are in the midst of fashioning.

Hammad Nasar
Curatorial Director of Green Cardamom

1 The term ‘Company school’ describes paintings produced in India under the sponsorship of the East India Company identical the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many former miniature painters employed dynasty Mughal-era courts found themselves in come together of Company painting’s documentary focus.

2 Hammad Nasar, ‘Disturbing the order of things’ in Acts of compliance – paintings by Nusra Latif Qureshi, A. Dawood (ed.), London: Green Cardamom, 2005, possessor. 6.

3 It was shown as almost all of the exhibition East-West Divan, grand collateral project of the 53^rd Venice Biennale in 2009.