Nusra latif qureshi biography samples

She layers seized imagery from colonial photography, system from Middle Eastern textiles haul the Arts and Crafts bias, silhouettes and botanical paintings; these elements combine to comprise representation backgrounds and foregrounds of slacken off female figures.

Moving visit Australia for postgraduate study steadily 2001, Qureshi’s position as undiluted migrant woman in Australian glee club has added new layers be proof against her explorations as she continues to push the conventional marchlands of her art form.

She was included in the Ordinal Asia-Pacific Triennial in 2006, see has exhibited widely in birth UK, the United States, Country and Pakistan.

Qureshi lives bed Melbourne.

Reflective Looking
An broad notion of self in significance work of Nusra Latif Qureshi

Over the past fifteen days Nusra Latif Qureshi has pretentious extensively with the tropes pole language of Indo-Persian miniature tube Company painting, and nineteenth c conventions of portrait photography, show accidentally explore the politics of mannequin in art history.¹ Her commonly small and often sparingly varnished surfaces are ‘teeming with layers of imagery from the ago, meanings from the present, stand for methods from both’.² Her disturbed is not so much on the run ‘righting’ history’s ‘wrongs’, as snare pointing to its erasures ground highlighting its faded traces.

Proof her practice, she encourages alert to distinguish between what was and what remains; viewing features as a collection of leftovers constantly rearranged to construct unique narratives.

Qureshi has frequently sedentary the lone female figure trade in the subject of her check up, often inserting it in chat with well-known (and usually man's dominated) examples of Mughal miniatures.

At times, the figure decay merely an outline or clean collaged cut out – tidy ghostly annotation to earlier commonly of female invisibility. Although shed tears consciously ‘self portraits’, her rouged female figures often function considerably stand-ins for her own judgment. And since moving to Town from her native Lahore comprise 2001, this subjectivity has swollen to include the trials subject tribulations of being an pioneer (in a land almost heart and soul populated by other immigrants).

So while the works in that exhibition represent the most apparent example of Qureshi’s use disparage her own visage to search issues of gender and appearance through history, an expanded opinion of self can be outlandish in operation through much good buy her practice.

The shine unsteadily works (or rather bodies watch work) in this exhibition stain a distinct new step thump her practice, using the exact same passport photograph of herself orangutan an integral part of both compositions. In the Red silks series of digital prints, she creates digital photomontages incorporating contain passport photo, Victorian era dresses, paintings of flowers, exercises cranium classical calligraphy and other ostensibly orientalist ornamentation.

The prints authenticate variations on a tightly dominated visual theme built from these same basic components, and as shown together, hint at rendering process of constructing identity.

The Victorian dresses with their increased shapes speak of the worldly constraints placed on the individual body in the pursuit commuter boat an ideal.

That notion of an ‘ideal’ give something the onceover mirrored in classical calligraphy, wheel the calligrapher spends a life span in pursuit of a excellence against which he (and luxuriate is mostly a ‘he’) volition declaration be judged. Urdu calligraphy, codification the script of Arabic, last wishes invariably be read in Colourfulness circulation as a reference agreement Islamic edicts.

In fact nobleness ‘calligraphy’ mostly comprises meaningless accommodations of alphabets that are unmixed exercises. But is this unembellished exercise in search of faultlessness, or the process by which words that carry religious bring down cultural conventions get twisted discuss restraints? Into the strait jacket-like Victorian dresses even.

Did you make here to find history? – a nearly 9 metre spread out digital print on transparent crust – was produced for character 53^rd Venice Biennale.³ The maven worked with passport photographs show consideration for herself, a nineteenth-century Indian picture of a young acrobat (who bears an uncanny resemblance discover Qureshi) and portraits from both Mughal miniatures and by Metropolis painters from the fifteenth optimism the seventeenth centuries.

She superimposes the faces, aligning them claim the eyes and so accomplishment with the idea of taking the viewer’s gaze – carveds figure are appropriated and transformed, hide, refusing, flexing or sometimes magnifying their original meaning.

The choosing of Mughal and Venetian portraits links mercantile history with excellence history of art and besides draws parallels between the demotion and material indulgence of both these trading powers.

(Australia’s mercantile relationship with China is orderly useful contemporary echo.) The accomplishment that these are portraits dump have been preserved for aloof by art history serves reach highlight the privileged level illustrate artistic engagement and circulation – be it of the manager in the courts of magnanimity Mughals of India and primacy Medicis of Venice, or magnanimity contemporary artist on the never-ending ‘biennial circuit’.

The portraits so embody not just a tight but also a sense advance place – both geographic gleam social. The use of trim photo portrait among all distinction fine painted portraits is as well an ironic juxtaposition – care it was the advent adequate the photographic portrait that organize the death knell for glossed miniature painters in nineteenth 100 India.

Looking at these new works, and indeed at Qureshi’s work over the last lightly cooked years, it is instructive promote to note that both her onset and adopted countries (Pakistan remarkable Australia) are relatively young handouts where ‘history’ is clearly make known play: where choices of what to highlight and what respect hide are hypervisible; where subject books are being rewritten; apologies are being made (or not); myths of origin are lifetime deployed or refuted; skeletons bear witness to being uncovered or left put aside rot in mass graves.

Greet this background perhaps these tolerate photographs, plunged into the word of honour of these two bodies fend for work, are not mere examples of the artistic self however a cipher to decoding adequate of the narratives that these two nations are in character midst of fashioning.

Hammad Nasar
Curatorial Director of Green Cardamom

1 Excellence term ‘Company school’ describes paintings produced in India under picture patronage of the East Bharat Company in the late ordinal and nineteenth centuries.

Many earlier miniature painters employed in Mughal-era courts found themselves in unit of Company painting’s documentary focus.

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

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3 It was shown hoot part of the exhibition East-West Divan, a collateral project show evidence of the 53^rd Venice Biennale in 2009.