hamra abbas

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Woman in Black (2011). Comprised of three stained glass windows measuring three meters in height, Woman in Black depicts the iconic image of a fictional female super-heroine. To view the work the audience is invited to sit on pew-like benches, inside a darkened room reminiscent of a place of worship. Stained glass, as an art form, reached its height in the middle Ages. Like the illuminated manuscript, it was used to illustrate narratives of the Bible to a largely illiterate populace. Seen from inside a place of worship, such windows were deliberately intended to focus the attention of the worshipper on the sacred image by literally ‘blacking out’ contact with the outside world. The interplay of light and dark have often served as metaphors for good and evil and are deliberately employed by Abbas to accentuate the mysterious powers of the female figure, enshrined within the glass. Shown in the company of an army, brandishing swords, and decapitated fighters, the female figure is shown either under attack or quelling an act of violence. She is placed in the middle of a scene of conflict, suggestive of the worldly realities of contemporary society. Though Abbas uses traditional Indian miniature painting to depict the female figure, stylistic flourishes borne out of the stained glass process intercede. Such quirks register the overlap of traditions and skills within the work. Conceptualizing the belief that the message is found in the medium, a tenet that informs much religious art, Abbas playfully adapts an illuminated painting into an illuminated window, whose image by design, come and goes with the fading of the day. Sharmini Pereira

Cityscapes 3 (2011). It is not uncommon for artists and writers to take a particular city as their muse. Cities like Paris, Istanbul, Venice, Cairo, London and countless others have been the subject of literary reflections, charcoal drawings, oil and water paintings, fiction, and for a host of other purposes that range from the absurd to the sublime. In my work, instead of focusing on my home city, or any one city, I aim to develop an investigative project that views a number of cities from a nomadic perspective. Thus being in contrast from the position that attempts to speak as an insider, as has been the custom. Each Cityscapes attempts to reference a peculiar aspect of the city’s history, memory, or the subtext and that has its own story to tell. Cityscapes 3 was done in New York during the winter of 2010/11, and features life-casted heads of Peter, Pete, Tomi, Kleber and Terry.

Su’ar (2011). The word su’ar is used both in Urdu (dialect) and Punjabi for boar. Boar is a repugnant animal in Islam whose meat is forbidden to Muslims. This is seen to be largely in line with all prophets prior to the Prophet Muhammad. The Quran and the tradition (Sunnah) of the Prophet categorically forbid its consumption on the basis that it is impure. Hence it is also used as a pejorative, and if the occasion permits, to be generously used as a hideous insult. As a result of this bias, the boar is seen as a creature that is the filthiest in entire animal kingdom. Due to this view the boar has become an image or motif for shamelessness and depravity of the worst kind. Anyone who is excessively greedy, lacking in hygiene, eats continuously, has no respect for any individual, sexually promiscuous (to the extent of incest) or devoid of any sensitivity may legitimately be called a su’ar. One must add here that it is beside the point if chickens, or for that matter, any other animal may be seen to indulge in the same habits as the boar. Irfan Moeen Khan

Cityscapes 1 (2010) – seemingly an ordinary collection of touristy photographs of Istanbul, is made truly ordinary by removing one element that upon first glance generously gives away the city’s character and history. Each shot taken at the crack of dawn is embedded in a narrative that invites the audience to imagine waking up one morning to find the city changed overnight, literally. Since a long time the minarets have been seen as symbols of political Islam in the Western imagination. In the Muslim world, minarets are part of the wider socio-cultural and aesthetic framework, standing above the winding alleys below, as they are, silent spectators to the bustling market places around, listening from the heights the daily conversations of the multitudes scattered on the ground. One may imagine that the minarets of Istanbul are its memory organs that allow the city to recognize itself at each sunrise. 

Why do fake hands not clap (2010) consists of a dozen sets of the artist’s hands (plaster casts) in clapping motion, and disintegrating as a result. In the video, the clapping produce an eerie soundtrack to represent the destructive impulses cloaked in our collective approval. The sound is not one of applause, and yet it is created by the very act of applause. So it is this disconnect that produces the anxiety, and plunges the viewer in a landscape of broken shards falling all around. click for video

Love Yourself (2009) is a continuation of the my Love Series. It is an installation of vibrating, toylike fighter jets, missiles, bombs, and bullets that, when switched on together with the neon works on the wall, create a vibrant installation of sound, movement, and light. The background neon reminds us that it’s “as good as the real thing”. The installation seeks to draw the attention of the viewer by a titillating display of colorful vibrating objects and blatant sexual innuendo—voyeurism giving way to a disturbing realization that these symbols of violence have been turned into pleasure objects.
video documentation by Kent Long

Paradise Bath (2009) is a set of 9 photographs, and an outcome of a performance I did during my visit to Thessaloniki, Greece. I was immediately drawn to the first Ottoman bath-house built there in 1444. Known as Bey Hammam or Paradise Bath, it stands in the city center as one of the main tourist destinations, as well as a symbol of the country’s Muslim past. This work takes the archetypal Orientalist image of a bath-scene to highlight issues of race, memory and power while referencing the ritual of washing/cleansing — symbolic in Islam and associated with regaining purity.

Please do not step: Loss of a magnificent story (2009) is a site-specific work for Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In this work I use the method of storytelling (dastangoi) to tell a tale of loss and legacy, interlaced with elements of satire and humour. Borrowing from the idea of storytelling, Please do not step weaves together narratives within narratives.

In this is a sign for those who reflect (2009) is inspired by my attendances at meditation sessions in Pakistan. Also called zikr, these were primarily meditations of a Sufi tradition. The movement of the walls, synchronizing with the sounds of breathing, recorded at these sessions, can be read or misread as an enclosing experience. My interest however, is to recreate elements of a sensory experience to imagine the power of synchronizing to one single idea or belief. In this is a sign for those who reflect is commissioned by 9th Sharjah Biennale. video documentation

Ride 2 (2008) is based on a mythical animal called Buraq, traditionally the Holy Prophet Mohammad’s ride that carried him from Mecca to Jerusalem and back on the event of Mi’raj in the 7th century. The image of Buraq has an iconic value in the popular culture of Pakistan, often seen painted on trucks, and portrayed as a winged horse with the head of a woman.
Ride 2 is part of other rides, under-construction.

God Grows on Trees (2008) consists of 99 individual portraits of children and a diasec digital print. The portraits of the children were painted over a year and informed by my visits to Madrassahs (religious schools) in Pakistan. Viewing the current fascination with Madrassahs as being akin to the orientalist painters’ fascination in the 19th and early 20th centuries with the harem, I attempt to thwart these exoticised readings to portray the universality of childhood experience. In painting the portraits I attempt to reproduce the faces as faithfully as I could, marrying realism with the techniques of miniature. The digital print was added to the work later. This is a photograph of trees along a road in Lahore, that are nailed with metal plates which reproduce the 99 names or attributes of God in Islamic tradition, and in fact gave the work its title as well. Also to my fascination is the ubiquity of the number 99 in the incongruous context of a psychologically critical pricing point in consumer society.

In Please do not step 2 (2008) Hamra Abbas uses thin interlacing strips of paper to form the Arabian stalactite work that has been stuck to the floor of the gallery. This dramatic and at the same time delicate and ephemeral work is around 30 meters long and crosses the natural path followed by visitors to the exhibition. In the form of a text, it traces out clear message, despite its size, whispers ‘Please do not step”. Enrique Martinez

Abbas works in many different media, inventing, intriguing, and critical, ways to comment on conventional ideas. In Paper Plates (2008), her target is the ‘skewed dynamics of cultural consumption’. Thin strips of paper have been printed with the phrase, ‘Please get served’, endlessly repeated. Discs of paper collage were made by combining the strips in complex geometrical patterns, which are recognisably Islamic. The discs were then hot-pressed into paper plates, a part of everyday life in every continent. The plates, though, are full of holes and cannot be used to ‘get served’. Tim Stanley

Lessons on Love, in its first incarnation in 2004, was shaped in unfired clay. The image was culled from a coffee table volume of erotic miniatures that showed an amorous couple entwined in the acts of lovemaking and hunting. The political balancing act between lovemaking and violence at play in the work was brought to the fore when a series of three similar couples were made for the Istanbul Biennial (2007). On this occasion three sculptures were fashioned out of hundreds of kilograms of brightly coloured Plasticine – the material’s overt playfulness and malleability lent the work an exaggerated dynamism, drawing out the discomfort of the figures’ conflict-ridden pose with a palpable sense of amusement. Hammad Nasar

Read is a multi-media installation, a suspended labyrinth-like wooden structure, concealing speakers playing the sound of children reciting the Qur’an as they memorize its verses, the standard method of instruction in Pakistan’s madrassahs. The title of the work comes from the command that the prophet Mohammad was said to have been given by God when the Qur’an was revealed to him. Abbas has structured the work so that the viewer must walk through the labyrinth, close to the speakers, offering them an immersive experience of the work. In Read the cacophony of sound filtering through the speakers, of children reciting the Qur’anic verses, is not the orderly regimented harmony that might be expected. Indeed, the chaotic babble is reminiscent of the sounds of a large number of noisy children gathered together anywhere in the world.

Battle Scenes (2006) references a pair of miniature paintings from The Akbarnama (c.1590), a 16th Century Mughal album chronicling the life of the third Mughal Emperor Akbar. These paintings depict a gruesome battle between the emperor Akbar’s army and his warring enemies, and are typical of those produced by his imperial atelier. Working in the post 9/11 context, Abbas draws on imagery from The Akbarnama to undertake a critique of war and contemporary systems of neo-imperialism. Following the diptych form and compositional arrangement of the paintings found in The Akbarnama, Abbas’ animated work depicts an array of figures of different ages, genders and ethnic backgrounds, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, posed warrior-like against a black background. For this work Abbas persuaded visitors at various London parks to pose for her; her subjects representing a cosmopolitan snapshot of London. Haema Sivanesan

Left Right (2006) is an outcome of the Vasl International Artists Workshop, Gadani, Pakistan

MoMA is the Star (2004) is based on the footage made outside the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin on the last day of the exhibition MoMA in Berlin – ‘the art event of 2004′. MoMA in Berlin was made possible due to the extensive renovation and expansion of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and was visited by an unexpected number of 1.2 million visitors in the 7 month (February 20 – September 19, 2004) duration of the exhibition. video clip

In All Right Reserved (2004), the blatant reproduction of the exhibition catalogue’s copyright page wrenches into the public domain Abbas’ concerns over authority and control. By flouting the explicit demands of the copyright holders, the work transforms itself into an eloquent comment on the movement of cultural property, and questions whether it is indeed possible or desirable to retain any degree of autonomy over a work of art. Sophie Gordon

In Please do not step (2004) Abbas creates a territory where art is rescued from the archives of sacred books and translation is mirrored in shades. While the collage of geometric paper tiles reminds the audience upon entering the space to Please do not step, one’s attention is immediately drawn towards the four paintings… Simone Wille