Pakistani artist Nadia Khawaja’s artwork called “I Am” reflects her nomadic childhood. It features a long list of countries that she has lived in or visited, along with precise calculations of the percentage of her life spent in each place so far. Through this work, the artist contemplates the various influences in her life and how they have shaped her identity. But she also questions whether it is possible to measure the impact of every experience in our life. The piece is part of her latest exhibition “In Search of Me”, where the artist has explored various ways of discovering her true self. Although Khawaja’s work is deeply personal, it resonates with the need of every person to understand who they are and what their relationship with the world around them is.
“Because of my father’s international job, I grew up without any sense of belonging to a particular culture or country. My identity has been shaped by every interaction and every experience in my life. And my work is about going beyond the layers of social and cultural conditioning to find my real self. I believe that every human being has this quest for self-discovery and self-expression,” Khawaja says.
The artist has used various media such as photography, drawing, painting, neon installations and digital art to get in touch with her true self. But her main tool is her intuition. The basic idea behind her work is to allow her thoughts and emotions to flow spontaneously, revealing her own inner being to herself. For the two photographic series she is displaying, titled “Grist for the Mill” and “Sea For Yourself” Khawaja took thousands of pictures with her iPhone, capturing random sights and moments such as a tranquil lake in the mountains, a dead sparrow in her yard and raindrops on the windscreen of her car. She then put the images together in pairs based purely on the intuitive feeling that they belonged together. “We are conditioned to look at things and react to them in a certain way and to find some meaning in every narrative. But I paired these images simply because they felt right together. Rather than the visual image, I responded to some intangible emotion it evoked in me. And looking at the paired images now tells me a lot about my perception of different elements, my reaction to different stimuli, and my relationship with the world around me,” she says.
Khawaja’s favourite medium is pencil drawing, and she has experimented with many different concepts in her drawings for this show. One set, titled “I love language”, features a range of imaginary hieroglyph-like symbols. “These forms are like doodles that come from deep within my subconscious and probably represent some kind of catharsis of all the images and information that I have been fed since birth and are accumulated in my consciousness. Maybe we all have an internal vocabulary such as this concealed within us. I have spent years mulling over these pictograms that mean nothing, yet are meaningful to me. I have separated them into various categories based on their shape and complexity, and put them together into words to write these pages of text that nobody can read. It is a playful way to invite viewers to connect with these symbols and to find their own meaning in these meaningless texts,” she says. The artist has also created a neon installation, with some of the symbols arranged in a circular pattern to represent the cycle of life. “Here I have used forms that looked like symbols of fertility, immersion, separation, nesting and nurturing, because instead of suppressing or denying sexuality, I want to celebrate it as the central life force of human civilisation and of creativity,” she says.
The idea of consciously letting go is explored further in a set of deeply meditative drawings filled with patterns created from repetitions of simple geometric forms. While many of these drawings have been done by hand, in others the artist has used a stamp of a square, circle or triangle to create rhythmic patterns that perhaps express her desire to find some order from chaos and some balance within. “These drawings require a lot of patience and solitude. It is about being with myself and allowing the bubbles from deep inside to come up to the surface. It is not about looking for meaning, but just a celebration of being,” Khawaja says.
The artist also plays with these rhythmic geometric patterns in a large acrylic painting, “Ode to the Sun”. This is the first time she is exhibiting a painting. “This is a joyful play with form and colour that reflects the movement and energy of music and dance, which I have always loved. My work is not about saying something; it is just about exploring what is inside me and how that interacts with the elements around me. It is about just being,” the artist says.
Jyoti Kalsi is an arts enthusiast based in Dubai.
“In Search of Me” will run at Grey Noise, Al Quoz, until June 30.
