Perhaps we all carry memories that return to us almost like dreams. We remember the feeling of a place without being able to recall exactly what it looked like; a colour survives while a face disappears. With time, experience begins to blur with imagination, until it becomes difficult to know where one ends and the other begins.

‘Playground’, recently on view at the Vasl Gallery, entered this uncertain space. The exhibition brought together artists whose works move between experience, memory and imagination, allowing familiar forms and places to become slightly strange in the process.

What made the exhibition interesting was that it did not treat memory as something we simply possess. Instead, memory seems to constantly alter the things we believe we know. Ammar Faiz’s works were among the most compelling in this regard. The open field and familiar patterns of Lahore’s terrazzo floors in Fragments in Motion carried a sense of recognition, but they also felt slightly out of reach.

Looking at them, one wondered what........

© Dawn (Magazines)