The riddling title of Zahra Mansoor’s solo show ‘Fanaa is the Eclipse’ complements the enigmatic quality of her artwork.

Figures painted on fabric emerge from a watery backdrop as if they are participants in a ghostly theatrical performance. The use of diffused light and violet monotones serves to enhance the atmospheric content of Mansoor’s paintings. The presence of a moon in the paintings suggests the time is night — a time pregnant with mystery, shadow and silvery light.

This surreal environment befits the artist’s inquiries regarding gender archetypes and behavioural tropes. Mansoor states: “I have been consumed by desire, fantasy, mirages for most of my life.” Her imagined paradisiacal garden, or gulshan as she calls it, is a liminal zone where certainty is eschewed for the creative possibilities yielded by uncertainty and indeterminism. Noor Ahmed, the curator of this exhibition, says that the work “offers a space where the viewer must sit with the ambiguity of intimacy, of memory, of becoming.”

Mansoor, in the spirit of a flaneuse, has explored city environments from which she extracts inspiration for photographs and paintings. Karachi, Lahore and........

© Dawn (Magazines)