There is something wonderfully paradoxical about ‘Borrowed Sky’, Farrukh Shahab’s latest body of work at Mainframe Art Gallery.

His birds are everywhere: flying, perched, nesting, converging and sometimes appearing to emerge from human figures. Yet the sky they inhabit is not entirely their own. It is borrowed, like the images from which the artist constructs most of his paintings.

Shahab’s practice as a visual artist, curator and educator spans nearly four decades. Based in Karachi, he has been working on his bird series ever since his engagement with Fariduddin Attar’s The Conference of the Birds. But while Attar’s allegorical journey remains an important point of departure, ‘Borrowed Sky’ is less concerned with illustrating the Persian mystic’s narrative than with what happens to images, memories and identities as they travel through time.

Shahab’s birds are also a means of exploring transformation and the desire to transcend the confines of the familiar. His technique is central to this process. He works over old museum posters and prints — fragments of art-historical imagery, layering paint and drawing over images that have already lived another life. He does not completely obliterate what lies beneath: traces remain, allowing different times and histories to coexist on the same surface. The old image becomes both foundation and something to be challenged.

Farrukh Shahab’s........

© Dawn (Magazines)