In midst of a pandemic and social distancing, art seems to offer new hope for us. Beaconhouse National University recently organized a degree show, displaying the artworks of their MA Art and Design graduates. Comprising various remarkable emerging artists, the show created a dialogue through connecting individual/collective experiences between the artist, the artwork, and the audience.

Anusha Khalid’s surreal short films express her subconscious imagination, she used various emotional elements to symbolically depict her thoughts. In an attempt to connect her subconscious with the collective subconscious of the viewer, she expresses her work through her everyday human experience. Her choice of medium, the surreal artistic compositions, and contrasting color palette reminds one of Andrei Trovosky’s art film ‘The Mirror’, Trovosky narrated his personal experience of World War II by connecting it to the collective nostalgia of the Second World War, similarly, Anusha captured the essence of that very collective human struggle through the surreal representation of her own past experiences.

Kashmala Khan’s stop motion films and set designs inspired by her own house are an emblem of pain and yearning. Her work depicts a plethora of emotions, complex emotions, such as distress, emptiness, and hope one feels after losing a family member, especially a mother. Composed of simple visual compositions portraying everyday mundane activities, her work connects the viewer through an allegorical depiction of human suffering and prolonged grief. Her work suggests that it’s important to not just focus on the void they left but rather focus on the small things, perhaps by cherishing time with other family members or feeling their presence in every new thing like in a new flower.

Sunita Maharjan’s work portrays the connection of humanity with nature in an industrialized landscape. She redefines our understanding of conventional medium by juxtaposing organic materials like seeds, soil, plants with industrial material including iron rods and wire mesh. Her work questions the intervention of humankind and nature within the new urban space. It converses with the viewer forthrightly. Choosing nature as her creative medium, her work is a documentation of the cycle of life within the advancing technological world.

Hema Sheroni Joseph’s work is a journal of all the houses she lived in. She chose various materials as her creative language, like fabric, thermoplastics, and metal. She collects different materials from different regions and incorporates them into her work as a symbol of identity, how cultures associate their identity through lifeless things. She created fragile houses representing her self-portrait. She inquires about the concept of home and how people, time, and place add layers to it. She used embroidery and stitching in her work to connect it with her history, the craft she learned from her female family members; her mother and grandmother. She keeps these houses incomplete, unfinished, metaphorically depicting her history with the place. Although incomplete her work embodies a wholeness within.

Ali Shariq Jamali’s conceptual art pieces deal with the concept of perception and its limitations. He intends to ask complicated questions like what is reality? or how can one define it? Is it a subjective or an objective experience? He juxtaposed his conceptual understanding of reality with simple objects and challenges the existing notions of reality through his art.

Hina Muzaffer’s awareness-based work is about stray animals. She documented and rescued stray dogs. Her hauntingly simple documentary films are eye-opening. Her work sheds light on a serious issue of Pakistani society, the killing of stay animals, and our desensitization to it as a society. Through her work, she intended to educate the general public specifically children on animal rights. She organized a six-week-long workshop for kids to make them empathize with stray animals, she then asked them to draw those animals. She later turned these drawings into stuff toys. Her understanding of art to address important social issues is quite mature and clever.

Yumna’s work investigates the fragility of time and its ultimate end. She used elements of life i.e earth, fire, water, air to represent life. She photographed the whole process of life, from beginning till its decay, symbolically capturing the process in an attempt to make it immortal. Her work is simple yet speaks volumes.

Wajeeha’s work delineates the difference between reality and fantasy. Using stylized animation comprising of pixelated compositions from nature, she reimagines the world through poetic language. For example in one of her works she has used water as a metaphor, representing life, similar to water, humans create their path by constantly running from one destination to another.

Kashif Mangi’s work is an exploration of the medium. He used material as an object and its end product. He displayed it unconventionally. His work makes you reconsider one’s understanding of art, its materiality, and the display.

Amrit Karki’s work is an inquiry into everyday objects and how we create meaning out of them according to our past experiences. He intended to connect his work to individual as well as larger collective narratives. He used objects like mops, clock, horn speaker, pencil, and sharpener and completely transformed its language. Challenging the familiar essence of an object, his work makes one uncomfortable, gives a feeling of uneasiness.

Sana Fatima’s work immerses one into the horror of her space. Her work talks about mental trauma and not being able to heal it. She has used various elements as a metaphor to represent her association with the trauma. Her work embodies a horrifying aura, claustrophobic, makes you anticipate a threat in a quiet dark room.

Click here to visit MA Ad's Virtual Degree Show 2021