The Night is Dark and Full of Rainbows, by contemporary artist Sharmistha Ray, is a seductive image: A marigold crescent rests at the bottom of an indigo square. The square is inside a vertical rectangle and framed by a diagonal rainbow, such as one thrown by a prism. Rays of color seep through the blue … Read More
For the last year contemporary artist Abdolreza Aminlari has been making his own paper. Working with master collaborators at Dieu Donné, Aminlari has been producing velvety, vibrantly pigmented sheets of cotton paper – prussian blue, neon pink, and deep mauves. The adoption of papermaking is unsurprising; Aminlari is best known for another labor intensive craft … Read More
Contemporary artist Golnar Adili is playing with language. Specifically the shape of Persian. For the past 15 years she has been making art that revels in the physicality of her mother tongue. She has extracted individual letters from her father’s writing and recreated them in print and sculpture, designed her own Persian pixel typography, created … Read More
Randhir Singh’s photograph Sector 5 Saket captures a ubiquitous scene in South Asia: the neighborhood cricket match. A stack of bricks stand in for wickets, field boundaries are demarcated by random objects, and the players’ attire is a mismatched cacophony of color. However, the protagonist of Singh’s photograph is one of the match’s onlookers: the … Read More
A Poet’s Quarrel, by Denver based Indo-Caribbean artist Suchitra Mattai, is an artwork made out of another artwork. Like many of Mattai’s recent pieces it is a textile intervention on a found artwork – embroidery on a landscape painting. Using bright yellow and red thread Mattai has embroidered large lightning bolts onto an otherwise idyllic … Read More
A wall of soft words. Bangla script as sculpture, with pillow-like volume and skin of shimmering sari fabric. The formal beauty of written Bangla catches the eye of the uninitiated. The title, The Spell Song, heightens the mystery of the text. For Bangla speakers the softness will transcend the physical to the linguistic. The phrases … Read More
Hangama Amiri is memorializing the everyday lives of contemporary Afghan urbanites. Combining a fashion designer’s toolkit with the history and language of painting, Amiri is creating rich images that place Afghan women at the center. We see a colorful bazaar, banners for Khatool Mohammadzai, the first and most senior female general in the Afghan National … Read More
Green is a loaded color for some of us. Green is Islam. Green is Pakistan. It is the dominant color on the Pakistani flag and consequently inextricably linked to national identity – saturating government seals, corporate logos, athletic uniforms, and more. It appears prominently in Pakistani-American artist Umber Majeed’s work. Majeed’s choice of green, however, … Read More
Mequitta Ahuja’s 2019 painting Xpect depicts a woman in a red dress reclining on two chairs that have been draped with bright blue fabric. The large painting directly behind her, the smaller painting on the floor in the background, and the lack of furniture around the woman imply that we are in an art gallery. … Read More
One Piece By… is an interview-column by Kajal arts contributor Sarah Burney. In each piece, Burney will have an in-depth discussion with a South Asian artist about one work of art they have created. Pakistani-Canadian artist Zinnia Naqvi mines her family album for inspiration and source material. In her photograph The Wanderers – Niagara’s Falls,1988, … Read More
