ISLAMABAD:A solo show of contemporary art paintings by Natasha Malik concluded here Monday at Khas Art Gallery featuring “The Life of an Image” – a multimedia series through which Malik explored the introspective artistic process, its challenges, complexities and outcomes.
The body of work examined the creative process of art-making and interprets the life of the work once it leaves the artist’s studio. The artwork exists and interacts within a multitude of systems, which often operate entirely independent of the artist, each with its own vision and purpose. Ultimately, these systems determine the life of the work in terms of how it is perceived, where it will be viewed and by whom, and how it is contextualized.
These thematic concerns culminate in Artscape, a four-player board game the artist has created which enables its players to experience the art world.The four players are The Artist, The Gallerist, The Critic, and The Collector. Playing cards guide each player throughout the game which consists of discussions, making choices, answering riddles, and monetary exchanges. Various dilemmas are presented to each player in the game which impacts his/her success and relationship with other players.
The game examines the relationship between creative practitioners, art production, and the art market. It addresses power structures such as Patriarchy and Capitalism, specifically drawing attention to ethical art practices. The role of the artist as a creative individual contending with these power structures is a central theme, said the organizers.
Natasha Malik is an artist and the founder of The Creative Process – an artistic platform working across the intersections of site-specific curatorial projects and activism from a feminist point of view.
Currently based out of Islamabad, Pakistan, she is interested in the synthesis of art making and curation in the context of regional education, history, censorship and social justice. As an artist, Malik explores female identity developed within the constraints of patriarchy. Her multi-disciplinary practice includes painting, installation, film, printmaking, and photography. Visceral reactions to tensions experienced under oppressive patriarchal structures are processed and reimagined through her visual vocabulary. The work produced allows space to confront the frictions between interiority and the predominant systems of patriarchy and capitalism.
Malik’s recent work is a multi-media study of objects from personal archives, where she reconstructs memories, dreams, sights and sensations as way of reconciling with loss. She examines the transformative nature of creativity through investigations of materiality, memory and the processes that lead up to constructing tangible surfaces.