The Cross Art Projects. Artist Exhibition, Debra Phillips, A talker’s echo. 2023

Naeem Rana / Nusra Latif Qureshi: This reminds me of some place — 26 June to 17 July 2010

This reminds me of some place by Naeem Rana and Nusra Latif Qureshi
Artist Talk at 3pm on Saturday 26 June 2010
Exhibition dates 26 June to 17 July 2010

This reminds me of some place by Naeem Rana and Nusra Latif Qureshi explores how symbolic forms meld cultural tradition with changing ideas about identity and belonging. The artists approach these themes through interrelated and reciprocal works that combine the traditional and modern, local and international, content and form.

Naeem Rana comes from a family of calligraphers and Urdu calligraphy is an identifying feature in his work, which tends to be very bold in the manner of Indian and Pakistani movie posters and is conceptually political.

In this lyrical series, however, titled Ashyana, he illuminates experiences and attachments to two places — Pakistan and Australia. The work unites word and image through calligraphy and the digital to manifest the beauty of each place and show how each provides an appreciation of the importance of the other.

Rana states: ‘It is like talking two languages and listening and understanding both of them with the understanding of the same and the other language while speaking one’.

Nusra Latif Qureshi also layers tradition with cultural inquiry. Qureshi is concerned with migration, possession and cultural colonisation. In this series she examines Bollywood’s hold on the global imaginary via its exuberant melodrama to cloak her hallmark interest in themes of propaganda and manipulaton, subjectivity versus objective narrative history.

Qureshi and Rana trained at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore and undertook post-graduate studies at the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne. The works function as spatial maps typically combining flat planes of colour with overlaid silhouettes or solid forms with pattern playing a support role.

Their work is buttressed by major museum exhibitions, often accompanied by scholarly publications, and in university art museums and biennials. For example, Nusra Latif Qureshi participated in the 2006 Asia Pacific Triennale.

There is something quite potent and distinctive in this generation of contemporary Pakistani artists. Practitioners enchant audiences with their superb skills combined with witty art historical and political plays, ploys and paradoxes.

Notes: significant catalogues include: Contemporary Miniature Paintings from Pakistan at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2004); Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA (Green Cardamom and Aldrich Contemporary, 2005); Beyond the Page: Contemporary Art from Pakistan at Manchester Art Gallery and Asia House, London (Green Cardamom, Asia House, Manchester Art Gallery and Shisha, 2006) and Reinventing miniature in Innovation through Tradition: Contemporary Art from Iran and Pakistan (London: British Museum, 2009)