Arriving in London in 1994 to acquire her MA Painting from the Royal College of Art, Risham Syed bought that small book, which every traveller and resident of the metropolis used to have, London AZ, the street atlas, with all lanes, roads and neighbourhoods clearly marked, mapped and defined.
In 2022, you hardly find this publication in a bookstore, or at tourist shops – because of Google maps, an app that enables a user to find his/ her way with the help of a smart phone anywhere in the world.
Before these handy devices, humans needed to navigate their routes, record their voyages, document their conquests and plan their trade with maps made on multiple surfaces. Maps were also a means to connect and contextualise one’s location – hence identity – in relation to other regions. From the Babylonian world map (750-500 BCE) to Indian, Chinese, Aztec, Arab, Medieval European and colonial cartography, mankind has been denoting/ documenting its surroundings, employing several methods, means and systems.
Risham Syed, recognises this situation in her recent work on display at her solo exhibition Appointments and Disappointments with History (September 27-October 6) at Canvas Gallery, Karachi. A total of eight artworks installed at the gallery (abundantly lit, but suspended in dark space) are mainly textile-based surfaces along with domestic objects. Hung like carpet/ partition/ painting, the artist has created quilts with layers of images. Her show seems like a walk through a museum of industrialisation, colonisation, and exploitation.
The quilt like panels are fabricated with Chinese silk of her “mother’s prized possession. She [the mother] would talk about making quilts out of these”. Now the daughter has accomplished her mother’s plan, by “probing the history of this fabric as a material tied up with trade, power, class and culture, hence smeared with violence, drudgery, upheaval and turmoil”.
