Mehwish Iqbal: Without Dwelling

The aesthetics of migration reside at the core of Mehwish Iqbal’s poetically charged contemporary art practice, and serves as the basis for examining larger socio-political questions regarding the entwined relationship between migration and labor, which she rigorously explores via embroidery, printmaking, painting, textiles and sculpture and installation. Born in 1981 in Sangla Hill, Punjab province Pakistan Iqbal completed a BFA in Painting from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, there she was taught by art critic Quddus Mirza, who is known for mentoring Iqbal’s generation of contemporary Pakistani painters. She later pursued a MA in Printmaking from the University of New South Wales, in Sydney Australia and subsequently established her professional studio in Sydney, where the artist has lived and worked since 2006, exhibiting throughout Australia and internationally. Exploring the pull of living and working between multiple local and global spaces, her works encapsulate the spirit of artists who make work on the threshold, think in more than one brain and speak more than one tongue. In this essay I discuss select art and ideas from Iqbal’s 2022 exhibition Laa Makaan (which means without fixed dwelling in Urdu, Arabic and Persian prose) which is anchored within a study of complex human geographical patterns and offers non-didactic and non- linear narratives on ideas related to feminism, labor, imperialism, mythologies and power.

As part of the South Asian diaspora living in Australia Iqbal has sought to consolidate a sense of common-wealth through her work by frequently working alongside various female and femme identifying community groups from the Global South Majority to create an environment of reciprocal cultural and creative labor. Many of the individuals that Iqbal has worked with are displaced people who have fled unstable social and political conditions that have been brought on by the lingering effects of neo-imperialism such as ongoing conflict and economic disparity. In the work Birth of a New Age, (2022), a large scale figurative painting in shades of black, white and grey, Iqbal creates a large human form that is literally and figuratively pregnant. Functioning as a monument to an unknown hero the painting resembles an overbearing statuesque character, which solicits worship as fertile carrier of life. Decorative opaque circles and flora adorn the figure as well as motifs of two leopards who ironically do not have any spots, which subverts the popular saying “a leopard never changes its spots”. The work also borrows from mythology whereby animals that have frequently been allegorized in ancient fable to tell moral tales, such as the ancient Sanskrit Panchatantra, from the 2nd century. These stories were the basis for the popular Old Persian manuscript Kalilah and Dimna that was later translated into Arabic in the 8th century. The painting is also reminiscent the 2nd century Gandhara civilization buddhas statues from North Western Pakistan that depict the ancient Indo-Greek fusion of Hellenistic and Buddhist from the pre- Islamic Indian Subcontinent. This work and the history that it relates to is a reminder of the region’s Buddhist, Hindu and shamanistic past, religions and traditions, that were later morphed into Islam under the singular notion of oneness echoed in the Muslim fundamental belief that ‘There is no God, but God.’

Correspondingly, Birth of a New Age builds off of the earlier work Capsules (2021) which features a series of nine textile cut out silhouettes of busts layered upon cut outs of apparel such as jackets and trousers. Reimagining the kind of mannequins that are used by seamstresses to drape and pin garments the piece alludes to the labor practices of immigrant women from the Indian-subcontinent and other communities that create spaces for community as well as generate income. Unfortunately, this type of work is also subject to exploitation as it often includes employees made up of undocumented immigrants whose circumstances force them to work unregulated hours and earn less than minimum wage. These individuals are effectively ‘invisible’ and partake in the work that ‘locals’would ordinarily shun, however, they contribute to a lucrative fast fashion industry, that profits from their vulnerability. Thus, Iqbal gives value to labor practices that are unseen, unrecorded and hidden.

In other textile mixed media works Iqbal creates alternative surreal dream like maps that explore epic histories, journeys and ecologies and operate as new mappings for complex cartographies. In the work Shah Bahadur (2022) which loosely translates into English from Iqbal’s Urdu mother tongue to strong king an image of a leopard in colorful red and brown threads is collaged atop of a green jacket and trousers, which are suggestive of army uniforms, a nod to Pakistan’s and Western military ambitions. Furthermore, the piece features Urdu text that is embroidered on the reverse of the semi- transparent textile and signals the reversal of order, as the text is forced to be read from left to right, which is incorrect since the Urdu script akin to Arabic and Persian is read right to left.

In a similar vein the works Badshah (another word for ruling king) and Sultanate (a country ruled by a sultan) continue with the monarchic theme and draws from the region’s rich Indo-Persian and Mughal ruling dynasties. To further illuminate these works Iqbal creates fantastical embroidered scenes featuring flora, fauna, angels and beasts. The art historical trajectory of these works references the rich tradition of Indo-Persian painting that Iqbal is trained in, and feature vivid scenes of paradise that are presented through the metaphor of the garden. The lineage of these ideas stems from the illustrations that accompanied the 11th century Persian epic the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi, which is the basis for a longstanding tradition of Persian painting.

In Mehwish Iqbal’s work the remixing and collaging of signs and symbols from the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane, the local and the global are meticulously combined to highlight high and low registers in debates surrounding the fine arts and craft, and also contribute to a nuanced tapestry of contemporary thought on complex geopolitical conditions. Iqbal’s method of piercing, sewing and stitching together is an act of defiance against fixed categorization, which refuses being fixed to one place or system of thought.

Mehwish Iqbal’s intricate artworks trace the ebb and flow of humanity in motion across the globe. Trained as a painter in Lahore, Pakistan, Iqbal migrated to Dubai, then Australia to pursue her graduate studies in printmaking. Combining print media techniques with tempera painting, object-making and textiles, she has developed a distinctive visual vocabulary over the past decade that is characterised by its unconventional, fragile materiality.

Positioned on the gallery walls and floor, Iqbal’s works have a three-dimensional presence. The use of recyclable materials such as tissue paper, newsprint and dressmaker’s paper give them an air of impermanence despite their hand-painted, embellished surfaces. As a frequent traveller between Australia and Pakistan, Iqbal has spoken about the global disparity of wealth and poverty, and the value placed on human life in two very different landscapes. ‘Pakistan was going through a lot of turmoil around 2012, 2014,’ she recalls. ‘I was looking at the loss of life and how it’s perceived there, and how life is valued here. My materials became a symbolic response to the fragility and complexity of life.’

Artist residencies in Turkey and the United States, where Iqbal engaged with Syrian refugees and undocumented Mexican communities, have expanded her focus on narratives of migration and diaspora.

I researched into the aftermath of World War II, looking at how people were displaced, and the huge exodus of people locating themselves in different landscapes where their identities were altered. That is so relevant to what we are going through in current times, to the idea of restricted and forced movement of whole communities, as a consequence of cultural or religious identity.

Iqbal’s installation Grey Wall (2020–21) comprises 50,000 tiny human silhouettes, each made from hand-cut paper and painted with three layers of wash by the artist. Unfolding across a long gallery wall, the figures surge forward in drifts and clusters, layers of paper accumulating densely then dispersing outwards. The same yet different, they retain traces of individuality despite their massed presence.

Female agency, and the intertwined relationship between human and natural worlds, are also themes within Iqbal’s art. ‘I was raised by very strong women in a patriarchal system, and heavily influenced by my grandmother who played a central role in the Partition of Pakistan,’ she says. ‘Women and children were the most vulnerable during the time of Independence. Listening to her stories of survival, from a young age, strengthened my belief in the role of women in society.’

Iqbal was raised in a village in the Punjab region of Pakistan, before moving to Lahore. Surrounded by animal life, she developed an abiding interest in the natural world – something that has deepened in response to Australia’s diverse flora and fauna. ‘There is a sublime connection between the human and animal world, including insects and bees. Our ecosystem depends on them and although individual creatures may be considered insignificant, they are vital and contribute so much.’

Insects – bees, butterflies and moths – are plentiful in Iqbal’s multi-panel work Fragments of an Assembled Landscape (2020). Incorporating printmaking, watercolour, embroidery and silver leaf on dressmaker’s paper, it brings together animal and human kingdoms through a procession of human silhouettes, wolves and insect life. The embroidered figure of a pregnant woman symbolises the sustenance of life and land: a powerful force holding children, families and communities together. Conversely, the survival strategies of the animal kingdom – the alpha male, territorial borders and their policing against strangers – are amplified in the human world, with devastating consequences.

Through this and other works, Iqbal reminds us of our fragile place within the world, and the power of community and connection in an era of vast change.

https://www.the-national.com.au/artists/mehwish-iqbal/assemblage-of-a-fragmented-landscape/

Within my blood, this love for land - Boundaries in flux

THE SUN IS bright and hard, the ferries and buildings glinting silver the day I catch the train to Sydney’s Circular Quay. I’m here to see Mehwish Iqbal’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia as part of The National biennial showcase of contemporary Australian art. For weeks I’ve been trawling Iqbal’s back catalogue online, hovering my cursor above works that explore mothers, migration and community. Finally, I am here. It’s the second day of winter, still a couple of weeks before the delta strain will spread from Sydney’s east (where I am) to the west, where I grew up and where Iqbal now lives. A couple of weeks before its separations will infuse our conversations with a particular distance.

To fully appreciate the scale of Grey Wall (2020–21), her imposing floor-to-ceiling installation, I have to step backwards until I am almost up against the artwork opposite. It is twenty metres long, roughly the size of a pygmy blue whale. Its black-and-white amorphous mass of human silhouettes is a commentary on global movement and migration. The figures overlap and swell, the work emerging like a landmass from the sea.

Mehwish Iqbal, Grey Wall (2020 - 2021)

Born and raised in Sangla Hill in the Punjab region of Pakistan, Iqbal moved to Australia in 2006 to complete her postgraduate studies in printmaking at the University of New South Wales. Incorporating painting, textiles, sculpture and installation, her work explores refugee movements, diaspora, power, womanhood and identity. She has shown widely across Australia, Pakistan, the US, Turkey and Hong Kong, participating in international art fairs and exhibitions, including Contemporary Istanbul, Art Central Hong Kong, Karachi Print Biennial and Sydney Contemporary. While her work has been exhibited around the world, her subject matter often intersects with restrictions on human agency and movement. This newest work comprises 50,000 paper silhouettes, each hand-cut and individually painted. It gives a sense of drifts of people surging forward and outward – heads, arms, legs protruding – in both orderly and chaotic migrations; absences or no-go zones are represented by white space. There is propulsion, movement, but also moments of stasis – a pause in the journey, a camp, a temporary settlement. Spillage across borders, too.

‘The work is referring to the global phenomenon of people being divided through policymaking, and the creation of boundaries which are heavily controlled,’ Iqbal says later when we speak on the phone.

The catalyst for the work was Donald Trump’s ascent to power in 2016 and his introduction of travel bans in 2017, barring individuals primarily from Muslim countries – later African ones – from entering the US. At the time, Iqbal was living in New York and researching the demarcation of territories in the aftermath of World War II, the ways in which families and communities were dislocated by these decisions. At the same time, protests outside her window were calling for an end to the enforced separation of Mexican families who had crossed the US border.

The three conversations that fed into this essay took place by phone as, like much of Australia and the world, we are kept apart by COVID-19. National borders are again tightened, families again separated and, through 2021, the Australian Government continues to pursue an inconsistent, often discriminatory, policy that bars people from certain countries entering Australia. My own parents made the difficult decision to fly to Russia at the start of the pandemic when my grandmother became critically ill. Stranded overseas as each consecutive Sydney-bound flight was cancelled, they were still lucky; many Australian citizens, far from home, have not had the chance to care for, or say goodbye to, loved ones.

We lose sight of individuals first in the largeness and messiness of global catastrophes and conflicts and then again in the tiny newspaper print that reports on them; individuals are often reduced to statistics. Haiti earthquake 2021: more than 2,200 dead. War in Afghanistan: more than 71,000 civilian fatalities. Australian immigration detention: 1,440 people held. It is sometimes hard to comprehend that these conflicts, calamities and policies affect individual people – until an image or a story hits you in the gut. Think of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned and washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean, along with his brother and mother, when their small inflatable boat capsized in September 2015. The image of one toddler lying face down in the sand made global headlines.

‘The reason each individual is painted with their own landscape is again emphasising the fact that each person is important in their own right,’ Iqbal explains of Grey Wall.

I watch a video of her dipping the paper silhouettes into trays of grey wash, her face open and serene as her hands make each movement. Each of the 50,000 figures are then individually marked with paint to delineate their features. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of hours it took,’ she tells me. To me, those curves or lines seem as if they might signify a bad knee, a recent heartbreak, a smattering of freckles on the bridge of a nose, the agonising wait for a visa, shrapnel lodged in skin.

Waking early each morning, Iqbal worked until ten or eleven o’clock at night, six days a week. ‘The process weighed heavily on me… I was having conversations with that work every day and it took a toll.’

Her artwork demands that the viewer spend time with it, too. Absorbing, thinking, feeling. It’s necessary to move closer to examine clusters and individual figures, noticing both patterns and anomalies. There are areas of saturation – overlapping bodies, crowds, bottlenecks, and areas of sparseness – absence, stillness, danger. In the serene, climate-controlled space of a gallery, the viewer is invited into notions of exclusion and dislocation.

As for the shape the work took, refugees may live in borderlands for several years, Iqbal says, before ultimately being relocated. ‘But while there,’ she explains, ‘they develop a sense of community and they form their own boundaries, their own mappings, their own structures. So those formations are very organic.’ While looking at the installation, I’ve jotted down in my notebook: bark, moss (?) – my sense of the landscape of the work as I studied it. ‘If you look closely, there are some clusters that almost mimic the shapes of flowers, or the map of a country.’

As COVID-19 changes how we demarcate both the world and the people in it, Grey Wall is also a reflection on the way in which global and national laws and policies determine who can go where and whose lives we value. More broadly, for Iqbal, ‘the work is looking at the human condition and the notion of separation.’

A couple of weeks after I stand with this work in the gallery, the New South Wales Government will send in helicopters and the army to intimidate residents of western Sydney into compliance. In the state in which I live, it is easier to blame individuals, cheaper to deploy police, than to show good leadership and provide accessible financial support and vaccines.

But on the day of my visit, my world does not yet hold these moments. I catch the lift up to the rooftop bar and order a glass of wine. Shortly after, everything shifts.

I WAS HOPING to see Iqbal’s studio as I worked on this essay, to see her embroideries and sketches laid out on the table, perhaps beside a favourite mug (she tells me she drinks tea almost constantly), or flowers from her sunny garden. I imagine a large, solid dining table, a jumper tossed over a chair, a stuffed elephant left by her toddler on the rug; these tiny details that bring a person into focus endear us to each other.

‘How do you know when something is finished?’ I ask Iqbal.

‘Sometimes the work becomes very heavy in terms of its treatments, and it needs breathing space for the viewer to actually come close and study each element separately, and that’s when I think I need to step back a moment and remove myself from it.’

This is particularly the case, she explains, when she works with embroidery that involves multiple elements and layers – silver leaf, watercolour, thread. As she introduces a new component into a work, Iqbal observes how it converses with all the other components and makes adjustments until there is a sense of balance.

There are ‘certain times when you feel the work is not finished, not in its entirety, but you have to let go of it,’ she explains. That process can be a difficult one. ‘The work is personal, because it’s documenting something that is coming from you. So, you know, you get attached to a work, it’s of course hard to part with… But it’s like giving birth to a child and after you’ve given birth, you have to let go of that control.’ I can hear her newborn like a gull down the line. ‘But if I were in that space, I would never be able to make another work. I have to intentionally remove myself.’

I remember the panic when my first book went to print – it wasn’t ready, I wasn’t ready.

‘What’s the feeling you have when a work is complete?’ I ask

‘I never want to have it complete completely…’ She pauses. ‘Maybe after a month or so, I look at it and I’m like, this looks complete, maybe I made the right decision… It’s funny how the work actually speaks to you over time… After a year when I revisit it, maybe I think, no, I could have done more.’

That’s how I think about my own writing, too. The American writer George Saunders has described his own iterative and intuitive approach to editing – going over the same sentences, tweaking, adding here, removing there, until the work feels ‘right’. There are no fireworks in the sky, the heavens do not open; after a passage of time, the work might look different, too, and I feel impelled to again uncap my red pen.

In terms of the role of art in politics and activism, ‘art initiates dialogue,’ Iqbal says. ‘The idea is to bring light to certain things.’ She wants people to engage with the work, to spend time with it, to examine ideas and question norms through its lens. ‘When change occurs, or how change occurs, is not up to me.’

On the individual figures in Grey Wall, Iqbal reflects, ‘When you are in their presence, you can’t ignore this trend. And although they might be fragile singularly, when they are together, that fragility reverses itself and it becomes something very strong and powerful.’

ONE OF IQBAL’S earliest memories of making art is of sketching portraits of her grandmother’s cats and the neighbours and farmers who came by the house in Sangla Hill. Using raw charcoal left over from her mother’s cooking, she’d draw directly onto the floor or walls, as well as covering notebooks and her school slate in pictures.

‘Art is something that is part of me,’ she says, ‘so it’s not about making choices whether I wanted to be this or that… This is something that’s innate and has always been there…’

I’m fascinated by these kinds of statements: I have never had this certainty about my own art. While my peers read ‘proper’ books, I was sent to English as a Second Language classes to play with sock puppets and sound out words. I was not someone who grew up knowing they wanted to be a writer.

Iqbal’s grandmother, an important influence in her life, was raised without a formal education in Pakistan: Iqbal Begum taught herself to read and write, to farm and ride a tractor and, when her husband died, she raised their five young children on her own.

Iqbal relays this memory. One day, coming back from inspecting her land, Begum’s feet were bare and young Iqbal asked her grandmother, ‘Where are the shoes that your aunties gave you?’ The shoes were a new pair of expensive Italian slides.

It turned out that a stranger had said, quite casually, to Begum, ‘I will never have the chance to wear such beautiful shoes.’ Begum slipped off her slides, and both women stood, for a moment, barefoot in the fertile soil.

‘Nothing should be more important than people,’ as she later explained to her granddaughter.

‘Those are ideals that have been forged within me growing up as a child,’ Iqbal says. ‘You know, respect for every individual irrespective of where they’re coming from, what their beliefs are, or what their background or social status is.’

She grew up listening to her grandmother’s stories about Partition – the division of British India into two separate states, India and Pakistan, in 1947, which triggered violence and led to millions of people leaving their homes in search of safety. Her grandmother had firmly believed that individuals had a right to their own country and to freely practise their faith. Taking in both Muslim and Hindu refugees, she created makeshift camps, providing shelter and food for women and their families. ‘These events shaped my way of looking at life. So even what happens now, politically or geographically, I’m always sensitive to this,’ Iqbal says.

I think of Ann Patchett’s teacher, the writer and activist Grace Paley, who stuck ‘cancelled’ notices on classroom doors when there was something more pressing than writing good prose to attend to – a human rights protest, a rally, a cause. ‘She taught me that writing must not be compartmentalised,’ Patchett writes in her 2013 memoir This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. ‘You don’t step out of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life, and who you were as a mother, teacher, friend, citizen, activist and artist was all the same person.’

Even though Begum may not have shared her granddaughter’s passion for drawing, she understood its importance for her. ‘Don’t stop Iqbal from pursuing her dreams,’ she said to the family shortly before her death. With a lineage of engineers and doctors, Iqbal’s mother had hoped she would study dentistry or medicine like her sister.

I think of my own parents – both engineers; of their disquiet when I announced I was withdrawing from my commerce degree and then later from a bachelor of law to complete a double major in sociology and psychology. They had scrimped and saved roubles, then dollars, and here I was throwing away what they saw as a lucrative career to study the humanities. Like many migrants, they wanted for their kids the financial security and stability they themselves had once lacked.

Having spent most of her life apart from her mother, Iqbal explores the distance and separation that exists in Letters to My Mother (2017), a series of hand-carved raw charcoal sculptures with inscriptions in Urdu and English, a work that also pays homage to her mother’s cooking. During annual celebrations, the times when her mother came home to Sangla Hill each year, Iqbal would watch her tend to the charcoal stove, preparing dishes like saag, a spinach and cheese curry – Iqbal’s favourite – over low heat for days. She was showing her love for family through the art of cooking. Letters to My Mother is an attempt ‘to rekindle the relationship’, Iqbal writes of the work.

Mehwish Iqbal, Letters to My Mother (2017)

I understand the potential gulfs between mothers and daughters, especially as amplified by the migratory experience. In the same way that the English inscriptions on the charcoal are abstract to Iqbal’s mother, my writing in English is partly inaccessible to my mother, who speaks and reads almost exclusively in Russian. My mother still reads all my work, though it sometimes takes her a couple of goes, and she collects the publications and lines them up neatly on a shelf in my old room. As I look at the intimacy of Iqbal’s Letters to My Mother, it seems to magnify and personalise the disconnection and distance that might be experienced by any two silhouettes in Grey Wall.

Before her death, Begum visited the village and sat for a portrait as a favour to her granddaughter. During the hours of the sitting, Iqbal – sixteen at the time – tried to capture her grandmother’s mood, history and likeness, all the while keeping up a lively conversation. Even though Begum was in good health, Iqbal understood that this would be the last time the two women would see each other: it was an overpowering, ineffable sensation. Begum died shortly after, aged seventy-two. ‘I haven’t looked at the portrait since that day,’ Iqbal says. In fact, she gave up portraiture for many years until art school forced a reckoning and she was able to pick up her materials again. That portrait, she thinks, is still at her mother’s house.

Mehwish Iqbal, Assemblage of a Fragmented Landscape (2020)

STANDING WITH ASSEMBLAGE of a Fragmented Landscape (2020), Iqbal’s other installation at The National, my attention is caught by the image of a crouching red woman on the far-left panel. She looks over her shoulder at me. Pregnant, heroic, defiant, her body is close to the earth and turned away in a protective gesture: body as shield. Iqbal was pregnant with her third child when she conceived this bright, intricate embroidery. It was when she became a parent for the first time, she says, that she started ‘looking back and trying to understand my own relationship with my mother. That became sacred within my art practice.’

Incorporating silk screen, drawing and hand embroidery, this work uses semi-translucent dressmaker’s paper as its base, different cut and sew marks visible like ghosts. It reminds me of a body labelled for surgery with permanent marker, of sutures, of a diagram of prime beef cuts. The inside close to the surface, visible, now outside.

‘I was always looking for materials that mimic the fragility and complexity of life,’ Iqbal says. A dressmaker’s paper catalogues the whole process of a garment’s creation, retaining traces of every stitch, every misstep, in the same way that our skin freckles, wrinkles, sags, stretches and scars as we age and go about our lives, recording the transformations and experiences of our existence on ourselves. Iqbal is interested in testing the limits of materials, in seeing how much they (and we) can bear.

In the far-right panel of the embroidery, a ferocious blue wolf provides the visual counterweight to the woman. An alpha male on patrol, he is keeping his pack in line, intruders out. Gold fangs bared, ready to tear meat from bone. Not so different, Iqbal says, from what goes on in human communities. While the pregnant woman symbolises care and nurture, the alpha wolf polices territories and protects the pack from external threats. There is no reason, Iqbal says, for those roles to be divided along gender lines.

Between these two figures stretches a vibrant pageant of celestial, animal and plant life. Human beings, but also winged creatures – in crimson, cerulean, gold, verdant green. Are they bearing messages, or perhaps simply watching over the menagerie of life?

‘When I was growing up with my grandmother, she used to tell mythical stories of angels and heavenly creatures…their meaning changes from work to work.’ They could be a reference to individuals who paved the way during Partition, she says. ‘In other contexts, they could be creatures taking inspiration from religious scriptures.’

In the context of the winged creatures in this work, Iqbal talks about the co-existence of different religions in societies, and also the inevitable fractures that exist. In 2014, she visited the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque in Istanbul and was struck by the layering of history within this cathedral-turned-mosque, the jostling between Christian and Islamic elements. Calligraphy, medallions and minarets sit alongside mosaics depicting Jesus, Mary, archangels, seraphs and cherubs, some plastered over during the Ottoman Empire but since recovered and restored to create a complex stratigraphy that illuminates the past.

The longer I spend with Assemblage of a Fragmented Landscape, the more parallels I notice between the human and animal kingdom; the way we structure our communities, work together, occupy space, fight and keep the peace. ‘We had lots of animals at home,’ Iqbal tells me. ‘My grandmother had cats, my father had hens, my mother had goats.’ And as she says this, I can almost ‘hear’ her embroidery’s soundscape: insects buzzing in summer, the flap of wings, human voices, leaves rustling in the wind, a clarion call. There are bees, butterflies, pigeons, goats. White, translucent moths. Red marching lines of ants. Big-bellied beetles. So much bounty.

‘My grandmother had a beautiful garden, where all sorts of fruit trees were growing,’ Iqbal tells me, ‘and she used to take me and my sister every day to visit.’ While the girls climbed the trees, Begum planted seeds and tended to her garden. ‘I understood from a very young age that nature had an impact on your mood, because when we came back from visiting the garden, we were happy.’

From where she’s sitting, Iqbal tells me, she can see leafy trees, candy-coloured petunias, lavender, gardenias. Her house and studio in western Sydney were designed by her architect husband, and feature glass-fronted walls that blur the distinction between inside and outside. Having access to the garden is important for her practice, she says. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests that the maternal home, the house we were born in, becomes inscribed in our body, making all the future homes we inhabit attempts to recreate the very first. Perhaps it is true.

As for me, I do not remember the towering block of identical flats or snow-covered streets of Moscow where I was born. But I do remember the first house my parents bought in Australia – an apricot-coloured two-storey in Marayong, about an hour’s drive from where Iqbal now lives. We had nine eucalypts in the backyard, an army of furry orange-and-black caterpillars one summer.

Growing up, Iqbal and her family visited the eponymous monolith of Sangla Hill in the centre of town, and that landscape feature loomed large in her childhood imagination. The abrupt conical rock is striking in an otherwise flat, mostly green plain. ‘I think this is something within my blood, this love for land and love for nature,’ she says. Since the initial outbreaks of COVID-19, almost two years ago now, Iqbal has not been back to visit. As we talk, Sydney is partway through what will be five months of lockdown. When I ask how Iqbal is managing under some of the nation’s most coercive restrictions, she assures me that, through it all, she has kept making art.

I remember Elaine Scarry’s notion that each artefact we create (each painting, each meal, each book) is a ‘fragment of world alteration’. When Iqbal’s mother picks flowers and herbs in the field to make saag, when she tends to the simmering curry on the stove, when she ladles it into bowls, she is bringing into existence ideas of care, love and radical hospitality and sharing these with those at the table.

As for what I perceive as the fragility of her chosen materials, Iqbal is firm: ‘There’s nothing that is permanent. You look at all the artworks that were created over time, all the materials are supposed to disintegrate… An artwork has its own life.’

The thought is both terrifying and liberating.

https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/within-my-blood-this-love-for-land/

In 2019, Mehwish Iqbal had her first solo exhibition with Nanda\Hobbs in Sydney, and the unusual nature of her work left audiences intrigued.

It is unusual for artists in Australia to have an international presence before a local one. In 2019, Mehwish Iqbal had her first solo exhibition with Nanda\Hobbs in Sydney, and the unusual nature of her work left audiences intrigued. Her Sydney debut joins an impressive list of international exhibitions held since 2014 – in places from Hong Kong to New York to Istanbul.

Iqbal’s own movement around the globe is captured in her art, which also exhibits a poetic embrace of the stories of others under the broad umbrella of migration. Using fragile tissue and dressmaking patterned papers, she embroiders imagery of exotic creatures, people and birds on the move, often in groups. These colourful explorations look at the parallels that exist between individuals, animals and nature.

Born and raised in Pakistan, Iqbal came to Australia in 2006 and studied toward a Master Of Arts majoring in Printmaking at Sydney’s University of New South Wales. As a child she had little access to traditional art materials, but would draw, using charcoal or whatever she could find on the ground. “I didn’t know the meaning of art, I was unconscious of what I was doing, yet making was strongly embedded within my personality,” says the artist. “I get affected by what is going on – so art is a vehicle for me to cultivate those dialogues and discourses. More than anything it has been within me – to respond to what is around me.”

In her use of such fragile materials – in which she tests the limits of paper – Iqbal finds an apt analogy for life as she creates work about people transformed and altered by migratory experiences, and the courage required to confront and survive change. “A lot of work delves into my personal life and the distance from my mother (I was not raised with her),” she says. “Universal meanings arise in the work. Conversations are not geographically bound and the vocabulary I am using is one I have cultivated over years.”

In ornate works that incorporate printmaking techniques, drawing and embroidery, Iqbal’s subject matter draws together mythical creatures, birds and female bodies. These multilayered pieces are enmeshed onto a gossamer thin (paper) base. Dealer Ralph Hobbs reports intense interest in the work during the exhibition. “This is such delicate work. While the broader Australian market is often painting-centric, Mehwish’s media, printmaking and embroidery, and imaginative subject matter brought in both collectors and curators. Her international credentials will help more and more as many Australian collectors become interested in the world market.”

Iqbal’s work has been widely shown at international art fairs, including Istanbul Contemporary, Hong Kong Art Central, Karachi Print Biennial and Sydney Contemporary. Earlier this year she had a solo exhibition with HG Contemporary in New York, which was also strongly received. Her use of thread in such a painterly manner invites the viewer to come close and experience the vernacular landscape, the humanity and the imaginative power in the work.

This article was originally published in Art Collector issue 91, JAN – MAR 2020.

https://artcollector.net.au/under-the-radar-mehwish-iqbal/

Mehwish Iqbal is a multidisciplinary artist who expresses the relationships found in global human life through a variety of materials and techniques. Although some of her installations deal with human matters, there is always a veil of atmospheric subtleness that we, the viewers, perceive and get embraced by. The scenes have no bloody tragic reference, but one depicts figures carrying their own bodies through- deserts, traversing rivers and being rejected. Albeit the international visual vocabulary that she develops in each type of artwork there is a natural Asian influence. A personal elegance emanates from the cultures of her Pakistani origins and her Australian residency. Despite the fact that she has not integrated sound yet, our imagination might lead us to perceive a possible sound of the footsteps in Forcefield of Complex Journey an installation where the artist employs her left leg to create several porcelain cast legs and refers to the multitudes and repetition of perilous journeys undertaken on foot by women and- children displaced from their homelands due to war, conflict and exile. Similarly, in Crossing the Lines one experiences a silent and audible performative quality of hand sculpted female figures immersed in a whimsical dance caught up in an abstract landscape a sight of resistance to homogeneity. Last year, Mehwish was working in diverse materials and processes, including print, textiles, drawing and mouth blown glass sculpture. One sees the types of meshes that she creates in her print and embroidery works as something out of this world, extremely fragile surfaces superimposed with layered imagery of print and embroidery testing the delicate surface of the paper to its limits. The works are also reminiscent of skin membranes tightly knit at certain points where threads or embroideries sculpt human and animal forms embodying elements from nature, language, clothing, geographical mappings, leading one to excavate each layer on its own terms— In Hagia Sophia the multitudes and elements of this vocabulary draw one’s attention to the historical and religious iconography of angels, and human forms experiencing a vulnerable landscape sprawled with animals and insects, subtly pointing to the complexities and tensions interlacing it.

Essentially, Mehwish works with fragile and sensitive materials such as paper, porcelain and glass and her approach to sculpture is very simplistic and minimal. Particularly, in the case of two different art pieces titled Fragile Bodies, and Mother and Child that have a very different visual and textural quality when compared to her works on paper. Being made out of glass, they carry a chemical and physical transformation process. Glass blowing that involves inflating molten glass and sculpting it at extreme temperatures, through human breath also lends to these amorphous forms that look haptically inviting. Mother and Child is a two piece sculpture of different sizes but both parts resemble the womb, the fallopian tubes, and shapes that experience the capacity of giving and receiving, of being penetrated but also of having emerging connecting parts.

Through the artist process, nature plays a key role and appears in its variety of dominia. Letters to my Mother is another kind of sculpture that is hand-carved on a natural material: raw charcoal. It deals with unity and the group; therefore, it is as much sculpture as it is an installation. The reference to numbers also relates to Force Field, and to her approach in painting, print, and drawing as part of the artwork that she produces. In Grey Wall, multitudes and unification confront the viewer’s imagination while addressing the world population by means of the pile of drawn, cut and painted paper figures. In short, Mehwish speaks of one and of multiple subjects with the same stamina and subtleness.

Mehwish paints with threads and draws with sewing movements. Analogies breathe through her work more and more as it all relates to material interactions. There is a primitive air that entangles with deconstructive protocols of coetaneous artwork. She avoids structured limits in most of her work, she neither uses stretchers nor other limits or hidden thread ends; the sides can have hanging elements as in Trivial Encapsulation; printed straight lines curve according to the weight of some areas, and footprints go along a path illuminated by clouds. The qualities that emanate from her thin ethereal art are the opposite from the textile art created in the early days of human existence on earth. Each painted-printed-embroidered piece is innovative and will undoubtedly make it through art history and the parameters of time, to be recognized as a work of art. Mehwish’s works are enduring creative contributions to the eye, the soul and the mind. The translucencies she creates evoke the need for light to understand this baroque decadent socio-political time. Anthropocentrism breathes in her works concerned with human respect and human agitation. Simultaneously, her interest in varied materials is present as she webs those luminous promenades on cloth and paper.

Her artwork is not a full narrative. Her forms can be read differently despite the fact that they are just shapes or contours in which there might be some missing details. Souplesse and evanescent ingredients appear as if out of magic from a landscape or other kinds of surrounding scenery. M is the first letter in her name, and is also the first letter of two of her most significant topics, maps and migration. As the basic structure of some pieces, the artist silk screens maps, intervenes them with collagraphs and etching, and then this is followed by meticulous embroidering.

Migration is a word that embraces whatever appears in her artwork. The flat migrates into volume, neutral colors migrate into warmer colors, the opened book-like documents migrate into maps, and theatrical maps migrate into the constraint of our world. Shapes also migrate in her art, they are clothing that migrate into memorabilia, embroideries that migrate into rings on paper, simile butterflies that migrate into deers, bees that migrate into landscapes, patterns that migrate into cloth, and ideas that migrate into substantial works of art.

Mehwish Iqbal lived her first eleven years in Sangla Hill, a tehsil in Pakistan. Mehwish and her sister were often moved during their formative years and from time to time were looked after by the extended family. She now lives in western Sydney in Australia with her own family. Mehwish’s personal journey and experiences greatly influence her art practice and thinking around notions of belonging, motherhood, globality and mass migration.

In the space of five years, since completing her Master of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales, Mehwish has exhibited important works in a range of media that has taken her way beyond her formal training in fine art printmaking. Experimenting in diverse materials and processes, her quest has given rise to an emergent conceptual-based practice with its own distinctive visual language. The Turkish art writer, Evrim Altuğ, describes this as ‘a feminine, optimistic and fertile language that continuously refers to human skin and consciousness of shelter’. Mehwish’s work recalls elements of Minimalism, Arte Povera and Indian miniature painting; an eclectic selection from east to west.

At the time of writing, Mehwish’s most recent work is a sculpture made from 5000 collected date seeds cast in porcelain. The Last Prayer takes on the appearance of a mound, with its base formed into a perfect circle. Traditionally, during Ramadan, three dates are eaten to break the fast to acknowledge the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, who broke his fast in this manner. Mehwish’s sculpture also refers to the communal acts of sharing and giving. (The seeds for this work were collected and given to the artist by various individuals and women’s groups in western Sydney.) Having cast the seeds, the artist then etched each one with a surgical

scalpel knife that accentuates not only the natural texture of the date seed, but in the artist’s words, “the appearance of female genitalia”

A formal comparison with Ai Weiwei’s now famous Sunflower Seeds from 2010, is quite obvious; they are cast in porcelain and similarly arranged in a circular mound, but were individually made by artisans in Jingdezhen, China, and painted to resemble sunflower seeds. Similarly, Antony Gormley’s monumental Asian Field from 2003, was made by volunteers in Xiangshan County, China, and consisted of 190,000 individual clay figures. Yet The Last Prayer was made single-handedly by Mehwish Iqbal and speaks to the artist’s interest in labour (in its various forms), and the hand-made as a site of resistance to uniformity. Perhaps in response to the internet age, but also as a disruptive notion of the seed as the female reproductive organ and representative of motherhood.

The complexity and fragility of The Last Prayer continues through much of Mehwish’s work. Forcefield of Complex Journeys uses a similar disarming strategy. Recalling the Minimalist aesthetic — like a Sol LeWitt in human form — Mehwish’s artwork features what appears to be twelve identical porcelain casts of a leg, lined-up with the precision of a factory production belt.

These are in fact cast from the artist’s left leg and refer to the multitude and repetition of perilous journeys undertaken on foot by women and children displaced from their homelands due to war, conflict and exile. In the development of this work, Mehwish met with a support group for refugee and migrant women in Mt Druitt in Western Sydney, who shared their personal migratory stories with the artist through drawing workshops.

Etched into each porcelain leg by Mehwish are complex signs and symbols in text-form and as pictograms that recall the often harrowing and tragic journeys by foot and the fragile state of becoming a resident in a new, foreign land. Even in the shallow shadows of the etched cast white porcelain it is difficult to read the finer details of the text and images. We are only given a certain level of permission to read fragments of these stories; the different languages and representations of figures, landscapes and places overlap and blur into one another like an ophthalmic disorder. Figuratively and literally, Forcefield of Complex Journeys is about the experience of dislocation. But more so, the work chimes with James Joyce’s coined term “dislocution” describing the double disruption of place and speech that is the condition of the displaced, or those in exile.

Similar misshapen forms of cultural translation are also apparent in Mehwish Iqbal’s series of multi- material artworks that start life as ready-made dressmakers’ patterns for children’s and women’s clothes. The paper is fragile and crumpled, almost like tissue-paper, and bears the imprint of a predefined order and shape-to-fit, as if everything is already sewn-up! The artist then uses screen- printing and etching to add layers of representation as varied as world maps, animals, insects, plants, young children and pregnant women.

The Italian Arte Povera artist, Alighiero e Boetti’s large-scale embroidered series Mappa (1971-89) was made with Afghan refugees in the Pakistan border camps, and the series stand today as a seminal moment in socially-engaged artistic practice that speaks of the condition of border-conflict and migration towards the end of the twentieth century.

Mehwish Iqbal also stitches and embroiders, on top of the dressmakers’ patterns and printed layers, to describe the present global condition of forced mass migration. In many of these works we see the disruption, or tears, in the surface (which is also the ground and the pre-made order), and like the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, Mehwish treats breakage and repair as part of history, rather than something to disguise. The hand-made and the artist’s interest in labour appears again, through the meticulous and laborious method of stitching as artistic mark-making, and one which painfully and psychologically illustrates the body in its altered state of repair, dislocation or dislocution even. In the celebrated Columbian artist, Doris Salcedo’s sculpture we see a similar metaphorical and phenomenological use of material; the careful stitching of human hair, rose petals or grass into bastardised furniture for example, to communicate the injustices and pain caused by the disappeared, the forgotten, the displaced.

Mehwish Iqbal’s practice stands in a line of artistic tradition of developing new visual language and innovation in materials and processes that give form and contribute to our collective understanding of current, urgent issues of global significance. Homi Bhabha introduced Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, by saying that turning the European traditions of existentialism and psychoanalysis to face the history of the Other, ‘which they had never contemplated... leads to a meditation on the experience of dispossession and dislocation — psychic and social — which speaks to the condition of the marginalised, the alienated, those who have yet to live under the surveillance of a sign of identity and fantasy that denies their difference’.

https://blacktownarts.com.au/tag/mehwish-iqbal/

The art practice of Mehwish Iqbal is layered and complex, bearing witness to patterns of global migration and the long-term effects of living in the continuum of diaspora. This influence has had subsequent effects that are intertwined into her cultural identity and her artistic practice.

Iqbal completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at the National College of Fine Arts, Pakistan in 2002. In 2006, she migrated from Pakistan to her new home in Western Sydney, Australia and completed a Master of Arts at UNSW College of Fine Arts in 2011, furthering her practice with printmaking.

I was fortunate enough to experience Iqbal’s diverse artistic practice during No Added Sugar: Engagement and Self-Determination, Australian Muslim Women Artists at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in 2012. This exhibition is now recognised as a significant community and cultural engagement project for showcasing the depth of talent within our contemporary diaspora that resides in Western Sydney. It also proved to be the progenitor to Iqbal’s understanding and expression of the migrant experience.

For this exhibition, Iqbal’s works encompassed printmaking and the large sculptural installation, The Silence of the Sea (2012) which comprised of hundreds of pale-blue origami paper boats hung from the ceiling in a wave- like form. The installation was physically overwhelming for the visitor as well as beguiling in its artistic intentions as it revealed shared insecurities and fear through loss of cultural identity from the migrant experience. Possibly unaware, Iqbal also addressed the domestic fears and insecurities toward incoming waves of migrants.

Iqbal’s current practice reflects and acknowledges the protection of privileges in existing social and cultural systems. Her expansive practice inherently conveys versatility and sensitivity to any medium. Recent work such as Memory Collectors (2016), exemplifies the metaphorical layering that Iqbal has adopted. Utilising silk screen, etching, collograph and embroidery techniques on paper, this seemingly delicate and intricate processes demonstrates interwoven stories and the transitional definitions of home and identity.

Through her art making, Iqbal has honed a sensitivity, vulnerability and acknowledgement of her own identity. Her practice examines the many layers of personal experiences, memories and stories with an inherent moral need to say something about the human experience. Both personal and authentic, her works on paper, installation and sculptural forms are relevant to our current times. The power of Iqbal’s art works are embedded within the layers of complexity whereby we discover our own truth.