Elementa is proud to present for the first time in Dubai this much anticipated exhibition by the Pakistani artist Huma Mulji, who will be showcasing a series of new photographs and sculptures. This will be Mulji’s first international solo exhibition.
Huma Mulji was born in Karachi, Pakistan and completed her Bachelor in Fine Arts at the Indus Vallery School of Art and Architecture. Her work has moved more and more towards looking at the absurdities of a post-colonial society in transition, taking on board the visual and cultural overlaps of language, image and taste that create the most fantastic collisions. She describes the time we live in as moving at a remarkable speed and in regard to Pakistan, Mulji refers to the experience of 'living 200 years in the past and 30 years in the future all at once'.
She comments on the city’s rapid transition where thoughtlessly constructed buildings have come up overnight, replacing the once agricultural landscape, largely owing to the boost in the property market. This is a city where both traditional Punjabi agricultural practices and the dreamscape of Pseudo-American Suburban sprawl, exist on a single ten-kilometer strip of road. For her, such swift urbanization sees displaced generations, unable to provide new skills in time for the people to integrate into another kind of life, brought to Lahore as a bi-product of global trade. Families pack up and leave: with children, cattle, the old, and the young.
She is interested in looking at this phenomenon with humor, to recognize the irony of it, formally and conceptually. Rather than dwell on and follow existing theoretical issues of living and working in a post-colonial nation, and applying those stagnant studies to a lived existence, she examines the pace of cultural change through her art work. The work avoids easy taking of sides in imagining a future urban landscape of Pakistan, particularly that of Lahore. Its intention is not didactic, but merely to highlight the shades of grey evident in the complexities and ethics of mass urbanization and the quest to realize the dreams of an aspiring new, house owning, commuter- belt living middle class.
Sculpturally too, the work attempts to underscore the conflict, the suspension of immense volume and weight and the visual risk of this mass, above human eye level as is seen in one of her works Heavenly Heights. The work for the exhibition in May, will look at this phenomena ironically, creating images, which are at once heartrending and funny.
Mulji's participation in recent selected exhibitions includes in 2008 Farewell to Post Colonialism, Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, China; Desperately Seeking Paradise, Pakistan Pavillion, ART DUBAI, UAE and Arabian Delight, Rohtas Gallery, Lahore. In 2007 Take Away, Zahoor-ul-Akhlaque Gallery, National College of Art, Lahore; “Outside the Cube”, National Art Gallery, Islamabad; Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, USA; Destination Asia: Non-strict correspondence, by Indian and Pakistani artists, Soros Center for Contemporary Art-Almaty, Kazikhistan and in 2006 256 Shades, V.M. Art Gallery, Karachi; Sub-Contingent, Fondazionne Sandretto Re Rauburg, Torino, Italy and Flights of Fancy, Royaat Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan. Her work is also part of the Charles Saatchi collection.
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