The abstraction of words through art

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There is something ineffably extraordinary about Delhi-based artist Saba Hasan’s mixed media works that or on display at the Art Konsult in New Delhi till March 26.
Through a riot of nails, leaves, written word, sand and plaster, she imbues the ordinary with exceptional connotations and denotations, leaving you in the richly woven tapestries with multi-layered meanings and interpretations.
Her big solo after about five years, the new show has no title. “I do not want to plant words or thoughts in your head about what it is that I am saying,” she says, talking about her works in an email interview.
The titles of her paintings and installations are far from revealing. They are, at best, “plainspeak”. Like nine books, burnt book, tied up books, etc. In the nine-book installation on floor, Hasan conceals several books, neatly set on nine rehals (Quran stands). “I don’t reveal which book it is that I have chosen to treat in a particular way. I feel the meaning broadens if the viewer can put his own book mentally into that space, be it in German, Turkish or Urdu,” says Hasan, who has been developing this technique for over ten years now, adding materials as she goes along. There has been a lot of trial and error in her studio, and she has made many discoveries during her travels. “I seem to lean towards the ordinary, the organic, but something that adds another letter to my language, another meaning as I go on gathering,” says the artist who knows what she is doing most of the time, but also relies on chance and accidents in the studio. A large brown work called “Large Parchment” (mixed media on canvas) got accidentally left out in the rain. “I let it be there for three days, just to see what happens. I learnt from this that I can actually use the elements, like the sun, wind or the rain to take part in the making of my works,” she says, adding that the process of making is a long one for her and she enjoys it at the pace of life around as it unfolds within and on the canvas.
But life, sometimes, unfolds in messier ways. According to Hasan, messy reality is best suited to abstraction. “It just takes longer to put things together and then go for the essential, but for me abstraction offers many possibilities and involves the viewer in its interpretation, thus never limiting the work to what may have been my original intention, but to allow it to acquire a life in its hanging where it is in rhythm not only with my breathing, but also with another human being, looking at it,” says Hasan, who thinks that abstraction allows her to delve into the mysterious for which no literal representation is true enough. In this show, she says she is beginning to use it to her purpose: of reconciling the atheist in her with the philosopher and spiritualist, as in the installation of nine books which deals with the multiplicity of truths, perhaps.
Abstraction also allows Hasan to build her own “visual language” where the sound of each material, its texture, glint or weathered feel is like an alphabet of a language which she wants to construct in art and use to convey a vision which offers not merely an insight into reality, pain and conflict, but a hope that there is a future, that each person has a tribe and that despite what we are doing there will be survival.
For Hasan, who distils her own life experiences and moulds them into artistic marvels, art to be art needs to have “painstaking thought and experimentation” to finally offer a “depth and vision”. She says: “It can never be alienated from the artist or her life and experience for it is that experience and understanding that brings value to the work.”
When she is working, Hasan is not conscious at all of who she is. “I am simply honest as I face my vulnerabilities as a human being and then try and overcome them for I believe in people and in this world of brutality. It may sound naive, but I believe in an innate goodness and common wisdom which will survive,” she says. Each work, she always hopes, would be an epiphany between art and life. “The two are never too far apart, nor am I looking at either with too much detachment. It’s like slow burn, slight shock at first and then you can live with it,” she says. Or it could be a book,which is concealed under shells. “It’s hidden but you sense its beauty and potential power if released,” says Hasan, who argues that the chaos on canvas emanates from the interaction of what is within and what is around. She says she walks the line between the real and the unknown, the understood and the concealed.
Walking this line for the show, Hasan moves from the vocabulary of letters (text) to the book itself.
She uses Urdu text both for the “content” and its “visual lyrical line”, moving from extracts from literature to news to personal letters, which lay bare feelings without censorship and bring a universal and contemporary relevance to the work. “After all, art is about both the personal as well as the larger cultural aspects,” says Hasan who chose books as her new material to “push the boundaries a bit”, on her quest to find a new surface so that instead of creating relief she could use the three-dimensionality of the new material. “When you are searching for meaning, there are always more than one dimension and I felt that instead of pulling out extracts, the entire book will bring with it a multidimensionality and loaded values which I could then have a dialogue with,” says Hasan. Looking at her works on display at Hauz Khas Village in New Delhi, you know she had quite a dialogue.