Nadira Husain
Femme Fondation
Femme Fondation
Galerie Tobias Naehring
Lützner Straße 98
Leipzig
September 10 — October 24, 2015
Lützner Straße 98
Leipzig
September 10 — October 24, 2015
Drift: Her, juvenile crisis, 2015 Silk screen, dye and tempera on hand woven cotton Ikat fabric 77 x 189 cm |
Drift: Postérieurs fanfarons (Drift: Gurke and co), 2014 Silk screen, dye and tempera on hand woven cotton Ikat fabric 220 x 79 cm |
Drift: Her, in charge, 2015 Silk screen, dye and tempera on hand woven cotton Ikat fabric 218 x 84 cm |
Drift: Dreamy Baby, 2014 Silk screen, dye and tempera on hand woven cotton Ikat fabric 190 x 77 cm |
Gang de filles, 2015 Kalamkari (traditional Indian hand-painting with vegetable dyes on cotton), framed 90 x 70 cm |
Dessin dans la prairie, 2015 Kalamkari (traditional Indian hand-painting with vegetable dyes on cotton), framed 90 x 70 cm |
Swim, swim, swim, 2014
Kalamkari (traditional Indian hand-painting with vegetable dyes on cotton), framed 80 x 80 cm
|
Gombos, 2014
Kalamkari (traditional Indian hand-painting with vegetable dyes on cotton), framed 80 x 80 cm
|
Laughing Turtle, 2014 Kalamkari (traditional Indian hand-painting with vegetable dyes on cotton), framed 80 x 80 cm |
When I visited Nadira Husain’s studio to see the new work for her upcoming show, she
had just returned from the US. Eventually we started talking about her recent trip and the
Hopi. She had brought back a book on figurines she’d seen there (Kachina Dolls) and was
showing them to me. Something about these figurines and her enthusiasm for them, made
me begin to think of them as keys to her visual world – if you needed keys that is. The
figurines radiate a solemn earnestness that is owed to their tradition, heritage and
meaning. The keys I speak of arise from a combination of this very earnestness and their
exuberant, gleefully manic and incredibly detailed workmanship, as well as their utterly
foreign style of human portrayal. This is how she introduced me to them: pointing out how
liberating and funny the notion of such an utterly foreign creatureness could be, and talking
about their meaning which can never begraspable for us in its entirety.
She also told me about German cultural historian Aby Warburg’s research on Hopi
imagery in 1900, whose approach and work she has incorporated in the current show.
This just gives you a small glimpse of Nadira Husain’s world of research: a realm full of
story-telling creatures and talking signs. A sign that talks is a sort of hybrid, an
intermediate being. It gesticulates, speaking without language. It is also intermediate
beings, hybrids, and their identity value, that are especially attractive to Husain. She finds
them in manga drawings, in the feminist visual narrative of Claire Bretécher, or in the
image of an onion: the Tor browser logo (the browser used for anonymous communication
in the internet). At times she alters these signs, sometimes changing their sex, switching
features around or placing them in absurd situations. Or she invents them, like the Femme
Fondation of the title: a creature that seems at first glance to be a woman, but then again
might be something completely different. You can find this creature in her paintings, often
positioned in the lower half, as Femme Fondation is supposed to carry the entire painting.
In this exhibition she is already here on the wall, an already present visitor. She is already
there.
Besides their incredible innovation and playfulness the individual elements in Nadira
Husain’s paintings entail a more weighty and earnest aspect – just like the Hopi figurines
do. These intermediate beings, that Nadira Husain is so familiar with, would most probably
be denied existence in an everyday, less imaginative reality or they , as things inbetween
two realities are not granted any space in the realm of pictorial representation.
This hints to her biography, something her paintings always refer to but it is also always a
conceptual approach, a result of her research on different traditions of imagery. The
knowledge that pictorial traditions form the respective visual representation of the world
and therefore form the framework of imagination, leads Nadira Husain to search for
different imagery. This quest is also one of memory, as she has seen these other images
before. Therefore the superpositioned layers she makes are in a way works of
remembering, associative concentrations that create pictorial space, which is then
ultimately conceived as an image. Perhaps this is the reason why a single layer is nearly
concealed by others and becomes part of one large single design. Not everything in these
paintings is readily legible. Their creation also spans long periods of time, covering many
steps: beginning with the weaving and printing of the image carriers, which are traditionally
handcrafted in India (using Ikat or Kalamkari technique), followed by screen-printing and
then lastly by the actual drawing and painting.
Ariane Müller, 2015
had just returned from the US. Eventually we started talking about her recent trip and the
Hopi. She had brought back a book on figurines she’d seen there (Kachina Dolls) and was
showing them to me. Something about these figurines and her enthusiasm for them, made
me begin to think of them as keys to her visual world – if you needed keys that is. The
figurines radiate a solemn earnestness that is owed to their tradition, heritage and
meaning. The keys I speak of arise from a combination of this very earnestness and their
exuberant, gleefully manic and incredibly detailed workmanship, as well as their utterly
foreign style of human portrayal. This is how she introduced me to them: pointing out how
liberating and funny the notion of such an utterly foreign creatureness could be, and talking
about their meaning which can never begraspable for us in its entirety.
She also told me about German cultural historian Aby Warburg’s research on Hopi
imagery in 1900, whose approach and work she has incorporated in the current show.
This just gives you a small glimpse of Nadira Husain’s world of research: a realm full of
story-telling creatures and talking signs. A sign that talks is a sort of hybrid, an
intermediate being. It gesticulates, speaking without language. It is also intermediate
beings, hybrids, and their identity value, that are especially attractive to Husain. She finds
them in manga drawings, in the feminist visual narrative of Claire Bretécher, or in the
image of an onion: the Tor browser logo (the browser used for anonymous communication
in the internet). At times she alters these signs, sometimes changing their sex, switching
features around or placing them in absurd situations. Or she invents them, like the Femme
Fondation of the title: a creature that seems at first glance to be a woman, but then again
might be something completely different. You can find this creature in her paintings, often
positioned in the lower half, as Femme Fondation is supposed to carry the entire painting.
In this exhibition she is already here on the wall, an already present visitor. She is already
there.
Besides their incredible innovation and playfulness the individual elements in Nadira
Husain’s paintings entail a more weighty and earnest aspect – just like the Hopi figurines
do. These intermediate beings, that Nadira Husain is so familiar with, would most probably
be denied existence in an everyday, less imaginative reality or they , as things inbetween
two realities are not granted any space in the realm of pictorial representation.
This hints to her biography, something her paintings always refer to but it is also always a
conceptual approach, a result of her research on different traditions of imagery. The
knowledge that pictorial traditions form the respective visual representation of the world
and therefore form the framework of imagination, leads Nadira Husain to search for
different imagery. This quest is also one of memory, as she has seen these other images
before. Therefore the superpositioned layers she makes are in a way works of
remembering, associative concentrations that create pictorial space, which is then
ultimately conceived as an image. Perhaps this is the reason why a single layer is nearly
concealed by others and becomes part of one large single design. Not everything in these
paintings is readily legible. Their creation also spans long periods of time, covering many
steps: beginning with the weaving and printing of the image carriers, which are traditionally
handcrafted in India (using Ikat or Kalamkari technique), followed by screen-printing and
then lastly by the actual drawing and painting.
Ariane Müller, 2015