LOVE LIFE AND BELONGINGS | Tracing the Traces: Taxila Temporality | March 19 – April 5, 2023 – Lahore Museum
Tracing the Traces: Taxila Temporality
Gandhara Artist Residency program aims to gain an experience through the traces of Gandhara Civilization at Taxila, a historical town situated 40 km away north from the capital city of Pakistan, Islamabad. During this residency sojourn, I visited the spot twice with my fellow participants. I took a lot of photographs, from museum collections to scenic beauty of Sirkap, Julian and around. This process gave me an immense
understanding of ruins and artifacts of Taxila.
Although there is a lot to talk about Taxila ruins and artifacts, I opted to go for the traces while taking textures of the objects and surfaces of that period. I developed a large scale (183×40 inches) drawing, by using graphite on a tracing sheet. The initial idea was to develop the complete drawing on spot at Sirkap while exploring various textures of stones at various spots at the location. Unfortunately, there was an overcast and the drizzle made me handicapped to work outdoors the day I planned. This made me limited to work only for an hour, tracing a wall which was excavated to track the different levels of historical architectural eras. The sheet got wet and torn from some spots.
I completed the drawing while using my mark-making process, imagination and traced marks in my studio. Mark Making is the core process in my image-making practice.
In addition, I rendered two portraits of Buddha which were placed at the Taxila Museum. These sculpture portraits of Buddha in stucco are extremely beautiful art-pieces and reflect the highest skill of the sculptor. They did not only portray the skill of the artist but also had an expression of happiness in one head and sadness in the other. In my rendition I used graphite on golden-handmade paper (each sheet sizes 22×30 inches), which I purchased on my visit to India in 1992. I tried to capture the same feelings of sadness and joy.
In future, I also plan to create hand-drawn animation to document the Gandhara Civilization in Taxila which will be a sequel of this project.
A visit to Govt. Girls High School Taxila was also on the itinerary. The residency participants inaugurated the exhibition based on the students’ works. Instead of traditionally choosing three positions for the best work, I decided to give a collective prize to all the participants, which helped in boosting the moral spirit of all students.