EXHIBITION: THE WORLDS OF MOEEN FARUQI.

Moeen Faruqi's newest paintings, which were recently displayed at the Canvas Gallery, Karachi, in an exhibition titled 'Continuum', took the viewer down the signature pathways of displacement and ambiguity that Faruqi has inhabited for the last 30 years.

The artist, both as a storyteller and as a protagonist, revisits spaces in his imagined and lived experience. These are familiar scenarios, often populated by people who appear to inhabit unrelated worlds. According to Faruqi, the characters that frequent his compositions appear unexpectedly and without a conscious effort on his part.

Connections can be drawn between Faruqi's art and the writings of Milan Kundera, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mohsin Hamid, and the art of Max Beckmann and Anwar Saeed. Hence, Faruqi's fantastical compositions cross the boundaries of cultural and political context.

Kundera once wrote, 'Man is separated from the past by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms).' Within this wider framework, Faruqi's imagery and imagination slips from one reality to another, where the past and the future seem to co-exist.

Mooen Faruqi's latest exhibition served as a continuum of ideas deeply rooted in his own life, family history and artistic journey

There is a strong sense of recall and an insistence on revisiting spaces from the past, such as his family house on Jamshed Road in an older part of Karachi. This is where Faruqi's family settled after migration from India and where his mother, Mariam Jaffer, set up teaching facilities for children in the locality. Faruqi utilised these architectural elements to form the structures of his compositions.

Citizens of the Inner World

The obvious ones, such as the chequered black and white marble tiles, have continued to appear throughout his work like age-old companions, the memory of which must hold much more significance for him beyond just the design elements. Memories, part dream and part fantasy, seem to inhabit his paintings. Faruqi allows a conversation between the private and the public life in his work, thus providing a glimpse into multiple realities and scenarios.

In Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, several of the sections have the same titles, suggesting that...