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Mussarat Mirza

Communion with the sublime

By Salwat Ali

Dawn

Mussarat Mirza

Apparently dull, drab and dated, a Mussarat Mirza canvas reveals itself only to those who are willing to probe beyond the surface imagery. Her murky landscapes of rural abodes in the arid hinterland town of Sukkar, shrouded in a haze of dusky shadows, are barely perceptible — and that is where the obvious ends and the ‘other-worldly’ realm begins. The artist’s latest series was up at Canvas Gallery, Karachi recently. Seen collectively, the current paintings again reinforced this opposing impact of banality and profundity that her art exudes.

Mussarat Mirza

Titled, ‘Rah-e-Hoo,’ the conceptual content of Mirza’s paintings is fueled by the artist’s personal quest of communion with the sublime. In the western art milieu abstractionists like Kandinsky and metaphysical painters like Chirico, Magritte and Morandi evoked the spiritual, in the early 1900s by exploring the unconscious. Dislocating objects from the real world and presenting them in incongruous relationships they tried to create an alternative reality that could relate to man’s inner being. In the east, however, faith in the religious experience is a strong motivator for realization of self. As an artist, Mussarat Mirza adopts the western mannerism to express her psychic inclinations but as a human being she seems to follow the path of the Sufi. Her concepts stem from Islamic Mysticism while her visual vocabulary is a variant of realism and abstraction.

Mussarat Mirza

Seeking enlightenment entails, “battling with shadows obscuring sight and vision, mending fences between self and the Self,” she declares in her artist’s statement. This act of self purification is an arduous process of extricating oneself from the dark abyss of superficial and material needs in order to enter the illumined state of piety and humility. Mirza, dwelling on the boundary between art and life translates this feeling almost literally in her canvases by making dramatic use of contrasting light and shade. She paints her old, inner city visions of mud plastered homes, narrow alleys and dirt roads vaguely, as little more than silhouettes, a vibration of one low colour against another. Gradually they ‘develop’ on the eye and one begins to grasp their internal relationships. By articulating the subtle sequence of tones she transforms flat areas into emerging forms reminding us how mutable and hard to fix the act of seeing really is. And if the shapes look simple, their simplicity is extremely deceptive, one recognizes in it the distillation of an intensely pure sensibility where outer image and inward vision are as one. Her paintings thus become vignettes of her own developing consciousness where she begins to see the light beyond the darkness.

Relating to the mystical and the esoteric was not unusual for Mirza because she is an inhabitant of Sindh, the land of the Sufi saints. Sufis as missionaries played a leading role in advancing the Islamic frontier in the Asian subcontinent, fashioning in the process one of the largest ethnic groups in Muslim lands today The Suhrawardi brotherhood founded by Abu Hafs Umar-al-Suhrawardi (1145-1234) in Baghdad in the 1230s was probably the first sufi tariqa but by the time the Sufic tradition peaked in the subcontinent in the 13th century disciples of many other Sufi orders had put roots in these areas. Sufis lived their lives and ordered their thoughts in ways designed to make possible a direct and personal experience of God, because Sufism teaches Muslims how to know God in their hearts. Using the regional languages and infusing them with the literary idiom they have done much to acquaint the masses with a love of God and of the Prophet.

Mussarat Mirza

Commenting on her inward journey the artist says, “I am just another captive going through the same dungeons of light and dark, the various levels of intensity and consciousness. Around me every pane, each wall, stands alone with tales of unfulfillment and unheard yearnings of the heart.” Her art, when seen in the light of these thoughts, appears as a direct reflection of her feelings. Technically, Mussarat Mirza cuts space on her canvas with the sensibility of an abstractionist. Her spatial divisions are mainly geometric in planar chunks of rectangular or square areas or a direct thrust of horizontal, vertical or diagonal gestures and slashes. She then moulds these forms into semi realistic scenes of mohallas, gullies, ancient mosques mausoleums, shrines and the like, sparsely peopled by the humble and the ordinary.

Mussarat Mirza

Her method of painting pertains to layering colours on top of each other and building a firm base. Using a knife she applies paint in clean forceful strokes but the dry abrasive texture speaks of relentless self editing through skillful scrapings achieved only when the paint has dried naturally after a sufficient amount of time. Brushmarks and thin coatings of paint are also visible but on the smaller forms. This preoccupation with technique makes her an artist who is less concerned with details of representational narration and more with direct painterly treatment to convey a felt thought. Her palette too is severely minimal revolving largely around the challenging task of creating tonalities from blue-grays, yellow and sludgy greens. This intense art-making however, comes to life only when she begins playing with light.

Mussarat Mirza

Source of radiance and how it lights up her composition is a crucial feature in her painting exercise. It is shards, slashes, bands, vast expanses or just glints and sparks of pearly or golden lights that do not just define the architectural framework of her structure but also create the mystical aura that she is trying to impart to her work. Her misty canvases glimmer, glow or gleam according to the intensity or paucity of light she distributes in her composition.

Mussarat Mirza

Mussarat Mirza

Ethereal radiance enjoys a special status in Sufi doctrines also. In his article, ‘The Mystic path’, Fritz Meier states that, “Yahya as Suhrawardi equated God with absolute light and non-being with darkness, and arranged everything in between according to a scale of steadily diminishing light and steadily encroaching shadow: he also conceived, in addition to this cosmic radiance pouring out from a single source, the idea of a second radiance, of illumination (ishraq), by means of which the already existing levels of light lit each other spiritually, as it were in manifold ways, but always from above downwards, or at least sideways, never from below. Only with this supplementary radiance does the light incorporated in man acquire the strength and the desire to resist the attractions of the material world …”

An artist with hermetic tendencies, Mussarat Mirza, having concluded her teaching tenure at the University of Jamshoro in Sindh, relocated to her ancestral home in Sukkur where she now continues to paint and teach art privately. Working in seclusion she exhibits in Karachi every few years only. Staying away from the bustle of city life has enabled her to concentrate on her work with single mindedness. This absence/distance also adds to the sense of mystery that surrounds her oeuvre but at the same time many young artists, buyers and collectors are just not familiar with her work.

With contemporary art now moving in several diverse directions senior artists need to keep pace with mainstream art if they are keen to retain their identity and pass the torch onto the younger generation. While the young are defining a new mindset there is much they can learn from the older generation.