27/07/2025
Curatorial Note
"Mental Labyrinths" — A Language of the Inner Chaos
Written by Tashfeen Rizwan
This painting is not a mere visual composition; it is a cry — a silent, reverberating outcry against the psychological disintegration, the inward collapse, and the mute despair that often go unseen, unheard, and unnamed in our collective consciousness.
Cubism, for me, is not just an aesthetic method — it is a philosophical rupture. It breaks the surface, distorts the form, and reconfigures reality to mirror the fractured state of the self.
My work doesn’t echo the outer world; it interrogates the inner one. It does not imitate — it dismantles.
This painting was not birthed in the halls of theory, but in the trenches of exhaustion. In the weight of unanswered questions. In the mental labyrinths that coil and tighten when no one is watching. Just as Picasso’s"Guernica" screamed the horrors of war through fragmented agony, my piece reflects the silent wars of our time — the violence of numbness, the aggression of silence, the ache of not being heard.
The shattered geometry, the erratic color fields, the contorted limbs — these are not design choices, they are emotional clauses. Each form is a sentence left unfinished. Each color is a scream stifled mid-breath. Each line is a vein carrying both memory and resistance.
I belong to Larkana — land of ancient soil and buried civilizations. The spirit of Mohenjo-Daro still seeps through our bones, not fossilized but pulsing, demanding to be seen. I do not borrow from this heritage to romanticize it; I converse with it, challenge it, even grieve with it.
The influences that brush against my subconscious are not imitations but dialogues — with Abdur Rahman Chughtai’s lyrical grace, Sadequain’s visual rebellion, M.F. Husain’s symbolic drama, Ismail Gulgee’s spiritual abstractions, and Rizwan Ali subversive layers.
They live somewhere in the echoes — but my voice does not mimic theirs; it rebels through its own shadows.
This painting is not made to please. It is made to pierce.
It does not flatter the viewer — it confronts them. It speaks in the tongue of abstraction not as escapism, but as resistance.
It stands in the lineage of South Asian expression, not to belong quietly, but to insist:
"Can you hear us, now?"
