Sameen Agha | Catalyst — Indigo+Madder

26 July - 21 September 2024

Sameen Agha’s practice explores the emotional landscape of home while considering its social and physical attributes, as they intersect with gender and self-identity. Working through her personal experience and memory, the works confront the complexities of loss, belonging and remembrance.

Catalyst presents a new series of installations, drawings and sculptures that explore ideas of catharsis and metamorphosis through emotion and materiality. Exploring these notions within the domestic sphere, the works interrogate gender-based power disparities and broader gendered systems that enable them. These enquiries are entwined with a highly personal exploration of emotions and their manifestation, as these pass through the body and are imagined in the physical realm. These ideas of transformation are also inherent in the materials themselves, with marble, at times, imitating lace or bruised skin; metal imitating paper or delicate foliage. Motifs from childhood memories are used to trigger desire, fear, pleasure, and pain, as they intersect with broader themes of joy, volition, and caution.

In the works, Agha continues her ongoing engagement with symbols of domesticity, especially her experiments with the schema for a home, based on childhood drawings. In ‘When the night is full of stars, take me home’, the structure takes on a solid, stoic form, with a delicately carved tiled roof. A backdrop of fireworks lighting up the night sky further asserts its immovability and highlights its remoteness. The form of the house is often used to express ideas of home and thus, comfort, but here it has turned into cold stone, challenging notions of belonging. On a closer look, the surface is a rich network of cracks, grains, veins and pigmented colour, charged with tumultuous energy, a result of the geological processes of extreme temperatures, through which limestone becomes marble. Agha carefully selects the stone slabs she works with, their pigmentation and connections with the bodily, often becoming an important part of the narrative or mood. Moving through the gallery space, ‘Every time I look for you’, emerges out of a steel column, where it seems to be merging into the architectural details. The scaly skin evokes sinister references to danger, while, at the same time, the headless beast seems to have transformed and become part of the setting, ultimately rendered harmless. In ‘Girls shouldn’t climb coconut trees’, a common playground structure is used to talk about gendered control, shaming and sanctioning of female bodies. It highlights how gendered social and familial pressures and expectations can discourage, stigmatise and control behaviour.

Agha’s interest in architectural forms and space, has led to her to use materials such as marble, metal and wood. Her use of marble is also connected to its historical links to monuments, mausoleums and homes in South Asia, its presence having become synonymous with monumentality, permanence and grandeur. Agha started carving stone, during a difficult period of upheaval in her family, as a means of catharsis and giving form to every emotion. She extensively uses a South Asian pink marble variety, whose mottled surface is reminiscent of bruised skin. Marble’s soft and porous nature enables a flexibility with textures, while maintaining an unyielding presence. She carves and finishes the work by hand, ingraining gestures of touch and their capacity to evoke memory. In ‘Grace’, the interplay between strength and fragility, permanence and impermanence is explored. The marble frame is extensively carved to produce a lace-like effect, inspired by the lace trimmed traditional trousers, widely available in Lahore, that to Agha, become tools for a performative, non-threatening, virginal femininity. A painted bouquet of artificial white roses, plays with ideas of beauty, innocence, purity and transience.

As they explore ideas of monumentality, transience and the body, these works come together in a kind of celebratory display. Fear and desire, mingling with play and jubilation, as senses of personhood and identity emerge and are transformed.

Sameen Agha [b. 1992, Lahore] lives and works in Lahore. She is the receipt of the 2024 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Agha received a BFAfrom the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2016. Selected exhibitions include Catalyst, Indigo+Madder, London, 2024; 2024 Sovereign Asian Art Prize Finalists Exhibition, Hong Kong, 2024; Eclectic Mix 3.0, Sanat Initiative, Karachi, 2023; A flaneur’s guide to getting lost, Khamsa Gallery, 2022; Flower of a blue flame, Canvas Gallery, Karachi, 2021; Past, Present, Future, Koel Gallery, Karachi, 2021 and Self-portrait in the age of the selfie, COMO Museum, Lahore, 2019.

SELECTED WORKS