LondonImran QureshiThe Curve, Barbican Centre // Through July 10From within the recesses of the Barbican’s dark 90-meter Curve, Qureshi’s luminous miniatures lure viewers to a personal contemplation of contemporary events. The twenty-six 14-by-11-inch folios, hung at various heights, retain in expanded scale the pictorial logic of a miniature (little depth of perspective, high horizons, stylization, and bright, unshaded colors).The sequence begins with delicate scenes of nature, the Lahore-based artist tapping into the symbolic imaginary of Mughal and Persianate culture—namely, the fashionable trope of the garden—to narrate cryptic tales of lost splendor and decline. Unlike the European garden, historically intended for promenading, the Islamic garden was designed for meditation and the stimulation of pleasure: lovers delighted in solitude, the unhappy found solace, and royals entertained their guests with great hospitality. In the Koran, the garden is a foretaste of heaven; a private place for retreat from daily worries, it delights the eyes with tree branches spreading shade, unfailing fruits, fragrant flowers, and fountains of running water. Using the curvature of space, Qureshi gradually introduces the viewer to darker elements. With his customary squirrel-hair brush, the artist transforms the depiction of old sovereign pastimes and landscapes for divine play into visions of dilapidation: In serial repetition, folio after folio, red weeds wrap around tree trunks, even uprooting them. Across several other works, swarms of dragonflies hover over murky waters like tiny faint glimmers susceptible to the slightest breeze—so one is reminded to heed where the proverbial wind blows.The artist revels in symptoms of the abandoned garden. But the miniatures appear less polished, suggesting a rather hasty production: Expanses of gold leaf (a material generally used sparingly by miniaturists) abound; messy streaks of blue and blotches of red soil the compositions. Flowering from the same carmine pigment are Qureshi’s too familiar buds of blood. Whereas five centuries back traditional miniaturists left their work unsigned and bereft of idiosyncrasies, Qureshi wishes to be different. This body of work brings to mind the 1998 Turkish novel My Name Is Red, whose Ottoman-empire miniaturists murderously staved off such a Westernizing shift: Has Qureshi succumbed to the violence of authorship?The ruined gardens could conjure up the perished paradises of Kabul, Kashmir, and Samarra, Iraq, but Qureshi is merely allusive. Another flower—the fragrant jasmine—inspired the Qatari poet Muhammad ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami to compose a fiery poem condemning Westernization: It ignited the Arab Spring. “Tunisian Jasmine” was aired on news media across the Middle East, resulting in life imprisonment (he received royal pardon and was released last March). Qureshi the miniaturist may well speak of violence, but his flora remain yoked to a sense of enigma and duplicity.
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