Adeela Suleman | Ashes to Ashes

The works exhibited in Ashes to Ashes, continue Adeela Suleman’s engagement with the narration and documentation of violence. Suleman’s exquisitely produced, beguiling sculptural pieces speak to daily negotiations with security and reflect the tenuous experience of life in and around Karachi. Suleman regards the very act of producing art in the midst of such uncertainty and turbulence to be both a form of rebellion as well as an act of liberation.

In this exhibition, Suleman extends her practice of incorporating found material: repurposing found craft, found object and found image into a unique and personal visual language. Her symbolism incorporates the visual idioms of the urban vernacular and is further embellished by metaphors which, even as they allude to popular constructs, are rooted in folklore, mythology and personal stories from her childhood.

The works themselves are seductively executed and artfully communicate a tension: the inexhaustible beauty of the landscapes contrasting with the escalating brutalism and the corrosive embeddedness of local and global violence.