alia bilgrami
Document Actions
works resume
DISPLACEMENT
My BFA thesis work was an attempt at articulating the feeling of displacement through a series of paintings. My visual vocabulary was inspired by elements found on cardboard boxes, such as the language and symbols that are part of a package. The language of the box itself offered me multiple meanings that I could translate into my paintings.
Migration often brings with it alienation and categorization; being put into boxes you may not belong in. The question of identity; hybridism and globalization seem to have one element in common: Each carries a concurrent, perhaps latent, sense of displacement.
This body of work was an attempt at articulating and resolving that feeling using cardboard boxes—essentially utilized for packing and moving—to embody the person or people displaced. Dealing with different kinds of displacement, such as geographical, spiritual, cultural and physical, my miniature paintings also reference memories of living between Montreal, Karachi, London and Islamabad, various homes within cities and the circumstances behind these translocations.
My new work is a loose version of these sentiments. Perhaps in some ways, it is an attempt at breaking down the rigidity of the box in the same way that contemporary miniaturists attempt to break down the miniature. While the underlying theme still contains hidden boxes or refers to the box and its construction in some way, it is a far more abstract body of work, in terms of both thought and execution.
