HER IMPISH RECIPE OF LINES AND SHAPES

Rita Datta traces the directions of Ayesha Sultana’s journey and reflects on the new romantic turn in her work.

- Rita Datta

No facile labels will do for Jessore-born Bangladeshi artist Ayesha Sultana: labels don’t accommodate the interstitial porosity that lets multiple creative practices evolve and flow into one another. Mapping her art from the student days at Lahore’s Beaconhouse National University (2008) takes you through a journey of enquiries and ellipses which indicates alert senses partnering a sensibility that, in its dialogue with materiality and evanescence, is continuously distilling the reality around and interpreting it in visual terms that are tenuous, ambiguous, quizzical and wryly open-ended.

So varied have been her experiments in art – in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video installations and found objects – it seems she has, at a fundamental level, been in search of subterranean links between experiences, ideas and the architecture of vocabularies. This is a search to understand the way material and form, space and movement, drawing and sculpture, tone and texture, pattern and rhythm, substance and shadow, figure and locale, can explore a liminal vision that’s meditative and, at the same time, teasing.

From the hint of a beguiling narrative in a painting of young women (They sighed a toast of denial, 2007) to photographic compositions with form that simultaneously suggest substance and transience (Body in Landscape, 2008), her emphasis was shifting towards economy, even though the works didn’t anticipate the captivating optical rigour seen in her first solo show six years later in Kolkata. By the time Experimenter hosted Outside the Field of View in 2014, Sultana had shed narratives, figures and whatever could be deemed flab, to pare down her language to austere patterns that wouldn’t even accommodate arcs and circles.