FREIGHT OF ANXIETIES

Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai, Saubiya Chasmawala and Baaraan Ijlal explore longing and loss, despair and disruption. Shweta Upadhyay looks at how women and wounds make their presence felt in their works.

- Shweta Upadhyay

When the pandemic struck in 2020, Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai started writing letters to her absent husband in a diary. She was locked in the barsati studio at her parents’ house and her letters in Urdu carried the freight of daily anxieties, longings, thoughts and expressions of loneliness, of the poetics and despair of waiting.

These letters were part of Nafas or the Isolation Diaries, which was held at Blueprint 12, New Delhi, from the 3rd to the 30th of April, 2021. The works include references from the poetry and books by Jalaluddin Rumi Balkhi, Mirza Ghalib, T. S. Eliot, Qurratulain Hyder, each having an impact on Ahmadzai’s life and thought process. The series encapsulates leitmotifs from Ahmadzai’s visual repertoire, which include a girl with a featureless face and a nest-like, cumbersome bouffant; chairs; beds; takhtis or flat wooden boards used in madrasas for learning the alphabet and calligraphy; cut pomegranates and the disembodied heart.