'Disrupting the Alignment' - exhibition by Naiza Khan opens next week

Published On Fri 10 Jan 2014 by Grant Hill

An exhibition of work by leading Pakistani artist Naiza Khan that examines the implications of globalised urbanisation for a land and its people opens at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) next week.

'Disrupting the Alignment', which will be held at Cooper Gallery, is Khan's first major solo exhibition in Scotland. Comprising three films, watercolours, prints and photographic works, it explores the storm of social and economic changes that the contemporary world is undergoing. The exhibition opens with a Preview Evening on Thursday, 16th January and will remain open until 15th February.

'Naiza Khan employs a questioning gaze and her work negotiates and interrupts the spoils of progress to ask questions of artistic agency and its place in the social realm,' said curator Sophia Hao. 'The works in this filmic installation incorporate history, myth and the ephemera, always returning to the spirit of a place.'

Based in Karachi, Khan produces work that has been exhibited internationally and she is well respected for her persistent advocacy of contemporary art in Pakistan. In 2013 Khan was awarded the prestigious Prince Claus Award in recognition of work that offers a complex and nuanced perspective on contemporary Pakistani society and the challenges it is facing.

'Disrupting the Alignment' features 'Observatory', an evocatively haunting film of a derelict observatory on the coast of Manora Island. Playing in a continuous loop, the film interleaves images of decaying architecture with a reading of weather reports from 1939, discovered in the building. In her deft re-awakening of a lost past, Khan brings the deteriorating present of the Observatory into an elegiac focus.

This pathos of a ruined, but latently alive past is also drawn out in 'Homage', which embodies a sensitive understanding of powerlessness and marginalisation. The film charts a subtle sculptural intervention that offers a glimpse of how an artist can memorialise a tragic event, the death of four school children, whilst evading the suffocating spectacle of the monumental.

A preview of 'Disrupting the Alignment' takes place at Cooper Gallery from 5.30-7.30pm on Thursday, 16th January. The exhibition officially opens the following day and will run until 15th February. The Cooper Gallery will be open from 9.30am-5pm (weekdays) and 10.30am-4.30pm (Saturday).

More information is available at www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/exhibitions.

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