THE LOOKING GLASS:

The widely accepted practice of women being the model and muse of male artists, has been a subject of much debate for most of the 20th century. However, women artists have used their work to disrupt this tradition and also the tradition of self-portraiture as a means for the male artist to assert ‘his’ identity, rarely have the women been presented as the subject of self-portraiture in the history of art.

Saira Sheikh’s Mirror Mirror on the Wall, an exhibition that opened last month at Rohtas 2 in Lahore, is a multi-layered project, creating a dialogue about the relationship between self-portraiture and mirror, perhaps casting doubt upon the seemingly similar characteristics between the two. The work is a radical departure from the conventions of art making in Pakistan, challenging, upsetting or perhaps reinforcing pre-conceived notions about art, for a bunch of reasons.

The gallery filled with drawings of the nude artist, is an investigation into the notion of ‘self-portraiture’, beyond the conventional portrait representation of the self. These unsigned drawings, sitting on easels or resting against the walls, are a combination of artist’s own rendition of the self in the mirror and drawings of six or seven other artists who were invited to the gallery a day before the opening of the show, where Sheikh modeled nude for a duration of six hours, as a living sculpture creating a hybrid of sculpture and performance. Performing the self-portrait is a way of coming into representation as both the subject and the object and like all performance-based art, it deals with aspects of control, the acquisition of an audience and subjecting them to the artist's "control" which involves another aspect of body art - endurance; both hers and the audience’s. The performance of actions is also a shift from the study of objects to a study of processes, in an attempt to articulate the self in everyday life and establishing a social identity based on everyday acts shaped through the practice of daily rituals.

This investigation into the nature of; self-representation, self-portraiture, autobiography, endurance, performance, objectification, perception, identity, socio-cultural acceptability, authorship, ownership, viewing/looking and artistic process, asks the viewer to think of art and the nature of artistic enterprise anew, particularly in this part of the world.

Sheikh is the creator, subject and the object of the work, both observer and the observed. This dichotomy is further highlighted when the viewer, upon entering the gallery is encountered by a mirror, on the façade of a small white cubicle, the size of a standard try-room perhaps. The reality of the looking glass is revealed to the viewer upon entering the cubicle from the back, which acts as a mirror from one side and a window from the other.  So upon entering the gallery the viewer watches him/herself, while from the inside of the cubicle the viewer watches the ‘others’ watching themselves, without the awareness of being watched, caught looking in on a private moment, overlapping public and private domains. The act of looking at the drawings is not any less voyeuristic than the experience of the cubicle, at once hallucinatory and distanced, suggesting the space of an imaginary world, with which the viewer is engaged privately but disconnectedly, hence the presence of one compliments the presence of the other, while also allowing the viewer to engage with the work more actively.

On one hand Sheikh takes control over her display by extending this invitation to be drawn, to reject subjection, an act of naked defiance or a sudden confrontation, that places the viewer in an equally vulnerable position, while on the other hand she stands motionless after extending that invitation, playing a submissive role, making herself vulnerable, reinforcing the prevalent ideas of female subjectivity, in a confrontation with the thin line between celebration of female sexuality and objectification of the female body, a rather tricky relationship to explore the many levels of self.

The exhibition despite being viewed within a controlled environment, by a small circle of seemingly like-minded people (plus some accidental viewers) who were invited to view the exhibit, is nevertheless going to act like a lightning rod (perhaps even by some of the readers of this review) for conflicting views of feminism, propriety, social responsibility, art-world economics, reputation-building and artistic license, which is a healthy dialogue, both in creative terms and for an ever expanding definition of art, as long as its constructive.