Atif Khan
Tales of the Heart
Opening Reception: October 27, 2022
Time: 4:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Tanzara Gallery, Islamabad
Exhibition continues until 09, November 2022. (Mon - Sat | 11:30 am - 7:00 pm)
By and large, Muhammad Atif Khan’s work is a homage to Pakistani popular visual culture, paying tribute to its amalgamation of Central Asian/Persian aesthetics and a local South Asian blend of expressive storytelling. Borrowing from and building on a gamut of images and iconography across hundreds of years of Mughal culture and miniature paintings, to Pakistani truck art and a diverse range of visual materials from his everyday life , Atif creates a unique imaginary universe. Juxtaposing eclectic images in contrasting environments subverts their original contextual meaning and opens windows on new stories that speak of his concerns about spiritual and physical worlds, simultaneously.
About the technique:
To construct the compositions on the basis of his own story line, he works with fractions of existing or found images, created by others. Atif Khan borrow these fraction of images from various sources of his interests such as Miniature paintings, Truck art and all types of popular printed materials i.e. books, posters, currency notes etc.
Atif Khan gathers data through photography and scanning from printed materials. He put all gathered data into his computer where he does editing, rearranging, composing and digital drawing using various software. Once he finish the work on the screen then it go through the colour correction and proofing stages, which ended up in the form of a Museum quality archival inkjet print.
One can call it recycling of images; even he extensively incorporate the found images in his work but the compositions and story lines are very much of his own, which suggests new meanings to the viewers.