Ruby Chishtie’s lines of life

LAHORE: Ruby Chishtie’s new collection of works, called Placed, Displaced, Misplaced, is the newest creative burst by the artist, who has specialized in bronze casting and ceramic sculpture. These works revolve around life itself, and her perception.
Each strangely bizarre prototype of life and its various elements are shown in mediums limited to cloth, wood, and metal wire. “To reduce the complexities of life, we have to develop a linear system, where there is a beginning, an ending and then there are happenings in between,” writes the artist about her exhibition.
“Even the buildings we live in are designed under the same influence: entrances and exits.” Life she says has been ‘designed’ and ‘altered’ in the same way and it has nothing to do with understanding. As far as her exhibition goes, this statement is very true. Understanding the work is not a part of the exhibition. It borders on surreal, imaginative, realistic, and metaphorical.
There may be realistic charpoys, made delicately out of wire netting, and metal work, but the whole scenario, which greets the art lovers as they enter the gallery, which is of several charpoys scattered around on the floor in one place, with a mess of some cloth arranged on one side, is not just that. It signifies something much deeper. But what is going on in the artist’s mind remains something of a mystery.
Is it a campout site, where many victims of a recent flood, are residing for the time being? Or are they symbols of thoughts, scattered about in a brain? Is it so easily explainable? Or is it such a private experience that the artist has only revealed to herself while arranging them? Despite these questions, the charpoys definitely present a very rural scenario. Perhaps it is a memory.
Another very mystifying piece of work is a three series framework of red splotches upon white, morbidly similar to blood. Made with paint and tiny red beads, from afar it is like a spatter of a red liquid upon a wall. From near it is nonsensical once again, only a very vivid and attractive pattern displayed on the wall.
A confusion of mosque minarets, some shiny cloth, a bag full of stitching material and some other religious symbols, is described as the map of ‘my’ land. Superficially this may seem like a strange combination of symbols, but to show the chaos in Pakistan, the country which is ‘loosing its stitching’, and coming undone, along with the dominating power of the mosque; it is an extremely expressive piece of work.
Dolls are a very intriguing factor in Chishtie’s work. Her expertise of making dolls has led her to display them in the most horrifying of fashions, not pretty and clean like children’s dolls, but deathly and limp, like dead bodies scattered around after a war. This one too, sees one headless doll lying ‘face down’, cloth-less, reminding one of suicide bombings in the country.
Nearby a head is also seen, this too separated from the body. This work too is scattered in the middle of the floor, with tiny cloth tents signifying once again a temporary stop in life. Another highlight of the exhibition is a coat which sits on top of a cage like maze of wooden and metal sticks, tied at each corner.
The cage shows the linearity of life, the man on top climbing his way through it, life being linear but like a maze at the same time. A wooden ladder is propped against the wall showing an upwards climb. Chishtie’s works may seem to be read into a lot.
But in actuality, they are as surreal and illusory and even signifying nothing as such, just like life for any individual is: there is no one meaning, and sometimes there is no meaning at all.