KARACHI – Tazeen Qayyum’s work comments on aggressive global politics and the subsequent suppression of differences. She uses insects as motifs, her favourite being dead cockroaches that are repeated in a pattern and are simultaneously rendered as compelling and repulsive.
Through these dead insects, she comments on human rights violations and human fatalities in the current wartime environment. The paintings have an attractive appeal, but only when the works are looked at closely, they reveal death and destruction.
They expose people being killed like insects, making us question our own insensitivity and the diminishing value of human life. In some of her works, she mimics entomological museum displays where insect bodies are violated and spread open for investigation.
With the use of original entomology pins, she not only violates the image, but also does violence to her surface, which is laboriously handmade. She uses labels in her compositions containing significant yet vague text to explore how categories and classifications could parallel the discursive agendas of political propaganda.
She further complements these works with reference to universal pesticide labels to evoke ideas that dehumanise and destroy.
Photos courtesy VASL Art
