AUTHOR: N.R.
PUBLICATIONS: CHAWKANDI ART GALLERY
DATED: 29 SEPT 2009

A collaborative project between Roohi Ahmed and Abdullah Syed, “Figure of Speech” was devised during a residency in Sydney, Australia. Interestingly the show had been divided into three rather undefined sections – one each of the artists work and one in which the two artists merged their individual motifs to recreate a third set of metaphors. Ahmed found the human form in places we wouldnt imagine the needle and its eye or the ubiquitous eucalyptus leaf. Syed saw the great axioms of our millennium in the beehive and the razor blade. The title of the show referred to the allusions the two artists had developed – Roohi called one of her works “Be-leaf” and another “Turning over a New Leaf.” Abdullah referred to the buzzwords of our times such as “axis of evil” and “weapons of mass destruction”. With an ingenuity born of intuition and skill, the two artists then developed a series of tiny objects, too small to be called installations, in which they combined their sets of ideas. Thus the razor blade was recreated using organic leafy material and attached convincingly to a twig and a needle constructed out of beeswax. lf one of the many aims of an artist is to show us what we cannot see, Ahmed and Syed succeeded in this exhibition.