Experimenter presents Conversations in Hyperreality, Saira Ansari’s first solo exhibition in India from 25 April – 31 May 2012.
Saira Ansari’s work is derived from responding to aggressive and vividly visual personal dreams and hallucinatory experiences that she has experienced for most of her memory. Her primary interest over the last few years has been to work around the experience of lucid dreaming, tonic immobility, nightmares, and letters of communication that represent physical and mental displacement. Off-hand drawings and texts are studies of her own deep-seated thoughts that provide a fleeting glimpse into her complex mind. Some works therefore are very casual records while some visuals are interpretations of scientific research and studies conducted in studying dreams and human psychology.
Ansari’s practice deals with uncomfortable dialogue, a dialogue that is loud, probing and insolent, but often ignored for the sake of sanity or even politeness and the etiquette of normalcy. She translates this dialogue into written text, sometimes directly scribbled on the walls in private and public spaces, in most instances within her drawings and journals and at other times through audio renderings. Text swathes her practice to emerge as a medium as significant as any other if not more. Conversations in Hyperreality at first sight, does not seem cohesive, but at the same time assumes the position of a storyteller and creates a visual allegory of the existence of two very important ‘realities’ that conjoin to form a sense of apparent truths where irrational thoughts, repetitive ideas, and unrealistic fears loom and interweave to create an imaginary scaffolding of conversations. Likewise the seepage of the real in this hyperreality often adds an absurd logic that helps direct hysterical fantasies to a stable lull, only to resume it at yet another imaginary, fantastical conversation.
Saira Ansari (b. 1982, Pakistan) earned an MFA from National College of Art, Lahore in 2010. She has shown at several exhibitions including Asia House, London, 2011; Marker- Project spaces - Art Dubai (Grey Noise) 2011 & Jam Jar, Dubai 2011, Artist Projects - India Art Fair, New Delhi, 2011 amongst others. Ansari currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil & Lahore, Pakistan.