Layers, Silences, and Maryam Jahanzeb Baig

Firsts are supposed to be special right? Here’s our first one. There’s too many layers to the work so bear along.

Maryam Jahanzeb Baig is a fine artist from Lahore. Her work depicts the impermanent nature of life. How time is the only champion throughout history ensuring every rise remains temporary. What once stood as the symbol of power is now controlled by a passerby’s intrusive thoughts and a weapon of microscopic destruction.

If you’ve ever walked around one of Lahore’s heritage sites, you’ve probably noticed vandalised murals along the stretched out burnt brick walls.

Names, scratches, initials of unrequited lovers, and some unimaginable injuries that a Mughal Emperor never envisioned for his architectural classic to go through.

What we particularly love about Maryam’s work is her courage. Imagine creating a piece only to ruin it. Yeah, I know a lot of artists pull that stunt, but to tear down an intricately sculpted clay or wood piece takes effort of the mind and body.

And then we talked to Maryam about her work and within minutes it started making sense. There are layers to her. She thinks for a minute only to enunciate a mild hmmm. You have to ask the same question in three different languages, tones, and volumes to bring out a nod and a comment.

And her work is assembled in a similar manner. That’s the second thing we love the most about her work. It’s a part of her personality extended out on these materials, going through these strokes and carves, and eventually layered off with a final destructive blow.

She is there, beneath the wounded surface, preserved in what the Mughal artisans intended. But she is also above the surface, in the brutal act of its disaster. What most of you will see is the final act, but what we see is the labor that replicated a lost craft, and tore it again in an attempt to make you feel the pain.

And so in this act, you see, and you question. If one elitist emperor employed hundreds of craftsmen to beautify the banks of Ravi with an organic Lahori color palette, who in the length of these 400 some years decided to scratch the first wall.

And who appointed to power in the civilised British Raj decided it's okay to physically abuse perpetrators of political vandalism but not architectural?

That, is how Maryam’s art stands apart.