ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN YOULIN MAGAZINE
When we now hear the words “social distancing” and “isolating”, their original meaning has been replaced with a clinical interpretation that is mainly related to disease prevention. The pandemic vernacular has become commonplace in our every day to navigate our new reality. In pursuit of renewing socialisation in a post covid world, two artists, Jennifer Rae Forsyth and Shireen Ikramullah Khan planned a situational intervention for themselves, where they exchanged postcard-sized snail mail between Canada and Europe for two years. The exchange became a medium for them to cope with the uncertainty of quarantine and generated a series of 104 collaborative artworks using one side as a traditional postcard text area and the other as a canvas. The duo exhibition opened on November 4 2022, displayed at Tagh'eer Lahore, a Creative Space founded by Nashmia Haroon that encourages multidisciplinary happenings and events from music, writing and visual art.
Untitled by Shireen Ikramullah Khan and Jennifer Rae Forsyth
These series of artistic encounters were documented as weekly artwork that developed their connection and deepened the intervention as a therapeutic medium of visual improvisation. Through the weeks, the artists share their personal notes of having overcome anxiety, stress, and creative blocks, because they had an open channel to consistently express themselves. The witnessing of each other's contributions in mark making, collage, poetry, lettering, geometry and painterly washes, further enriched the process of artistic explorations offering new discoveries.
Untitled by Shireen Ikramullah Khan and Jennifer Rae Forsyth
Individual art practices of each postcard create an open channel of visual communication for over 50 weeks. While the rest of the world was sealing itself away under strict lockdown, Jennifer and Shireen managed to establish a compassionate and soulful connection completely remote from in-person interaction. Based in Edmonton, Jennifer has a long-standing practice creating images using collage-based techniques, her perceptive observations of urbanisation and gentrification lend to her selection of anatomical, mechanical, commercial transportation and architectural visual syntax that she lays on the paper. After she had done her half of the piece, she would send the artwork to Shireen, who was initially in Amsterdam and then later on in Berlin. Shireen would then use painterly washes, drawings and text to complete the work.
Untitled by Shireen Ikramullah Khan and Jennifer Rae Forsyth
Both artists welcome the other’s worldviews, sharing their familiarities and differences without strenuous confrontation or fear of rejection as their artwork became one organism by the end of the process. The images did not belong to a single individual mind but became a shared experience between both of them. The viewer walks around the display hung in the centre of the space using fish wire, creating multiple sections in the large hall. The hanging makes it possible to read both sides of the postcard, where the personal notes between both artists become part of the display. The internal dialogue and initial hesitations at the beginning of their correspondence soon become highly personal and spirited, as each artist explores elements of kinship through the revelation of art. The internal state of each artist becomes the externalised visualisations that are captured as artworks. Deeply held values begin to surface in the form of native proverbs written in Urdu and translated into English, opening up further participation with the artist's innermost thought processes.
Untitled by Shireen Ikramullah Khan and Jennifer Rae Forsyth
Art projects such as this and other collaborative art experiments have been the foundation of surrealist movements starting from the 1920s, where playfulness and chance were considered catalysts in freeing the mind from preconceived traditional notions of art making. The medium of choice was not restricted to formal classical art and spontaneity was considered a powerful automatism that became fundamental to surrealism. Jennifer Rae Forsyth and Shireen Ikramullah Khan created a working relationship much like the pioneering surrealists that believed that love and friendship were paramount to authenticity in creation. Their works are infused with poetry and confessional anecdotes that allow the viewer to share their experience with each passing week. The arrangement of sending the artwork through mail provided the freedom to receive and contribute as individuals, the process simultaneously conceals and reveals both artists pushing the viewer to eventually see them as one. Their exchange is reminiscent of the famous “Exquisite Corpse” visual gameplay, where a piece of paper was passed between multiple artists, each getting a turn to create a collection of marks, words or drawings. The paper would be folded at each turn to hide the previous contribution, or be left with only a single mark to begin the next drawing until a long composition sequence was achieved that was only revealed at the end of the game.
Untitled by Shireen Ikramullah Khan and Jennifer Rae Forsyth
This layering of stories and combining narratives creates a realm of imaginative clues and motifs that are more intuitive and metamorphic in nature. The psychological here is active and evolving throughout the series through the changes in colour compositions, selection of collaged images and a variety of poetic verses. These postcards carry the weight of time and distance experienced by each artist in terms of how they were coping with the changing world around them, in their respective countries. The materiality of the artwork remained a constant, and a psychological anchor that provided them stability and hope, while the unfamiliarity of the world was looming around them. These reflections become clearer through the ephemeral compositions that showcase a world breaking away and calmly drifting into the void. The artists continue to reconcile the aftermath of their pandemic-induced isolation through the act of displaying the expansive visual interactions that helped them remain connected to one another.
Untitled by Shireen Ikramullah Khan and Jennifer Rae Forsyth
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