Two Pakistani American women reinvent traditional art with unconventional subjects
Source: Washington Post
Ambreen Butt’s mixed-media artwork, “Shoaib (8),” takes its title from the name and age of a young victim of an American drone strike. (Photo by Kevin Todora/Ambreen Butt)
Ambreen Butt makes a striking first impression.
In the Pakistani American artist’s first solo exhibition in Washington, two large images hang on the wall just opposite the entrance to her show, “Mark My Words,” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Titled “Pages of Deception,” the diptych appears, from a distance, like facing folios of paper in a calligraphic Islamic manuscript, with traditional filigree borders. On closer inspection, however, these 70.5-by-45-inch “pages” are taken up with overlapping circles of shredded and collaged snippets of paper: the transcript of the 2011 terrorism trial of Egyptian American Tarek Mehanna, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison by a Boston jury. The thousands of indecipherable text fragments — the left side representing the prosecution’s closing argument, with the defense’s statement on the right — seem to swirl almost into meaninglessness, in a powerful commentary on the inscrutability of justice.
All of the exhibition’s 13 works on paper reward such close examination and engagement. The artist builds on her training in classical Indo-Persian miniature painting, incorporating an array of other techniques to explore contemporary political narratives.
