Keep in mind live in within your limits I know what are you, No way revolution parasite, Looking very pretty darling you are
Amna Asghar
Acrylic and screen print, 2016
By appropriating and recontextualizing images from popular sub-continent culture, Pakistani digest magazines and Disney animations, these works enact various modes of quotation, translation, mistranslation, hybridity, and overlap. Beauty ads, excerpts of love stories, distilled Disney skies, subcontinent graphics, music, advertisements, and text come from digest magazines and cassette tapes. Interested in the way images hit one another based on their proximity, these paintings, sometimes images sliced, sit together on multiple panels. Like the gutter of a book or magazine, how does one inflict on the other? Text, in both Urdu and English, printed and painted, are cropped, running in opposing directions, opposing forces across the surfaces. Their slick and resolved surface belies an attempt to seduce the viewer while the actual content often points to moments of difference and gaps in understanding. It is a packaging tool, in ways, to entice the viewer. Hence the formal underpinnings in making the image play a large role in conceiving the ideas of product and commodity. The paintings are like flipping through a book quickly and connecting snippets of pages to one another. The groupings becoming sonnets, couplets, remixed, like a variation in music, these works become altered versions of their original sources
