RABIA FAROOQUI lives and works in Kirachi, Pakistan. She is an emerging artist, recently graduated the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Farooqui explores personal and sociocultural narratives through a series of dramatic gestures and peculiar movements, finely rendered in miniature.

Six Selves and a Cow | The development of a very traditional medium reflects greatly on the images you use and the narratives that are envisioned. Working mainly with the technique of Gouache on Wasli, Rabia Farooqui explores the links and the tension that exists between traditional and modern practices for Pakistan women.

Using portraiture as an accessory along with the miniature technique of painting, Rabia Farooqui has pruduced a series of delicate gouache paintings and graphyte drawings that touch on such issues as the gender politics, cultural self-definition and the authority of traditions – still in a humorous manner.

Her resulting montages of gestures and images often counter the narrative associations suggested by the isolated scenes and offer a greater plurality of meanings.The narrative is reveled in juxtapositions: her imagery conveys harmony and discord, security and disruption—and she focuses on the voids left between these extremes, the uncomfortable existence of betweenness.

By using the process of montage to combine and reorganize imagery of the self, Farooqui illustrates again that meaning is constructed relationally rather than emanating from within.