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print this pageTangles, Knots, and Binds: A Contemplation as the World Burns
Humna Raza
Saturday, October 21 - 2:00PM to 3:00PM
Corn Center, Room 176
My mom and I were never on good terms regarding my hair. In Pakistani culture, a woman's hair should be long and luxurious, as she is judged by how well she keeps it. My mother always pulled too hard when brushing my hair and I would tell her it hurt. Eventually she stopped trying and I was left to try and figure my hair out on my own. As a multidisciplinary artist, I strive to untangle the knots in my life just like I am constantly combing out the tangles in my own hair.
In Tangles, Knots, and Binds, I engaged in a process to find, embrace, and heal my invisible scars and wounds through image making and self-portraiture. The works express a narrative of my own long-withheld feelings of depression and anxiety, but I construct them to invite viewers to relate to the work in some way.
The series uses hair, hands, and my own face as visual metaphors for the secrets and lies that have kept me bound in suffering. Hands have the power to create and destroy. Hair has energy and deep ties that are both symbolic and cultural. The face is one's identity and revealer of emotions.
I was trained in the traditional methods of painting, drawing and ceramics, but I use photography to capture my reference images, so it is an integral step of my process. Making photographs has become a performative act to invoke my own emotions, embrace them, and placing trust in my intuition. The paintings stress perfectionism, the drawings and ceramics embody freedom, and the photographs seize the harshest, genuine truth.
My photographic process has been difficult to embrace. My estranged father was a portrait photographer in Karachi, and I associated photography with his absence from my life. The more I tried to run from photography the more I found myself gripping onto my camera only that much tighter; ultimately engrossed by its history, potential, and beauty.
Tangles, Knots, and Binds is the story of a young woman facing the trials and tribulations of the ever-growing world around her. It is the harrowing and honest expression of her emotions towards her home, her race, her culture, her religion, her nationality, her sexuality, her gender, and her family. It is a visual gateway for understanding and relating the painful emotions that we all collectively share, in this reality and the next.
We are of flesh and blood.
Knotted, bound, and twisted,
Knave, bruised and tormented.
Flowing and overflowing with emotions.
speaker
Humna Raza
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