Treading Sacred Ground - II

Nusra Latif Qureshi, born in Lahore, Pakistan, studied the complex art of miniature painting at the National College of Arts, Lahore before settling in Melbourne, Australia. Gathering imagery and icons from Mughal, Pahari and Rajasthani miniatures, Qureshi ironically juxtaposes these traditional motifs with symbols of power and dominance, reorganising hierarchy of scale and composition to inject new meanings into the iconography. Discarding the handmade wasli paper typically used in miniature painting for a coarser illustration board, Qureshi still preserves the laborious traditional methods of preparing the pigments and paintbrushes. Fascinated by the role of British colonialism in both destroying the Mughal empire and shaping the prevailing Pakistani culture, her work breaks down the imagery of power inherent in these systems and reorganises it, challenging its telling of history. "Her critique of the widespread acceptance of colonial mores is articulated in her assertion that to link miniature painting to tradition is incorrect. 'Tradition,' argues Latif, is 'a forced notion of antiquity and, thus, inaccessibility and remoteness, a sentiment continually expressed by the British coloniser confronting a cultural product from India, past or present." (Y. Dalmia and S. Hashmi, Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, New Delhi, 2007, p. 88).