Risham Syed | HISTORY AS PAST
Risham Syed is a Lahore-based artist who uses painting, as well as other mediums to explore difficult questions of history, sociology, politics, and post-colonial identity.
south asian artist, risham syed, women artist, Lahore-based artist, associate professor, head of the department, SVAD, BNU, Seven Seas
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Risham Syed

HISTORY AS PAST

Installation 2014 (after ‘The Great Bath at Bursa’ by Jean-Leon Gerome)
Medium: Painting (23″ x 19″ acrylic on canvas on board), brass rod, super-sized white cotton towel).

Orientalist painters like Jean Leon Gerome, in the words of Edward Said, ‘represented the exotic east with a visual expression of sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure and intense energy that had a life of its own’. The romance with the exotic comes in full circle when in the absence of other types of figurative visual imagery of the past, Orientalist paintings serve as an evocation of a lost era.

Detail: Acrylic on cotton on aluminum 5″X7″