Dir Bio: Maryam Rahman is a multi-disciplinary artist. Her work ranges from film, installation, public art intervention to miniature painting and drawing. She has a particular affinity with drawing as a thinking tool, a direct mode of expression and a formal art discipline. She is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art. She lives and works in Lahore. She teaches at the National College of Art and studies Lahori Nastaliq calligraphy a Hast-o-Neest Institute.She manages the art estate of her aunt, Lala Rukh.
Films shown in Divvy Film Festival 2024
Maryam Rahman Film
dir: Maryam Rahman
run time: 8:20 mins
production year: 2024
art film short
synopsis: The film is about the daily practice and live performance of artist Maryam Rahman as she writes the names of Sindhi women in the precise art of Nastaliq calligraphy. The performance was curated as an interplay with Pakistani Classical Music. The art of Nastaliq is seldom experienced as a live performance. The highly controlled and slow-paced movements turn fleeting and gestural - a heroic visceral performance in drawing. Nastaliq is made up of ligatures, units like the jagain or flourishes in Pakistani Classical Music which can be appreciated as complete abstract forms in themselves or in their coming together to create a new image.The ’sarir-e-khaama’ or ‘the sound of the qalam as it writes’ is often obscured by louder voices. The muted sounds require us to lean in a little further to hear them - the less-established paradigms, the little-known narratives, the embracing of the anti-hero.Drawing these names is an act of resisting their erasure. At the same time it questions the colonial and postcolonial narrative of the exclusion of the classical arts from the arena of High Art.
