Lala Rukh Rupak 2016
Courtesy of the Estate of Lala Rukh and Grey Noise, Dubai
In Rupak, artist Lala Rukh gives visual form to the live quality of sound
Rupak 2016 is Rukh’s last major work. It consists of an animation and 88 drawings. The soundtrack features a tabla – a drum from the Indian subcontinent. The work takes its title from the rupak taal, a rhythmic pattern in Hindustani music.
Lala Rukh was a socially and politically engaged artist who had a deep interest in music. This was sparked by her engagement with the All Pakistan Musical Conference, an organisation created by her father, Hayat Ahmad Khan, in 1959. It promoted diverse types of music from around the country.
In her drawings Rukh creates a form of visual annotation for a musical tradition that is largely based on memory and improvisation. The square-shaped units, which make up the various configurations, derive from calligraphy. They run along a single line in the black-on-white drawings, while they pulsate in and out of sight in the white-on-black animation. Rupak encapsulates Lala Rukh’s precise, minimal visual language. The artist often condensed complex subject matters into concise forms.
Curated by Devika Singh
Danica Dakic, ISOLA BELLA 2007–8
Isola Bella 2007–8 is a single-channel video projection displayed in a dark and sound-insulated space that is carpeted and painted grey. Outside the space a number of props used in the film are displayed in a case on the wall, above which hang three posters bearing the work’s title in large white capital letters against a backdrop of blue sky and palm trees. The film, which lasts just over nineteen minutes, was shot at the Home for the Protection of Children and Youth in the Bosnian village of Pazaric, near Sarajevo, a facility for young people with mental health problems and physical disabilities. The artist collaborated with its forty residents to stage an unscripted performance. Set against the backdrop of historical panoramic wallpaper featuring an ideal and beautiful island, the play presents a series of monologues, movements and musical improvisations enacted spontaneously by the residents. Wearing ordinary clothes and paper Victorian-style masks, the participants are both the actors and the audience for the performance. The title of the work, Isola Bella (Italian for ‘beautiful island’), is derived from the name of the wallpaper design and hints at the history of the place, which benefited from its geographical isolation and survived the Balkan wars of the 1990s without any serious damage or casualties. Most importantly, however, it points to the utopian character of the performance, which blends narratives describing real facts from the lives of the protagonists with fictional stories reflecting their never-to-be-fulfilled dreams and fantasies: one of the inmates, for instance, tells a story of his life on the streets and experience of drug abuse while another projects her future as a legal expert for the United Nations.
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artworks in Lala Rukh
Art in this room
Danica Dakic
ISOLA BELLA
2007–8
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Danica Dakic
ISOLA BELLA
2007