Artist Saba Hasan’s book sculptures probe fragility, memory and time in new exhibition

New Delhi, Nov 20 (PTI) A new exhibition here at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) presents artist Saba Hasan's book sculptures in a comprehensive display for the first time, bringing together both her early works and her mutli-media experiments.

The exhibition, titled "jo gayab hai, aur hazir bhi", offers a holistic view of Hasan's sculptural vocabulary and highlights the subtle, multi-dimensional dialogues her works enact between the seen and unseen, the preserved and the lost, the personal and the collective.

The exhibition title, referencing renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s "Hum Dekhenge", interrogates the dialectics of presence and absence and situates the book as a site of reflection.

Hasan’s practice transforms books of varied sizes through folding, cutting, burning, layering and embedding, often with organic and inorganic materials.

"This exhibition of Saba Hasan’s book sculptures is an unhurried invitation to encounter how ordinary objects such as books can be reimagined. Saba begins with the very familiar, the personal, handy structure of a book as her passage between strife and peace and as an instrument of gradual catharsis. Using old and distressed books as her core material , she enacts various inventive as well as mundane processes upon them in radical gestures of conversation, and transformation," curator Neha ‘Zooni’ Tickoo said in a note.

She added that Saba’s preoccupation with the structure of the book is an attempt to fragment the authority of written language.

The exhibition puts together few of Hasan's early works and her video art.

“Book as material I have always loved and understood, its fragility holds great powers of subversion. So is with the passage of time, cycle of life, significance of natural elements, conflict, preservation, rebellion, survival, the deep interconnectedness of humans with each other and the earth," Hasan said in a statement.

The exhibition will come to an end on January 10. PTI MAH MAH MAH