Huda Hafeez is a maladaptive day dreamer
I do not just imagine and visualise scenarios, I am physically involved. If somebody caught me in the middle of this daydreaming; I would be talking, the bodily gestures and all that. It is a parallel world where things, elements, and people are taken from this reality but everything is under my control. I change the narratives and they work perfectly in my script.
Huda is neither the hero nor the villain in these stories, assembling the puzzle as she is immersed in the scenes. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis presents a different perspective on the genesis of mankind’s imagination in which the mind pulls from all worlds, and the definitions of reality are made and remade to will.
We see possibilities conjured up by a mind indulging in escapism, free to determine what may or may not be. The characters adopted from her time on planet Earth are transported into a timeless space where they are manipulated to fulfil new destined roles. Dreaming is not a well-adjusted affair; it can establish communications without facing any criticism.
To date, symbolism plays little part in Huda’s work. Patterns and objects don’t have fixed connotations; they may be meaningless in common usage, but they may have acquired deliberate meaning in themselves over time when viewed through various sets of eyes, implying something vague, mysterious, and unknown. The symbolism is simply and precisely a matter of contrasting speculations.
In the surrealist manifesto, Andre Breton writes, ‘Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience, it has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretence of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them – first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason.’
Huda may be inhabiting a certain fabric of space – time, but she is certainly not limited to stay in any one. A familiar feeling artists associate with – we often argue with ourselves, a devious, dynamic process to satiate our inherent curiosity.
Image: No Big Deal, Huda Hafeez, acrylics on MDF, all copyrights retained by the artist 2024.
