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Sense of Line – Drawings by Imtiaz Dharker

Date
-
Date
Thursday 13 July - Wednesday 2 August, 2017

Project Space
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
University Road
Leeds LS2 9JT

Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm.
Exhibition free: all welcome.

Preview: Wednesday 12 July at 6pm
RSVP: umimistry@alchemyanew.com

Sense of Line is an exhibition of drawings by artist, poet and documentary film-maker Imtiaz Dharker.

Imtiaz Dharker is an artist, poet and documentary film-maker. Awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, recipient of the Cholmondeley Award and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has published six anthologies of poetry. Carol Ann Duffy said, ‘If there were to be a World Laureate, the role could only be filled by Imtiaz Dharker.’

Imtiaz has had a number of solo exhibitions in various major cities in India, London, Leeds, New York and Hong Kong. Her first major, visual arts commission was in 1975 when she was invited to illustrate the distinguished Indian writer Ruskin Bond’s novella Flight of Pigeons. Many of these works were bought by late Bollywood stars Shashi and Jennifer Kapoor who had also produced the film Junoon based on Bond’s novella. Today, her drawings are held in a number of public and private collections.

Imtiaz Dharker, Letter, 2017. Pen and ink on hand made paper. A Sacred Sounds commission.This one-person show of drawings, often incorporating poems, excavates contested physical and mental landscapes through explorations of feminism, terrorism, tyranny and oppression. For Imtiaz image and word are inextricably linked. Everything starts with the image: sometimes as the line of a poem, sometimes as a drawing. They have commonality of emotion and theme as well as the physicality of being lines on paper — either as image or verse.

Sense of Line has important things to say about the transcultural society in which we live — the blurring of intellectual boundaries while physical borders are being hardened; the increasing state of estrangement and alienation afflicting societies; the inhabiting of multiple identities and personal yet universal narratives of love and loss.Sense of Line has been generously supported by Peter Hirschmann and Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society.

The exhibition is curated by Nima Poovaya-Smith (Senior Visiting Research Fellow and Director of Alchemy) in partnership with Noor Al Maamari, Barbara Bright Cardone, Lucie Donaldson, Victoria Vargas Downing and Tricia Ramsey(students from the MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies and MA Arts Management and Heritage Studies programmes at the University of Leeds).

Alchemy is an arts organization based in Leeds which exists to connect people — across cultures, nations and generations — through the arts. It aims to challenge perceptions, opening doors to new ideas and ways of thinking through shared cultural experiences.

See here for details of Sense of Line Salon on Thursday 13 July, organised in connection with the exhibition.

Images (from top):

Imtiaz Dharker
Alif, The Opening 10, 2005
Pen and ink on hand made paper

Imtiaz Dharker
Letter, 2017
Pen and ink on hand made paper
A Sacred Sounds commission