Body Quotidian initiates a dialogue between recent sculptures, photographs and paintings by artists Laila Majid and Inaam Zafar. Though their immediate concerns may vary, both artists share a preference for metaphor. Majid and Zafar’s works remind us that our bodies persist—bound by skin and hair, sustained as vessels of flesh and blood—even as contemporary technologies increasingly warp and reshape our perceptions of youth, truth and beauty.
Placed alongside each other, their works reveal a mutual economy in how surfaces, materials and silhouettes are represented, hinting at the subtleties of our bodies’ existence in the realm of everyday life. They underscore chemical residues and suppressions, as well as hues, constituent matter, and the forms that contain, protect or provoke the human figure. The works evoke the heat and sweat that rise from the skin, even the faint trace of electricity that seems to hover over our edges.
Running alongside these gestures is the suggestion of the spaces we inhabit, the rooms we reside in, the subdued palette of domestic life and the peripheral orbs of light that appear almost spectral upon introspection. The ensuing conversation flickers between states of solemn repose, play, desire and death. The body appears only partially, its contours suggested, yet never fully revealed, as if profoundly inscrutable in its essence.
Body Quotidian is curated by Raja’a Khalid, Assistant Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation.