Enclosure/Erasure

APT artist Imran Channa is showing "Enclosure/Erasure" a solo show at Koel Gallery Karachi

This current body of work is part of an ongoing investigation that complements my previous works.

For this series I consider and interrogate the intersection between knowledge and power. My primary focus is how historical events are documented and disseminated. I am interested in how historical facts become distorted, how this distortion can dominate narratives, how fabricated narratives can override collective memory, and how collective memory shapes social consciousness.

Photography can be viewed as presenting what appears to be truth. This moment, frozen in time, and recorded on film and paper presents many challenges. By its very nature, this framed image is problematic. It can be bearer of great untruths by elimination what is outside the frame. Can a viewer ever be certain they have the full picture of what they are looking at?

This series of work interrogates the role played by photography in creating a particular picture of the past. Referencing personal and official photographs, this new body of work questions the authenticity of history by illuminating the mechanism that manipulatessocial and historical narratives.

My technique forces the image to undergo a series of transformations. A faithful representation goes through a process of erasure until the image is rendered visible and invisible. What remains on the paper are fragments elucidating uncertainty and doubts.

The whole process is time consuming, requiring detailed editing and precision. My aim is to create an image that alludes to something familiar but is never accurate enough to be recognizable. Provoking uncertainty and throwing constructed history into doubts, these drawings invite the viewer to consider alternative realities grounded in the familiar. Spotlighting the vulnerability in ones own perspective, this new body of work questions if we ever truly know what we think we know or have been led to believe.