Photo: DR

The exhibition brings together canvases, works on paper and a video that all together create a dialogue between life and death. The foliage and nature represent life, while the red refers to death. This red echoes the current situation in Pakistan and the rest of the world, where violence is experienced on a daily basis. “Yet people are not giving up hope,” explains Qureshi. Hence the flowers that spring from the red paint to express the hope that remains despite everything, the hope for a better tomorrow. "

Qureshi's floral ornaments sketch the contours of the landscape idea and line the canvas by stretching their rootlets like climbing plants. Recalling the porosity of borders, spaces and bodies observed after violent attacks, they also constitute a metaphor for the interference between social structures and personal sensitivities. Qureshi's works evoke the vulnerability of bodies at the same time as the social fabric that forms the backbone of our existence.

The titles awaken social and cultural resonances beyond metaphors. And They Still Seek the Traces of Blood is taken from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose artist heard the songs on the radio in his childhood. He tells us about the dead buried without having received the funeral honors and without any investigation having clarified the circumstances of their death.

Imran Qureshi, unanimously praised for his installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2013, participated the same year in the “Encyclopedic Palace” organized by Massimiliano Gioni in the central pavilion of the Venice Biennale. For the 2014 edition of the Nuit blanche à Paris, he created two installations, in the Sainte-Genevière library and on the Quai d'Austerlitz. The same year, he presented several paintings as well as a work , at the inaugural exhibit at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, titled “The Garden of Ideas, Contemporary Art in Pakistan”, while the Eli and Edyth Broad Museum in Michigan hosted their exhibit “The God of Small Things”. The Ikon Gallery in Birmingham dedicated a personal exhibition to him in 2014-2015, as “artist of the year 2013” ​​nominated by Deutsche Bank. He is one of the artists invited to the Iranian pavilion of the 56^e Venice Biennale, until November 2015, to illustrate the theme “The Great Game”. In 2016, Imran Qureshi will present a personal exhibition at the Barbican, in London and will participate in the inaugural hanging in the new rooms of the Kunsten, in Aalborg.

Works by Imran Qureshi are in the permanent collections of such prestigious institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Opening: Saturday September 12, 2015, 17.30 p.m. - 20 p.m. in the presence of the artist

For more information : ropac.net