The feminist within

Vazda Khan, an eminent poet and versatile painter, is creating a new world through her paintings, looking towards establishing peace, communal and gender harmony, and compassion

By Romana Farid

In her solo exhibition, Feminism within, Vazda Khan’s paintings reflect contemporary burning issues. Her concern shows through her canvasses, the colours of a feminist sentiment. Vazda's art has somehow managed to escape influence by negative forces and market trends. What is equally evident from her works is that the crowd has no face, and it is useless to give it any name, interpretation or meaning: it has only one nature, and that is uproar.

Vazda's work seeks to immerse itself in this cacophony, emerging dripping with a sensibility that is both figurative and abstract, a melding of traditional technique and a modern examination of the way things are. In terms of pure art, though, her paintings strain for a strong presence in overcrowded field of painting.

Her works are what Harold Rosenberg, the most vocal proponent of the Abstract Expressionist movement, termed “action painting”. No Breathing Space, Sara Akash, Game of Power, Feminism Within, Symphony, and Survival are proof of Vazda's skill at her work. No Breathing Space tries to convert the unuttered feeling of a woman into words through her facial gestures. Game of Power is a satire on women—those women who have ignored their community and their motherland for the purpose of fulfilling their questioned aspirations.

At a formative level, these paintings also depict the vicissitudes of being a woman through slight changes in facial expressions, like Grecial theatre masks. Feminism Within seeks to envision a glass ceiling that women everywhere come up against: in fact, there is a ladder below the ceiling that they can touch but cannot climb. Symphony, on the other hand, reflects the Woman’s essential calm, a nature that defeats subjugation by being all-absorptive.

The colours dark blue, chocolate and green in Vazda's work give her thoughts a new but predictable dimension. Dark green conveys a Naturalist’s sensation—but juxtaposed with orange, it becomes satirical. In this sense, while this gives the paintings a personal touch, it doesn’t take away from the fact that Vazda is painting a collective. If there is personal pain, it is countered by collective action. All it takes is for us to look within and see the pain in the eyes around us.