Dua Abbas Rizvi

Canvas Print

$700

One of the strangest sensations of living with high- functioning anxiety is that you appear composed and your life appears impeccably put-together. But the reality is that living with an anxiety that constantly propels you to do more, without pause or rest, can feel like an extended dream-sequence—lurid, and marked by an unnaturally heightened sensory perception. I am hyper-vigilant and live constantly in fear of the earth being pulled from under my feet. Consequently, the fruits of my labour scatter and spoil before I’ve had a chance to enjoy them. It became easier for me to approach this condition through an allegorical visual language involving fruit, as fruit so often signifies rewards and bounty of both a secular and spiritual nature.

Dua Abbas Rizvi (b. 1987) is a visual artist, illustrator, and art journalist based in Lahore, Pakistan. She graduated from the National College of Arts (Lahore) in 2010 with awards for excellence. Her artwork has been part of several exhibitions including Stations of the Cross (New York) and Art for Education: Contemporary Artists from Pakistan (Milan). Rizvi's largely figurative practice explores womanhood through personal and familial archives, rooted in regional history and folklore. It is inspired, too, by embodied rituals of faith and remembrance. During the first lockdown in 2020, Rizvi found herself spending more time in her home-studio working freehand with paper. The act of cutting brightly-coloured, hand-painting paper into large, comforting shapes Brough her immense relief from anxiety. For this exhibition, she decided to continue her intuitive, uninhibited dragon with scissors to create images of hope and loss reminiscent of picture-book illustrations.