Ammara
Jabbar is a 2015 graduate from the Fine Art Department from the Indus
Valley School of Art and Architecture. She is was the recipient of
the Imran Mir Art Prize in 2018. The Imran Mir Prize seeks to promote
emerging art practitioners based in Pakistan, who demonstrate
extraordinary talent and promise. Ammara was selected for the
Gasworks Residency UK, in 2016. She was also part of the VASL Taaza Tareen residency in 2016, and has been part of projects, exhibitions and biennales within the city of Karachi since graduation. She recently had her first solo exhibition in Karachi. Her practice is a skillful and adroit translation of references to the domestic and performative as a means to investigate notions of gender and public space in the city, and imagining new radical futures of belonging for all groups.
The manifestation her work is strung with a delirious balance of coy flirtation and guided vanity, as she enables it to perform on her behalf. Dressed in silks and beaded buttons my works sings and flutters with flawed ambition. They confound into sacred objects desiring to inspire ritual. The sonorous abilities of the work is an integral component of the aspiration associated to it. Like a grand orchestra of mismatched sounds stippled together like marriage band, hollering with the misguided virtue and rebuttal of the underlying subjectivity. While mobilizing these ideas, her work actively appropriates a vernacular aesthetic, an exercise in excess, like the bride who sits ceremonially in ornate, flaccid grandeur. Ammara's work engages the poetics and polemics of housework and places the female as a point of introspection and subsequent redemption.
