you miss more than you see | Faiza Butt: D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi

Faiza Butt’s practice addresses the dichotomy between culture and history. She takes inspiration from cultural iconography and traditions via a global smorgasbord and imbues them with biographical elements or psychological truths from her own life. She then exposes her subjects to a process of aestheticization to explore our visceral impulses towards images of beauty and alterity, coaxing the contemporary zeitgeist into the realms of critique with as much fervency as the historical legacies that shape them. Often, her children serve as an allegorical lens to locate our collective selves in time – somewhere between the ineffability of the past and the ambiguity of the future. Here, Layla and Zack’s solipsistic, askew glances hint at an unusual, self-absorbed way of being that articulates the discursive and compounding effects of a technologically driven world, where notions of ‘presence’ and ‘contact’ are under threat of re-issue. As we entrench ourselves further into a third intermediary state of ‘screen time’ in various arenas of the virtual world, the cognitive binaries of ‘sleeping’ and ‘awake’ states no longer book-end our inferences and imaginations. Instead, our faculties devolve further into confusion and indecisiveness, and we grow desensitized, disoriented and disassociated, invoking our own absences through our technological mobility. ‘you miss more than you see’ prompts a profound reading of the modern world – and how we find, or don’t find, ourselves in it.