Tazeen Qayyum

Calligraphic drawings reflect on peace ­– as conflict continues in Ukraine and elsewhere.

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Sakoon is Pakistani-Canadian artist Tazeen Qayyum’s first solo exhibition in Toronto, which is surprising given that she has been making work and showing internationally for decades. She trained as a miniaturist painter in both South Asian and Persian traditions, and while she works across media, including both live and for-camera performance, her experience with small-scale approaches is apparent across her oeuvre. 

Qayyum often works with repetition, complex patterns and circularity, seen, for example, in her 2018 performance Khayaal (care), commissioned and installed as a public art piece for several months on a large video wall in downtown Toronto through the TD Bank art collection. This latest show is no exception.

For Sakoon, on view at Zalucky Contemporary until March 19, Qayyum brings together eight new framed drawings on paper, one large unframed drawing on canvas from a 2018 performance at the University of Guelph, and a video. All are characterized by repetitive drawing from the centre of a circle outward. 

All but one piece is comprised of a single word in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan (and a regional language in India), intricately written in calligraphy over and over, rendered with great care in archival ink on acid-free paper. The exception is an interesting, politicized work using two words, brabri/bartri (equality/privilege), made amidst the rising mainstream consciousness around structural racism following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Six of the works, including Brabri/Bartri, are drawn in black ink on white paper. The other two are white ink on black paper, and are displayed on a wall that faces the other six. The drawings feature the words sakoon (calm/peace), yaqeen (certainty/belief), sabr (patience), hasil (attain/gain), zameer (conscience), zarf (depth of character), and fikr (concern/thought). When I saw the works, I was told Qayyum subtly integrates her signature into the works as part of the circle.

A 60-minute, single-channel video shows her at work during a 24-hour performance that culminated in a drawing, Tauba (repentance). Shot from a bird’s-eye perspective, it shows 24 simultaneous frames in which she physically moves over the paper, drawing out each word in Urdu. The video helps viewers understand the painstaking and time-consuming process behind the works in the show, underlining both the durational and performative aspect of their creation. The artist listens to Qawwali, music from the Sufi tradition, a mystic branch of Islam, as she enacts what, for her, is a ritual.

Sakoon translates as “peace” and the drive behind the works, as Qayyum says, is “the innate desire to find sakoon that drives us all, may that be the sakoon within or outwardly.” I am awash in a sense of calm as I absorb these works, which are amazing in their intricacy and detail. But it is difficult to avoid thinking about violent events elsewhere in the world. The gallery’s owner, Juliana Zalucky, is Ukrainian Canadian. With the Russian attack on Ukraine, many people are thinking not only of the horrors of that war, but also other conflicts that get less attention in the Western media ­– be they in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan or Iraq. 

In this show, the works about values like peace, conscience and attainment are balanced by the work of patience and concern/thought, and outstanding issues of privilege and equality, as Qayyum encourages viewers to turn inward and contemplate the ways these concepts play out in their own inner and outer lives. ■

Tazeen Qayyum, Sakoon, at Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto from Feb. 12 to March 19, 2022.

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Zalucky Contemporary

3044 Dundas Street W., Toronto, Ontario M6P 1Z3

647-352-3331

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