76 x 152 cm, suminagashi and graphite on paper 2022
Farsi for evil eye stay away. The graphite sketch is made on mylar and cast in green-tinted resin.
Farsi for evil eye stay away. The graphite sketch is made on mylar and cast in green-tinted resin.
76 x 152 cm, suminagashi and graphite on paper 2022
Chashme Badoor is a pair of spectacles made in silver, gilded in gold, encrusted with green onyx and champagne-colored zircons. This pair was conceptualized in Oxford, handcrafted in Lahore and the final drawings in the lenses were made in Dubai. They replicate the 17th-century spectacles named Astana-ye-Ferdous, fabled to have been made for a Mughal Prince in India. In place of the emerald lenses, I have embedded graphite drawings of refugees from the Partition of India in 1947.
Auctioneers and European historians have brazenly posed in the original spectacles. Most recently, Pharrel Williams appropriated the design claiming it was his original collaboration with Tiffany & Co. I have placed them in Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, in one of the cabinets of curiosities, to draw attention to its contentious past and present perception. The drawings in the lenses act as a 'vision corrector', forcing the viewer to confront the refugee crisis that was created as the British colonizers hastily left the new divided Subcontinent.
Saba Qizilbash
Artist, Researcher, Educator
Postgraduate Student - Ruskin School of Art,
Exeter College, University of Oxford
MA Art Education
Rhode Island School of Design
BFA
National College of Art