There are rooms full of people where silence can somehow feel louder than conversation. A birthday is being celebrated, a party is underway, bodies sit beside one another or disappear into a crowd, yet something remains strangely distant.

Usama Toru’s debut solo exhibition ‘Elsewhere’ at ZQ Gallery occupies this peculiar emotional space: one where people are physically present but seem to have already drifted somewhere else.

Born in Mardan and now based in Lahore, Toru is a graduate of the Pakhtunkhwa College of Art. His paintings move between everyday living rooms and imagined spaces, exploring what he describes as the tension between familiarity and strangeness, and between reality and memory. Yet, what makes ‘Elsewhere’ compelling is not simply this premise but the visual unease through which it is constructed.

Green dominates the exhibition. It settles on to faces and bodies until skin no longer feels entirely human, giving otherwise ordinary encounters an almost dreamlike........

© Dawn (Magazines)