There are exhibitions that simply present artworks, and then there are those that make you question the very act of looking.

‘Lines and Language’, Rabeya Jalil’s solo exhibition at Canvas Gallery, is firmly of the latter kind. It draws viewers into an active engagement with how we read, misread and internalise visual information. Spirited yet thoughtful, intuitive yet analytical, this body of work examines mark-making not merely as expression, but as a system that can be dismantled and rebuilt with new intent.

The curatorial statement notes that the show “critiques a visual language system, identifying connections and challenging the binaries of the serious and the satirical, of high and low art, and of the values associated with cultivated and uncultivated taste.” Jalil uses these binaries only to undo them. Her works mingle the playful with the rigorous, the spontaneous with the structured, the academic with the everyday. In dissolving hierarchies of taste, she raises the question: who decides what is sophisticated, and what is dismissed as ‘naïve’ or ‘uncultivated’?

Her explorations here echo the impulses seen in her 2018 solo exhibition at Koel Gallery,........

© Dawn (Magazines)