Nadia Batool Hussain with Fatima Hussain

Fatima Hussain (b. 1983, Lahore) is an Artist-Curator/Theatre Practitioner based in Islamabad who teaches at the National College of Arts, Rawalpindi & Lahore campus. Fatima has presented projects at the Shanakht Festival Karachi; Flux Deptford X, SPILL Festival 2011 (London); Zahoorul Akhlaq Gallery, Lahore; Aicon Gallery London; The Guild NY; SAVAC, University of Toronto, and many others. Her work over the last few years has addressed multiple issues bringing into it the political, the historical, the everyday, and whether with intention or escape, ‘art’ for her, has fallen within a larger interpretation of the colonized structures, languages and territory. Fatima is a 2005 graduate of NCA (Lahore campus) where she was trained as a painter. She moved on to Central Saint Martins, UAL for her MA in Fine Arts (2007- 2008). Nadia Batool Hussain (b. 1978, Karachi) is a visual artist and art educator living and working in Islamabad/Rawalpindi. Her work is usually focused on the experience of the body, which she uses to identify the world around her. She collaborates with other artists and is focused on facilitating art practice in her community. She is currently teaching painting at the National College of Art, Rawalpindi Campus where she heads the Department of Fine Arts. Her work is an attempt to understand issues of identity and femininity in her experience. It usually focuses on narratives representing her experiences. The images and text tend to sway from the purely clinical and anatomical to something more emotional. She believes she can draw parallels between these two opposing notions by using one to identify the other.

For KB17 Nadia Batool Hussain and Fatima Hussain have collaborated on a site-specific installation entitled Correspondence. The artists write: “In response to ‘wit-ness’, the correspondence of the structure of Narayan Jagannath Vidyala High School works as the witness to the event, which in this case is the development of its surroundings. Our project takes the building as an entity that we imagine has corresponded across geographic terrains with other structures. We see this correspondence in today’s time as a witness to many events and developments even such that it finds difficult to articulate. Translation and interpretation of this correspondence (although fictive) unearths a sequence of events that reference the larger sociopolitical narrative of the region. These documents are layered with footnotes and musings of a discoverer who navigates through the letters in order to make sense of how the structure has witnessed its surroundings over time.”