The Great Rebuild!

Fiza Khatri’s new body of work opens a portal into the worlds of children. It asks of us what it means to take these worlds seriously; to observe, to share, to learn from children’s imaginaries and world-makings. Khatri’s practice is led by a deep interest in the histories and lineages of image-making. For them, the artist is not a solitary figure, but embedded in communities and relations that shape and inform their practice of making. Similarly, the figures that enliven Khatri’s paintings are not simply subjects of observation, but actively participate in the construction and sociality of painting and the world beyond.

Tensions are palpable on the surface. We move between enchantment and darkness, apparition and erasure, relation and isolation, seeing and imagining, seriousness and play. Forms refuse to settle into fixed outlines. Layers of paint reveal different edges, different possibilities, imbuing the human and non-human figures with a potential to morph and move. The paintings sit at the edge of a contradiction – the opening up of a world through the fixing of an image.Khatri explains that working through and confronting the tension between image and surface, story and medium, is at the heart of their practice. The expansiveness of storytelling comes up against the material resistance of paint.It is this friction that enchants and enlivens this new body of work.Children become Khatri’s guides and companions, as the artist comes up against the limits of image-making. Khatri centres children’s daily worlds of play, acts of making and unmaking, building and transforming, as a practice of possibility for building deeper relationships through painting. In these works, children are seen mirroring the worlds of war and violence around them – as they build tents, journey in boats, take refuge in shelters, play doctor-patient – yet in the process of echoing and reflecting, they also inject a sense of play, wonder and irreverence. Their mirror creates a disjuncture, a gap, a departure in our perception of the world, that allows for new meanings, relations, and possibilities. Imagination and existence are not held apart as separate realms, but intertwined, shaping one another. The dissolution of this boundary is felt in Khatri’s own practice of making, where the artist does not seek a pre-determined image but embraces an openness to arriving elsewhere.