FRIEZE LONDON

The weighty anatomies are in tension with the skeletal and epidermal prints by Simryn Gill. Part of her Naga Doodles series, each image records in ink print the body of a tropical snake that Gill found run over around her hometown of Port Dickson in Malaysia.The bodies abstract themselves and appear like eroding landscapes. The impression of individual scales, streaks of colour along with bloodstains doubles as a rugged, earthen terrain. Their presentation, isolated in empty space, on off-white paper, and unframed, makes them almost diagrammatic and as if drawn from an archive of 19th- century natural history drawings.

Fiza Khatri’s five-panel atmospheric painting installation directly addresses this historic period when Victorians were in a frenzy to name, collect, and produce knowledge about the world’s flora and fauna. Two Gharial crocodiles, a critically endangered species from South Asia, encountered by Khatri at theYale Peabody Museum, are shown superimposed on an area in Northern Karachi, Manghopir, known for its crocodile shrine. Like an altarpiece, the animal’s portraits are accompanied by paintings featuring accoutrements related to the sacred space; rose and jasmine garlands and a knot of crocodile skin showered with ruby red rose petals. The sequence for Khatri is a ‘vision of repair’ that articulates their fantasy of repatriating the specimens from America to their native habitat.

Ali Kazim’s Bird Hunters intensifies the idea of animal-human conflict. Using his distinctive watercolour method involving pencil and ink drawing and submersion of the image in a water bath, he represents a solitary male figure with a duck planted on his head. The bird, shown calm and nonplussed, references the illegal wildlife trade in species that migrate from Siberia to South Asia. The hunting of these birds is undertaken by individuals concealed by elaborate avian headwear. Hovering above are Matthew Krishanu’s characterful crow paintings that, like his magnificent Banyan tree, speak to the magnitude and dominion of the natural world. Started in 2012, each crow, painted with dark and dense textures and never in flight, is anthropomorphised to the point where it seems to exhibit familiar traits; at once coy, brazen and introspective. Similar reverence and attention is felt in Anwar Jalal Shemza’s Fish. The illusionistic work is one of his early experiments with modernism and part of a small number of paintings to include figurative representation. The shoal of fish is painted in a style that reflects both Shemza’s training as a graphic designer at the Mayo School of Arts, Lahore (now The National College of Arts) and his development of an experimental, geometric style informed by artistic references of the time, in particular the abstraction of Zubeida Agha (1922- 1997) and Shakir Ali (1916-1975).