Smoking Ornaments (Lila, Night Blue, Green, Yellow, Brique)

Inkjet print on muslin fabric | Produced especially for the exhibition "Sense of Safety" | Donated to the YermilovCentre collection / 2024

Smoking Ornaments consists of five semi-transparent muslin panels, each printed with ornamental motifs. The background is a reproduction of the solid concrete walls of the YermilovCentre, creating a striking contrast between the concrete's solidity and the fabric's lightness. Concrete is an extremely strong material, used in the construction of bomb shelters and bunkers because it can withstand the force of impact during shelling and bombing. The walls of the YermilovCenter, made of concrete, transposed onto transparent fabric emphasizes the ambivalence, fragility, and constant anxiety for safety. This way, Nadira Husain highlights the feminist understanding of safety as a collective continuous effort and care work to ensure this safety.

As in her other pieces, the artist combines figures, symbols, and ornaments from different cultures to create complex images that reflect her own multicultural experience, thus disrupting the Western European hierarchy of classical painting. Traditionally, ornament in European art has been seen as decorative, often outside the central image or text.

Nadira Husain disrupts the conventional hierarchy as her work is filled almost exclusively with these "secondary" characters and subjects. This move not only forces a rejection of the hierarchy of the image but also refuses a Eurocentric view of the image. As an artist emerging from the intersection of Indo-Islamic and French culture, Nadira incorporates a non-European view of ornament as a self-sufficient rather than a decorative narrative motif. The compositions bring together traditional motifs found in Islamic art and Mughal art with smoking putti, disruptive characters to the idea of a central narrative.