And The Florist Says “white Lily”
Giorgio Guglielmino
When I first looked at Joya Shahrin Huq’s series of life-size, unique prints of kameezes, it appeared that the garments were lying on the white sheet of a bed. I asked myself if the dresses were there just before being worn or if they had been wearily thrown there after a dinner or a night out.
The answer came from the title of the exhibition, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go. Those dresses didn’t go anywhere -they were ready, looking beautiful and elegant, but remained inside the walls of the house. Nevertheless, each of them tells a story, and a very beautiful one.
Each one is a unique dress not only for the pattern and the colour but most of all for an element that the artist decided to add as a detail of a possible plot, as a clue for something that might have happened. Three peacocks on a brown/beige dress, three chickens in the place where we would expect the legs, a stitched few flowers embossed on the surface in another one. These dresses compose the most interesting series of the exhibition with their rare balance of technique and desire for transmitting a feeling, precision of the signs and undefined meaning.
The red dress with the stitched flowers is the one that intrigued me most; one flower is placed on the dress and the others, beneath it. It gives me the idea that once, when the dress was first tailored, all the flowers where on its colourfull surface, adorning the dress as a sort of hymn to spring.
But with the passing of time, with the uselessness of a dress that was never worn, one by one the flowers slipped away. Only one remains, as a last chance of a breakthrough, of an event that will require the dress, of a whimsical night that could change a whole life. It is a struggle between the passage of time and the irresistible will to believe that life can still change, even if so much time has already passed.
There is a wonderful scene in a Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s movie where a man enters a flower shop and asks “What flower expresses days going by?”
Surely the florist and Joya have the answer.