ince settlement became the second side of the self, human beings have been imagining their personal habitats, manifested in multiple formats depending on climate, surroundings, the constitution of society, systems of belief and concepts of comfort. From igloos to palaces, mud abodes to concrete constructions, thatched huts to forts and makeshift shelters to skyscrapers, mankind has built all kinds of spaces.

From an early stage, every person starts visualising their own home. No matter whether materialised or not, still standing or disintegrated long ago, founded on the ground or rooted in heaven, the house more or less represents the personality of a living being. Like an individual, it is prone to transformations of all sorts, caused by advancing years, unsuitable locality or an unfavourable environment.

Nausheen Saeed’s recent work, shown in her solo exhibition Elsewhere, Perhaps (August 25 - September 3 at Canvas Gallery, Karachi), expounds on this situation. The show comprises drawings on paper and sculptures made of concrete. Her works on paper look like archives of evaporating entities; her three-dimensional pieces, by their nature, are not only frozen in time – as all sculptures are – but in their materiality too: heavy, rigid, immovable and difficult to decompose.

Though small in scale (mostly 14 inches high), these works, through the viewer’s engagement with their verticality, resemble tall apartment blocks – an effect enhanced by the greyness of concrete, a common hue across the continents. Once the essential frame is finished in solid material, strengthened with steel, buildings are clad in gypsum, plaster, bricks, tiles, wood, cement, marble, granite or other stones, with colours, patterns and other details added according to the owner’s taste, normally influenced by the era and social circle. Light, weather and financial resources play an important role in this process.

However, when a living space is stripped of its outer layers, it returns to its initial condition: an assemblage of bare walls, uneven gaps, visible joints and raw seam lines. Much like the skeleton of a human being after death – a combination of bones exposed as the flesh deteriorates into dust, is washed away in water, consumed by fire or devoured by vultures and other scavenger birds.

The series of structures produced by Saeed alludes to a palpable and painful reality, regularly witnessed in the print and electronic media. Neighbourhoods in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Ukraine and other war-torn parts of the world bear the residues of unavoidable catastrophes. Photographs circulating in newspapers and on social platforms document grim scenes of aggression, exploitation and control – a phenomenon of dehumanisation that reappears in the destruction of living quarters.

Nausheen Saeed, in an oblique manner, has constructed these human-less homes. Consisting of eroded walls, exposed gaps, the outcomes of shelling and roughened external textures, these residences are segments of a ghost city: a colony missing children’s laughter, domestic harmony and interaction between inhabitants. Viewing Saeed’s latest work, one realises that representing the state of a people and place is not the artist’s sole concern. One is simultaneously confronted by the crude memory of genocide and the refined pictorial quality of the sculptures, a tension that keeps compelling visitors to stare at these substitutes for sorrow.

Her choice of reinforced concrete is significant because the material suggests two opposing states: a new structure in the process of becoming a house, and a ‘lived’ space undergoing demolition. Whether erecting a new structure or tearing one down, one remains aware of its foundations, hidden plan or remnants.

A set of three sculptures by Saeed emphasises this aspect. Generated from the layouts of places of worship, the concrete plans emerge from the ground, much like the invulnerable trunks of oak trees. Minimalist in their aesthetics, despite – or because of – the thickness of their walls and the expanse of their built areas, these sculptures are, in a sense, overlapping maps that eventually become high-rises.

The connotation of cartography is convincing, given the precision with which the original mosques of the Middle East are replicated. The movement between terrestrial space and its sparse layout is an occurrence that takes place both in the body and in our thoughts and imagination. Houses, cities and empires are built on extensive configurations, the earliest known example being the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro. Drawings lead to bricks, stones, cement and natural and industrial substances. Once delineated on a tangible surface, these marks usually assume an independent identity and character, enticing inhabitants to defend them with patriotic songs, nationalist harangues, warmongering propaganda, weapons and faith. To that extent, the population of a country does not reside within the boundaries of its motherland; rather, the homeland’s exactitude occupies the heart of each citizen.

Nausheen Saeed’s work on paper reflects this conditioning. In this respect, she joins the artists who recognise that creative work is not merely about producing objects to be looked at. It can also prompt us to look within and rediscover an obvious if forgotten reality.

This recalls a passage from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which Melquíades, the gypsy, visits the fictional town of Macondo and encounters labels such as table, chair, door, wall, bed and pan attached to objects, along with a notice reading: “This is cow. She must be milked every morning.” The town’s inhabitants are suffering from an epidemic of amnesia. The labels help them confront what they have forgotten.

Saeed requires no such act of magic, since art itself can perform that function. Her materials and forms draw attention to the fragility of national borders: a world divided into territories as vast as the Russian Federation and as small as Vatican City, with those divisions embedded in the minds of people and reinforced by prejudice, hatred and political interest.

Saeed dismantles these fixed ideas by taking the map back to its origins: soft boundaries between tribes, conquered territories, reclaimed land and traditional fiefdoms. It was once possible to cross from one region to another without an official document; the limits of a country were neither absolute nor precisely known. The territory now called India, for instance, did not exist in its present form under the British Raj, the Mughal Empire, the Sultanate dynasties, the Gupta period or the Mauryan Empire.

Her drawings depict contemporary, sometimes contested, borders as if made from delicate substances such as clouds, rendered in charcoal powder and dry pigment. They introduce an idea of fragility into what is otherwise a firmly fixed notion. These soft, sensitive images might appear to stand in contrast to the exhibition’s largest work, Untitled VIII. In reality, they are closely related to this heap of 15 amorphous, bloated forms of reinforced concrete, unevenly piled and derived from maps of various republics. They appear to melt despite being constructed from a material as rigid as reinforced concrete.

Together, the works suggest that the longevity of art does not lie in conforming to accepted ideas, but in unpacking the assumptions we carry with us and moving beyond them.

The writer is a visual artist, an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.