Minna Haroon
BIO:
Minna Haroon is a contemporary visual artist who executes ideas through miniature paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and digital works. She lives and works in Lahore as an artist and government officer (Assistant Director, Lahore Arts Council, Alhamra) in Punjab, Pakistan and Incharce of Alhamra Academy of Performing Arts. She graduated with Bachelors in Fine Arts from National College of Arts, Lahore in 2021 and later did her Masters in Art and Design from Beacon House National University in 2016. She has received the prestigious “Sir Percy Award” at NCA and “young artists 2012” at Alhamra Art Council in 2012. She had been permanent faculty member of Lahore Grammar School, visiting faculty member in Beaconhouse National University and University of Management and Technology. She has exhibited her works at various art galleries nationally and internationally and has curated various exhibitions at Alhamra Art Gallery, Museum of Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University and Queen Sirkit Convention Center, Thailand
Artist Statement:
Reflection on Resilience
Trained as a Miniature painter, this body of work has been influenced by the specific formal orientation of objects within space, which exists in Mughal Miniature paintings. Subsequently, this orientation of objects and spaces investigates the personal and social expression of self- organization and self-identity. Throughout in history archeologist have discovered about various civilization and its people through the recovery and analysis of material culture and their objects which were left behind as evidence of their existence in the particular region. The existences of objects are associated with human and their bodily traces. Th objects contain acts and actions of time within them and our memories are inlaid in those objects that define human existence and its cultural significance. The relationship between people and its objects marks the human identity and its existence in its absences. Absence refers to the idea of impressions, marks and objects left behind by the human body. The impressions of necklaces are narrating about its owners and its history of women from Pakistan about the dowry system in our country. These necklaces are in possessions of different people from y surroundings an are expressing the stories of their possessors. The impressions are about our experiences associated with presences and represents absence because one cannot experience it again. Whit such traces of memories through materials and processes, I am trying to redefine the meaning of objects by transforming them and celebrating them in tangible marks that shift the existing object into their impressions and about the presences of human associating with objects which they leave behind.