Soul in limbo: Surrealist photographerNishat Fatima's exhibition at Goethe-Zentrum Hyderabad

HYDERABAD: City-based surrealist photographer Nishat Fatima has unlocked images of the unconscious by making the familiar strange again. The artist tapped into a dreamscape of mundane moments, and everyday objects and presented them in a different light. Her ongoing photo exhibition at Goethe-Zentrum Hyderabad is a response to the upheaval of the past few years and is mysteriously beautiful.  

“Photographs do not depict reality; they are the construct of the person who has taken them. To make them real, I distort all the familiar distractions and let the mystery remain as it were,” says Nishat Fatima, former journalist, photographer and now a faculty at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT).   
Surreal photographers embrace this mystery by removing all that is expected. To counter the rather repetitive constructive reality on Instagram, Nishant wanted to create something. “On Instagram, there has to be a specific background; there has to be a particular style of the subject, a pattern, so repetitive, so repetitive,” She chants as she elucidates her work, “It is a chance, a moment when unconscious is in sync with us. It is when familiarity becomes unfamiliar and unfamiliar familiar.”    

She uses multiple exposure settings, frames, and reframes unless all the familiarity is gone. She also uses mirror imaging and displacement; techniques to ensure the spectator is not sure what they are looking at. She started serious photography in 2016 and is professionally focused on painting fashion and portraits with light.   

The exhibition titled: A Surrealist Feeling spans three bodies of work - Bone Soup, I Am Here, and Opening a Door. The artist reflects on her engagement with everyday objects on their own and in their interaction with people. “I have always been fascinated by windows, the obscuring of people behind glass, or framed by a rectangle in the distance, and the narrative that it can lead to in your imagination. Blur and magnification, picking out an element from commonplace phenomena and objects, are also common themes in my photography,” says she.  

This artist’s unpredictable and unorthodox imagery, captured through experimental methods, eradicate the rationale of standard perception and presents reality; as she says,“as it is.” The works heighten and intensify life’s mundane aspects and elevate the significance of an ordinary picture with mystery.