Surveillance in Miniature

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Syeda Aatika Fatima: Is Someone There?, Mandy Zhang Art, London, 9 October–17 November 2024.

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I keep trying to capture the image with my phone. Spotlights interfere with the clarity of the photo, the disconcerting ghost of my reflection transposed onto the solitary scene. An overlay of hands and glass lenses spoils the fine drapery of the curtains, the suggestion of a figure now looming large in the replicated painting on my screen.

My poor digital snapshot of Syeda Aatika Fatima’s titular painting, Is Someone There (2019) is an apt introduction to the entire exhibition. Is Someone There is one of the only gouache works to depict a domestic space sans inhabitants; it presents a room that seemingly breathes free of the bodies, families and communities tightly clustered together in the animated architecture of Fatima’s surrounding paintings. A mauve coverlet is spread over a pine bedstead to the right, a patchwork of blues completes a rug to the left; light filters through dusty rose curtains in the background and thicker maroon drapes frame the atmospheric whole. It could be a photograph uploaded onto Instagram, a domain that vibrates with its own understated vibe. It could be a still from a film loaded with life, ripe with an event not yet passed.

Is Someone There paradoxically gestures to presence when it is absence that dominates the visual plane. It assumes a personality, a mood, when all personas and their feelings are out of sight. It plays a game with the sparseness of the scene and the pervading possibility that there is more than just furniture occupying the room. Set against a collection of densely populated and meticulously depicted domains, Is Someone There claims to be devoid of humans yet uncannily implies there’s something unnervingly, incontrovertibly, human about this view. Overlaid with my ridiculous reflection and the rhetoric of the title extends this game about what or who we’re looking at back onto us.

Fatima subtly observes that domesticity always depends on the poor who stand outside of it.

Painted in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic was properly underway, Is Someone There captures the artist’s increasing sense of unease over surveillance and privacy when living in Pakistan. As a double-sided work (the opposite plane can be viewed from outside the gallery, on the street, and shows the concealed window of the room surrounded by a prettified front garden and a tree that resembles a human figure, the possible presence intruding into the interior view), the painting captures this schism between what’s materially there versus what’s psychologically felt, between empirical observations and initial impressions, between outer realities and our own inner worlds. Such tensions, sensed by the viewer in the subtle depths and straying strands of light against seemingly smooth surfaces, would become exaggerated during the pandemic when isolation became a determinant factor in social living and socialising was contracted down, for the most part, to our individual abodes. The conditions for the homely to appear, well, unhomely (unheimlich, as Freud would say) grew exponentially; the supposition of someone watching you inside your home – and of you watching someone outside it – did too. Is Someone There, though ostensibly avoidant of the many peopled paintings that form the exhibition, indirectly encapsulates and points to the themes Fatima’s recent works directly explore; that is, this haunting still life concerns itself with issues of proximity and distance, intimacy and the estranged gaze, of seeing and being in an age when the demarcations between on- and off-line life blur.

Works like Open Season (2021) and They never stood a chance (2020) re-enact through their compositions this overlap of inner and outer, on- and off-line existence. But if in Open Season the complex amalgamation of scenes conveys the indistinction of private domesticity with public activity, in They never stood a chance it is the simplicity and supposed singularity of the composition that achieves the same effect. In both paintings, nonetheless, the careful collusion of the external with the internal, the personal with the social, is brought together through a series of windows –on which side of the glass the viewer stands is not always crystal clear.

Open Season sees a kaleidoscopic array of interconnected windows through which people can be espied gardening, playing, dining and doing all manner of chores and DIY. Depicted in exquisitely lush colours, with the utmost detail and precision, the people, patterns and tableaux that belie the troubling question of who is watching whom and where the voyeur is positioned in relation to them. Finely rendered curtains partially reveal and conceal a woman in a backyard; another pane is tipped upside down to show a sunbathing figure watched askance in this aslant vision. The jumble of vignettes and the intrusive perspectives they garner not only reiterate Fatima’s concern about the lack of privacy and the ‘open’ invitation to survey your neighbours when it comes to modern metropolitan living, but they also challenge a linear reading of the intricate narratives each window frames. Cleverly opening up usually closed habitations to expose the private habits and habitudes one enjoys within them, Open Season allows each scene to bear in on the other, contracting and collapsing time and place, as well as conveying the claustrophobic reality of para-pandemic life. Fatima scales most of the windows to the size of a hand-held device (virtually the measurements of my own Samsung mobile), so that the overall conglomeration of casements reflects our collective digitised perception of the world, an awkward tower of technological hyper-surveillance and dependency screened into our day-to-day living, publicly streaming our personal lives through the ever watchful lens of a smart phone.

Humanity moves into the background, almost another object, servile to the devices originally devised to serve it.

This folding of the material with the digital and the shrinking of life to fit the frame of a screen compliments the tradition of miniature painting in which Fatima works. Having studied at the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan – a school known for its miniature-painting department, former student-turned-tutor Imran Qureshi and world-renowned neo-miniaturist Shahzia Sikander – Fatima’s own exceptional miniaturised worlds carry the traditions of this form – like the use of wasli, gouache, borders as a decorative framing device – whilst reanimating them to suit her own purpose. Hence in Open Season the tessellated window frames act as their own kind of borders, but instead of dividing the public from the personal, fact from fiction, they confound both, creating optical layers where the difference between surface and depth, light and shadow, interior and exterior, are further elided. This convention, derived from the Mughal era of miniature painting, would often involve several illuminated (often gold leaf) borders, further encasing the miniaturised subject and maximising the opulence and skill of the decorative. In Fatima’s work this bordering technique develops from an unfolded and flattened origami of window-shaped nets into the outline of multi-storied houses. Borders in Fatima’s miniatures become, therefore, their own self-reflexive containers, critical and lexical spaces which ‘house’ multiple realities and moments, not least our own with the art itself.

The reformulation of tropes belonging to the miniature tradition continues in the work, The Distressed Doll’s House (2022). This painting simultaneously realises and reanimates the device of the border through the erected scaffold of a multi-levelled house situated against a pale pink background. Yet between the faint skeleton of this building, scenes and scenarios do not neatly stay within their spatial confines. Far from portraying a picture-perfect world, the diminutive domestic settings are often in disarray, depicted on a diagonal, and they threaten, in their ‘distressed’ state, to spill beyond their painted partitions.

A significant figure, however, in all these home-bound, house-shaped dramas is that of ‘the help’. Irrespective of how calm or chaotic each scene appears, there is always an additional person labouring around the families, couples and individuals who recline and relax, slumber or play with ease. Often women (though not solely), these figures quietly hold the social fabric of these delicate worlds together. They weave in and out of the action of the space, cooking, cleaning, sweeping and puncturing the fallacy that the comfort of our lives does not rely on the discomforting efforts and labours of others. In the ‘doll’s house’ of her work, Fatima subtly observes that domesticity – the unit of the family, the capitalist-defined utopia of social togetherness, of selfhood and nationhood itself – always depends on the poor who stand outside of it. In The Distressed Doll’s House, then, the artist builds into this child-like microcosm of the home an adult awareness of socio-economic inequalities and political injustices, ever aware of what and who holds the roof and walls in place.

She embeds the panic of surveillance and the slow violence it issues into the most private crevices of what we call ‘home’.

In some respects, the figure of the help returns us to Fatima’s initial work, Is Someone There. Although community and social cohesion are displayed through often frenetic occasions, isolation comes in the form of an outsider stepping inside, of the margins drawing closer to the centre of conventional, conservative, familial units. Unlike another theatre of the house, the exoskeletal surreal painting Safe Spaces (2022), The Distressed Doll’s House draws our eye inwards, much like a child’s with its preferred new toy, to examine what keeps the furniture of the home there – and literally clean. Later works take this examination of what underpins domestic and national dynamics further by envisioning the house and home of the future. Here, human help is replaced with technological aids and robots, the window supplanted with actual screens affixed to walls and placed over the heads of its inhabitants. The digitalisation of our world and the isolation it symptomised are now inverted, with the digital becoming the world and isolation a prerequisite for such dystopic dwelling.

2084 (2024), High Rise (2024) and Council Tax (2024) all insert ostensibly innocuous forms of technology into their interiors and the bodies of those who occupy them. But the sinister ubiquity with which this technology resurfaces (replacing books, paintings, watches, glasses and even embedded in the limbs and torsos of Fatima’s apparently blithe populace), again and again, demonstrates that the new prop to survival, the new connectivity, are also the causes of dysphoria and disconnection. Though the glowing polychromatic palette is still employed, Fatima’s painted buildings, the homes in which we initially seek to dwell and project ourselves, become increasingly compact, higher in height, but lower in their prioritisation of the communal. These abodes look out to the skies with smaller windows and presumably less desire from the inhabitants to do so. Isolation in these works is no longer expressed through an empty room, nor the intricate lattice-work of innumerable windows, but through a tighter, stricter, smaller grid of panes, cell-like, myopic, virtually impossible to survey but inevitably giving sway to surveillance through the technological revolution reigning supreme within them. Humanity moves into the background, almost another object, servile to the devices originally devised to serve it.

What is impressive about these dystopic impressions of our world is that Fatima delivers them to us with characteristic flair and flamboyance. Each painting presents our increasingly isolationist and hyper-(dis)connected world in gloriously bright colours, luring us in with eye-catching shades and jewel-like hues. The truth about our globalised yet individualised lives is wrapped up in the fabulous style and fantastical composition of the miniature, thus emphasising Gaston Bachelard’s belief that what is miniaturised holds gravity rather than the triviality for which it is it so often mistaken.

As the walls narrow and the figures retreat deeper into their rooms, away from one another, Fatima holds a light to the causes of our social separation; she scrutinises our privileging of the digital gaze and hand-held lens through which we project our lives all the while surveying those of others. She embeds the panic of surveillance and the slow violence it issues into the most private crevices of what we call ‘home’, as well as asking on whose discomfort our own comfort is founded. If, as Doreen Massey argues, space is defined by people and all their various relations, Fatima’s own cleverly crafted dimensions are designed to do the opposite, shaping their occupants and the modes in which they relate and inevitably separate. But, as Fatima’s paintings continually realise in their contours and corners, if we tilt the concept of the home to an alternate side, maybe, just maybe, people could begin to shape space, and therefore the world, to their own desires, their own needs and to a broader, more inclusive and interconnected sense of togetherness. Despite seeing it in miniature, a larger world exists beyond the screens in our hands – we just need to step into it.

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Syeda Aatika Fatima, born in 1997, is a visual artist based in the United Kingdom. She completed her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and is a recipient of the Paul Desty Scholarship. She had completed her BA in Fine Arts from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan and has since then moved permanently to England.

Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou is a writer, the founding editor-in-chief of Lucy Writers, and has a PhD in English Literature from UCL. She holds a BA in English Literature from Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies from King’s College London and a Diploma in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Arts. She regularly writes on art, dance and literature for magazines such as The London Magazine, The White Review, Elephant, Art Monthly, Wallpaper*, The Arts Desk, Burlington Contemporary, the87press’ Hythe, Worms Magazine and many others. From 2022-2023, Hannah managed an Arts Council England-funded project for emerging women and non-binary writers from migrant backgrounds, titled What the Water Gave Us, in collaboration with The Ruppin Agency and Writers’ Studio, which resulted in an anthology of the same name. She is currently working on a hybrid work of creative non-fiction about women artists and drawing, an extract from which is published in Prototype’s 2023 anthology, Prototype 5.

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