Title:    باطن  اور  ظاہر      / Zaahir Aur Batin

(‘Batin - the inward state’ and ‘Zaahir - the outward appearance’).

The thematic thread that runs through this body of work is an agile, amorphous style of creating something truly based on “Self” or “Dialogue with the inward (Batin) and outward (Zaahir) self”. The course of self-observation allowed the artist to discover and uncover the psychological dimensionality of a human mind. It is an exercise of reading herself to understand and decode something intangible. With densely over-layered contour work, Akbar presents a transparency but at the same time the illegibility of her mind – coinciding with and intersecting highly concentrated etchings of various memories of being rejected and accepted, constructed and deconstructed, admired and attacked, on paper. These drawings are autonomous pieces that are speeches on their own – personal speeches that have transported from the inner to the outer space of being; monumental speeches that have caused trauma and pleasure, incubation of chaos and refinery of order; challenging speeches that have shaken the symmetry of my thoughts - exposing honesty and vulnerability to the world through each stroke and expression with a piercing question: Who owes you an approval?