Twisting with the Image: Farida Batool on Experiencing Photographs

Artist Farida Batool has been exploring the experience of the image and its movement through lenticular prints or 3D holographic photographs since 2006. As a woman and as an artist based in Pakistan, Batool has always situated her body in her work in relation to the city. Borrowing from personal experiences, her work highlights the presence of various sites as forms of socio-political control. She juxtaposes situations of surveillance, change and chance with references from films, poetry and literature.  

A lenticular print is made up of layers of images that appear to move when the viewer shifts their position from one side of the work to the other. Lenticular ghosting of the image—or the blurred overlap view of two images in a lenticular print—appears at certain angles of transition in the course of moving across the print. While Batool’s practice earlier deliberated on the placement of the viewer beyond the “ghost image” of a lenticular print; she has now shifted into simulated worlds of virtual reality (VR), a process that requires a more physical involvement by its audience. By translating the presence of a space into the form of temporary immersive images through her VR works, the artist moves the viewer between feelings of claustrophobia, suffocation, impatience and freedom.

Over three decades of her artistic practice, Batool has constantly approached the tense and personal situations of her everyday life by taking to the image as a malleable medium of expression. In this video interview, the artist shares her journey of arriving at the use of lens-based practices as a medium and form over painting and drawing. While the latter weighed her down to working in a space, the image allowed her the freedom to make her studio mobile. This sense of freedom also influences the way Batool moulds and reinvents the meaning of images, as described in this conversation with Veeranganakumari Solanki.

_{(Featured Image: Dhaltey Shehr Ke Do Sooraj. Lahore, 2020. Virtual Reality Immersive Video.)}

_{Interview taken on 07 August 2021}

All images featured in the video are works by Farida Batool. Images courtesy of the artist.