Sanié Bokhari and Manik Raj Nakra- Between the Earth and Sky

Sanié Bokhari and Manik Raj Nakra

Between the Earth and Sky

October 20- November 5, 2022

This is the story of the entire world, from the moment it was conceived, through the tiniest pinprick of the contemporary human eye, arrested on the ground and looking ever upwards, shuttered in the briefest of frames, limited to its most crucial and beguiling symbols. Between the Earth and Sky hems together two artists who uniquely commingle the binaries of the divine and the human, the massive and the minuscule, and the materials of mythologies both ancient and new. The exhibition showcases drawings and paintings from Manik Raj Nakra and Sanié Bokhari, artists whose practices ripple against one another as they seek to address mythological and mundane narratives across borders and traditions, questioning these narratives’ durability and potential as they’re introduced to material and conceptual friction. Enormous cosmologically–and, sometimes, literally–while maintaining illustrative legibility as though you might somehow fit them into your pocket alongside a sacred text, each work in Between the Earth and Sky presents new ways of looking at robust traditions of passing down wisdom betwixt limited human perception and infinitely grand eternity.

Through mixed media paintings and drawings, Manik Raj Nakra takes on the possibility of addressing the ancient world as his own. In Between the Earth and Sky, Nakra explores Indian iconography through aesthetic modes historically entrenched yet seeped in contemporaneity–printed, painted, and drawn on handmade paper with raw edges, layered and arranged with a care reminiscent of artifacts set for display in a museum. Striking graphics, patterns, and stark compositions unfold a rainbow of themes as old as they are relevant, with motifs like Kali’s tongue dripping with blood (historically used as a reminder that nature ultimately consumes all life), images bound by their aversion of expectation in appearance, placement, and medium. In Miss Sinister, Nakra renders in juicy wet media a figure being consumed by an anthropomorphic Kali-moth, bordered by a tiger’s paw feverishly stamped along its edge and geometric markings at its corners–adornments evocative of those in Mughal painting, a practice derived in India in the 10th century which flourished in Pakistan during the spread of Islamic texts.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, a city whose history of hosting Mughal painters stretches back at least five hundred years, Sanié Bokhari creates paintings, drawings, and mixed media works which address the materials and symbols that give form to our daily lives–despite how far removed in time and space they might feel. Like Nakra, Bokhari has drawn upon the legacies of Mughal painting throughout her professional and creative practice (working with, for instance, wasli or vasli paper, which was especially created for Mughal paintings at their inception a millennium ago to facilitate illustrations of poetry or sacred texts in albums called muraqqas), stretching its limits to fit the complexities of that which the artist demands. In Between the Earth and Sky, Bokhari leaps beyond the miniature in larger-than-life drawings whose limited palette of red and greyscale trace echoes of the ethereal through the artist’s interpersonal imaginarium. In Paradis Perdus the subject framed by a border of columns dense with motif bends her knee to the side just enough for the viewer to catch a glimpse of a singular nipple, shining in graphite, as dozens of bomber jets loom overhead. In her smallest piece (in which the artist fits an entire, flattened globe above which two figures float dazedly, the feminine of the two catching a reflection in a mirror which feels to be floating away itself), Bokhari, like Nakra, collapses the physics which flatten us through probing the immortal potency of storytelling.

Manik Raj Nakra creates paintings, drawings, and installations which apply a contemporary lens onto Indian iconography, colonial anachronisms, artifacts from early civilizations, and mythologies of ancient cultures to explore themes such as power, lust, ceremony, and self-sabotage. In his work, Nakra forges a world of teeming jungles where four headed leopards perch on old world ruins and silver teethed monkeys pray for our salvation. Nakra’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Texas and San Francisco, participated in The LINE Residency in 2020, and was included in his first institutional museum show at The Contemporary, Austin Texas in 2021. His client list includes Converse, The Oxford American, The LINE Hotel, Cosmopolitan India, Facebook, Urban Outfitters, Soho House amongst others. Nakra lives and works in Austin, Texas. This is his second time showing with Martha’s Contemporary.

Sanié Shoaib Bokhari was born in Lahore, Pakistan. After completing her Bachelors in Painting from the National College of Arts, in 2014, she taught there for two years. She continued her studio practice alongside and has exhibited her work in galleries in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. In 2012, she was one of the three individuals selected to represent Pakistan in Luton, for a cultural exchange program where Pakistani truck art was the main focus. She also spent a month at the Vermont Studio Centre, after which she recognized the necessity of graduate school for her work practice. In 2016, Bokhari started a two-year MFA program, in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her current practice is an undertaking of an inquiry of the broad range of prospects presented by contemporary painting. This is her first exhibition with Martha’s.

Text by Lindsey Lascaux

Photography by Andrea Calo

**Sanié Bokhari**
*Stretch Your Eyes*
52" x36”
Graphite on Arches oil paper
2022

**Manik Raj Nakra**
*Miss Sinister*
25 1/2 ” x 19”
Watercolor, wax pencil, block printing ink, glue on vegetable-dyed handmade paper
2022

**Manik Raj Nakra**
*Kali Moth*
16 1/2” x 21 1/2”
Watercolor, block printing ink, glue on vegetable-dyed handmade paper
2022

**Manik Raj Nakra**
*Nyctophilia*
15 ”x 23”
Watercolor, black glitter, block printing ink, glue on vegetable-dyed handmade paper
2022

**Manik Raj Nakra**
*Kali Mouth*
16” x 12”
Watercolor, gold leaf, glue on vegetable-dyed handmade paper
2022

**Manik Raj Nakra**
*Ceremony*
22 1/2 ” x 16”
Watercolor, gouache, block printing ink, oil paint, glue on vegetable-dyed handmade paper
2022

**Manik Raj Nakra**
*Chimera*
14” x 25”
Watercolor, block printing ink, oxidized gold leaf, glue on vegetable-dyed handmade paper
2022

**Manik Raj Nakra**
*Mother*
13” x 11 1/2 ”
Watercolor, block printing ink, glue on vegetable-dyed handmade paper
2022

**Sanié Bokhari**
*Mother and Child*
30" x 30”
Graphite and acrylic on canvas
2022

**Sanié Bokhari**
*Liquid Love*
41" x 54” framed
Graphite on Arches oil paper
2022

**Manik Raj Nakra**
*Monster*
56” x 46”
Oil, spray paint, charcoal, chalk, on canvas
2022

**Manik Raj Nakra**
*The Strangers*
62" x 60"
Oil, spray paint, wax crayon, charcoal, and chalk on canvas
2022

**Sanié Bokhari**
*Paradis Perdus*
48" x 36"
Graphite and colored pencil on canvas
2022

**Sanié Bokhari**
*The Bode III*
14" x 11"
Graphite and colored pencil on canvas
2022