Shahzia batool biography of barack

Shazia Batool’s conversations – about Quetta, about the worsening situation and the burgeoning art scene – are filled with dramatic gasps and sharp intakes of breath but beneath her excitable exterior lies a steely resolve.

This is evident in the stories she chooses to tell: How she wheeled herself into Quetta’s Serena Hotel and insisted that its managers let her exhibit her paintings; how, as a physically-handicapped person, she manages to live in an environment not exactly friendly to the disabled, how she migrated to neighbouring Iran with her mother but, after living there for two years, decided to return alone and resume her life in Quetta.

“I felt trapped there,” she says simply.

This sense of entrapment had begun to affect her art.

The paintings Batool creates here, in her home city, are large and vibrant and full of colour; they examine individuals in a crowd. In Iran, on the other hand, her work was darker: In one painting, a solitary woman, her face somewhat obscured, gl