ISLAMABAD: From Noah`s quest to put two of everything on his ark to the darl< duality of Jekyll/Hyde, twins or doubles have existed in life and art for eons.

Doppelganger, the season`s first show at Khaas Gallery, explores this very duality and brings to the fore those underlying binaries that have been part and parcelof societies from the beginning of time.

Curated by art critic Aasim Akhtar, the show brings together Pakistani artists from diverse backgrounds and art on various mediums.

Mr Akhtar told Dawn that he meant to showcase relativelyyounger artists, those whose practice entailed the figurative. `They don`t make still life or landscapes.

They can, but the whole concept of the doppelgangeris tied to the human form,` he said.

`The medium was open, it could be watercolour, oil on canvas or a multimedia piece, so that artists were not restricted.

Talking aboutrecent trends,he said that art-making had become so diversified that the kind of concerns artists had begun to articulate through their art, could not even be conceived 10 or 20 years ago.

`If you look at the work that was being done in the 1980s and 90s, there was not much exploration of new mediums. The technology was there, but the acceptance of video or photography asart was not there.

Sana Kazi, whose piece `The Kingdom of God is Within You` harks back to Leo Tolstoy`s tome of the same name, said she drew from the story of Mansoor Hallaj, who famously raised the cry of `unal haq`, or, `I am the Truth`.

Ms Kazi said she painted with ash and drew with graphite, sometimes treating part of her image in the traditional miniature technique of `pardakht`, which entails drawing with a squirrel-tail brush.

Anas Ghauri, one of the younger artists whose work was on display at the show, told Dawn that he liked to work in greyscale and used photographs as the basis for his drawings and prints.

`Although my worl< is non-figura-tive and one can`t actually see any human figures in my work, it is difficult not to feel the presence of the human body there, because it is there and not there, at the same time.

Nadia Batool Hussain who heads the Fine Arts department at NCA`s Rawalpindi campus also displayed three pieces at the exhibition. She praised the contribution of Zishan Afzal Khan, the patron of the Khaas Gallery, to the promotion of local art and artists.

Other artists whose work is on display include Alia Bilgrami, Scheherzade Junejo, Inaam Zafar, Madiha Hyder, Naira Mushtaq, Haider Ali Jan, Sheraz Faisal, Maira Khan and Amra Khan. The show will continue until October 12.