Yaruk Mehmood

Yaruk Mehmood is a visual artist based in Karachi. He is completing his Bachelor's in Fine Art from the University of Karachi in Dec 2022. Mehmood primarily uses drawing and sculpture as his mediums but has also created work with digital mediums, including illustrating several children’s books and publishing them on Amazon Kindle. He has worked for Digitonics, an IT company based in Karachi, as the Design Team Lead for children's book illustrations and cover designs and then as a freelance artist. Most recently he has been working on a collaborative project between the Manchester Museum and the University of Karachi in which his team is responsible for curating and collecting data about South Asian food cuisine in Karachi. The research has been published in the form of a book called Manachi and attended the book launch at the Manchester Museum. He has been actively participating in many group shows happening in Karachi. His most recent group shows include Hummara Purcham Season II, Exploring in Depth, Celebration 75th Independence of Pakistan, Purani Jeans, Invisible Beast, Baad e Saba Season II, and We the People - We the Art. Besides exhibiting his work in art galleries he volunteers and participates in art events. He has volunteered at the Karachi Biennale (2022), Karachi Biennale (2019), Pursakoon Karachi, Karachi Art Fest, and Pakistan Women Festival. He has also taken a one-week workshop at Bacha Jail in Landhi. Through his volunteer work, Mehmood has worked with eminent national and international artists, including Abdul Jabbar Gull, Faisal Arjuman, SM Raza, Syed Faraz, Sinta Tantra, Carlo Galli, and, Herwiegh Scherabon.

My work focuses on the powerful connections built between the viewer and the artwork itself through emotions and dialogues. The central point of building that strong connection is the art perceiver, one who decrypts those visuals seen in the artwork, who helps convey deep emotions or make one think of forgotten memories or revisit meaningful experiences. This seems promising in order to create a dialogue. The dialogue is also to share the search, the connection I try to capture while creating it, and is the most accurate validation to ourselves that we are purely connected with what we are doing. A validation of being an artist is that we are honestly expressing what we feel from outside to inside, it's just like taking a deep breath and exhaling out, a process of converting oxygen into carbon dioxide for the sake of living. We are always In search of connections likewise I tried to build with the artworks and the connection that the art piece itself creates with the viewer. My material is based on my idea based on the journey of Soul, which is a representation of time of death. When the soul is leaving the body. The idea in Muslim culture says, if you put a fragile Malmal(cheesecloth) on sharp Thorns and if you push it, the way the threads break is the representation of the pain when soul leaving the body. So my drawing starts with soaked fabric into ink and taking an impression of that torn fabric onto the paper. The journey of soul begin on the paper at that very moment.