Zainab Mohsin | MA Fine Art Online Graduate Showcase

Project Title	Nothing
Venue	Pune, India and Ajman, UAE
Date	November – December 2023 and online ongoing: zainabmohsinart.com

About:

Zainab Mohsin’s practice is artist centred and process based. It signifies process over aesthetics in art. Aspired from Dadaism and Automatism, the works are, dissident, and the process, spontaneous, raw, free-hand and playful. The works also display symbolism, satire and irony.

Project: ‘Nothing’ is a series of pen and charcoal drawings that uses spontaneity and playfulness in its process. It includes the process videos, as part of the work, as here, process is where the art is.

Research Question: How can a spontaneous process-based drawing practice signify the importance of small and quotidian aspects of everyday?

In Documents of Contemporary Art: The Everyday, Stephen Johnstone compiles theories and works of various artists that work with the everyday. They establish the everyday as ambiguous, elusive and open-ended. Everyday realism also portrays unpreciousness in the way art looks.

Contemporary art is saturated with references to the everyday. Drawing on the vast reservoir of normally unnoticed, trivial and repetitive actions, the rise of the everyday in contemporary art is usually understood in terms of a desire to bring these overlooked aspects of lived experience into visibility. The investigation of everydayness asks us to consider the deceptively simple question: What happens when nothing happens? (Johnstone 2008, p4).

‘Nothing’ is a celebration of small, mundane and quotidian elements of everyday. It is a subtle irony of the hyper-productive world that we live in and the failure to acknowledge value in our ‘regular’ that ultimately forms the big picture. Embracing the everyday, that is considered as an ‘in-between’, rather than the destination, ‘Nothing’ tries to establish art and hence, value, in the process rather than the outcome.