Mehwish Iqbal’s sculpture series “The Only Daughter” aims to empower women globally and Muslim women in particular by highlighting the status of women as elevated by Islam, beyond the boundaries of cultural and social dogmas. The work refers to both religious and social contexts of female foeticide: pre-modernity, people would bury their daughters alive, while today, technological advancement assists in gender-selective abortions of female fetuses.
“The Only Daughter” is a series of works that I created to explore the lives and experiences of many South Asian women who give birth to a female child and are then faced with social pressures and cultural scrutiny to their inability to produce a male heir.
These works explore issues of gender inequality, abortion of female fetuses, and socio-political scenarios that propagate stereotypes about the role of women in a society to produce male heirs. It generates some crucial questions regarding the psychological and emotional state of women who are transformed through complex layers of social expectations.
The work process derives inspiration from Mughal miniature painting, Islamic geometric patterns and work of contemporary artists such as Swoon, Shazia Sikander and Kiki Smith. It involves stylized landscapes representing the delicacy of an environment, animal symbolism, children’s clothing and textile design techniques. This vocabulary is translated on clothes pattern paper. The work is a translation of multiple ideas which are carefully webbed through a process of layering at a physical as well as intellectual level.
