Navine’s Panicle Paintings Contemplate Parenting and Pandemia

Culture, What's On | 13 Oct 2022

What: Navine G. Khan-Dossos’ geometric art comforts and provokes, drawing inspiration as much from the full sweep of Islamic traditions as well as from the digital realm. Working between London and Athens, her art treats geometry not as an abstraction but as something essentially informational, a social commentary. Her most recent composition, Panicle Paintings, is a series of fifteen portraits of parents who gave birth during the pandemic. They appear as palms and several other symbolic and fantastical trees derived from Sumerian seal scrolls and Mesopotamian art that symbolise fertility and childbirth. The dreaded coronavirus sits harmoniously beside emblematic motifs in a sort of Fibonacci sequence, forcing us to contemplate the divine and the mundane, as indeed this pandemic has.