I was five the first time I visited my Aunt Susie in Los Angeles, and she was the perfect beauty to introduce me to Hollywood, because she looked like a movie star. She’d escaped our birthplace, Indiana, thirty five years before, and had made it to the edge of the Wild West. Like a worldly, comely cowgirl she settled into the arid climate of California’s canyons, in a hacienda-style apartment building down in the flats and a glamorous job at a high end boutique that flew her to Italy every year to go to fashion shows, an event the likes of which I’d never heard of, and pick out stuff to sell the next season. She told me that Marilyn Monroe had lived in her apartment at some point, and it looked like it. Susie even had a red convertible that we’d whizz around town in.
She bought me my first bra and undies, a little Calvin Klein cotton set. I spent time in the dressing room worried that my dead relatives could watch me trying stuff on from heaven. Susie let me rent movies, like Splash, which is about a mermaid who comes onto land to find this man she’d rescued at sea as a little boy and still loved— and I simply couldn’t believe how realistic it was to watch Daryl Hannah’s legs turn to scales in a bathtub she filled with salt water for some relief from the burden of being human. I was obsessed. Susie bought me sidewalk chalk and taught me how to spell the word mermaid, and drove me in her boxy convertible up PCH to a restaurant in Malibu looking out over the open Pacific, a wild expanse of dingey blue serving as our backdrop, and I asked every waitress who walked by if she’d ever seen a mermaid out there. Oh yes, they all told me, winking at susie while thumbing their pens and little server notebooks. We see them all the time. You just have to keep your eyes peeled.
I went to LA every summer after that. In the winter, I’d read books Susie recommended—the diary of Edie Sedgewick and Valley of the Dolls and Marilyn Monroe’s published journals. I poured over the fashion magazines she sent me. I waited at the door for the monthly delivery of my Delia’s catalogue, an almost inexplicable nineties phenomenon that I believed to be the epitome of California cool, and soothed my quiet teenage rage by dreaming of the day I’d leave Indiana and travel back to somewhere like LA again, hopefully permanently, to fulfill my mermaid dreams, to wear all the Delia’s clothes and coordinating accessories I could possibly get my hands on.
When I first met the art of Hiba Schahbaz, my longing for the magic of becoming a long-haired, bare breasted, shimmeringly iridescent half fish snapped me into a heavy nostalgia. Indiana is land-locked; the thought of sea beasts but a myth there. Karachi, where Hiba grew up in Pakistan, sits on the Arabian Sea. Coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs, writes one of Pakistan’s greatest authors, Kamala Shamsie. Hiba herself feels most comfortable by the water. It’s where I go to make decisions, it’s where I go when I need to pray, she told me a few days ago when I went to visit her newest exhibition at Adler Beatty Gallery, Magical Creatures, which is open until June 20th.
Kamala Shamsie makes Karachi sound so safe, and Hiba’s mermaids look so protected, their hair insouciantly covering or exposing their naked breasts, as if they are viewed only from within a bubble of security. She doesn’t paint them as if she’s a man, peering voyeuristically into their cozy world. She paints them as if she, too, is interested in preserving their security, in respecting their comfort.
The reality is that Karachi, like many places on earth, has its fair share of violence. Seventy to ninety percent of the women in Pakistan experience domestic violence in their lifetimes, and until 2006, a woman had to produce four male witnesses to testify in her support if she were to make accusations of rape—her punishment if she failed to do so would be charges of adultery, punishable colloquially by an honor killing (there were almost 500 honor killings in 2021). The ideal world of mermaids that Hiba paints is a beautiful dream, fulfilling the promise of a place as complex and unique as where she was born.
Hiba was trained in miniatures painting, a traditional art form that emerged as early as the 8th century AD, which she learned in Lahore, at Pakistan’s national college of the arts—basically the only place on earth that teaches it. In Persia and India, these tiny, detailed works on paper were historically created for personal, private use—and as such often depicted the human form, forbidden in other aspects of Islamic art making. Miniatures have long been made on hand made paper, using natural pigments, and have always included elaborate floral and fauna rendered in soft, organic hues. Other hallmarks of them include the arabesque, or soft “s” forms, calligraphy, and geometric forms. Hiba picks up on some of the trademarks of the tradition, using black tea, for example, as a watercolor paint, but renders her paintings on a differing scale—sometimes tiny, sometimes not. In the current Adler Beatty show, there are her own miniature books and watercolors, paired with religious miniatures from different traditions, such as 15th century French.
There is also a room-sized installation of Hiba’s mermaids, seashells, water serpents and lotus flowers cut out from thick paper and adhered to the walls at life size.
And there are paintings in between at a more standard size, around 50 inches tall. Throughout, Hiba establishes the nude female form—which you kinda have to think of as self portraiture—as a way to reclaim her own body and history; never so much as in The Guard (Dragon Sky), 2015-2025, where a central goddess is flanked by female warriors and protective dragons.
This idea of reclamation is something that follows all of us through our lives, offering itself as an option at every step, every new project, with each phase of our time. Hiba’s paintings are a roadmap of encouragement for how to find our own ways to redefine our bodies, identity and history.
I love your writing. It just takes me there … thank you 💜
For me that was such an enjoyable fun read! Delia, how could I have forgotten the thrill it gave me too! Your aunt sounded like she was something else!! You made me want to see this exhibition! Long live mermaids!