Visual art / SPLIT OPEN, Natasha Tareen. At M16 Artspace, Griffith, until June 8. Reviewed by SOPHIA HALLOWAY.

Artist Natasha Tareen didn’t take a traditional pathway to a creative career.

She is self-taught and gained some exposure to a formal education in visual art by taking electives at the School of Art & Design while studying Business Administration at the Australian National University.

Tareen went on to be a finalist in the School’s 2024 Drawing Prize, and in that same year participated in her first group show at Platform (Everything I Am Not, curated by Yona Su and Joyce Fan). Tareen continues this impressive trajectory with her first solo exhibition, SPLIT OPEN, at M16 Gallery.

SPLIT OPEN excavates the complexity of brown femininity, bodily autonomy and generational memory through the visual language of the mythology and folklore of Central and South Asia and drawing on Tareen’s own Afghan heritage.

Tareen is particularly interested in the predator/prey dynamic and the role of women in these tales, which she interweaves with her own memories to convey deeply personal narratives.

Double portraits are a recurring format in SPLIT OPEN and provide a mechanism for Tareen to examine these dynamics. TETHER includes two figures, a blushing young bride flanked by a faceless, forbidding figure.

The work speaks to the cultural expectations placed on young women, particularly in relation to marriage, but also the conflicting stereotypes about women of Afghan heritage who are seen as either submissive or threatening.

Tareen reclaims innocence through the recurring bow motifs, such as in Spirit of the Ranges. A girl with bows tied in her long hair is accompanied by an Afghan hound. This guardian creature is at odds with the wolf that lies alongside Tareen in BREAK & ENTRY. The cultural expectations placed on women can be oppressive, but culture is also a protective force.

The surreal and dreamlike nature of Tareen’s works on canvas are compounded by textile works that hang in the space. Simple clothing items have been marked by Tareen with recurring imagery of the sun, moon, daggers and snakes, and Tareen’s characteristic bows. Clothing creates a bodily presence in the space but also invokes a sense of absence and otherworldliness.

Tareen examines how the emotional inheritance of generations before her is carried in the body to reclaim a complex cultural legacy that is a source of both trauma and resilience.