Honors Thesis – Tehreem Waqas Mela

The Liberal Arts Experience
Oil on Canvas
Mount Holyoke College Permanent Collection
An exploration of my relationship with the western canon at Mount Holyoke College. During my time there, I co-founded a protest art movement called ‘Mount Holyoke Doesn’t Teach Me,’ a student led survey of what the students of colour think are missing from the college curriculum. The subject of this painting is my friend Guneet, whose grandfather hails from my village. Guneet has a Sikh mother and a Muslim father. Just like me, she accesses multiple modes of wisdom and knowledge through the amalgamation of histories that reside in her.

Framed
Oil on Canvas
Private Collector from Mount Holyoke College Collection
Photography was a colonial medium to document and compartmentalise people from my village. My own relationship with photographing my village comes with its hierarchies and ethical considerations. The subaltern is consistently ‘framed’ by the viewer. What if we instead give the medium of photography to the subaltern themselves?

Mardon Ka Shujra (The Lineage of Men)
Oil on Canvas
The oral tradition in my village only records the names of men. The lower castes, the Mirasis, the women are all excluded from the narrative. They record my fathers, grandfathers, brothers but never me.

Pakistan was Partitioned in 1947
Plaster, Ink, Colour Pencils, Acrylic
The following images are a sculpture series exploring my personal history intertwined with Pakistan’s colonial history. There are images of my grandfather receiving a prize for dog racing from the late Queen, carved sayings in Urdu and Punjabi and images of the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre 1919. The sculptures are casts of books and seek to imagine the space outside the canon.