RUPAK

An abiding source of inspiration for Lala Rukh throughout her career was Hindustani Classical Music. She became familiar with Indian classical music as her father was the founder of the All Pakistan Music Conference (APMC). Across a number of her other drawings and works references to music and musical notations can be discerned, but her final work Rupak, a stop motion animation, is the culmination of this abiding preoccupation. Lala Rukh collaborated with Sunny Justin who she met at APMC to compose the twelve-second rupak taal tabla solo that forms the basis for her animation. Once the score was completed, Lala Rukh devised her own method of transcribing beats to paper. This took place over a two-month period, during which she would draw and re-draw the sounds of the rupak taal in a dot based system on a grid. She made these dots using the angled tip of a qalam (dried reed pen used in calligraphy). Finally, Lala Rukh completed a set of 88 drawings that were then scanned, with her marks all coalescing into an animation, where a single white dot that moves rhythmically along the screen to each tap of the tabla is heard on the accompanying soundtrack.