BETWEEN
THE SHADOW AND THE SOUL [1]
Mad in
Karachi
‘How
do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You
must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here’.
Lewis Carroll ‘Alice in Wonderland’
Munawar Ali Syed, a sculptor himself, has curated a
sculpture show titled Mad in Karachi - a
pun on Made in Karachi, as it is mispronounced by many in Pakistan. The dark
humour of the title reflects the attitude of the people of Karachi, a unique
city that turns with the violent blows it receives, combating the madness with acidic
humour and a refusal to stay down for long.
Sculpture is perceived to be a rarity in Pakistani art which
has traditionally been dominated by painting and in recent times by miniature
painting. However the growth of conceptual art and the return to material has
resulted in artists crossing media. In this exhibition the 18 artists showcased
are primarily sculptors, with the exception of a few such as Naiza Khan, Sara
Khan, Riffat Alvi, who also produce 2 dimensional works.
Karachi is a sculptor’s city just as perhaps Lahore is a
painter’s. As a sculptor, traversing the city of Karachi is like walking
through a sculptor’s gallery. Haji Camp with its metal market, noisy with
sheets of shimmering steel, its lanes of ball bearing shops piled up like a
Louise Nevelson artwork, and its wood market with huge band saws spewing sawdust as it drives
through massive tree trunks sounding like a racing car track. Khori Garden workers forming kulfi boxes that would be
quite at home in a contemporary art gallery, recycled metal spice containers;
Husseini Metal Supplies tucked in behind the city courts with its copper sheets
and lead chunks catching the afternoon light; and in quiet back lanes the
makers of musical instruments, the old dark shops with shelves upon shelves of
exotic chemicals; the brash coloured paper decorations of the paper market; the
clacking of oiled printing presses in tiny lanes of Pakistan chowk; the massive
workshops of Garden where trucks are constructed and quietly painted with
vibrant colours; the winding lanes of the old bottle market, or Bohri bazaar
with its hardware or billowing fabrics enticing buyers; Jodia bazaar with its
cones of colourful spices, wooden cooking utensils, woven baskets and wholesale paan shops; the Eid Gah market
with it warren of metal forgers, electroplaters, and lathe machines amidst
which files are toothed painstakingly by hand. On the other side of town, B
Road Liaqatabad a mini version of Nishtar Road with its metal casters,
carpenters workshops, misri makers, kite makers, tooling shops. Somewhere in
between lie the jewellery markets of Old and New Sarafa Bazaar and the
medicinal herb markets.
Visually there is so much inspiration for the sculptor with
space, mass, volume, scale and texture calling out from the constantly altering
inner city lanes, the congested new vertical constructions, the cacophonous new
on old structures, the crazy wedding halls of Nagan, the Sunday market tents
that transform bland open spaces into busy bazaars and then just as suddenly
vanish; and of course the exotic homes people build with decorated facades and
wild overhead water tankers in the shape of footballs or boats or
aeroplanes.
Karachi is also home to a dazzling range of ethnic communities
from the original settlers of Lyari to the migrant Pathans of Kati Pahari each
enriching the cultural pattern of this city. Karachi is perceived as a volatile
violent city, but I see it as an amazingly tolerant city that shuffles to make
room for everyone, creating an addictive cultural flavour one cannot find
anywhere else.
But every so often, as politicians with local or
international agendas intrude, the cloth is reversed and the seams are
violently pulled out and one becomes aware of the different threads of class,
community and race. Then for a while Karachi becomes a dark place, a contested
site, and its artists, musicians, thinkers grapple with the metaphysical
meanings that such conflicts leave exposed. Its people are bewildered left
wondering if the harmony was a lie or this malevolence. Communities retreat
into watchful silence questioning their future, their past decisions to make
Karachi their home. Then as suddenly as the violence erupts, it subsides and
the relieved citizens restart their interdependent lives, the motorcycles
return to breaking traffic lights, the labourers resume their search for the
centre of the earth along every other street, shoppers flit from illuminated
shop to shop like crazed moths, young boys in cars vibrating with music speed
through the streets, or panic staid Sunday drivers with wheelies, and somewhere
seaward from the rich man’s Marina Club a fisherman settles down to his patient
weekend pastime.
These are the layered experiences that the artists in Mad in
Karachi have responded to.
There are reflections of urban chaos in the works of Aamir
Habib whose transparent ceiling device, part light part ambulance or police with
flashing lights, reminiscent of an operating theatre light, mosquito killer,
with its tangle of visible wires like an illegal electric kunda connection, all
hovering above like an all seeing eye.
Aliya Yusuf continues the metaphor of electricity with her
ceramic and copper devices that lie like a disrupted or abandoned repair job, a
subtle metaphor for the frequent electricity breakdowns that plague Karachi.
Riffat Alvi’s “Birds of Hope” sit placidly, disconnected
atop charred dismantled urban homes. The birds are like toys, not
real, raising a question: is peace merely a hope not a reality?
Adeela
Sulaiman and Abdullah Qamar, presenting works in metal, attempt to establish a
metaphysical order to the chaos and tragedy. Abdullah’s “Nucleus” calms the uncertainty , to his mind
a recurring cycle, creating an organic sinister oozing form that seems to
breath like some subterranean creature.
Adeela Sulaiman aestheticizes death like the Olympian Fates stitching a
potentially endless curtain of exquisite dead birds trying as the artist states
‘to create a facade over something horrendous’.
Naiza Khan’s enigmatic metal garments, uncomfortable,
unwearable, like so many of society’s restrictions, adds a gender statement of
wilful exposure and cruel restraint. A similar theme of vulnerability is more
gently explored in carved wood by Tariq Luni’s Half Naked Half Covered-
abstracted female forms shrinking before the intrusion
of the covering and uncovering gaze.
Abdul Jabbar Gull’s partly burnt wood tryptich suggests
the reclaiming of space within the urban cinders reminiscent of children’s
games played on the sandy edges of traumatized neighbourhoods.
The impact on children of living in a violent city is also
explored in the works of Sara Khan, who pioneered the miniature sculpture as an
extension of her practice as a miniature painter. Her bullet vase and baby
drinking milk from a bullet bottle are disarming images that underline the
impossibility of protection for the young and innocent, for those trying to
live graceful lives in the current times
of meaningless violence.
Asad Hussain turns to the well known children’s fable of
the cleverness of the crow throwing stones into a bottle of water to raise the
level and slake his thirst; except his crow has to throw in bullet shells instead
of pebbles. Are these the stories of survival we will have to teach our
children? In the same breath-catching idiom, his child, the Angel of Kolachi, stands innocent and unprotected between rigid
unseeing minarets cut into giant shaving blades, alluding to the double impact
of religious control and the threat of violence.
Blades, this time a cascade of cutter blades
formed into the wings of a dismembered bird of prey in Sadia Jamal’s work,
creates the painful memory of past violence that remains potentially dangerous
like an unexploded device. Or perhaps it is a half finished device that has yet
to wield its horrifying destructive power.
A sense of powerlessness is expressed in Faheem Rao’s ceramic
work presenting gasping fish circling in despair around a cluster of presumably
dead fish, bringing to mind the aftermath of violence, the milling of stunned
people who gather around sites of bomb explosions and other tragic disasters.
Munawar’s toothpick couple like an Adam and Eve, are a symbolic representations of humanity
reduced to insubstantiality constructed out of fragile toothpicks. The sense of
their vulnerability and impending doom is emphasized with interspersed, almost
hidden, match heads mostly around the female figure. Lives are inflammable, a
disaster waiting to happen. Toothpicks are used to remove annoying bits of food
after a meal. Is this what the worth of human beings is reduced to?
The interpretation of the body continues in Faraz Mateen’s
carved books: is human identity reduced to the names in a telephone directory,
or is it the individual asserting his presence by imposing his personal
identity on the attempts to reduce humanity to statistics, be they blank pages
of lives yet to be lived, or the cacophony of conversations that a telephone
directory promises? The passivity of the carved heads in a coma like state is
strangely disturbing in its acceptance of reality and dissociation from it.
Widening the political theme are Nabeel Majeed’s works “Do
More” “Leaders” and “Sanctions”, a satirical view of the War on Terror and its
impact on Pakistani politics. The construction of the work with the clever use
of origami, recalling the 1000 cranes of peace, reads instead like war games,
territorial strategies with the players depicted as crabs and rats, on either
side of the Afghan Pakistan border.
Even more meticulous are Nosheen Iqbal’s miniature works
made of watch mechanisms symbolic of lives pieced back together in a survival
strategy. They are emblematic of the ability of Karachi’s citizens to adapt to
rapidly changing circumstances, reinventing the destroyed fragments of their
lives into positive affirmations of the continuity of life. Survival consists
of internalizing, living below the radar, micro lives ordered out of the chaos.
It also calls to mind the spirit of the older markets and workshops of Karachi
reusing and recycling discarded materials that persists despite the intrusion
of throwaway consumer products.
Saba Iqbal even more deliberately steps outside direct
engagement with political turmoil, creating windows congested with mechanical
parts of indeterminate objects de-emotionalizing the urban experience. Pressed,
compressed, worn, unusable vestiges of useful objects block out what lies
beyond.
These artists caught in the now are counterbalanced by the one artist
who chooses to sublimate turning to the sufi traditions of this land. Amin
Gulgee’s signature work seeks and finds balance and harmony, between the seeker,
the feverish human spirit and the sought, the containment of the metaphysical
void. “ How can there be a window where
no wall remains?” This has been the eternal quest of the Sufis who themselves
were no strangers to political turmoil.
In the context of this show, it is tempting to read into Amin Gulgee’s
work, the juxtaposition of the grid to the screaming soul of Francis Bacon’s
paintings, but it is probably more accurate in the context of his own work to
see it as a gesture of love and longing for peace and harmony.
Durriya Kazi
Karachi 2011
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