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| Painting over the lines by five Pakistani artists |
The
small Chelsea area of Manhattan, sandwiched between the bright
lights and big glory of Times Square and the cutthroat downtown
Financial District, plays host to numerous independent art galleries
offering the latest in New York chic. By traversing the narrow
streets, you pass many galleries housed behind the façades of old,
crumbling buildings.
Those
who just dwell among the lush, well-publicized exhibits of New
York’s major museums are missing perhaps a deeper experience by
ignoring the Chelsea art galleries. For behind their doors are the
adjectives reserved for eclectic art observers: bemusing, confusing,
wicked, inspiring, delightful, crazy, hilarious, and beautiful.
Case
in point: The two-year old IndoCenter’s newest exhibit:
“Painting Over the Lines: Five Contemporary Artists from
Pakistan”.
The
exhibit gives an introduction to the “dramatic fluctuations in the
country” by offering an off-center vision of Pakistan’s
tumultuous geopolitical, historical and of course, religious
background. The five featured artists – Sylvat Aziz, Rashid Rana,
Ali Raza, Risham Syed and Hamra Abbas – are all alumni of
Lahore’s (Pakistan) famous National College of Art and disciples
of the late Zahoor ul-Akhlaq, a professor at the college whose
innovative combinations of traditional miniature painting techniques
and modern Western art concepts created a new chapter in Pakistani
art.
Sylvat
Aziz draws upon Akhlaq’s direction in her provocative series,
“The Monkey’s Wedding”. Fourteen of her prints are featured in
the exhibit. The photos are digital prints Aziz made of her own
photographs, borrowed art historical images and the drawn-figure of
a sly monkey peeping out in some of the prints.
The
series serves to unearth “elusive social and political issues”
that romanticize Lahore’s past with the monkey as a silent witness
to “true” history. A few of Aziz’s prints offer a hodgepodge
of images: colorful birds, human figures in various forms of dress
and splashy backgrounds. Two other prints show the mirror images of
male nude backsides.
These
images draw away from Islamic sensibilities by focusing on human
figures and nudes, which are forbidden in the realm of Islamic art.
More pungent are Aziz’s architectural shots of building facades,
where the muted colors and repetition of window openings hint at a
deep, hidden world rarely seen by the public eye.
One
print shows the dark stairwell of a Mughul fort in Lahore. During
former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s time it was declared a
world heritage site. Heady cocktail parties flourished, while
simultaneously, its basement housed political prisoners. The monkey
hides at the bottom of the stairwell as the witness to its true
horrors.
As
subtle as Aziz’s prints are, Rashid Rana’s large canvas
paintings forgo understated meanings for loud, ostentatious designs
that draw the viewer’s eye in one direction while surreptitiously
poking fun at himself and the viewer. One painting – really three
grouped together – challenges the viewer to claim it as Pakistani
art.
The
piece has one huge canvas covered by an insipid floral print bought
locally at the Ichra Bazaar in Lahore. It is flanked by two large
recreations of Jean Baptist Carpeaux’s 19th century painting of
nudes cavorting around an angel figure. Again, the placement of
nudes in Rana’s creation obviously goes against Islamic
guidelines. That being said, the painting pokes fun at art by
literally asking, “What is so Pakistani about this painting?”
Those
words, etched in green across the floral print in English and Urdu,
is a mocking attack on stereotypical Pakistani art as categorized by
critics and the general populace. By creating a work that seems
atypical to conventional Pakistani art, Rana seems to be asking,
“Is this truly Pakistani because I am Pakistani? What is Pakistani
art really?”
“Whether
they consciously acknowledge it in their work or totally deny it,
all artists in the third world have to deal with the fact that their
work is about the questions of identity,” says Rana in a press
release. “Even if a Pakistani artist reproduces the same image as
Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ exactly with the same technique,
it is the work of that artist and thus Pakistani.”
Another
artist, Hamra Abbas (who worked under Rana’s tutelage), also
confronts traditional artistic sensibilities by pairing “carefully
executed” miniatures with consumer products placed on pedestals in
front of the paintings. One pairing in particular speaks volumes
about today’s social climate.
“Terrorist
Painting – Six Easy References for Beginners” may easily escape
the viewer’s attention among the larger, flashier paintings in the
exhibit. Yet this piece may be the crux of the show. It offers six
miniature images – a blackout, a blurry image of a Time magazine
article, a mid-shot of a girl in camouflage and jeans, a mughul
image of a man being decapitated, a bottle that says “White
Perfect” and finally murky flames of a violent act. These images
seemingly build the recipe for a terrorist – but that’s just a
part of the story.
Beneath
the images is a list of ingredients. At first glance it seems to be
the makings of a horrible bomb. But in reality it is the ingredient
for L’Oreal Plenitude’s “White Perfect” skin lotion, a
bottle of which is placed on a camouflage-draped pedestal in front
of the image. And there it is – the vision of perfection coming at
the hands of being white.
Such
wry imagery and juxtaposition of techniques and moods create a
dialogue for the definition of Pakistani art, which is under the
influence of Indian, Western and local traditions. Quddus Mirza, a
painter and critic living in Lahore, writes, “Despite its
genealogy in local popular culture, current Pakistani art resembles
mainstream art from the West more than ever. … [The new group of
up and coming artists] found new sources of imagery in urban popular
culture and vernacular aesthetic traditions.”
Mahnaz
Fancy, program and development officer of the IndoCenter says the
exhibit demands each person to discover their own Pakistan rather
than one predetermined by popular media. “It’s more than just
Islam – though Islam is a big part of the country. Pakistan has
been shaped by outside forces and is under the process of
discovering where it going and how it should get there.”
