PAKISTAN’S ART AS ITS CHRONICLER

Just as we get in the car, Aisha’s phone goes off. We all know what it means. I tell Adnan to floor it. He reminds me I’m no longer in Pakistan, so we inch through Doha’s nighttime traffic in an orderly manner — an alien concept for a thoroughbred Karachiite like me. The truth is, I hadn’t even initially realised that Adnan was Pakistani.

We’d started off by speaking English to one another when he first came to pick me up. When I eventually asked him where he was from, he responded, “Kohat, in Pakistan.” We quickly ditched the English and switched over to Urdu. Doha is, I think to myself as the National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) appears on the horizon, one of the few places on the planet where speaking Urdu actually gives you an on-the-ground advantage.

Adnan moonlights as a driver here when he isn’t working his construction gig. Aisha Zaman is covering the event we are en route to for Architectural Digest Middle East, she tells me and, based on how vociferously her phone is pinging, I gather that our prime minister’s arrival for the inauguration must be imminent. Strangely enough, us three Pakistanis, who had never met before today, find ourselves in this city by the Persian/ Arabian Gulf heading to an exhibition that speaks to our motherland.

Adnan is a Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) loyalist and, as Aisha and I exit the car upon reaching the NMoQ, he tells me to pass on a message from him to Shehbaz Sharif. I tell him I’ll think about it. Truth be told, the PM is the last thing on my mind.

The history and transformation of Pakistan over the decades is, in many ways, reflected in the evolution of Pakistan’s artistic and architectural landscape. Keeping this in mind, what does Pakistan’s art tell us about the past, present and future of this country? A recent exhibition in Qatar attempts to answer these very questions…

PRELUDE TO AN EXHIBITION

I last met Zarmeene Shah, one of three co-curators of ‘Manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today’, in Karachi just as she was getting ready to jet off to Doha to put the finishing touches on this ambitious exhibition housed at the NMoQ. Now, as I enter the foyer of the museum characterised by its undulating walls, I see Zarmeene being thronged by a cavalcade of well-wishers. Deservedly so.

‘Manzar’ is composed of the diverse works of artists, photographers, architects, writers and archivists who have shaped the narratives and perspectives of Pakistan since the 1940s. This exhibition is not just an exploration of aesthetics, but a profound historical inquiry into Pakistan’s national identity, political upheavals and social movements. Here, the question is not just how art documents a nation’s history but also how it shapes its trajectory. It’s an ambitious undertaking, and its central aim is one I resolutely agree with.

Ask most people how they think one should learn about a nation’s trajectory over the years and they’ll tell you to pick up some state-mandated history book. In all honesty, the history books I remember being taught at school didn’t do me much good. You ask me the same question, and I’d tell you to turn to the arts. Read our literature, listen to our music, see the works of our artists, visit the buildings we constructed, and so on.

A nation’s history, its struggles, triumphs and dark secrets don’t lie codified in some crusty textbook. They lie in what the people created and what stories they chose to tell. ‘Manzar’ exemplifies this — but we’ll get to that.

BEFORE AND AFTER

As the crowd of invitees shuffle towards the entrance of the exhibit, Ali Kazim’s soaring artwork The Conference of Birds greets us gently. Kazim’s birds are in flight, in search of the mythical Simurgh. The colours are muted, but the aspirations are lofty — like that of a young nation in search of its identity.

However, while ‘Manzar’ explores how a nation informs the artistic practices it produces and how a country’s history is reflected in its art, it is only loosely chronological. The architect Raza Ali Dada, hot off the heels of his involvement in the Lahore Biennale, has designed ‘Manzar’s’ serpentine layout and, as co-curator Caroline Hancock puts it, “There is no single linear chronology… but a crossroads of avenues, alleys, dead ends, streams, detours, sky jumps and deep dives.” 

That’s certainly one way of going about it. I suppose this is a fitting reflection of how the art that Pakistan has produced over the decades serves as a microcosm of the erratic political and social milieu from which it has emerged. Our art can be simultaneously acerbic and pleasant, inviting and distant, logical and irrational — just like our nation, and us. The contradictions that define the country and its people are what, naturally, define its art. Our past is contested, the present is in flux and predicting the future in this part of the world is a mug’s game.     

Back at the exhibition, the curators then confront us with Salima Hashmi’s triptych Zones of Dreams which, with its muddied depiction of South Asia and the borders that define it, lays bare the playground within which ‘Manzar’ will be operating.

The first section of the exhibit roots Pakistan’s creative ethos in its pre-Partition history. Ustad Allah Bakhsh’s Sohni Mahiwal channels the romance of Punjabi folklore, while Abdur Rahman Chughtai’s miniatures and Zainul Abedin’s depictions of rural life anchor the art in the lived realities of the people. Together, these works highlight the historical and cultural depth of the Subcontinent and frame art as a tether to collective memory, binding land and identity. 

Could the curators have begun the exhibition from an earlier epoch? Potentially. After all, the conversations that Pakistani art chooses to have and the influences that shape it extend back millennia (well before the arrival of Islam in the region, contrary to what our aforementioned crusty textbooks would have us believe). But, I suspect that the curators were weary of the fact that, like an unruly yarn, the narrative thrust of this exhibition would quickly spin out of control if they didn’t cap its start shortly before 1947. In the end, it was the wiser choice. 

It is vital to mention that the works on display here aren’t limited just to the canvas. For instance, sequestered behind a glass barrier is the book Amal-e-Chughtai, which contains the poetry of Allama Iqbal in Urdu and Persian and has illustrations done by Chughtai. Published in 1968, only 275 copies of this book were ever printed. What a find this is. Of course, Chughtai’s talents extended well beyond the canvas and into popular culture, as evidenced by his logo design for Pakistan Television (PTV).

But, before we get PTV, we have to get Pakistan.

This brings us to the defining moment for the region. As ‘Manzar’ shifts gears and moves us into 1947, the trauma and legacy of Partition reverberates through Zarina Hashmi’s simple yet evocative Dividing Line and Bani Abidi’s The News, which cannily calls into question the enduring rupture between Pakistan and India through its use of two boxy television sets squatting side-by-side — one showing an Indian news channel peddling their state narrative, while the other shows Pakistani newscasters doing the same for their overlords .

Here I run across Noor Ahmed, General Manager of the Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP). We were both rather groggy when we had bumped into one another a couple of days ago, shortly after our plane had hit the tarmac at Doha’s Hamad International Airport at the cusp of dawn. She had, however, given me a teaser of what CAP had up its sleeve for this exhibit.

The archival material present at ‘Manzar’ makes up some of the best parts of this exhibition. As part of the CAP display, there are replicas of the first Pakistani passport, photographs documenting the loss of life triggered by the division, and also an audio recording of the first radio announcement made on Radio Pakistan by Mustafa Ali Hamdani, at 12am on August 14, 1947. As Noor tells me, “Nostalgia is an important way to connect with people. It is a very pure form, through which to share context with people about what was happening in Pakistan when a work of architecture or artworks were commissioned and produced.”

Flanking the CAP display is David Alesworth’s magisterial Lawrence Gardens (Bagh-i-Jinnah), which uses a Kashan carpet to map the colonial and postcolonial transformations of Lahore’s iconic park. Based on a 1915 map of Lawrence Gardens, Alesworth maps the postcolonial Mughal-style additions to the garden on to a found Afghan garden-carpet, thus enacting a kind of reclamation of the colonial project. 

I suppose the fact that this reclamation is done by a Brit, who moved to Pakistan in 1987, has since become a mainstay in the country’s artistic scene and has created works that speak directly to our contemporary quandaries — particularly in his collaborations with Durriya Kazi —  tells us that, much like the country itself, Pakistan’s art world will readily embrace any ‘outsider’ who is brave enough to wrestle with its complex realities.

A NEW GENERATION

Now, as we move past 1947, ‘Manzar’ begins to delve into Pakistan’s quest for an artistic identity unshackled from its colonial past — something the nation itself was unable to achieve. With Pakistan’s push toward modernity in the 1950s and 1960s, artists such as Shakir Ali, Zubeida Agha, and Ahmed Parvez sought to carve a new visual language for Pakistani art. These pioneers drew from Western abstraction while embedding it with local sensibilities.

Agha’s vibrant canvases and Ali’s Cubist experiments reflect an eagerness to redefine national identity through form and local artistic vocabularies, rejecting colonial romanticism for a modernist, self-determined aesthetic.

As the nascent nation began to spread its wings, so did its artists. The Pakistan Group in London, comprising Ali Imam, Ahmed Parvez, Anwar Shemza, Murtaza Bashir and Safi-ud-din Ahmed, broke on to the international art scene. In fact, a fascinating catalogue from the group’s exhibition in 1958 at Woodstock Gallery, London, is also on view here. Ali Imam would famously go on to found the Indus Gallery in Karachi in 1971, permanently altering the city’s artistic landscape.

From one trailblazer to another, Sadequain’s ‘calligraphic modernism’ merged traditional Islamic calligraphy and the poetry of Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz with gestural abstraction, creating a hybrid style that resonated with both local and international audiences.

Standing in front of Sadequain’s darkly emotive canvases, I find the novelist HM Naqvi without his customary cigarette, locked in conversation with the architect Marvi Mazhar. This is a fitting coincidence, given that Naqvi and the artist Mariah Lookman have collaborated on a video installation for ‘Manzar’, titled Behrupiya, which speaks directly to Sadequain’s work — literally. 

Lookman utilises an 8mm film that had been used to record an interview of Sadeqauin, but which has since completely decayed, to “create a conversation across time.” As the charred remains of the film flash across the screen, a voiceover by Naqvi and Kamran Bahalim narrates Sadequain’s rubayis and passages from art critic Akbar Naqvi’s writings on Sadequain. According to the novelist, in this exhibit, Sadequain and Akbar Naqvi “speak to me, to us.”

A NATION IN FLUX

What our art can tell us about our past is often exactly what is left out from our history lessons at school — case in point, the separation of East and West Pakistan. The political and emotional rift that led to Bangladesh’s independence in 1971 is starkly captured in Salima Hashmi’s unsettling, Francis Bacon-esque Sohni Dharti. Composed of newspaper clippings detailing the turmoil, the work mourns the fracturing of yet another homeland.

Once again, archival material, in this case, newspaper headlines from the front page of Dawn in 1971, continue to guide the ‘Manzar’ historical through-line. It underscores how art and archival material capture the wounds of separation and highlight the cyclical nature of division, which continues to shape the region’s geopolitics.

As the decades marched on, artists of the 1980s and 1990s embraced modernity while addressing Pakistan’s shifting socio-political landscape, the struggle for democracy, increasing migration, the growth of urban centres and the rise of media. In this climate of change, Zahoorul Akhlaq’s grid-based compositions merged miniature techniques with modern abstraction, as View from the Tropic of Illegitimate Reality showcases. Importantly, his contributions to the National College of Arts (NCA) gave birth to some of the brightest artists that currently dot Pakistan’s artistic firmament. 

Akhlaq and the miniaturist Bashir Ahmed were dubbed by the columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee as the “Sorcerer and his Apprentice.” In many ways, Akhlaq’s untimely death remains a testament to the senseless violence that has marred the trajectory of this nation and the talent that all too often is extinguished too early. As Cowasjee, who was a close friend of his, wrote after Akhlaq and his daughter Jehanara were killed, “Bashir had always prepared Zahoor’s canvases. Now his task was to give him his last bath and carry him to his grave.”

But cruelty and brutality are not unique to Pakistan. None manage to capture the violence and racism that marred the lives of the Pakistani diaspora in the wake of increased migrations from Pakistan with as much raw authenticity and stylistic verve as Rasheed Araeen. His art is confrontational, counterculture and unapologetic.

Even the name of one of his pieces up at ‘Manzar’, Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person) — a pictorial documentation of his performance in 1977 — spits in the face of England’s artistic establishment. Araeen’s Burning Ties is a series of photographs that denounces the racism of Western art circles as the artist sets ties on fire in an act of rebellion against the old guard. It’s visceral and almost animalistic.

Speaking of challenging established traditions…

TRADITION REIMAGINED

The most arresting section of ‘Manzar’ is undeniably the showcase of Pakistan’s neo-miniature art, and it’s easy to see why. The lucid colours, the incorporation of different mediums and the detailed nature of the artworks, makes it evident why many of Pakistan’s most sought-after artists, locally and internationally, are practitioners of the neo-miniature style.

The curators cleverly begin here by showing the miniature Mughal artworks made by the likes of Balchand and Mir Sayyid Ali during the 16th and 17th centuries. This serves as a clear juxtaposition to how this art form has evolved and how modern artists took a sledgehammer to these conventions.

Shahzia Sikander’s Explosion of the Company Man, splayed across the wall in the shape of an open book, critiques the imperial franchise by deconstructing popular iconography and commenting on the concept of ‘Company paintings’, which were made by Indian artists for the British. Sikander’s miniatures break the boundaries of scale, form and content, addressing issues that are central to her, such as gender, identity and power. 

Khadim Ali’s Invisible Border 5 also speaks directly to our times. Through embroidery on fabric, Ali depicts the Simurgh and a dragon squaring off against one another, above a swarm of angry protestors, locked in a tryst between good and evil. Born to Afghan Hazara parents in Quetta in 1978, Ali’s work explores the embattled history of Afghanistan and how exile, discrimination and cultural loss have marked the lives of millions in this region.

Just a year after Khadim Ali was born, Pakistan’s tenuous relationship with Afghanistan was irrevocably damaged, as was Pakistan’s social fabric, courtesy of Gen Ziaul Haq’s disastrous policymaking in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion. Artists such as Salima Hashmi, who documented the suppression of women’s rights during Zia’s regime, and Lala Rukh, whose work with the Women’s Action Forum protested against discriminatory laws, exemplify how art served as a tool of resistance against political unrest and social injustice.

Into the 1990s, the rise in popular culture and the rapid urbanisation of teeming metropolises such as Karachi led to the forging of a new aesthetic that broke through the hierarchies of high and low art, blending popular and folk culture. Durriya Kazi and David Alesworth’s rollicking Very Very Sweet Medina, which blends truck art with the heightened painting-style of Pakistani cinema posters, serves as a delicious commentary on the idea of home and migration — be it Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) migration to Medina or the many migrants that call Karachi home.

A BLUEPRINT FOR IDENTITY

One of the greatest successes of ‘Manzar’ is how it manages to incorporate the architectural trajectory and development of Pakistan into the gallery space, weaving it into the broader conversation about Pakistan’s development over the decades, or lack thereof.

Pakistan’s early nation-building efforts under Ayub Khan are exemplified by the design of Islamabad by the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis. The grid-like city plan and architectural drawings reflect the aspirations of a nascent state striving for progress, trying to marry modernist ideals with perceived national needs.

Filmed interviews with, and architectural drawings and models by stalwarts such as Habib Fida Ali, Arif Hasan, Kamil Khan Mumtaz, Nayyar Ali Dada and Yasmeen Lari provide an insight into the architectural processes that led to the transformation of our cities.

Lari’s Heritage Foundation of Pakistan has used bamboo and palm fronds to build shelters for flood victims in Pakistan, and these structures are also present at ‘Manzar’, lining the courtyard of the Palace of Sheikh Abdullah Al Thani at the NMoQ. One of these bamboo structures has been beautifully transformed by the multidisciplinary artist and founder of Koel, Noorjehan Bilgrami. Titled Nir Kahani [Indigo Story], Bilgrami and her team of craftspersons utilise a 3,000-year-old technique of resist and mordant printing of the ajrak cloth. The ajrak has then been draped across the natural indigo-stained bamboo structure to stunning effect.

Nearby, Amin Gulgee, who I’d just met days earlier at Frere Hall during the Karachi Biennale, proclaims in his usual stentorian roar that, during this trip to Doha, he’s been having “artists for breakfast, lunch and dinner!” Gulgee’s Memory Garden, made up of seven copper structures arranged in a corner of the courtyard, carries forward the tradition of calligraphic modernism through the slender forms of his metaphysical metalwork. Gulgee’s sculptures reach skywards, mirroring the aspirations embodied in Ali Kazim’s birds at ‘Manzar’s’ outset.

ART AS A MIRROR AND MAP

When I get back to the car, I tell Adnan he must go see the exhibition when he gets the time. He says he’ll think about it. On the drive back to my hotel, we talk about where Pakistan is and where it’s headed. Like most Pakistanis, home and abroad, he’s fairly cynical about what the future holds. I don’t blame him, but cynicism is easy.

I’d like to imagine that most works of art that have been birthed into existence in my country were created out of some sense of hope. I’d like to imagine that those same aspirations fuel ‘Manzar’, where art and architecture emerge as a chronicle of Pakistan’s evolving identity, reflecting its triumphs and tragedies. The exhibition not only charts the country’s complex history but also provides us with the opportunity to understand how art informs and reshapes national consciousness — how it serves as both a witness to and a catalyst for change.

I just wish people back home could see it.

‘Manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today’ is on display at the National Museum of Qatar till January 31, 2025

The writer is a member of staff. He can be reached at hasnain.nawab1@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 24th, 2024