High Noon, as the title suggests, stages a confrontation with this brittle identity politics and claims a kind of luminous clarity, where shadows and ambiguities disappear. Noon is when mad dogs and Englishmen are the only creatures out on the street. High NOON is also a punning physicist’s term for certain states of quantum superposition, when particles exist in both of two possible states, so perhaps there’s also a suggestion of kairos in the title, the ‘time of chance’, that suspended moment when decisive action may bring about great and significant change. Clearly, for Pakistan, such a time is at hand.
Whether Pakistani artists like it or not, the question of their identity now has geopolitical significance. Who are the inhabitants of this young country? What do they believe? Unmanned drones hover over the North West Frontier to mete out punishment to those who answer incorrectly, while men who have no time for representation of any kind, and who hate art for its advance into the territory of religion, are waiting in the wings. As the confusion and carnage on Pakistan’s northern border threatens to move southwards, the long-standing preoccupations of post-colonial cultural politics are pushed aside by more pressing concerns.
It may be that it’s only possible to wage war on those whom one doesn’t see fully, those whom one allows or forces oneself to view as less than human. This suggests that – seen now, in 2010 – the art in this collection has a particular urgency that exists as much in the desire to trace small, personal actions (getting dressed, drawing a line), as in overtly political gestures, such as the arresting opening image in which a woman hangs her blood-red washing out to dry on the wings of a decommissioned fighter plane. The machismo of the military, which has played such a decisive (and often disastrous) role in the history of Pakistan, is one factor at work in this time of chance. So is the public space of the street. What does it mean to turn private, domestic life (ironing, reading a newspaper) out on to the eerily empty roadways of Ramadan? What relationships do such actions have to the other uses of the street – as a place of protest, or commerce, or as the setting for an Independence Day parade? A wall stained with betel-spit is a modest testimony to the accretion of history, a guttural desi riposte to the vast canvases of Anselm Kiefer, with their caking of European ash and dust. Sometimes one feels the artists have internalized the categories of post-colonialism and are now doing what is expected of them as Pakistani artists, by reproducing them in the hope of critical approbation. Yet even the failure to represent oneself authentically, the impossibility of seeing oneself except as belated, constructed, supplicatory, is significant.
Right now we need more than news images, but representation of any kind feels inadequate in the face of the vast material forces driving the region towards conflict. The paradox is that the most fugitive, fleeting traces of humanity – melancholy petals painted in watercolour on a marble floor – may outlast those forces. The floor is in Kabul. The light falls across it, striating the painting with bars of shadow. What is pigment? What is light? Time is passing, quickly.
HIGH NOON
In collaboration with
Green Cardamom
Pari Wania, 7.42 p.m., 22 August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi.
Ashish Sharma, 7.44 p.m., 23 August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi.
BANI ABIDI
Karachi Series 1, 2009
Chandra Acharya, 7.50 p.m., 30 August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi.
Jerry Fernandez, 7.45 p.m., 21 August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi.
RASHID RANA
Identical Views II, 2004
IMRAN QURESHI
Time Changes, 2008
NUSRA LATIF QURESHI
Detail from Did you come here to find history?, 2009
IFTIKHAR DADI
Urdu Film Series, 1990-2009
MEHREEN MURTAZA
The Blowjob, from the series An Anthology of Cosmic Snippets, 2007
RASHID RANA
Detail from I Love Miniatures, 2002
NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Kazi in NoMansland, 2008
MUHAMMAD ZEESHAN
Cityscapes, 2009
AHMED ALI MANGANHAR
Untitled, 2006
MOHAMMAD ALI TALPUR
Untitled (Machine Drawing), 2006
CAPTIONS
BANI ABIDI (IMAGE ON PAGE 135)
Edition of 5. Inkjet prints on archival paper, 28 x 18.5cm each (x9).
Loaded with cultural representation, this body of work deploys fiction to subvert meaning and destabilize dominant myths of national origin. A quixotic young man – ostensibly a young Christian convert to Islam – makes incongruous appearances in public places dressed as the Arab hero Mohammad bin Qasim. In this particular image he is photoshopped against the landmark ‘Teen Talwar’ (three swords) in Karachi, meant to represent ‘Unity, Faith and Discipline’, a secular motto atttributed to Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
AYESHA JATOI
Dyed garments on fighter jet, C-print, photograph of installation/performance. Image courtesy of the artist and Asif Khan. Decommissioned aircraft and armaments – missile casings, old jets and once even a massive submarine – are frequently installed as public monuments, indicative of the presence of the military in the civic realm. In this performative act of resistance, the artist washed a load of red garments and then draped them across the aircraft to dry.
BANI ABIDI
Duratrans Lightbox, 50.8 x 76.2cm each.
At dusk during the month of Ramadan most Muslims in Karachi are breaking their fasts, leaving the streets eerily empty. Abidi imaginatively reclaims public space by allowing the streets to be occupied by ordinary citizens from religious minorities – Hindu, Parsi (Zoroastrian) and Christian – who are part of the shared history of the city, but increasingly less visible.
RASHID RANA
Edition of 10, C-print, Diasec, 194 x 197cm.
This is a composite image of photographs that could be from a video or a stop-motion animation. Frame by frame, the artist dresses himself, changing garb several times, reinventing his image. In the ‘mirror’ image the process is reversed, but does not correspond perfectly, creating a sense of dissonance.
IMRAN QURESHI
Site-specific installation, Qasr-e-Malika (Queen’s Palace) Bagh-e-Babur, Kabul, Afghanistan. Emulsion and acrylics on marble floor and walls. Image courtesy of the artist and Turquoise Mountain, Afghanistan.
Qureshi uses the motif of foliage from traditional miniatures as a form, a weedy organic growth that seeps into architectural space. This installation in Kabul interacted with the play of light from the windows on the gallery floor, shifting the image with the passage of time.
NUSRA LATIF QURESHI
Digital print on transparent film, 65 x 870cm.
Qureshi’s practice deals critically with the politics of representation, fragmenting dominant historical narratives. Borrowed images are reappropriated and transformed, obscuring or refusing their original meaning. This work is a combination of the artist’s own ID photos, Moghul miniature portraits, early colonial photography and portraits by Venetian painters.
IFTIKHAR DADI
C-print Diasec, 64 x 52cm.
A suite of photographs of Urdu-language films shown on state-controlled television in the 1970s, examining television as a way of imagining and shaping collective ideas of ‘success’ or ‘urban modernity’ as exemplified by the interiors, fashion, personae and gestures of the films. Taken at slow shutter speeds, they capture scanning lines of the television screen and produce a grainy, blurred effect that suggests a dream or trance-like state, several steps removed from the ‘reality’ of the depicted scenes.
MANSUR SALIM
Oil on canvas, 81 x 122cm. Image courtesy of the artist and ArtChowk.
Mansur Salim’s surreal subjects include landscapes on a fictional planet, a space loaded with magical symbolism, layered with nostalgic memories, art-historical references, vernacular mythology and mathematical riddles. Disrupting notions of time and the context of place, this work is named after the ill-fated
lovers in the Punjabi tale, while the faces strongly resemble film stars from the 1970s.
MEHREEN MURTAZA
Archival C-prints, 38.1 x 38.1cm. Courtesy of the artist and Grey Noise.
From a series of a dozen digital collages in which Murtaza playfully examines the latent presence of technology in urban visual space, merging globalized modernity with local landscapes. Referencing old war films or sci-fi fantasies, she creates charged images with a lurking sense of the absurd.
RASHID RANA
Edition of 20. C-print, Diasec, gilt frame. 45 x 35cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
At first a conventional portrait of the Moghul emperor Shah Jehan, on closer inspection the image reveals itself to be composed of photographs of billboards from the streets of Lahore, challenging exalted cultural forms by reconstructing them with visuals collected from the everyday.
NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Set of 5 digital prints, 6 x 61cm each. Installation of postage stamps from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, sizes variable, displayed on white plinth. 30 x 30 x 100cm. Image courtesy of the artist and collection of Raffi Vartanian. Commissioned for Lines of Control, a Green Cardamom project.
STAMP INSTALLATION
Three sets of stamps, from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, all bearing the image of Kazi Nazrul Islam, a revolutionary poet claimed by all three nations as a national symbol.
SET OF 5 DIGITAL PRINTS
The first four images are of the fierce, grimacing eyes of Nazrul as he was forced to pose for official photographs, unable to voice his refusal due to a mysterious disease which affected his speech and memory. The last image is of General Ziaur Rehman of Bangladesh at Nazrul’s official funeral, which took place in Bangladesh against his own wishes and those of his family in India.
MUHAMMAD ZEESHAN
Digital print on canvas, 91.5 x 55.9cm.
A found urban image photographed by the artist, part of a series of abstract ‘paintings’ created by splatters of peekh on city streets, which are more visible on the footpaths and alleys in lower-income areas. Peekh is the spatout juice of the paan leaf, commonly chewed with tobacco as a mild relaxant.
AHMED ALI MANGANHAR
Acrylic and oil on slate, 18 x 22.5cm each.
Slates and chalk are used widely in rural and lower-income government school environments as rudimentary writing materials. History, erasures, memory and nostalgia are all themes that the artist explores. The top figure is Seth Naomul Hotchund – a prominent Hindu trader rewarded by the British for his services to the Crown and considered a traitor by Muslim landlords and Talpur rulers of Sindh in the nineteenth century.
MOHAMMAD ALI TALPUR
Printer’s ink on paper, 75 x 55cm.
Talpur used a mechanical printing press as an instrument to ‘draw’, varying the process to produce a series of works based on the form of the common exercise book. Although produced by a machine, the work registers a strong presence of the artist’s hand and his desire to subvert the predictable. This particular piece combines the formats used to write in Urdu (upper half) and in English (lower half), reversing the linguistic and class order determined by access to education.
All images, unless otherwise specified, are courtesy of Green Cardamom and the copyright of the artist.
GRANTA
ARITHMETIC
ON THE
FRONTIER
Declan Walsh
© DECLAN WALSH/GUARDIAN NEWS
& MEDIA LTD 2010
We rattled through the parched countryside, past fortress-like farmhouses and salt-flecked marshes, kicking up a cloud of dust. A village loomed. As our jeep slowed down, a gang of long-haired tribesmen stepped up, all turbans and curly whiskers, brandishing their Kalashnikovs with mobster panache. They seemed to be smiling. Then the firing started.
I crouched instinctively as three bullet bursts whipped over the jeep roof at a horribly low angle. My host, however, was entirely unperturbed. Anwar Kamal yanked his door open and strode purposefully into the gunfire, waving cheerily. His bodyguard, a strapping man with chipped teeth, trailed behind, cackling with delight as he, too, emptied his rifle into the sky.
It was January 2008, a fortnight before the last general election, and I had come to north-western Pakistan, along the troubled border with Afghanistan, to get a taste of the campaign among the Pashtun. Kamal, a local political veteran, was my guide. A burly sixty-one-year-old of martial bearing, Kamal was many things in life – lawyer and chieftain, landlord and warlord. Today, though, he was simply a candidate. Over thirty years in politics he had notched up six election victories, he said; now he was canvassing his rambunctious constituents for a seventh.
A whistle sounded, the shooting stopped and we were led into a courtyard where the elders, wrapped in wool shawls, were waiting. We sat down for an unusual variety show. The gunmen took to the floor to perform a traditional dance, whirling in a sort of shufflestep waltz, rifles swinging wildly from their shoulders. I hoped they had engaged the safety catches; it seemed unlikely. Next up were the volleyball aficionados – teenagers in baggy pants (no shorts) who tossed around a child’s pink ball that jolted violently when it hit the rutted ground, which was often. The crowd took the game seriously; when I overstepped a white scrawl in the soil, a gruff-looking man nudged me back with the barrel of his gun. ‘Line,’ he said.
Afterwards, Kamal, now garlanded with a Christmas-style tinsel necklace, posed for team photos and addressed the villagers through a crackly speaker system. I could make out just a few words – ‘electricity’, ‘money’, ‘America’ – but the punters seemed to like it, chortling at the gags and clapping vigorously at the climax. Finally we were hustled into a long, low room where a feast had been spread out on a plastic floor mat – spicy chicken wings, chunks of juicy mango, spongy cake and sweet tea served in dainty china cups. As we kneeled, Kamal turned to me. ‘I hope you’re enjoying yourself?’ he said. Of course I was.
Even by the rough-and-tumble standards of Pakistani politics, Kamal cuts a striking figure. Theatrical, loquacious and utterly unapologetic, he reminds me of a figure from another era – perhaps the Flashman historical novels. He is a commanding presence. His face is fleshy and pitted, dominated by a flamboyant moustache that sweeps from a centre part to sharply twirled ends. A lawyer by training, in public he articulates slowly and at length, speaking in a raspy baritone that swells on demand into a thunderous bellow, usually when addressing his fellow Marwat tribesmen. In private he is entertaining company, deploying a rascal’s smile in the service of tales of skulduggery and derring-do. He has a maddening disregard for precision. ‘You see that man over there?’ he will say. ‘He has killed six, seven, EIGHT men!’ And he uses an idiosyncratic turn of phrase that would be charming if the ideas he was articulating weren’t so alarming. ‘You see,’ he remarked casually during the electioneering, ‘this murder and fighting business is very tricky.’
Murder and fighting, it turns out, are constant preoccupations in Lakki Marwat, an impoverished district in the southern reaches of Pakistan’s Pashtun territories, wedged between the sluggish Indus River and the mountain wall of the tribal belt. I spent two days with Kamal on that trip, jammed into the back of his jeep. We splashed through ponds of mud and zoomed between stands of palm trees for a dizzy whirl of election rallies, sometimes three in an hour. I didn’t see a single woman. Guns, on the other hand, were everywhere – Soviet-design Kalashnikovs, old British Lee–Enfields and imitation Chinese pistols, often decorated with rainbow-coloured beads. ‘Carrying guns is a common fashion around here,’ Kamal told me as we bumped along. ‘Like a woman wears her necklace, this is our jewellery.’ Few were licensed, he added, but the authorities couldn’t do much about it. He pointed to the rutted road. ‘You see that strip of rubber? That is the only civilization around here. Either side of it, the government does not exist.’
Kamal sweetened his appeal with gifts – a wad of rupees here, an electricity transformer there – yet the people se
emed genuinely to appreciate his swashbuckling style. ‘All the wealth of Kabir Khan is not worth one hair from Anwar Kamal’s moustache!’ declared a village headman; Kamal grinned like the Cheshire cat. Haji Kabir Khan was his old nemesis, a rich businessman with more hard cash to splash around. They had once been allies. But if Khan had the voters’ pockets, Kamal was confident of their hearts. In one place, villagers presented him with a jet-black turban wrapped with thick, luxuriant folds; for good measure they dropped one on my head too.
Nearly every building – houses, petrol stations, even mosques – was capped with a square tower, two or three storeys high and studded with loopholes. These medieval-style fortifications were called burj, Kamal said, and served as both home security and a marker of status. The richer a man, the higher his burj; poor families made do by punching a few holes in their living-room wall. But the feared enemy was not some invading army; more likely it was a vengeful cousin or an irate neighbour. Most Marwats were embroiled in blood feuds, he explained, and disputes dragged on for decades, handed from father to son like cherished heirlooms. ‘You never forgive,’ he said. ‘You may wait twenty, thirty, fifty years – and then you take revenge.’ I suddenly understood why, in some villages, Kamal held two rallies, often just a stone’s throw apart: any larger gathering would have risked a shoot-out among the voters.
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