April 24, 2008	Thursday	Rabi-us-Sani 17, 1429

KARACHI, April 23: It was after ages that an art auction took place in Karachi. The venue was the Indus Valley School of Arts and Architecture and the aim was to raise funds for Milestone, a school meant for children with special needs, physical and/or mental.

Ten well known and not so well known artists had put up their works for auction. However, the response was not very heart-warming. Only one painting by Meher Afroz and a sculpture by Rabeya Jalil were sold and the total sum raised was to the tune of Rs117,000. But as Raania Durrani of the ceramics department, who was conducting the show, said that the eight unsold pieces will be on display at the art school’s gallery for art lovers to buy them at what are minimum reserved prices, fixed by the artists themselves.

But a more interesting and certainly quite a unique exercise was to put up for sale 50 works of art done by 13 students. Each of these paintings was a joint effort between the art students of Milestone and the artists who had donated their works for the auction. In some works you could see that the well-known artist’s contribution was minimal. The child who painted the national flag had done a pretty good job, which was why Meher Afroz merely added flowers, her emblem, if one may use the word, to the painting. But in other works, such as Zainab Amir’s painting, Nurayah Sheikh Nabi, a faculty member, felt the need to contribute more. Nurayah added a man and a woman to the composition, and also highlighted the clouds.

All the 50 collaborative pieces of art are uniformly priced – Rs10,000 each.

The curator should have labelled them with the names of the child artist and the recognised artist. Not all children have signed their names but all senior artists have put their signatures. Only two kids were at the auction and TV cameramen trained their cameras at them. They were the celebrities of the evening.

Zainab basked in her new found glory. “I am eight,” she told a lady who patted her cheek. “I shall teach her to draw,” she said as she pointed at her youngest sibling, who is a few months old and who didn’t quite relish the fact that her mother was paying less attention to her.

Zainab, who is one of the 50 students at Milestone, says that she loves her school, and as her mother confirms she misses her friends and teachers on weekends. Zainab has the makings of an artist but when someone asked her if she would like to become an artist when she grows up, the eight-year-old had no answer. Perhaps she didn’t understand the question or perhaps she hasn’t made up her mind.—Asif Noorani