Last week I had my first official screening of “Another Face”. A crowd of invitees gathered at the Pakistan High Commission in London and nibbled on pakoras and samosas beneath glittering chandeliers as they watched the 23-minute film and listened to my speech explaining why I had made it. 

I was nervous. As an artist I am no stranger to exhibitions, and although I feel uncomfortable and exposed sharing a space with a roomful of people peering at my brush strokes on canvas, it didn’t compare to how anxious I was welcoming guests to take in the moving image I had created.  The difference? People are more familiar and relaxed with the screen. Most people enjoy a television and/or go to the cinema. Most people have strong opinions about what they like. It’s an effective, but over-used means of communication. Everyone is a seasoned consumer. But a painting is different – more open to interpretation, less main streamed, space for self expression and even mystery is permitted.

But the audience was friendly. Girls giggled as they spotted places they recognised in Karachi on the film. Those involved in the making of it grinned at me from their seats. The Deputy High Commissioner pointed out yet more connections between Cambridge and Karachi that I had missed.

Many of you have written to me in recent times demanding that I “do more”, insinuating that my written word is mere rhetoric and is disconnected with reality that is Pakistan. I’d like to address these points. I do “more” other than write for Dawn. I write in other places too, I lecture and train, but importantly, I also make art. I am no politician, no great government official (as I discovered), and no doctor nor soldier – I can only make the best of what I have. Some may think that making art sounds frivolous – but I genuinely believe that the visual image holds tremendous potential as a catalyst for positive change and I took a decision last year to dedicate time to exploring this. I have been much inspired by the writing of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and his thoughts on the power of the image (and the object).

Baudrillard also writes much about reality – and his famous essay “The Gulf War Didn’t Happen” although provocative, was for me a fascinating discussion about the two dimensional “reality” of an event constructed for us by news networks – and very relevant to Pakistan today. I would never suggest to fully know the “reality” of Karachi nor Pakistan, but as Rumana Hussein says in my film, “a city has many layers”. And rather than present a sacharin sweet version of the truth, which many Pakistani newspapers reported that I had unearthered, I hope that my film work, photographs and paintings will show simply a single layer that I experienced during a short visit to Karachi earlier this year. It is no more “true” than a report by a visiting journalist there to dig into terrorism or corruption. I simply dug into ordinary things – talked to students at Karachi University, met business owners, artists, journalists. Witnessed ordinary things – people playing on the beach, shopping, eating.

I tried to explain all this in an interview with Affinity Radio this week – in advance of my next screening in Cambridge on 9th August, but there was irony in the fact that even a small local radio station was more interested in the aesthetics of warfare and my previous life as diplomat than my intention to pick apart media perceptions of Pakistan.

But the starting point for my film is Cambridge. Perhaps best articulated in the Cambridge News – my film is also an exploration of my own English identity as a starting place – and explores commonalities between the two cities that many thought impossible.

Next week, I will share the film with a different audience entirely – a crowd from Cambridge – many of them fellow artists and perhaps a film-maker or two. Of course I am hugely anxious about this for the reasons mentioned above. There won’t be piles of samosas to pick at, nor chandeliers and diplomats, but I can only hope for some commonality between next weeks and last weeks audience, in that the film will be received with the gentle spirit it was made in.

For information about the Cambridge Karachi Portrait and for screening details of Another Face, please visit www.cambridgekarachi.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.