The idea of a ‘home’— a place with a familiar sense of belonging — is one that is common to all humanity. What this idea means to each of us is undoubtedly varied, sometimes contradictory and always fiercely individualistic. The five-person show ‘Home’, at the Canvas Art Gallery, Karachi, featured what this sentiment and succeeding displacement meant to each of the exhibiting artists.

The five artists participated in the ‘VASL 7th Taza Tareen Inter­national Artist Residency’. Faryal Ahsan, Sufyan Baig and Zoya Siddiqui from Lahore,Safdar Ali from Tando Jam, Sindh and Helen Harris from Windhoek, Namibia — together the five artists-in-residence lived and worked in Karachi. Each other’s company informed them, but their own perceptions are what drove them.

With the exception of Sufyan, who used a more generic visual context, the other four artists chose to use specific subject matter as a symbol of representation and understanding.

Hassan, using stop motion and reel prints, isolated her theme (exclusively figurative) into small, harshly cropped frames, controlling the focus on the viewer. The hands of a drug addict, the wry tactility of his wild beard or the changing, animated expressions of a girl. Her form of storytelling considered how identities, memories and territories are cultivated and tended, and how people hold together their simultaneous desires to both embrace and settle, and be ignorant and return.

Five artists focus on their own perception of ‘home’

Siddiqui’s work was quite interesting because she used her camera as the protagonist of the pieces, personifying it. Instead of just using her camera as a lens through which she could study her hometown of Lahore, she now also studied the city’s interaction with her camera, and in turn with her as an artist. In one piece she prominently features her DSLR camera, pictured above eye level, giving it an elevated respect. In the background is the fading blurry Minar-i-Pakistan — a deliberate favouring in a bizarre juxtaposition.

Helen Harris’s work centres on the city and how it is infinitely fractured and connected by means of the road. Cutting into digital prints of buildings from her hometown, and creating collages of buildings and the female form, Harris emphasises that different diasporas are connected, quite literally, by the concrete web they all live in.

This side book, Helen Harris

However the piece that stole the show was Ali’s ‘A truthful lie still breathes’. Imitating a terra-cotta brick used to make the foundation of the artist’s ancestral home, this piece was a latex imitation that physically moved, as if alive and breathing. Its brilliance is in its deception; a very simple and therefore genius way to show that it is not the house, but the sentiment behind that physicality that gives it its significance and transcends it to a ‘home’.

The artists’ work is not collaborative in the traditional sense of the word, but it is clear from the cohesive nature of the show that these displaced artists embraced Karachi to be their adopted home, and thus their basis of artistic exchange.

Both Faryal and Zoya gave importance to the camera and its interaction with the public. Safdar and Helen used elements of architecture to denote fragments of their childhood memories and Sufyan used sky views of a developed metropolis in an effective manner, because for all their banality, they were also familiar and thus nostalgic.

The way the art was curated supported this collective effort. Instead of different spaces in the gallery being assigned to each artist, all their work was exhibited together. Twenty-seven pieces on show seamlessly flowed together to form a whole “Home”, which we own and also are indebted to.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, June 14th, 2015

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