KARAHI: Pakistani art is in safe hands, rest assured. In fact, it is the artist community, unlike writers and performing artistes, which has not shunned dreamy, somewhat quixotic notions that were once the bedrock of 20th century philosophical thought.

Another strong evidence of it is an exhibition that opened at the Koel Gallery on Tuesday. The group show has been titled Past, Present, Parallel, which suggests that the participating artists are not taking the ‘future’ into account. What they are interested in is the past, disfigured by the present. Here’s how.

Syed Hasan Raza touches upon the idea of vertical urban growth, of buildings, with an intriguing series of artworks a few of which are untitled and some others are called ‘Dense City. The medium that the artist has used are wooden scales and watercolour on paper. It is quite astounding that without being overly thoughtful or abstruse about the issue, he has kept things as simple as they can be, and yet creates an impact which is hard-hitting, driving his point home with effortless ease. The image of urban life that he has drawn is worth pondering over. Wood depicting concrete, and the concreteness of the soul, is a striking concept.

Raza doesn’t stop at that. He turns the same concept through watercolour into a figure, a moving figure. It can be interpreted in multiple ways, including that of entangled bodies.

Baley ke phool I by Sarah Hashmi. / Photos by White Star

Memories and their bearings on our collective lives are what Batool Zehra and Batool Mandvi have chosen to draw viewers’ attention to. Both do an impressive job: the former through a series of photographs in which some parts of the pictures have been whitened to remove fragments of the past; the latter through a series of mixed medium images where relationships (and their phases –– especially when all goes topsy-turvy) take centre-stage.

Zehra Almas goes the other way, that is, the artist by virtue of digital prints called ‘Itna sannata kyon hai’ picks the darkness that envelops the seemingly bright city life, Karachi in this case, as her topic.

It is befitting that the curator of the show, Mehreen Zuberi, has kept Sarah Hashmi’s work for the last segment of the exhibition. The artist appears to be moved by issues related to migration and displacement. In a touching pair ‘Living Maps I and II’ (ink, fungus on organic paper), she draws the trajectory of two individuals not with reference to their geographical movement (though that has been shown) but with reference to their present psycho-physical condition, which is painful and engaging at the same time. The effect is heightened in ‘Baley ke phool’ (ink on paper) where a letter written in Urdu in the 1950s comes across as an incomplete form of epistolary communication because of the faded blue ink. Brilliant.

The exhibition will run till Aug 10.

Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2015

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