Akram Dost Baloch is a Quetta-based artist who has chosen to reflect the socio-political aspect of life through his unique style of painting and carving on the wood. Belonging to a remote and underdeveloped area of Naushki, his family has produced many talented artists, like his younger brother Jamil Baloch and few others who are studying in various art institutions throughout the country.

Baloch is a graduate of the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, and has been a prolific artist with strident ideas and powerful technique in hand. He is well aware of the historic and artistic traditions of Balochistan which, are still alive in conventional crafts. The artist incorporates this knowledge into his paintings and also within his technique. Wooden screens, panels, and at times even boxes with carving, display his artistic skills and aesthetic diversity.

The exhibition of his works entitled Shanakht (Identity), at the Zulfi’s Art Gallery, Lahore, was inaugurated by the celebrated artist and former NCA principal Salima Hashmi. The exhibition provided the local art lovers the opportunity to have a look at 60 coarse canvases and six hard wooden surfaces carrying crucial topics; drenched in personal feelings and humanistic emotions that the artist absorbed through his subjective experience of life.

Baloch is a socially conscious artist who knows how to create a visual dialogue between the artwork and the viewer by triggering the unconscious through his art that carries unwelcome facts of life. However, his grasp over his themes and topics, is strong enough to experiment with different techniques ranging from oil on canvas to wooden relief and painted panels.

Akram Dost Baloch’s paintings show the uncertain nature of our society and its identity crisis

Describing his works, he states, “In my paintings, I have wished to highlight certain unwelcome facts and create a dialogue through art, which is an invitation to remedy apathy in the face of serious moral and social demands.”

Unfortunately, Balochistan has been facing political unrest and turmoil since the ’70s. Nowadays, shadows of terrorism and sectarianism have also affected this beautiful, yet deprived, province. The artist and his family have been a witness to all this chaos and turbulence. As a sensitive observer, he has converted his pains and difficulties to a creative expression, which strongly holds the visual vocabulary of dark and deep tones and roughly-textured surfaces with some similarities to the art produced under Expressionism.

Baloch has used the portraits of powerful chieftains and helpless and vulnerable women where eyes, in both cases, are painted to symbolise discrimination, injustice and deprivation. His frames with twisted human figures, distorted features and intensely vacant eyes, speak loudly of the chauvinism, inscribed deeply on the rocks of his homeland which he has transformed, as an antithesis, in his wood carvings and oil paintings through an aesthetic protest.

The artist is a recipient of the President’s Pride of Performance award, conferred upon him in 2004. His name as an artist has been acclaimed nationally, as well as internationally, and currently he is serving as the chairperson of the fine arts department at the University of Balochistan, Quetta. Therefore, one should hope that he will transfer his ideology of social justice, and knowledge and skill of making it speak through visual arts, to his students and followers.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine May 15th, 2016