January 17, 2004

Naz Ikramullah’s imagery may seem effortless to many an uninitiated viewer, but it is an authentic response to the physical and emotional environment — be it the sparse landscape of Ontario, or the warm light filtered through the green jaafris in her mother’s verandah, at Kashana, her home in Karachi, says Amra Ali

A reality that is situated somewhere between Karachi and Ottawa, Canada; it could well be traced between Calcutta and London. Fragments that remain dispersed, yet are wholesome, incorporate a vocabulary of influences that coexist simultaneously in more than one world. Building upon layers through painting, printmaking and collage, Naz Ikramullah’s mixed-media works impart the knowledge of an experienced lithographer combining a much direct, ‘in the face’ sort of an approach of one who assembles pieces of ‘scrap’ from the environment around her.

Her work evolves in stages, replicating her many states of mind, meticulously selecting, rethinking and reworking; painting that transforms into collages, exposing itself to a recycling and eventually a rebirth through laser and photocopy-machines. From the very painterly to the very ordinary (such as colour photocopies), her process incorporates the traditional to the contemporary, exposing the duality that is part of the global culture of art today. Much like a map, her work seems to be a visual manifestation of the journeys travelled, and those, which she chooses to revisit.

Naz was born in London, when her father Mohammad Ikramullah was deputy trade commissioner of India, and her mother Begum Shaista Ikramullah was studying for her PhD. Mother, whose maiden name was (Shaista) Akhtar Bano was a profound influence, and was one of the key women figures involved in the struggle for independence.

Begum Ikramullah led a dynamic life, later becoming ambassador to Morocco from 1964-67. She authored several books, including Letters to Nina, which were letters on partition, Behind The Veil, and Husseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy: A Biography, among others.

By 1940, the family was back in their home on Hailey Road in Delhi. Naz speaks of her first taste of education outside the home at ‘Aunty’s’, as having influenced her deeply. She has memories of the German teacher, Mrs. Gauba, who taught them lessons that they’d carry with them throughout their lives. Later, when her sisters were to leave for more formal educational schools, Naz made sure that she would continue within the more relaxed atmosphere of Aunty’s.

She remembers Seeta Bhai, who taught them Manipuri, a passion that continued well into her adult life in Canada under the supervision of Vasanthi Shri Navasan. She recalls having seen Ram Bhopal dance in Delhi all those years back and, the passion that the performance instilled in her for dance. Besides, at Aunty’s, they wrote on takhtis, and learnt Hindi. Her eyes twinkle as she recalls the very first history lessons and her composition on the ‘Koh-i-Noor’, and the lessons on clay modelling.

Her approach to art, it seems to her, took root in this environment, which encouraged her to look at the larger culture and work inwards from there. Her peers were people like Ashraf Liaquat Ali Khan and Geeta Bhatia, among others. She still visits Geeta on visits to Delhi, one among the many links that form a thread of continuity and a link to her past.

Dreamscape, a work included in the current solo exhibition at Chawkandi, Karachi, seems to address that very sensibility — one that is located between nostalgia, romance and memory. Dreamscape is a painting that carries visions of Lucknow and Venice that the artist refers to as journeys in her head. The Blue Door, a work done on a laser printer, is, as she says, ‘reflective of places that stay in the head’.

Images that are distanced; veils that play an aesthetic magic and transport imagery to a state of dream; it is much like Urdu poetry, very indirect and carrying with it an uninhibited sweetness. Beauty and harmony, when exposed with such directness and ease, is perhaps a troubling experience in the visual arts today, when the shocking, the morbid and the banal are the more accepted issues in artistic expression.

Naz lives and works in Ontario, within a climate where most artists from South East Asian origins have flocked to parallel galleries or pockets where their work is easily slotted and ‘visible’. In that way, she has been working against the grain and singing a tune which is deeply in touch with her own self, oblivious of pressures form the outside.

She carries a heavy portfolio, having shown first at the International Women’s Club in Karachi in 1960, where she recalls Sadequain having bought her painting for a hundred rupees. In 1970, she showed with a group of printmakers from Pakistan in a travelling show, which was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute. Incidentally, she became Pakistan’s first printmaker when she set up her press in Karachi after completing her postgraduate studies in lithography from the Slade School of Art in the ‘60s.

A long and enduring association with Ali Imam and shows at the original venue of the Indus Gallery kept her in regular contact with Pakistani art through the ‘70s and ‘80s. Artists like Shahid Sajjad, Zahoor ul Akhlaq and Nahid Jaffri were the friends she got much support and encouragement from over the years.

A printmaking workshop by Michael Ponce de Leon from the Pratt, at the PACC, Karachi, in 1970, was her first introduction to Pakistani artists like Syed Ahmed, Ahmad Khan, Ghulam Rasool, Marjorie Hussain and Shahid Sajjad. Her work has been shown at venues as diverse as the Royal Portrait Society in 1958, at the Woodstock Gallery, London, in 1963, at the Bharat Bhavan International Biennial of Prints, in Bhopal in 1995, at The Barbican in 1989, the Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi, in 1989 and at the Crymroza Gallery, Bombay, in 1990, among many others.

In the work titled Blue Door, we see a distant image of the gardens of the president’s house in Delhi, and in the mid-foreground, she identifies a friend’s house with a blue door that has always fascinated her. Amidst other layers, and in the immediate foreground, we see a stem and leaves, the veins of which link Naz’s approach closer to a deconstructivist’s.

My World, a Photoshop print, and also the title of the current solo show, is perhaps the most enduring image of her home in Karachi, a lifetime of memories revisited, and one which she continuously comes back to in real life.

The link to Karachi was established when her father Mohammad Ikramullah arrived here on August 11th, 1947 with Naz’s younger and only brother Enam, and opened the new country’s Foreign Office. During the upheaval of Partition, the two older daughters, Salma and Naz, who were only ten and nine years old at the time, were in Lucknow, while their mother was to give birth to her youngest daughter, Sarwath, in Calcutta.

The older sisters were to form a bond that made them appear, as Naz says, like twins. At a recent reunion, just late last month, both sisters were able to spend some time with each other and went to Benaras together. They were once again just like two schoolgirls, laughing and giggling. Unfortunately, Salma’s health took a turn for the worse and she passed away shortly afterwards.

Fragments from her life, as she recalls moments full of humour and love with Salma, or other incidental details reveal a sensibility that cherishes many of those moments that most of us easily overlook. The rendering of conversations held decades ago, a certain smell recaptured, or a form remembered, a political stance reiterated, become the visual metaphors for expression spread across many cultures and geographic locations; or dislocations as she may call them.

Her imagery carries with it a ‘narrative’, as pointed out to her by her old friend Shahid Sajjad. The narrative in Naz’s work, however, becomes a point of reference that seems to elicit a strange response of detachment from the viewer. Surprisingly, the work itself is a story of a series of detachments in the artist’s life.

Hers is not a work easily understood here, for it carries a strong presence of the incidental and the personal. For her, the simplest of forms or locations become the point of reference. Naz has strong concerns about many artists who chose to exploit cultural differences and traumatic situations for the sake of making socially correct art. It is also ‘dated’ — linking lifetimes that continue to haunt her — while the current artistic milieu is one of easily identifiable nuances.

Misinterpretations are possible when work is transported from one geographical location to another. It may not be work that can easily be put in a recognizable slot, not be very ‘contemporary’ or ‘slick’, nor that which may be soliciting profound and earth-shattering traumas or questions. Its colours are not very eastern, and yet it speaks a language rooted in Urdu poetry: its nuance is indirect and soft, it’s meaning lyrical and hidden.

Professor Anand Krishna has spoken about her work and the Indian miniature. Both evolve in stages, as he has remarked. It is like a meal, he once told her, which is best recalled three days later.

Naz sees a tone similar to a film by Shyam Benegal, in which a girl’s presence is only visible through a screen. The flying figures, or the bird may be symbols of the absent lover. The window, a repetitive device in her work, is typically a symbol of sufism — or it could simply be an expression of the artist’s subconscious.

Living in Canada since the 1970s, Naz has made a niche for herself within the established art community there. She has shown and worked with art consultant Edward F. Monagham for many years, and been in art education in Canada almost since the very early years of her arrival there. At present she teaches at the Ottawa School of Art in Ottawa.

When you see her walking in the corridors of her school, clad mostly in saris and sometimes in a shalwar kurta, and hear her singsong accent, you spot the ‘desi chhap’ from a mile away. Yet, when you meet her here in Karachi, she seems far removed from the very desi person you knew back in Canada. Here, her ‘washed out’ colours and overall approach suddenly appear decisively western. She lives this duality, and her art is an authentic statement of her personal story that also weaves the history of our times.

Take the example of old streets that are renamed in this city at the advent of each new administration or the solid architecture that is torn down to make way for flimsy structures, cutting off any continuity with the old names or associations with buildings, hence forcing us to make new linkages repeatedly. Eventually, we lose a very special sense of ownership about our own locale. Naz Ikramullah’s work, perhaps, represents such issues of linkages and stories that we may have forgotten.