August 12, 2006

Two decades ago it was rare to hear of a Pakistani artists show abroad. Usually the venues open to them were Commonwealth institutes and ethnic centers. As a growing number of artists receive education in other countries and opt to settle there, they have begun to establish a strong network that transcends ethnic barriers in their new homeland.

Over the last 6 years I have seen considerable change in the integration of artists of Pakistani origin in Canada. The separation once very apparent at ‘Laal: The Passion of Zahoorul Akhlaq’ hosted by the Mississaugha Art Gallery. This major exhibition that combined Zahoor’s retrospective, and a tribute by his artist friends and students in the form of works on Takhti, while widely attended by his artist friends and the South Asian community received a lukewarm reception from the mainstream art community and art critics.

This had left many questions unanswered, was this because he was not known in Canada? Or there was little interest in art from South Asia?

In the 1990’s, the office of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Art Collective) was the first port of call for artists after they landed in Toronto. The organization would put them in touch with their peers from the region and provide opportunities to participate in exhibitions that focused on issues of ethnicity. Today this work is being expanded by organizations like The South Asian Art Gallery (SAGA) founded and managed by Ali Adil Khan and Cr8tiv80 Studio, the brainchild of Asma Arshad Mehmood. Located in the Artist’s Walk of a quaint small village in Burlington, near Toronto, the SAGA exhibition space has fair-sized rooms on two levels. Recently when I was invited to hold my talk ‘ Reclaiming the Context, 6 decades of Visual Art from Pakistan’, that which provided a historical and critical back ground by SAGA, I got an opportunity to see a show of Neo Miniaturists on the ground floor and the remains of an earlier show of Amin Rehman on the first floor.

A graduate of NCA, Amin Rehman made Canada his home in 1988. Over the years he has established his art practise and last year he was acknowledged as the SAVAC Artist of the Year. His oeuvre follows two distinct trajectories, one the written text and the other painterly images in encaustic. On display were monochrome works in black depicting all kinds of ships. Conceptually the work points to the potential ecological threat the ship-breaking industry in developing countries offers both for the planet as all its toxic material leaches into water, but most of all the poor unprotected labourer who physically carries out this job at a pittance, while exposing himself directly to the crippling effects of poisons like lead and asbestos.

The artist’s text based works, in wood and metal is often carried out by a technique similar to inlay. The layered and fitted alphabets, both in Urdu and English carry messages of social activism. The Gendering Detail, curated by New York based art historian Kristy Phillips selected four artists, Talha Rathore, Tazeen Qayyum, Sehr Jalal, Amna Amir that share their intensive training in miniature painting from NCA.

I found the work of Tazeen Qayyum to be the most conceptually vigorous as she successfully pushes miniature towards the two-dimension. The artist borrows the language of entomology that involves the study, dissection and labelling of insects. The cockroach becomes a mythological insect that represents the weaker minority that survives only because of its tenacity and resilience in an inhospitable environment of tense race relationships and Islamophobia in the post 9/11 Northern American scenario. The unexpected, hated yet familiar domestic insect cockroach is the protagonist of this saga of tensions and polarities. Her work examines the insect like a rare specimen and then as a motif in a pattern like a recurring theme. Always present is her sensibility as a miniature painter. Using the frame within frame device for emphasis and detailed areas, her colours remain lush and vibrant.

A show that critiqued resistance to cultural transformation in the diasporas and ruffled feathers was ‘ In To, Out of and Away’ based on an installation and video, the show was curated by Asma Arshed Mehmood and exhibited at Mosaic, Heritage Festival of South Asia at Mississauga organized by the Cr8tiv80 (Creativity) Studios. The curator invited women to contribute their worn shalwar for the installation in which they were displayed in their folded form with a statement of the contributor. The short video showed a below the calf view of a woman stepping out of her shalwar and male hands folding them.

According to Asma she faced resistance from the beginning when South Asian artists expressed their discomfort at giving their intimate garment for a public display till they gradually understood its symbolic significance. When viewed by the community through the prism of their fixed notions of modesty, the exhibition to them conveyed only one message, that of flaunting modesty. The provocation did however manage to open up a debate on double standards for genders, the need to rethink outdated modes of modesty and a review of the unrealistic social expectation from women in the South Asian Community. This unexpected break from the nostalgia that usually informs the mood of the community at heritage shows made the voice for change heard via this controversial show.

Having worked closely with national Canadian art and cultural institutions like The Art Gallery of Ontario, Royal Ontario Museum and Ontario Arts Council has familiarized both these art activists Adil and Asma with the mandate of these crucial organizations and their methodology of achieving goals. Once a rapport was established it has helped to sustain a long-term cultural dialogue.

As the Creative Director of Cr8tiv80 Studios, Asma has not only created opportunities for ceramists Sheherezade Alam and Nabahat Lotia who demonstrated their techniques for hundreds of visitors at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto but also for the first time persuaded Royal Ontario Museum and Art Gallery of Ontario to have presence at this mainstream venue. She strongly feels that the work of Pakistani artists at the Art Gallery of Mississauga will contribute to the cultural presence and prestige of their community and is working towards mobilizing the community to send up a fund for this purpose. Adil Ali Kan has been instrumental in facilitating the sale of Sylvat Aziz’s work, a well-known painter of Pakistani origin to The South Asian Galleries of the ROM.

The success of artists like Sheherezade at the Gardiner Ceramics Museum and Ishrat Suharwardy at the prestigious at the Waterloo Art and Glass Galleries and Samina Mansuri for the coveted Banff Residency among others who are being acknowledged for their art beyond their ethnicity makes one feel optimistic for the future of artists in the Pakistani Diaspora in Canada, in these times of uncertainty and divisions.