If the exhibition currently being held at the Full Circle Gallery, Karachi, packs up by the time you get to the premises ask the curator for a catalogue of the paintings and sketches.
You won’t be disappointed. With the sort of polarisation taking place in the world people are increasingly coming up with political statements.
Two young Pakistani artists, Amir Raza and Hidayatullah Mirani, in an exhibition appropriately titled "Trapped" have produced a series of pictorial testimonials each of which comes with an exclamation mark. The artists, who in essence describe man’s inhumanity to man and beast, use different symbols for the litany of misfortune that afflicts the oppressed. The pictures have a snorting irony and a freshly minted terror.
Amir Raza put it rather nicely in his introduction to the ‘Ratoo Tota’ clutch of compositions when he pointed out those imperialists who have been spewing out jingoistic doggerel have turned whole nations into states of servility. Islam, on the other hand, instils a sense of awareness in its followers.
He was probably referring to an early period in history when the people of Oxford and Cambridge were just learning to read; while the Arabs in Andalusia in southern Spain had extensive libraries. The problem, of course, which Raza has recognised as a split between orthodoxy and modernism, is that certain sections of the clergy in Pakistan have imposed a mental condition that stifles thought processes and encourages the faithful to resort to violence.
This throttling of the spirit of inquiry has inhibited both inductive and deductive reasoning and made the faithful repeat parrot-like what they are told. It comes to life in the picture of a young girl wrapped in a bright blue chador with the face and beak of a parrot, sitting cross-legged on the floor reading the holy book perched on a stool. Behind her is a wall littered with an assortment of lethal weapons from a militant’s arsenal.
The painting, however, which nicked the nerve, entitled ‘Past and present 2’ done in gouache on wasli, was simply irresistible. It is a picture of a hand grenade where the handle that detonates the weapon is a parrot’s beak. Besides being a jolly good illustration it has a silky menace which is not lost on the viewer.
Mirani is a lover of wild life. In his private sanctuary entitled, ‘Killing me softly with love’ he invites the visitor to glimpse his catalogue of small animals whose temporary existence is being regularly terminated in the name of entertainment. There are birds skewered on poles, squirrels and rabbits that fall into man-made traps and a dragon fly being ensnared by a plant. There is even a hen that had apparently lost her way and was garrotted in a mouse trap. This is a particularly nice piece of work. The drawing is excellent, the colour wash soft and warm and the theme full of the intoxication of a one-sided assault.
It doesn’t make any sense for artists to give only a few of their compositions headings, while leaving the rest untitled. Mirani’s brilliant composition of a bird skewered on a pole, is simply crying out for a title. And I don’t always agree with the headings that artists give to their compositions.
For example, Raza’s picture of rows of tiny pistols and birds in turquoise and black perched in silhouette on strips of barbed wire against a menacing red background is called ‘Black and white’ which is quite incongruous. Unless the artist wanted to convey the idea that the message was so obvious is was as clear as black and white.
