The engagement of visual artists with the iconography of cinema is a recurring, though not an extensively explored subject of contemporary art in Pakistan.

Artist Mian Aijazul Hasan incorporated the imagery of the popular Lollywood images in his paintings in the ’70s, such as in his work ‘Thah’ (1974), and other works that looked outside the confines of modernism’s ‘art about art’ and combined it with a broader commentary on the social and the political facets of war and power.

Iftikhar Dadi’s narrative incorporated the imagery of Pakistani film stars in his work of the late ’80s and ’90s, when artists like Duriya Kazi, David Alesworth and Elizabeth Dadi, in Karachi, were exploring outside the confines of conventional metaphors and material of urban aesthetics. More recently, and more visible especially in relationship to global markets is the work of Rashid Rana, whose imagery is an engagement with urban symbols such as faces of Hindi film icons among other visual images of the city.

The Urdu and Punjabi cinema billboards and posters have been the muse of Lahore-based artist Ahmed Ali Manganhar’s work, which was recently on show at Canvas Gallery, Karachi. In more than a decade of painting, Manganhar’s imagination has been located in its admiration of the cinema. As we reflect on the work and through it on the culture of film, its stories and songs that play in our minds, and make connections to its place in our own imagination and fantasies, we also engage with the artist’s technique.

Ahmed Ali Manganhar incorporates the genre of film in a personal idiom in order to have a consistent conversation with an era

In earlier paintings Manganhar used cinema stills as the faces of Waheed Murad, Nisho, Shabnam, Amitabh Bacchan, etc, emerged on large canvases that replicated the ambiance and feel of a cinema hoarding. He enlarged those stills from projections onto the canvas, which was layered in washes in acrylic on canvas. The colour hues in icy shades were relatively uniform, which gave a distant effect. Not quite nostalgic, the imagery re-created the grandeur of film song and dance.

Due to the filtering of stark colour divisions, the relationship of the viewer and perhaps also of the artist, was as if one had entered a dream or fantasy-scape. And just like the Urdu and Indian film transports you to a world where the line between dream and reality didn’t really matter, the artist manipulated the film-still to further diminish a sense of clarity of space. The faces and figures seemed suspended in a space that one couldn’t quite identify. Half-dream, half-memory and some nostalgia, it certainly was the intangibility of the form that was a source of ambiguity in the work.

The surfaces in Manganhar’s work in the current exhibition are layered, and the imagery has shifted into an even more ambiguous space. Conceptually having moved far away from his earliest exposure to image-making through sign painters in his native Tando Allahyar the new journey, as the artist says, is a move towards a cubistic division of space.

Although he carries the linear black outlining of the film poster, he responds not just to the face or image of any of the film icons that he has portrayed, but allows the viewer into the character and ambiance of the current space in old Lahore where he lived to experience the world around places such as the famous Tarannum theatre.

Manganhar, who is a collector of old cinema posters and memorabilia, incorporates the genre of film in a personal idiom that has to do with a consistent and contained conversation with an era, not necessarily in the nostalgia of it, but as the songs and lyrics continue to re-live in the present, and in the worlds that open for us of the inner city of Lahore. Much like one absorbs or senses the atmosphere of smoke and decadence of private spaces in Lahore through Mohsin Hamid’s Mothsmoke, Manganhar’s paintings invite us to enter the aesthetics of living quarters in inner Lahore where people are surrounded by remnants of a cinema culture and can still hear the sound of its music. These are the rooms of Kucha Shahbaz.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, March 1st, 2015

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