The exhibition titled “Tracing the Void” curated by Hajra Haider at IVS Gallery, Karachi, brought together two artists Sajjad Ahmed (Pakistan) and Sonya Schönberger (Germany). The show is a poignant reminder of wars and its residues on humanity and the collective memory. Both artists engage with history as a way to understand the present and perhaps empathise with the fate of victims and alleged perpetrators of wars. The way these two artists approach their work is quite distinct as Ahmed lives in a country currently engaged in wars and Schönberger belongs to Germany’s post-war generation trying to make sense of the country’s involvement in genocide.

World War II had left massive debris in Berlin, which was moved to designated places outside the city forming huge rubble hills. After almost 60 years Sonya Schönberger started to excavate the rubble and recovered shards of objects from the early 20th century. The artists’ collection of shards was exhibited at ‘Museum of Things’ in Berlin. At the museum Michael Engelke, who is known as a ‘thing expert’, provided a meticulous description of the original form, function and manufacturing details of the shards.

These objects and Engelke’s video recorded description are a fascinating means to connect to a time of advanced industrial manufacturing and nations demonstrating their industrial supremacy through war.

Sonya Schönberger and Sajjad Ahmed explore the voids between historical events and our present lives

Alongside collecting shards, Schönberger started conversing with people who had witnessed the war as a way to understand how a society allows atrocities to take place in its name. This project in oral history is an important archive of personal and subjective views of the past. She follows her artistic process and lets the narrative develop to bring about unexpected results. This can also be seen in the form of a photograph captured on expired film using an Agfa box — an old camera from the ’30s.

Untitled, Sonya Schönberger

The artist categorically states that the Germans are responsible for the atrocities of World War II, however, the narratives also draw upon the helplessness of the time and perhaps provide a means to deal with the not so distant past.

Sajjad Ahmed’s installation is a calm grey interior space with a window, a frame and a table with a book pasted on it. Through the frontal window one sees recording of a busy everyday life in an urban centre of the country. It is viewed through a grid made from an ongoing violent protest, obscuring the ‘scene’ intermittently. The video is partly covered by a curtain with a print of Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ — a fresco considered one of the greatest Renaissance paintings portraying thinkers, artists and scholars, contemplating or debating about the world.

On one side of the window is a white curtain framed like a painting, and on the other side, a book titled Being and Nothingness is glued to a table. Unlike Schönberger’s work, the grey room is a space curated by Ahmed in a way that everything remains frozen and under his control. There is a collision of ideas in this room — the distance between a historical event and our present lives, an ordinary object framed as art and vice versa and Jean Paul Sartre’s seminal text on human existence and consciousness. There are no definitive answers here but much like ‘School of Athens’, Ahmed wants the viewer to deliberate on life and truth, about past events and residual effects of those events, things as they exist and their representation. Both artists provide an opportunity to direct viewers’ attention to their actions or inaction and silence that may have far reaching implications in times to come.

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

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