The series ‘Look at the city from here’ on the 10th anniversary of the Gandhara Art-Space concludes with Farida Batool’s solo show ‘By the high wall and the closed gates’. Following the same pattern as the previous two solos in the series, the show looks at the artist’s oeuvre from 2009 onwards, coupled with new works, to create a dialogue on the city’s distinct character from the artist’s perspective.

Batool’s work is political commentary through an ‘urban’ language and gets deep into the pulsating spirit of the city. She focuses on violence and terror, but goes beyond the cursory glance and dissects the emergence of the culture of fear that has quietly settled in and is subtly choking the city. As the artist says, “I feel like most people look at [Lahore] in black and white instead of showing the nuances of the complexities of the city.”

She achieves this perfectly through her piece ‘Kahani eik shehr ki’, which incorporates small postcard sized lenticular prints placed in a long straight line, creating an illusion of the artist taking us on a journey of roadsides with Lahore as her backdrop. She passes a mosque and the Lahore High Court with various vendors, policemen and lawyers outside. The citizens, cars, rickshaws, containers and barricades come together to highlight the undertones of fear that exist in the everyday.

Farida Batool goes beyond the cursory glance and dissects the emergence of the culture of fear that has quietly settled in and is subtly choking Lahore

The walk ends with a long wall covered with layers of graffiti. Batool’s own words describe this part of the work perfectly, “The layered images are often related through the notion of memory or history, with the ‘earlier’ image being both partially erased but also constitutive of the ‘later’ image in order to portray contrasting realities.” This piece is able to say a lot about the city on multiple levels, giving us a complete sense of the nature of Lahore, its spirituality, its street life poised at a vulnerable edge, its layers of history contextualising the present.

Her choice of lenticular printing is not just meant to create interesting illusions, however, but informs the narrative. “In a video the audience has to watch the events in a particular sequence, but with lenticular prints they have a choice between what they want to see and what they don’t.” This is most relevant in the piece ‘Dekhna mana hai’ where you feel the suffocation inflicted by the male gaze, but you have the power to choose to shut your eyes as you move across the piece. This control is an illusion in itself though, as a few eyes shut, others open, and you end up in the same frustrating struggle for control that is reality.

The gradual progression of fear in Pakistani society can be mapped by the increasingly visible measures taken to ensure ‘security’— which itself lend to the tense air of our cities. In a series of photographs, ‘Oos sheher ka band darwaza’, ‘Oos sheher main mohabbat’ and ‘Oos sheher ki oonchi deewar’, we see barbed wire isolated on a white background, and the whole frame covered by a red brick wall. Batool brings these signifiers of our underlying fear out of the background and into stark view. At the same time, the barbed wire gives the illusion of a heart shape with a string of gajras that are sold at traffic signals, which look dark, colourless and morbid but hint at the presence of love amongst the violence. It signals the existence of normal life amidst the chaos, or perhaps the ethereal omnipresence of danger amidst normal life.

The most striking piece, however, that perfectly depicts our current human condition is ‘World Cup 2016’. Here we find the bloodshed and violence in the past year likened to a sport, where human life is a plaything, and news almost seems like a public contest for the inhumane. It is inspired by a video that was released of a couple of young boys kicking around the decapitated head of a policeman. It alludes to the appropriation of violence in our society and the death of our conscience as the consumption of brutal imagery becomes commonplace through social media and television.

As a reaction to this Batool has prints of hands, arms and feet cut up and constructed into actual footballs that litter the floor. It looks like a surreal cross between a warzone of limbs, skin and hair strewn across the floor, and a playground of footballs. The fact that the audience is welcome to play with these balls makes it somewhat unnerving.

What strikes hardest is the fact that among all the Karachi vs Lahore debates, the political urban landscapes of the cities could not be more similar. Batool’s work could just as easily have been about Karachi in its essence, once visual intricacies and cultural specificities are overlooked. Three shows and one publication later we realize how essentially alike cities are, united in their experiences and concerns, but too divided over petty squabbles to be able to improve their own situation.

‘Look at the city from here: by the high wall and closed gates’ is being exhibited at the Gandhara Art-Space from August 18th till September 16th, 2016.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 4th, 2016