One can see the city through the eyes of an urban developer, a land grabber, a law enforcement official, a sociologist, a social worker, an advertiser and a number of other lenses.

For an artist the city reveals itself very differently. Many artists have found their inspiration in the streets of this city, its buildings and its people. Athar Jamal, Masroor Haider, A.Q. Arif, Arif Mahmood, more directly recording its people and places and many others such as Roohi Ahmed and Munawar Ali, tangently inspired by the mood of the city and its activities.

One can also see the city itself as art. As a sculptor, where few art galleries are large enough to accommodate sculptures, I came to see the streets and bazaars themselves as art galleries. The metal and wood markets with their organised stacks of wood or ball bearings reminiscent of a Louise Nevelson Sculpture, the hissing furnaces of Eid Gah metal market banging out tools from red hot metal, the delicate repoussé of the copper workers of Golimar, the aesthetically stacked circles of paan leaves of the paan mandi, the conical Anish Kapoor forms of masalas and powdered food colour in Jodia Bazaar, the looping of jalebi in karahis of hot oil like sizzling drawings, the colourful bolts of lawn billowing in the breeze of Bohri Bazaar, the dyeing vats of dupatta gali, and of course, the riotous decorated commercial vehicles.

Beyond sensory delight, there are darker and more thought-provoking poetics of the city: the motor cycle number plate that says chal nikal, the 50-year-old date palm with its head hanging forlornly as its trunk is burnt away by a city sweeper to get rid of the streets’ rubbish. The painted door of a small terraced house in a rubbish-filled back street locality and a rickshaw that says Kaash or Zakhmi Parinda. Areas with evocative names like Khamosh Colony, Geedar Colony or Kati Pahari. No one can even think of the imaginative ploys of some street beggars as street theatre.

Karachi’s walls have served as a people’s newspaper for years, announcing political gatherings, a new product on the market, a spiritualist who can ensure you marry the person of your choice, messages for or against a political personality. Over the years, artists have stepped out into these public spaces from time to time. Some unsuccessfully: Ismail Guljee’s sculpture made from the scrap of a downed Indian Air Force plane after the 1971 war was removed, Shakil Siddiqui’s murals on a hospital wall on M.A. Jinnah Road in 1985 had to be whitewashed under pressure from religious groups.

More surreptitious efforts found their way on the walls while the city reeled from violence: S.M. Raza made a number of drawings on city walls of headless men fighting in 2009. Earlier in 2007, Asim Butt made eject signs all over the city to protest emergency regulations. The Dhaba Art movement started by Abdullah Qamar in 2008, held its first art exhibition on a city wall in 2010. The Banksy inspired ‘Rang de Karachi’ team sprayed stencils for peace on the city walls in 2010 staying one step ahead of the police.

That official permission first came with the involvement of USAID/OTI’s (Pakistan Transition Initiative) to address violent extremism. Initiated in 2007, its real impact on the streets of Karachi came in 2016 with the (Re) Imagining Walls of Karachi project that painted murals all over Karachi. It was intended as a social cohesion effort, and text and political imagery were not allowed.

These murals have not only gained acceptance but inspired other artists to add their own paintings to public walls in Karachi. While these murals are beautiful to look at, and preferable to the commercial advertising and messages of hate, it remains to be seen if they squeeze out the walls of expression that are perhaps the only platform of communication for a silenced people.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 22nd, 2017