The British were recently called out by Shashi Taroor, the Indian MP and writer, on their convenient ignorance of certain aspects of their occupation of the subcontinent that painted them in a negative light. Taroor used the phrase ‘Historical Amnesia’. This seems to be where the show “Painting Amnesia” at the Canvas Gallery in Karachi, derives its title from, while the works explore a rather personal relationship of the artists with history and the role of collective amnesia in shaping the present.

While the British may have forgotten the atrocities of the colonial empire, the subcontinent suffers from a similar yet, in some ways, quite the opposite problem. In the process of forgetting the negatives, we seem unable to divorce ourselves from our colonial past, leading to our own cultural genocide. In Ahmed Ali Manganhar’s work we see our collective identity crisis as we try to locate ourselves in our past.

Manganhar’s work is an exciting barrage of layered images presented through graphic mark-making with flat colour and the use of negative spaces to reveal the layers of paint below, lending the work a certain profound richness. The work seems to question the reliability of history, the fickle nature of time, and the impermanence of memory. As he puts it: “... I attempt to resolve the drama of history through techniques of painting projections of archival photographs, landscape drawings and pictures of my hometown.” One can catch glimpses and snippets of these — trees, faces, historical and mythical imagery, windows and building structures — layered and fading, melding into one another.

Two artists explore the dynamics of their relationship and their personal histories

He speaks of the erasure of the present and the disconnect from the past, of living in a land carved by colonial rule. However, the layers of imagery in the works seem to answer his questions — the present does not exist in a vacuum but is a product of the past. It may take on its own presence but will always carry within it identifiable aspects of past experiences, no matter how faded or deformed. As each moment is committed to history, it also imprints itself on the present and helps define it.

Zahid Farooqui’s monotone canvases focus on art history and the ways in which we perceive it, but can arguably be extended to any kind of history. He argues that images in art history reach us through secondary means, through pictorial reproductions. A lot is inevitably lost in translation, and Farooqui depicts this via paintings of crumpled up black and white versions of photographs of famous paintings throughout art history.

Far from reproductions, these paintings mould the iconic works to the artist’s own personal style resulting in a distorted, unrefined, stylised version of history. We are made to questions whether these works are versions of the old or something new altogether, and to ponder the implications of appropriating an existing artwork and taking out new meanings from it. At the same time, works like Vermeer’s ‘Girl with the Pearl Earring’, ‘The Mona Lisa’ and Dali’s melting clocks — ‘The Persistence of Memory’ — no longer have a presence as an art piece but as motifs, references or images being used as a tool of communication, which drives home the artist’s point about photographic reproductions being lesser than the original.

For most of us history seems etched in stone; constant and unchanging. However, even historical fact is a subjective account of the winning side, and memories are selective and short-term. For something that shapes our reality to such a great extent history can be quite unreliable and these artists successfully depict this. We are able to witness how an artist deconstructs the notion of personal histories and the complicated ways in which it relates to the present — both shaping it and being shaped by it.

“Painting Amnesia” was on display at the Canvas Gallery, Karachi, from March 14 to March 22, 2017

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 9th, 2017