Those familiar with Adeela Suleman’s extensive oeuvre will find something both new yet familiar in her latest show Fragmented Landscapes that is on view at the Gandhara Art-Space in Karachi. The internationally celebrated artist is known for conceptual dualities presented in intricately crafted and painted metal pieces, talking about assimilation of violence in everyday life and our subsequent desensitisation to it. While this overarching theme is still present this time, the metal is replaced with fine china and torn up postcards.

These painted dinner plates have cropped up in her work before, such as in the series Dream of Carnage. Her medium has always been found objects, and these vintage plates have been collected by her from all over the world, from discount bazaars to old friends’ discards, representing for her our willing consumption of violence almost as a source of sensory pleasure, much like the food we eat. As ubiquitous as plates themselves, violence has somehow crept its way into dining table conversations — an easily forgotten pleasantry not only unable to ruin a pleasurable experience but perhaps even add to it.

The final visual outcome reflects various compositional decisions made by the artist; while certain plates are completely whitewashed and then painted, others have been allowed to retain the original design and are incorporated into the artist’s narrative. The dichotomous imagery that is produced reflects our relationship with violence as a nation and the ways in which it shapes our lives. Pretty ladies in Victorian dresses sit and enjoy a picnic while two decapitated men in Mughal attire hack at each other with swords. Soldiers fight in a puddle of blood under a beautiful tree encircled a finely painted border. All of these are framed in ornate carved wood to add to the grandeur.

Adeela Suleman’s latest work talks about our relationship with violence and the ways in which it has shaped our nation

However, Suleman’s real strength is in her romanticising the grotesque. Scenes of violence are not just normalised, but beautified and heightened to the status of art, which is typical of her practice. With the overconsumption of violence comes the almost fetishistic sense of pleasure so that we don’t just become immune but would actively engage in it. As they say, violence begets violence, and the lines between right and wrong have become dangerously blurred. Thus, her violent imagery is wrapped in the guise of intricate Mughal miniature, where even the blood sprays daintily like a red fountain. It makes for profound commentary on how we deal with terrorism and death on a daily basis and how it shapes the psychology of a nation. A group of ordinary citizens beating muggers to death on a public bus in Karachi comes to mind. In the absence of heads, Suleman removes judgment and guilt, or rather spreads it evenly; we do not know who is the perpetrator and who is the victim, but we all suffer the same as a society and as a nation.

In another series of works the plates are completely painted over with postcard images of beautiful sceneries of Pakistan with rivers flowing red and reflecting on to a violent pink sky. The disquieting picture of serenity carries a striking beauty as the bright shades of red stand stark against the white wall. The image is split up among the different plates that come together to bring it back into focus.

Suleman believes that as a nation we are fragmented, unable to reconcile religious, ethnic, sectarian and class differences. The same idea extends into a series of pieces, Untitled X, where the artist has taken actual postcards, carefully torn them up into rough squares and placed them next to each other like pieces of a puzzle.

Violence does not exist in a vacuum but leaves its impression on objects, places and people. While these pictures present Pakistan as beautiful to a visitor, the histories attached to these places tell a difference story, and the scars of the past are what eventually shape the landscape. Whether they succumb to the ugliness or stand beautiful in the face of it, the landscape still carries its mark and becomes a kind of monument to the atrocities it witnesses. In a place where each life is touched by violence in some way or the other, whether we embrace it, ignore it or rebel against it, we eventually become its monuments too.

“Fragmented Landscapes” is on display from May 4 to May 27, 2017 at Gandhara Art-Space.

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 21st, 2017