The multiplicity of narratives and concerns presented by a city as diverse and expansive as Karachi have made it the inevitable focus of art practices of countless artists, and yet with each new body of work we, as an audience, are presented with fresh perspectives into novel aspects of this ever-growing metropolis. Wallflower is one artist’s experience of the city articulated through visual metaphors derived from her everyday landscape and applied to broader urban narratives.

Jovita Alvares received the Imran Mir Art Prize in 2016 for her thesis display at the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture, and takes forward similar concerns and visual vocabulary in her current body of work, developed over the past year, displayed by the Imran Mir Art Foundation and curated by Aziz Sohail. Her use of photographic montage and photo manipulations use the bougainvillea flower to document the shifts in her landscape as she navigates her daily commute.

This movement is beautifully captured in the piece ‘Wallflower’ which is a long vinyl sticker stretching across an entire wall, intelligently incorporating the interrupting window into its display with its view of a bougainvillea. Constructed out of video stills that repeat the image of the bougainvillea tree till it fades into obscurity, these montages are the artist’s signature style, a kind of negotiation between the fleeting quickness of video and the constraining stillness of photography to present a more comprehensive and complete view of her subjects.

Jovita Alvares articulates her experience of the city using the bougainvillea shrub as a visual metaphor for the disparity of shifting landscapes

What is striking about the conceptualisation of such an ordinary motif of urbanity is its quotidian nature — the artist brings our attention to an everyday sight, overlooked and taken for granted. Alvares recalls noticing the flower when travelling out of her neighbourhood in Cantt and into Defence, which is much more rigidly structured and planned, more affluent and better managed. To her, this brightly-hued flower becomes the embodiment of this disparity, as it appears better kempt than those in Cantt. The series ‘Dream Flower’ brings this idea to the fore, taking its name from the idea of a ‘dream house.’ The works bring attention to the flower, highlighting it starkly within the blank architectural form of houses.

The inherent biology of the flower turns it into an apt metaphor for the city itself and its residents. As her statement reveals, “The bougainvillea as a foreign plant thrives particularly well in the desert climate of Karachi and adds colour and cover to the militarised and brown landscape. Contrasting with other local flora which are erased in the fast-growing city, this flower becomes an apt symbol through which to parse the truths of a rapidly shifting metropolis and our place as citizens of it.” This brings to mind the multiculturalism that defines Karachi, and the marginalised communities that continue to survive, and at times thrive, in less than ideal economic and sociopolitical conditions.

Yet, a more interesting aspect that relates the flower to the treatment of minorities is more nuanced. Alvares talks about the exoticisation of a culture or a group of people, as we pick shallow notions of beauty and put them on a pedestal without any real concern or understanding of the prevalent issues within said culture, or the realities of the people that belong to it — much like the flower is used for its beauty with not much regard for its biology.

This idea seems to be reflected in the artist’s process for her series ‘Dying Flower’ which charts the different stages of the flower’s life as the artist layers scans of flowers that she brought home with her to experiment with. Her attempts to preserve the flower proved futile, as it soon dies when taken out of its natural habitat, a pertinent depiction of the problematic nature of preserving cultures in museums or as costumes; it is more for our pleasure than for that particular people’s benefit.

As the artist reacts to her everyday surroundings and experiences, the themes that emerge are both deeply personal yet relevant to a broader discourse pertinent to our urban existence. As we traverse the city through her eyes, certain truths about our own experience of, and relationship with, the city become painfully apparent.

“Wallflower” was on display at the Imran Mir House from January 3 to January 8, 2018

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 4th, 2018