FESTIVAL: ART IN PUBLIC DOMAIN

Published April 15, 2018
Schoolchildren attending the festival
Schoolchildren attending the festival

The inaugural Karachi Art Festival was conceived and organised by Nigaah Art Magazine — one of the many initiatives that have cropped up recently on Pakistan’s art calendar to promote art in the public domain. The event kicked off at a local hotel and featured art discourse, art displays, live mural painting and performances.

The event opened with welcome remarks by Tauqeer Muhajir, the editor of Nigaah Art Magazine, followed by the keynote speech by Hameed Haroon, CEO of the Dawn Media Group. He spoke at length about the theme of the festival, “Art in the Public Domain”, giving a history of art in public spaces and how it has been vandalised, stolen or has disappeared. He further spoke of the neglect the PNCA collection has faced and the lack of a suitable national collection of art, and how there is no discourse or guidelines for the identification, documentation, protection, preservation and maintenance of art in the public domain. He closed by expressing his hopes that Nigaah would be able to initiate this process through its discussion forum.

The first panel discussion was on “Art through the decades.” Sarmad Ali hailed Sadequain as the first proponent of public art and spoke about the deterioration of his public murals as well as those by other artists such as Chughtai. He went on to talk about the censorship and restrictions on art that artists have had to face since the ’70s — from Bhutto’s and then Ziaul Haq’s time. Anwer Rammal added that the sculptor Shahid Sajjad once received death threats for one of his sculptures displayed at a doctor’s office. Sarmad said that as a nation we are not willing to preserve anything and are only interested in destroying everything, including our values.

The recently held Karachi Art Festival featured two days of art discourse, art displays, live mural painting and performances

Another interesting session was on photography titled “The Evolution of Art through the Lens.” It brought up the debate of whether or not photography is art. Abrar Cheema said that there is a need for a festival solely dedicated to photography as people don’t realise that photography can also be art and say that a machine cannot create art. Tapu Javeri expressed his frustration at the question of whether photography is art still being debated, and said that this topic has died and settled. Farah Mahbub spoke about the importance of learning photography from a teacher, as the learning curve is shorter as you don’t learn through trial and error.

A panel discussion | Photo by Fahim Siddiqi/ White Star
A panel discussion | Photo by Fahim Siddiqi/ White Star

Apart from the discourse, there were artworks on display, with booths set up by various art galleries, including VM Art Gallery, Art Chowk, Full Circle Gallery and a display by the Jamil Naqsh Museum. A couple of sculptural pieces were also on display outside the exhibition hall, one of which was by the eminent sculptor Abdul Jabbar Gull. However, there was a need for more of such artworks out in the open and perhaps a more public location for it to be truly recognised as ‘art in the public domain.’ There was also the need for a more curated form of art display with larger spaces assigned for each gallery to start a conversation with the audience.

“The Karachi Art Festival” took place on the April 7-8, 2018 at the Beach Luxury Hotel in Karachi

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 15th, 2018

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