KARACHI: Does an artist’s perspective of life drastically differ from that of, let’s say, a person’s who does not have a creative streak? It is difficult to answer the question. But practising art or even dabbling in it does make creative individuals a bit more intrepid. The reason is: compared to those who cannot create, artists are compulsive expressers. They cannot help but convey their feelings through their art.

Then there’s a differentiation within the artist community: modes of expression. Basir Mahmood, an exhibition of whose artworks titled All Divided Equally is under way at the Canvas Art Gallery, is an artist who works with photographs, metal and videos to put his message across. This means he, unlike a big number of his contemporaries, does not stick to one particular medium. Justifiably so.

Mahmood, in his statement, claims that he is interested in exploring his position as an artist by adopting multiple roles: an author, an initiator, an observer and as a withdrawn subject. The last one he describes as a “disengaged onlooker on a main street”. Interesting.

It is interesting because the disengaged onlooker sounds like an entirely different species than an author or an observer. But Mahmood is being poetic here. By giving himself several parts, he is actually telling the viewer that he is just as normal a human being as anyone else who goes through one phase [of life] after another. However, even when he is “disengaged” the artist in him will not stop creating because it is his second nature.

An example of that would be the titular diptych ‘All Divided Equally’ (inkjet print on Museo Max). The fruits and vegetables etc that the viewer sees in the images are a familiar sight. Is it so? There is something quite unfamiliar about the two big images. The artist imparts a unique, not necessarily palatable, look to them by merely arranging them in a particular order. The order turns them into characters, somewhat haggard, as if they’re being scrutinised by a higher authority. So the work of imagination enters a realistic domain, only to return to being imagined.

The exhibition, curated by Salima Hashmi, concludes on Sept 11.

Published in Dawn, September 5th, 2018