ISLAMABAD: A solo exhibition titled Na Maloom Ishtihari, featuring the work of the contemporary visual artist Ghulam Hussain, opened at the Satrang Gallery on Thursday.

A graduate of the prestigious National College of Art in Lahore, this is Mr Hussain’s second solo exhibition at Satrang, where he displayed a collection of woven archival prints of local Punjabi film posters.

The gallery’s founder and director Asma Rashid said: “Hussain’s captivating works are a visual overload providing a glimpse into the local Punjabi film industry, street culture and the advertising around it. Hussain’s miniature practice is based on his family tradition of crafts using intricately woven canvas, wasli and other mediums.”

“I’ve been thinking about the concept behind this body of work for the past three or four years. When I did my thesis, I made posters around the famous Shakespearean quotation, ‘All the world’s a stage’, where we are all characters and we complete our act and move on. In 2009-2010, I transitioned to other collections, but the background of having worked on posters remained. I live in Hyderabad city, where the largest, most famous market is Resham Gali, and I have spent years watching posters being put up, posters being taken down, posters getting torn and posters being written on. Those memories were coalescing, but I wasn’t sure about how I wanted to proceed with that,” Mr Hussain said.

“One day a friend of mine was trying to rip a poster off and I started helping him. Then I asked what he was trying to do, to which he replied that there are so many inappropriate and lewd posters on the streets and [his] daughters pass by [there]. I would go look at the posters being put up at night. When we were younger, we would wake up and there would be new stickers, posters, banners up in the morning and that is where the idea for this collection came from – Na Maloom Ishtihari.”

The phrase literally translates to unknown offenders, as ishtihari is used for people on wanted posters.

Going back to his roots in Sindh, Mr Hussain challenges the notion of high craft by integrating forms low craft, such as weaving and brick-building, with the miniature style of painting.

Commenting on how pervasive posters are in our lives, from advertising to political messaging, all the walls in “low society” are covered, Mr Hussain said.

“I also saw young children drawing on walls and the graffiti that takes up so much room in society. We see walls with the message, ‘It is forbidden to write on this wall’, scribbled on them. It gets me thinking.

“It is part of the childhood experience to draw or paint on walls, crisscross lines on notebooks and colour every corner of the available space, showing freedom of expression as an innate characteristic of childhood. As an adult the same behaviour can become a way to express anger, uncertainty, intolerance and irrationality whether in the form of graffiti or through what is placed on seductive or bold posters. These posters sometimes have stickers, pamphlets, brochures or flyers pasted on them.”

In keeping with this idea, and taking the opportunity to assess the audience’s reactions to these posters, the artist placed stickers, stamps and other objects that spectators could use to cover the works at will. The choice of object and the placement on the piece, showed what people reacted most to, what they chose to accentuate and what they hid.

Italian Ambassador Stefano Pontecorvo, who inaugurated the exhibition, compared Mr Hussain’s work to Arte Povera in Italy.

He said: “This is quite an astonishing exhibition. It opened my eyes to the extreme vitality of the Pakistani cinema and contemporary art. The idea of using archival posters, the idea of testing the reactions of the viewers and bringing in weaving into a piece of ‘poor art’ brings to my mind a commonality with Italian art — arte povera which is literally poor art.”

Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2019