KARACHI: A group show that can be seen at the Full Circle Gallery has taken a leaf out of the famous George Orwell novel Animal Farm. The exhibition, which will conclude on Jan 24, is self-explanatorily titled Animals.

For the uninitiated and without giving spoilers, Orwell’s book talks about animals’ agitation, almost revolution-like, against the humans. They’re able to do that because they are intelligent beings. But once they take over, things go topsy-turvy and infighting ensues … for power.

The curator of the show, artist Babar Moghal, whose paintings are also on display, describes the novel as allegorical, reflecting events leading up to the Russian Revolution in 1917 proceeding to the Stalinist reign. It’s good to know that Babar is aware of another important facet of the story, which is not drowned out by its political overtones: human behaviour. He goes on to elucidate, “It’s a cynical view of humanity and social hierarchy, but sometimes we can relate to it when we encounter manipulation and abuse of power in our lives, and even when sometimes we become aggressors ourselves.”

Spot on, one might say, because the world we live in, now, is marred by its characteristic feature of intolerance. The participating artists — Amna Suheyl, Babar Moghal, Fatima Baig, Komal Shahid Khan, Maham Siddiqui, Mazhar Qureshi, Paul Mehdi Rizvi, Rimsha Talpur and Zahra Asim — are acutely aware of it. They put this thought across by focusing on the physical aspects of human beings rather than their psychological leanings. And that’s the way to go about it, since in the contemporary world what you see is what you get.

Here, it needs to be understood that in the Orwellian realm, limits are demarcated for characters; they need to follow orders. In our time, individuals have assumed enough power to challenge groups and form their own groups.

So, generically speaking (since it’s difficult to talk about all the artworks) the faces that the artists paint, the clothes that their characters wear and the modes of communication that they adopt etc have an air of unease about them. However, the effect of this somewhat hostile unease gets diluted by the ideological confusion that has caused it — apt metaphor for the new global order. Our artists know it.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2020