KARACHI, Sept 12: A multimedia exhibition titled ‘This Is My Story’ on the effect of violence in the country organised by the Citizens Archives of Pakistan (CAP) opened at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture gallery on Monday. The display will continue till Sept 19.
This Is My Story has a variety of exhibits in different media, ranging from audio-visual presentations to pen-and-ink work to photographs. But none had a more resounding impact, perhaps because of its size, than Asad Faruqi’s blown-up black-and-white shot called Lyari Gang Warfare. It’s an image of a man in extreme anguish embraced or held by another person — a picture of a soul shattered by the loss of someone or something close to him. The most remarkable aspect of the image is that it doesn’t let you know about the photographer’s perspective and you only try and fathom the torment that the subject in the picture is going through.
The photographs of the 2009 Ashura blast by Asma Qasim are also indicative of the kind of society that we’ve become. It portray the horrors of the blast that shook not just the area where it occurred but the entire country and hints at the banality with which such incidents are treated these days — damage control, fire extinguishers, people gathering to witness the spectacle, etc.
S.M. Raza is a young artist who for sure is perturbed by the gory sights that he’s been witnessing in Karachi on a regular basis. His drawings sometimes make you wonder about the tremendous potential that he has. He only needs to branch out in form and content. One of his pieces has a bloody arm with a broken rosary in it. The dash of red in the otherwise black drawing creates a feeling that’s indescribably moving.
Sadia Khatri’s images had a young boy who was injured during an act of sectarian violence. The bit by bit shots have an effect of a film unedited yet having a kind of sequential harmony. Interesting work.
The exhibits have been broadly divided into the following categories: Bearing Witness, Brother in Arms, Record (newspaper clippings), Final Frontier, Shockwave and Dialogue.
The participating artists are Asad Faruqi, Fazeelat Aslam, Fazal Rizvi, Asma Qasim, Rehana Latif, Yousuf Zia Ali, Sarah Naqvi, S.M. Raza, Nariman Ansari, Sitwat Rizvi, Sumbla Aftab, Sadia Khatri, Fahim Akhtar, Ozair Rao, Hasan Zubair Bhatti and Akifa Mian.
