The city of colours
Ustad Fatah, the seasoned painter of cinema billboards refers to Pakistan as ‘the garden of flowers’ spontaneously reciting verses dedicated to Karachi as his team of Lakshman, Babu Bhai and others appear visibly excited and tearfully overjoyed with emotion. They reminisce about the good old days when they made good money from painting cinema billboards, most of which have now been replaced by digital printing on panaflex.
The recent opportunity to contribute to what is said to be the longest ‘art’ wall in Pakistan by the organisers of the “Re-Imagining the Walls of Karachi” project, has given them immense pride. Not only are they earning praise from the commuters who stop by and get photographs taken with their art, there is a great sense of connectivity of the artists to the audience, the general public. For many established artists, students of various city colleges and art schools, truck artists and wall chalking artists, it is an unprecedented occasion to come together in celebration of their creativity in the public realm. A contribution, that we hope, is here to stay.
This project, which is a part of the larger umbrella of “I Am Karachi” has received an overwhelming response, with coverage in local and international print and electronic media. Such is the immediacy of the iconography that the images have gone viral on social media, in turn creating a much wider online viewership. Karachi, an urban centre bursting at the seams, with an estimated population of 23.5 million (in 2013), holds many cities within it, so the potential of the visual as a positive intervention cannot be underestimated.
For Adeela Suleman, head of fine arts department at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, who has spearheaded the wall project, the curatorial challenge has been to channelise many tiers of creativity into a cohesive whole where the passerby and the onlooker can instantly connect to the visual, with the bigger challenge to connect a city of such magnitude through these walls. The impact of this will unfold with time, and like any public project it is to be seen how the citizens and the state respond to and protect this legacy.
Imagination knows no bounds as artists cover the city walls with images of beauty and hope
The M.T. Khan Road, formally called Queen’s Road, has been chosen as the model because it provides the longest stretch of continuous walls. The idea of the organisers has been to replace negative chalking with images of positivity for the city. Covering over two kilometres, the main anchor is the wall of the Karachi Port Trust and if you are driving by you catch glimpses of color or painted foliage of the indigenous Amaltaas and Gulmohar flowering trees and traditional shaamiana motif; however, you can also drive closer to the wall and you will discover a new motif, a floral pattern, a bird, parts of historical Karachi buildings, or just doodles.
There are imaginative surprises, such as a section of a tree trunk painted under the hanging branches of a real tree to create an illusion of the real. Next to it is a painted bench; again an illusion, but the viewer can take a photograph as if sitting on a real bench. There is the donkey cart race painting created by artist Hasnain Ali that has been stenciled and repeated along a long stretch, the route of the popular weekly donkey cart or Gaddha Gaari races of Karachi. The same stenciled image reappears on the walls of the Karachi airport, the FTC near Gora Qabristan, etc.
Commuters from Lyari, Defence and Clifton going to the financial centre of the city or to the beaches, pass by this road and very often families and children park their cars on the roadside and walk the stretch to enjoy the painted walls. For over a month since the process of erasing existing chalking started, the public has been intrigued, stopping to speak to the artists at work in hot and humid weather, creating unexpected conversations on the streets, this time not in protest, but in celebration and curiosity.
Moreover, the painted walls and underpasses, such as in Lyari, Nazimabad, Numaish Chawrangi at the Quaid’s Mazaar, Shahra-i-Quaideen, Dalmia, Gulshan-i-Iqbal , the airport and other areas have brought a new pride to Karachiites as it bridges the social, and art / non-art divide by its shared recreational aspect.
Munawar Ali Syed, who has steered the ‘Stencil’ component, has strategically repeated stencils by changing colours or format so that a person in Gulshan may see the same image as someone in Numaish. This is significant subtext to connect people and their collective imagination and experiences. In a city divided by distances, strife and fear, there is a considerable therapeutic element with the intent of ‘reclaiming public spaces’, as the organisers convey.
By all means, there are deeper issues which address the relevance and purpose of overnight wall chalking, be they for selling a local product, a call to protest, or religious and political slogans and symbols. Street iconography is really the pulse of its people, and of those who have no other means or venues to express their concerns. It is most accessible, and slogans such as “chalo chalo Nishtar Park chalo” are iconic symbols of the visual language of the streets of Karachi. Should this project overstep itself or disregard sensitivities and sensibilities, it could face hostility.
The new paintings on the walls will make the city’s dwellers consider taking care of the precious creativity and the city authorities may even make better pavements to walk or sit on. Interestingly, wall drawings have emerged overnight by anonymous persons on empty spaces within the new art, a sign that the audience is responding.
The city signs that read, ‘keep the city clean, keep the city green’ seem like a pun on words. The money spent on placing them could simply be used to collect garbage, make garbage shoots, public toilets, and plant more (indigenous) trees. Artists’ projects have included public service and community projects in many countries, where the nature of public and private, and art and non-art boundaries have been explored and the medium is the service.
However, through the current project, artists seek to intervene in and negotiate with public spaces with the focus on replacing harmony and beauty to the marred walls of dissent and discontent. The story that unfolds can only hope to bring back some pride on the street.
Adeela Suleman comments that the Airport Bridge is especially decorated to welcome the visitor to a city considered hostile and dangerous. Suleman has invited the Phool Patti team Ustaad Hyder Ali, Ai Salman Anchan and Mumtaz Ahmed to paint in the style of art on trucks on the columns of the airport bridge. This is where Suleman’s artistic concerns meet her curatorial vision, as her own art is informed by the iconography of the popular. She explains that her team discusses and modifies truck art imagery to suit someone driving by, so that the image of a peacock, for example, is stretched to allow if only a fleeting glimpse.
Some part of the image registers and stays with the viewer. The studio experience translates onto the street, where the team may look at a wall from across the road, from over a bridge and alter an existing work provided by an artist, or add to it. The collective becomes more important than the individual.
Suleman draws from her vast experience of collaborating with local artists and artisans, and in many ways the Airport Bridge mural may well be a departure point for her as an artist, as she negotiates with a non-art audience in a non-art space. This shift marks a move away from the highly insulated and exclusivist domain of the art market and gallery circuit, creating space for a more congenial public / private dynamics to emerge. Public spaces where dreams can be visualised open immense possibilities to nurture the imagination of the public as collective. And more importantly it can be used to make ground for artists to respond in more ways with their city than they have in the past.
In this multi-layered initiative, Suleman relegates the ‘Re-imagining’ of walls to other artists, and they in turn incorporate their artistic sensibilities towards re-imagining not only the city walls, but their own artistic imagination in relation to their milieu. These may be significantly valuable directions in altering the existing landscape of gloom, dilapidated concrete, jumbled wires and heaps of garbage, in bringing colour and in initiating a process of endless conversations by the city, for the city.
Besides, Ustad Fatah reminds us that we want hatred to be replaced by love. Yet another tier is the contribution of school children’s drawings, guided by art critic Shahana Rajani and artist Rabbiya Jalil. They bring their experience of engaging school children through drawings in the project “Bachon se Tabdili” which is replicated and enlarged by artists throughout the city.
In the same vein, the artist Munawar Ali Syed visualises the ‘Stencil’ initiative, explaining that prominent artists have contributed to it disregarding their names in the interest of a communal statement of positivity and celebration. The highlight of this is no doubt the combination of 17 different artists’ stencils titled “Dhak Dhak Karachi” which Syed has visualised as a new work that extends from Khudadad Colony to Numaish. Close to the Numaish Chowrangi and the location of everyday strife, the boundary wall around the Quaid-i-Azam’s Mazaar is the ultimate feast of colour and an apt homage to the Founder with the simple message that reads, ‘I Love Karachi’.
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine June 21st, 2015
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