Exhibition: Fear and loathing in Lahore
The series ‘Look at the city from here’ on the 10th anniversary of the Gandhara Art-Space concludes with Farida Batool’s solo show ‘By the high wall and the closed gates’. Following the same pattern as the previous two solos in the series, the show looks at the artist’s oeuvre from 2009 onwards, coupled with new works, to create a dialogue on the city’s distinct character from the artist’s perspective.
Batool’s work is political commentary through an ‘urban’ language and gets deep into the pulsating spirit of the city. She focuses on violence and terror, but goes beyond the cursory glance and dissects the emergence of the culture of fear that has quietly settled in and is subtly choking the city. As the artist says, “I feel like most people look at [Lahore] in black and white instead of showing the nuances of the complexities of the city.”
She achieves this perfectly through her piece ‘Kahani eik shehr ki’, which incorporates small postcard sized lenticular prints placed in a long straight line, creating an illusion of the artist taking us on a journey of roadsides with Lahore as her backdrop. She passes a mosque and the Lahore High Court with various vendors, policemen and lawyers outside. The citizens, cars, rickshaws, containers and barricades come together to highlight the undertones of fear that exist in the everyday.
Farida Batool goes beyond the cursory glance and dissects the emergence of the culture of fear that has quietly settled in and is subtly choking Lahore
The walk ends with a long wall covered with layers of graffiti. Batool’s own words describe this part of the work perfectly, “The layered images are often related through the notion of memory or history, with the ‘earlier’ image being both partially erased but also constitutive of the ‘later’ image in order to portray contrasting realities.” This piece is able to say a lot about the city on multiple levels, giving us a complete sense of the nature of Lahore, its spirituality, its street life poised at a vulnerable edge, its layers of history contextualising the present.
Her choice of lenticular printing is not just meant to create interesting illusions, however, but informs the narrative. “In a video the audience has to watch the events in a particular sequence, but with lenticular prints they have a choice between what they want to see and what they don’t.” This is most relevant in the piece ‘Dekhna mana hai’ where you feel the suffocation inflicted by the male gaze, but you have the power to choose to shut your eyes as you move across the piece. This control is an illusion in itself though, as a few eyes shut, others open, and you end up in the same frustrating struggle for control that is reality.