The growing presence of Pakistani art in international art fairs scored another high with the participation of Bani Abidi and Khadim Ali in dOCUMENTA (13). The two National College of Arts graduates, represented by Green Cardamom, London, are the first artists from Pakistan to receive an invitation to exhibit in dOCUMENTA.
Contemporary art circuit's most coveted platform, dOCUMENTA, which takes place every five years, opened its 13th edition on June 20, 2012. It was initiated in 1955 after the trauma of World War II, to re-establish culture and the visual arts as a primary focus in society, and to reconnect Germany with the field of international art during its process of post-war civil society building. Unlike the international exhibitions that emerged from trade fairs of the colonial period, the exhibition relies on the premise that art has an important role to play in the process of reconstruction of a civic society, of its healing and recovery.
Since its inception, each dOCUMENTA has focused on the relationship between art and society and attempts to identify the most critically important art being produced around the world.
Directed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, dOCUMENTA (13) explores commitment along with the spaces and places where collapse and recovery are articulated through intuition, research and materials. While traditionally taking place only in Germany, this year’s edition also focuses on contemporary art and culture in Afghanistan, with works by Afghan artists exhibited in Kassel and an exhibition of both Afghan and international art held in Kabul. Along with public lectures and seminars, held in various places in and around Kabul and Bamiyan, an exhibition is currently being held at the Bagh-e-Babur and the Queen's Palace in Kabul.
Reviews on the event have just started to trickle in (at the time of writing of this article) and Roberta Smith writing for The New York Times observes that almost always dOCUMENTA exhibitions present more art than is possible to track down, much less absorb. The current effort spreads the work of some 200 artists and artists’ collectives from some 50 countries all over Kassel, starting at the Fridericianum, the regal Neo-Classical museum that has been the show’s focal point since its commencement in 1955. Ardently feminist, global and multimedia in approach and including works by late artists and selected bits of ancient art, it provides visitors with paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos and most of all, a number of impressive installation and performance pieces. Works involving sound or music of some kind are especially outstanding. Commenting on the current showing Smith surmises:
“Ms Christov-Bakargiev has assembled an immense, unruly organism of a show. It is alternately inspiring — almost visionary — and insufferable, innovative and predictable, meticulous and sentimentally precious. I would not have missed this seething, shape-shifting extravaganza for the world, and I’d rather not see its like again, at least not on this dwarfing, imperious, self-canceling scale.”
On the home front, it is the works by Abidi and Ali that are generating interest. According to the gallery press information, ‘Death at a 30 degree angle’, Abidi’s project for dOCUMENTA (13), is a reflection on self-portraiture, megalomania and monumentality. A film broken up into three separate projections screened on free standing planks leaning against the wall (like a dissected sculpture that does not fit into space), it tells the fictitious story of the commissioning of a monumental statue by a small-time politician somewhere in contemporary South Asia.
In the sculptors studio the man struggles with ideas of self-representation attempting to decide between the many self-portraits that are offered to him by the artist. He even ponders what might happen to the statue after his death. Inspired by the book, The Emperor: downfall of an autocrat, which dwells on the rise and fall of Haile Selassie, Abidi examines critically — but not without humour — the supplements of power (self-aggrandisement, sycophancy and paranoia) that unfold throughout the portrait commission. Interested in the sheer scale of human ambition, she unmasks the obsession with posterity, the need to stage history as spectacle and the absurd monstrosity of egocentric political power that characterise political power, past and present.
A graduate trained in classical miniature painting, Ali is an Afghan artist who grew up in Pakistan. His family hails from Bamiyan (Hazarajat) where the colossal sixth century statues of Buddha were destroyed. The artist has done a considerable amount of work through video, photography and miniature painting to examine the destruction of the statues and subsequent years of war and rebuilding. His project is in two parts.
In Kassel he has exhibited four miniature paintings, ‘The haunted lotus’, which explore the mythic tales of the Shahnameh (book of kings) in a contemporary context. The second part is a seminar for children conceived as a prototype for an art school that takes place in Bamiyan during summer 2012. It focuses on the lost culture of storytelling from the Shahnameh, starting from its first illustration, a miniature painting by Kamaluddin Behzad and after listening to stories from the epic the children respond through drawings.
The Shahnameh, an epic poem of 60,000 verses written at the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni and considered a unifying cultural narrative of Central Asia, was read to Ali by his grandfather and its illustrations were his first lessons in art history. The heroic figure in the book, the mighty warrior Rostum upholds virtue and honour through glorious deeds. Ironically, his name was appropriated by the Taliban in their fundamentalist war. Painting Rostum as a horned demon with a beard, Ali’s miniatures tell stories about loss of his own cultural heritage and human values, and how meanings shift and words are perverted through ideological adoption.
The dOCUMENTA is not a selling exhibition and runs for a 100 days which is why it is often referred to as the ‘museum of 100 days’.