The art of Pakistan

Till very recently, I didn’t realise how lucky we have been in Delhi, as far as seeing really engaging Pakistani art goes. A lot of it is the result of entrepreneurship of private organisations —galleries and others. Just in the 2000s, Khoj helped bring in some excellent artists in group shows and Nature Morte brought us the outstanding Rashid Rana show, for example.

Most times, as viewers in India, we see a lot of this art through Indian eyes as well as Indian politics. When I saw the Hanging Fire show, a mapping of contemporary Pakistani art curated by Halima Hashmi, at the Asia Society in New York, I expected it to be greater than the sum of each individual artist. It turned out to be not as engaging as I had hoped. Why?

To make sense of this experience, it is useful to remember what the Delhi shows were like. Firstly, it was a scale issue. Each previous show I had seen was much bigger, sometimes even more flamboyant. Rashid Rana, for example, shown in 2007 in Nature Morte, was represented by works in three rooms. Talha Rathore’s works in Espace took up a large hall and the Khoj show, all miniatures, was spread across the IIC Annex. The Hanging Fire space was not any larger than these three spaces combined. The issue is hardly quantitative, but relates to how much of each artist’s work we are able to see in overview shows such as this one.

But this also begets the question of the overview show itself — an even more important issue. Any large group show has to have some kind of narrative thread running through it. This makes it a specifically identified slice of the larger pie. Hanging Fire is no exception. In fact, here the glue seems to be a kind of illustration of contemporary Pakistan itself, as perceived in the Western world. Several works lent themselves to both a nuanced and a wider interpretation.

Take Ayaz Jokhio’s diptych of a pen and a bullet, which suggests itself easily as a metaphor for a violent Pakistan, a result of its direct imagery. The works of Fazia Bhat carry this crisis within them too, because her approach derives from popular imagery and imagination; Bhat’s Get Out of My Dreams series contains hooks for easy viewing with “feel-good” implications. In contrast, Rashid Rana’s image-studded carpets are spectacular, in part because they defy such easy reading of contemporary art. It’s impossible to walk away admiring the caret, because the smaller images invite, and then repel you.

Another break-away from the rest of the show — Bani Abidi — was really the most brilliant of all. In her work, a local band, confident and open to challenge, try playing the American national anthem. They fail repeatedly, even though they try — an allegory to the fraught state of relations between the two countries.

The contrast between Rashid Rana, Bani Abidi on one hand and several others on the other unintentionally breaks up the show into smaller fractions, like regional political parties.

This pushes me to ask if shows, particularly if you already know something about the art in a specific country, work at all? I have my doubts — they don’t work beyond a preliminary first experience of national art, because survey shows have to compromise a more complex, nuanced narrative and instead, stick to a wider nationalist thread. Notwithstanding the outstanding artists or curator, it is hard to set up something like this, deciding whom to include, exclude and whom to exhibit next to whom. For these reasons, in the case of Hanging Fire, the sum of the art works is less than each one of them alone.