ocks, while they might look small and insignificant objects, speak of aconcern for security resulting from some fear. They are a sign of mistrust at the subconscious level,contained in their design, function and history.

Safety walls, barricades, barriers, fences, barbed wires, metal detectors and scanning machinesinstalledaround us are no different. However, these were not so common two or three decades ago. Prior to9/11, passengers ondomestic flights were not stopped for identification, body search and luggage scrutiny. Those travelling light carried their cabinbags to the plane without any interception or examination. Now, on leaving home, one mentallypreparesforachain of checks and dresses and packs accordingly. The conditioning has reached a level where one hardly waits forthe security personnel’s command to submit to the scrutiny. Likewise a residential place, an office block, a business venture, a housing society, a hospital, an educational institute, a shopping mall, a cinema hall, a revered shrine or a place of worship can no longer be conceived without a huge paraphernalia of securitycontraptions.

We have grown so used to barriers and hurdles that their presence no longer registersas an out of place nuisance. This reminds one of a passage from One Hundred Years of Solitudewhere Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes the amnesia epidemic in Macondo. In their fight against the loss of memory, the inhabitants of the town “with an inked brush marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan.” Going further, they labelled animals and plants: a sign hung from a cow’s neck read: “This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk;” and so forth. This goes on until, Melquiades the gypsy, cures them and people realise their folly.

Today, citizensin almost every city are living in conditions comparable to the fictionalsettlement and share a similar kind of oblivion. The frequent sight of security tools, machinery and arrangementshave made us ignorant of their strangeness. Instead, these are perceived to be integral to the normal. If a visitor fails to spot/go through one, they ask for it.In our society, these safety appliances have endedup being desired goods. With the passage of time we have learntto installthese on our premises as well as next to those.

We have grown so used to barriers and hurdles that their presence no longer registersas an out of place nuisance. This reminds one of a passage from One Hundred Years of Solitudewhere Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes the amnesia epidemic in Macondo.

SeemaNusrat recognises this transmutation in human behaviour as well as physical objects and the environment. Living in Karachi, she has mapped the safetymeasures at a private residence, an office complex, a religious building, an educational structure, a public park and an urban market that on the one hand resist terrorist attacks and on the other restrict a citizen’s vision by erect physical, visual and psychological barriers. As extremist threats, political agitationand violent crime grow, exclusion isincreasingly considered natural. Yet, the unease of crossing these barriers and the knowledge of their indispensability invokes a contradiction - a conflict. This coexistence of discomfort and protection is addressed by artists in diverse ways: by presenting these objects without a background, hence drawing attention solely totheblotting products (BaniAbidi); looking at theeyesores through the lens/aesthetics of minimalism (SeherNaveed); or by extracting a delicate/amorous content from the harshness of rough clusters of metal wires (Farida Batool).

All of them have exposed the efforts and contraptionsof securityas illusory. The more a threat grows, the higher an external wallis erected, the stronger a building’s facadebecomes. The sand sacks grow, the fences thicken andthe iron bars multiply, yet the assailants find their passage to reach the tightly guarded sanctum. These artists have presented these objects assomething delightful to look at but disappointingin terms of fulfilling the intended purpose. SeemaNusrathas expandedon this approach in her practice. In work (at her solo exhibition,Unseen Screen, a collateral event of LB 03, from 3^rd to 31^st October, at the White Wall Gallery, Lahore), the material, technique, scale, visual components, their composition and treatment enhance the reality of decorativeness, more than functionalsideof what is regarded asa security article.

Outer walls, metal gates, iron bars, concrete grills, traffic-police separators, camouflaged elevations, watch towers, green dividers, organic hedges appear as undetachablecomponents of a building; actually thebuilding in Nusrat’s work; because in every art piece, there is nothing except these protective layers. In her immaculately assembledartworks, parts and types of various safety gadgets are composed like pieces of Lego. The impression is enhanced by the chromatic scheme, flatness and geometric division of each work. An important segment of their making is theartist’s choice of medium and technique: Plexiglass sheets joined in a mechanical manner. Thus the works become a substitute for actual items than their representations. The realisation that we cannot detect the traces of a human hand/touch supports their perception of being non-personal, neutral, efficient and practical products, like pre-fabricated and familiar stuff we collect for use or decorate.

One can notice a shift in SeemaNusrat’s aesthetics since she moved from Karachi to Lahore. She hasdocumented the abundance of green plastic net (made of industrial substance) stretched on balconies, terraces, entry spaces,and outside of windows against the harsh sun of Lahore – mostly to shield plants and providing shade and privacy. Traditionallymanufactured inlong and loose lengths, these are now made – fit to size – in fibreglass sheets to keep sunlight, rain, insects and birds away. Colours of thesecoverscompliment the greenery from the surroundings, hence giving the impression (and satisfaction) of being an organic addition.

Nusrat translates this practice (so common that it oftengoes unnoticed) into the language of geometry. Her recent body ofwork is a combination of grids and patterns that suggest metal grills, green net and (globally recognised) municipal barriers with their repeated stripes of yellow and black paint. In these, the link to her earlier, Karachi-based imagery,is frayed because the new pieces have a dominating sensibility of abstraction. Abstraction in art, that originated in the beginning of the Twentieth Century, with its conceptual, spiritual and subliminal overtones, also switched our gaze, attention and interest from reality (in all senses of the term) to pure pictorial matters. Towards a tendency of approaching, decoding – and anticipatingthe social, psychological, political and ideological issues as forms. In the middle of last century a number of European (mainly the French) theorists argued that meaning lies within the language and is not above it. Language, they said, was more potent and significant than the writer’s intent; so much so that Roland Barthes replaced the term author with the word scribe. (One of the reasons possibly wasthe experience of World War II, that cause a crumbling of beliefin human will, decisions and acts).

Human beings also appear in Seema Nusrat’s latest work; transformed (disguised?) as watchtowers (titled Observers). These elongated and hard-edged masses (manufactured in metal and deco paint) are grouped like a family, with their heads and lanky bodies concealed inangular andsimplified armours, resemblingcubist imagery. But more than mere formal excursions, Nusrat’s sculpture remindsof Rene Magritte’s Perspective II Manet’s Balcony(a1950 appropriation of EdouardManet’s painting The Balcony,1868-1869).The Belgian surrealist converted three human figuresfrom the French impressionist’s setting, into three wooden (coffin like) riveted boxes, arranged in the same order.

Magritte’s work somehow furthers the reading of disappearing faith in humans; and experiencing fatalities consciously caused by the homo sapiens. Similarly, SeemaNusrat’s large-scale humanoid sculptures clad in metal sheets, document the fear, risk and danger a human faces from others as well as comment on it.Death can result from fate, medical complicationsor natural/mechanical disasters; it is more unbearable when it arrives in the shape of a bullet, bomb, drone or an exploding pager, a walkie-talkie or a mobile device.

The writer is an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore