In his book, This I Believe; Carlos Fuentes notes, “Silence. Tranquillity. Solitude. That’s what unites us.” However, acquiring an intimate museum and a private zoo can also bind human beings. No matter how diverse we are in geography, ethnicity, beliefs and social/ economic categories, all of us retain small, worn-out, ordinary objects, left behind by loved, departed ones – a few in physical forms, most in the storehouse of memory. Likewise, everyone, either fond or a keeper of domestic animals, or allergic to them, experiences the existence of some species in his/ her surroundings. Pets, live stock, favoured birds such as sparrows and parrots or unwanted and unwelcome creatures like ants, mice, lizards, flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, lice and termites.

Those we abhor we try to exterminate so that our domestic areas are cleared of them. We, the human race, have been performing this operation on a grand scale, often without conscious participation. Our regular interruption of nature’s balance and harmony results in the extinction of several species, which, instead of their natural habitats, have survived only in words and images.

Ehsan-ul Haq and Iqra Tanveer’s collaborative project, Memory Orbits, at The Barracks (one of the sites of LB 03) addresses the loss and disappearance of individual and global, of human and animal, of material objects and their residues in our mind that resonate with Of Mountains and Seas, the theme of Lahore Biennale’s third edition. The work of these two artists –currently residing in Amsterdam – translates the Biennale’s title into an everyday idiom.

Like many other societies, the past and the future are often referred to in Pakistan as the same entity; illustrated in the Urdu use of a single word (kal) for both yesterday and tomorrow. The two artists have assembled images that, on the one hand, originate in the past: death in the family, animals vanished long ago, clay portraits connected to archaic statues; and on the other, offer glimpses of a looming future: approaching scenarios of dissolution and extinction of humans, animals, vegetation; and the disruption of nature’s cycles, observed lately in the upheavals of seasons, their extremes and unprecedented calamities.

When a visitor reaches the installations by Haq and Tanveer, he/ she discovers a connection between walking through the park (Nasser Bagh) and descent into the exhibition space (The Barracks). Outside, he/ she encounters trees, green fields, water channels, plants, flowers, sky and the clouds. Nature is also present inside but here it has been portrayed as fragile and vulnerable. Although the artists’ approach (to borrow a phrase of Peter Schjeldahl) “is playful even when the effect is devastating,” one detects a neutral tone in these collaborative pieces, creating an illusion that they have picked and placed things from their surroundings, rather than produced those. Components like clay figurines, and rudimentary and disintegrating animals are hand-made but look as if rescued from some archaeological ruins, vaults of a natural history museum, or discarded stuff at a shop selling lawn decorations. Likewise, the projected videos have an unavoidable anonymity.

Intriguingly, one hardly detects the artists’ presence/ character/ hand in what they have created meticulously: strange and disbanded things and recordings of natural phenomena seem to be spread in the corridors of history, forgotten but unearthed. Both Ehsan-ul Haq and Iqra Tanveer have employd a range of strategies to invoke an atmosphere of loss. Based on observation, collection, research and manipulation of the medium, their narrative, stretched over five rooms, emanates a delicate scent of death. Amplified by the architecture of the location, lower than the ground, these old (military) bunkers with domes and arches were used during air raids: against the threat of death. The experience of being in a subterranean circular construction also reminds one of catacombs; the underground burial tunnels of early Christians during the Persecution.

Instead of deceased bodies, the work of the two contemporary artists evokes other desertions: personal, ecological and collective. In one room, disjointed earthen forms depicting species that perished centuries ago are linkedwith a network of thick iron wires. Some animals of the group are partially covered in a video of a zoo built in Karachi that never became operational. Hence there are barren patches, empty cages and abandoned structures. The tangible section of this installation maps diminishing due to a prolonged process of nature; the other, the virtual one, is about dysfunctionality resulting from human failure.

Like many other societies, the past and the future are often referred to in Pakistan as the same entity; illustrated in the Urdu use of a single word (kal) for both yesterday and tomorrow.

The sad narrative continues in other rooms, by combining various manifestations of life. The videos of trees illuminating both sides of a mud-daubed fabric are accompanied by a few flowers and stems laid on the extended cloth. On the edge, a wooden rake is balanced with a black sculpture on top. The hand-made dark object could be a stylised human face, an animal’s simplified head, a squashed flower, a totem or none of those. The entire installation becomes an archive of loss, accentuated with the presence of leaves and stems; since a single blade of grass contains data related to millennia; and layers of political, economic and migratory pasts. Several vegetables, fruits, spices – staple ingredients of our diet today, were transported from distant regions ages ago.

Haq and Tanveer, brought the organic parts of their installation from the Netherlands. These included the small portion of a plant incorporated in another installation. Its name in Latin, “lunaria means ‘moon-shaped’ and refers to the shape and appearance of this species’ siliques”, but is known in “Dutch-speaking countries as Judaspenning (meaning coins of Judas), an allusion to the story of Judas Iscariot and the thirty pieces of silver he was paid for betraying Christ.”

In this installation, one tracks references to both moon and Jesus, in an oblique albeit poetic manner. On a domestic-scale screen, a calm sea flows, but because of the circular mirror put on the coarse cloth, the projected video of waves is interrupted, hence the round shape of a dark moon is introduced in the moving image. The luminous glass surface of the mirror produces another glowing disk on rough and mud washed fabric. At the back, a stone (lithography) block, covered with the picture of a sole tree, is left near a dried and cracked clay sculpture of a fish with a curled rope in its mouth. The noosed water-creature with rope could be a metaphor for crucifixion. The atmosphere of grief and desolation is enhanced by the inclusion of a pick-axe ending in a raw statue of some head – in clay.

The black moon motif is present in another installation: a large white circle is directed on the wall through an epidiascope, joined by a dark metallic disc slowly moving above the lit glass of this overhead-projector. What unfolds on the wall is the course of the eclipse, gradually concealing the blank circle in delayed movement; thus a viewer observes the ‘moon’ in various stages of death, till a complete departure, prior to its resurrection cycle.

As a natural phenomenon, death is generally associated with living beings, but for primitive communities, celestial bodies and other elements of nature also had souls and were mortals. Perhaps our ancestors were more in tune with the ecology and refrained from annihilating, destroying or disturbing these entities. This sensibility is evident in Iqra Tanveer and Ehsan-ul Haq’s work. The demise of a human being and cyclical disappearance of a cosmic body are comparable and linked like the room where forty pictures of the sun’s varying phases are transferred on the curvature of the wall, along with 40 wax candles placed in a row on the other side. In the middle of this space, one of the candles is burning in front of an archaic object (face, female body or a blend?) fixed on a wooden stick, to be replaced each day with another candle. (The 40 photographs and 40 candles probably allude to forty days of mourning).

The lumpy body/ face could be a nine thousand years old female figurine from the Mehrgarh site, a mother-goddess found at Crete, or a variation of Brancusi’s sculpture carved in the last century. The object has a whiff of devotional air. One realises that it could be all three as well as several others fabricated by the mankind. Its idea, significance and importance are as eternal as nature, its components as real (and illusory) as death and reincarnation.

Recycling is probably an updated term for reincarnation. All of us are now talking and concerned about ecology; everywhere from Boston to Bali; from Caracas to Cape Town; and from Tokyo to Toronto, in policy meetings, at cultural events and during academic conferences. Notably, Ehsan-ul Haq and Iqra Tanveer are not talking about the crisis of the environment, but conveying it through their practice. There are video projections and screens, but due to their imagery, content and the dominance of the mundane (read ‘not-arty’) stuff, their installations look like segments of nature.

Their medium is their message.

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