anzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan,1940s to Today, a recently opened exhibition, organised by the Art Mill Museum at the National Museum of Qatar, Doha, is remarkable for a particular reason. An exhibition is usually focused on works of visual arts, or concentrates solely on the practices and examples of architecture, but curated by Caroline Hancock, Aurelien Lemonier and Zarmeene Shah, Manzar, which can be translated as a scene, a landscape or a perspective, affords an unprecedented multi-disciplinary view of creative manifestations from the history of Pakistan since 1940s. A few miniature paintings dating as far back as mid-16th Century are also part of the show.

The exhibition is “a selection of approximately 200 paintings, drawings, videos, sculptures, installations, tapestries and miniatures” which “present multifaceted modernities and contemporary practices.” In order to introduce a wider narrative, the display also includes valuable archives, i.e., facsimiles of official documents: a Pakistani passport; photographs of historical moments including the 1947 migration, the 1971 war and of women’s rights demonstrations during Zia-ul Haq’s military dictatorship; reproduction of newspapers and magazine pages, exhibition catalogues and related publications including the cover of Anwar Jalal Shemza’s Urdu novel, Lala Rukh’s protest posters and Sadequain’s hand-drawn announcement for his solo show in Karachi.

Divided into 11 thematic sections, it is much more than a survey show, since it provides diverse lenses to dig new meanings, content and context within the complex story of Pakistani visual culture. The journey, as mapped in separate gallery spaces, travels from linear directions to spiral movements, drawing parallels between periods and locations; between genres and disciplines; and between utility and aesthetics.

As has been observed, the earlier phases of Pakistani art concerned with the preservation of tradition and the legacy of colonialism, often blending Western elements with local ingredients. Abdur Rahman Chughtai, in his exquisite paintings, reinvented the definition of Mughal miniature. A transformation bloomed decades later, particularly in the early 1990s. Shahzia Sikander, Imran Qureshi, Ambreen Butt, Talha Rathore, Aisha Khalid, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Tazeen Qayyum, Khadim Ali and many other graduates of miniature major from the National College of Arts, who were trained in the conventional methods, infused contemporary references, sensibility, content and techniques in their work.

Walking through the display, one recognises how the two strands of Pakistani art and architecture (deeply nailed in the society) are about conversation or conversion – if not the conflict between tradition and modernity. Observed in production of two major architects of our age, Nayyar Ali Dada and Kamil Khan Mumtaz, and evident in the canvases of early modernists like Zain-ul Abedin, AJ Shemza, Ahmed Parvez, Shakir Ali and Murtaja Baseer. Zubeida Agha adopted abstraction in her art. Instead of modifying reality in stylistic (or cubist) formats, Agha relied on a purely optical interaction/ expression.

This dialogue continued in the work of Zahoor-ul Akhlaq, Shahid Sajjad, Imran Mir and Rashid Rana. Rana’s digital print I Love Miniatures (2002), having Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan’s portrait composed of tiny pixels of huge billboards is particularly iconic in reinterpreting both the past and the present; indigenous and imported; and classical and commercial. The conversation between dichotomies is also visible in the work of other artists, many of them based in Karachi, who joined the language of urban vernacular into the vocabulary of high art. The early initiators of the trend included Durriya Kazi, David Alesworth, Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi. Like neo-miniature, the Karachi school urban vernacular found other exciting voices – mainly through pedagogy – in artists of later generations, who inculcate object imagery, and concerns from their surroundings. They include Bani Abidi, Huma Mulji, Asma Mundrawala, Adeela Suleman, Risham Syed, Farida Batool, Faiza Butt and Ruby Chishti.

Of course, it would be simplistic and unjust to read an artist’s entire practice in terms of a label provided by a museum or coined by a critic, because a creative individuals are always expanding their horizons and are often inconsistent. This reminds one of Walt Whitman’s verses; “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well, then I contradict myself./(I am large, I contain a multitude.)” One finds themes of identity, alienation, displacement, dispossessions, feminism, fundamentalism, power, ecology, urbanisation and industrialisation, recurring, overlapping, or intermingled in the work of visual artists and architects from the Islamic Republic.

The importance of ecosystem and environmental harmony has been addressed in the architectural practice of Kamil Khan Mumtaz; in the four-channel video projection of Naiza Khan; videos and photography of Lala Rukh; and a few other exhibits in the show.

Political tyranny, a curse of our times, has been a significant concern in contemporary art. Examples of this include Rashid Rana’s Red Carpet I, (2007), the interwoven pictures of a slaughterhouse joined to shape a typical oriental rug; hence a critique on the Western view of Muslim world, as a complex scenario of ideal beauty and extreme cruelty. References to violence also appear in Imran Qureshi’s splashes of red hues and in Rasheed Araeen’s series of photographic prints dealing with race riots.

Racial marginalisation has a parallel in gender discrimination in our society. The exhibition showcases pictures of Women’s Action Forum’s protest, and posters (mostly made by Lala Rukh); and the collages of Iqbal Geoffrey – challenging the status quo and social injustice. The hegemony of power is unpacked in Huma Bhabha’s sculpture of a man/ demon on a chair; as well as in Bani Abidi’s video projection, Shan Pipe Bandlearns the Star Spangled Banner (2004) in which the humble band players from Lahore rehearse an American tune (in the age of War on Terror). Extremism and dislocation are addressed by Risham Syed in her installation, History As Re-present-ation I (2014), consisting of an empty seat with a stand bearing the small image of a vehicle, blown up and on fire.The outcome of threats, both from the state and extremists, is the emergence of urban barriers seen in Seema Nusrat’s mixed media collages, New Urban Landscapes (2016)in which recently devised safety measures stand as the most important, most visible – in fact the only visible – contraptions in their surroundings.

Political divides that cause individual, community and cultural alienation are a recurring motif in the work of the generation that was born in one country and migrated to another or else witnessed the 1971 war and secession of Bangladesh. This includes artists like Zarina, Salima Hashmi and Meher Afroz. Zarina’s superb prints, emanating from her experience of displacement become a metaphor for a person condemned to survive in a state of perpetual detachment. A feeling of homelessness is apparent in Ruby Chishti’s mixed media construction, The Present is a Ruin Without the People (2016) and Ali Kazim’s immaculate watercolour on paper, The Conference of Birds, (2019). A cultural divide can be read in Seher Shah’s beautifully haunting visuals Argument from Silence (2019), a total of 10 polymer photogravures on Velin Arches paper, where Buddha looks lost in the passages of the past. Images of Gandhara sculptures placed on museum plinths in semi darkness remind one of the dust of history collected on narratives, artefacts artistic practices and lives.

A curator (the word literally means curer or carer and was once exclusively associated with archaeological museums) brings out newness from the folds of forgotten or familiar history. The three curators of Manzar exhibition have done this in such an unconventional yet incredible way that most of the Pakistani artists present at the inauguration of the exhibition on October 30 admitted to being reminded of some known, but often neglected fact about the country: a medley of diverse ethnicities, languages, customs, faiths and histories – repeatedly illustrated in the art and architecture from Pakistan – a country with a 75-year history and a 7,000-yearpast.

(To be continued)

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