There could be several beginnings. According to the Bible, “In the beginning there was the Word”. To Camille Paglia, “In the beginning there was nature”; Bosnian author, Faruk Sehic writes, “In the beginning there was Eden, whence we were expelled”. But for the 3^rd Mansion Artists Residency, in the beginning there was the house, a portion of which was rented by a restaurant. Later, the entire building was taken over by eateries one after the other till, due to constraints added by Covid-19, the premises were abandoned.

At this venue, the Mansion residency, organised by Nausheen Saeed, was held from 15th to 30th January. It included six artists of different practices and experiences. During a period of social distancing and fear of other humans, this endeavour not only connected individual artists, but also brought viewers to a meaningful, non-commercial art activity.

An artists’ residency, by its very chemistry, is about exchange of ideas, sharing facilities and exploring new options. In South Asia, art organisations such as Khoj, Vasl, Britto, and Theertha facilitated links between artists of a country and the region. Some leading names of contemporary art from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka discovered their voices while away from their studios and normal pursuits. However, the year 2021 (like 2001 in that both altered the entire planet) posed a challenge to the notion of ‘normal’. The ‘normal’ became a threat. In a way, all participating artists and Saeed, the curator of Mansion Residency, defied this fear. While keeping safety measures, they revealed the unlimited frontiers of possibilities.

One cannot expect artists to venture out for something revolutionary or shocking in the brief span of two weeks because art has to be slow-acting to be effective and lasting. The work produced at the residency offered diverse responses to our environment: physical, collective, natural, virtual and emotional.

To start with, the space seemed a perpetual stimulus, especially its run-down state, for creative individuals who prefer dimness to brightness, misery to happiness, dust to cleanliness and brokenness to functionality. This reading may be a cliché, but ask any artist, and he/she would feel more comfortable with peeling plaster, dilapidated structures, uneven wall paint and withering woodwork as a subject, because it all comes across interesting compared to a boring state-of-the-art freshly furnished construction.

The location in Lahore was a point of departure that inspired artists to respond to it. The scale of its interior impressed Suleman Khilji who established his studio in the bare walls and large glass window. This was an ideal place due to its dimensions, informality and atmosphere that he could have never had. Khilji rendered drawings - almost ghost images - of staff living there so that the work was a testimony to their presence. To many the staff may even not have been people with names and specific personalities but merely cooks, electricians, cleaners and guards.

The building had once flourished as a high-end restaurant. Khilji made an effort in his work to return ‘the arty area’ to these characters.

The past of the place, a food joint, its dysfunctional kitchen and deserted dining rooms, played a significant part in some of the works that emerged during the residency. For instance, Kiran Saleem, who has been appropriating art of the past, addressing the issue of environment, and intervening into familiar settings, responded to the property by placing a section of Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, behind a screen of wooden blinds to create her Bar Behind the Bars. The Parisian bar, from the impressionist’s painting, was translated/transported into another ‘bar’ made of wooden lengths. Fixed behind these stripes, the print of the painting was lit whenever a visitor stepped into that section, alluding to all kinds of bars - prohibitions and pleasures.

The location in Lahore was a point of departure that inspired artists to respond to it. The scale of its interior impressed Suleman Khilji, who established his make-shift studio in the bare walls with a large glass window.

Her other installation, 45 plastic bags containing fish and water, was suspended like a chandelier from the ceiling. Fish is not an alien entity either at a formerly Chinese restaurant or in polythene bags for a citizen who sees and ignores vendors selling them daily on the city streets. Saleem recognised the luminosity of water through transparent bags and the glistening scales of the fish and turned them into an item of fancy lighting. The work may have provoked critical responses by animal rights advocates who nonetheless enjoyed delicious qeema-paratha offered at another art installation. Some self-appointed art-moral cops routinely denounce any art work that utilises animals and plants, but never protest the cutting of trees to make furniture, or caging and barbequing of birds, or controlling, burdening and slaughtering of other animals. Saleem has been painting images of fish in plastic bags in her canvases too, indicating the fate of the living, and one feels that this installation, Together but Apart, Apart but Together was a natural/logical outcome of that concern/vocabulary.

The history of the place, a restaurant, suited Rabbya Naseer. She put a temporary roadside café, a dhaba, in the vacant lot previously available for serving snacks and beverages. She had cups collected from hotels across the world and furniture from some other source. The food was prepared by a number of people, including a few family members, so that it was a commune-like café, where the artist also told a story to those who paid for it, while waiting for food or tea. The tale, about the narrator’s encounter with an Iranian woman having a strange name, had a surrealistic overtone, making the entire episode suspect.

But who cares, if the artist had actually met the Iranian in a train or the anecdote was a fabrication, because as the end was without a conclusion, its actual origin can also be contested. Facts always change. Umberto Eco observes that the scientific and historic truths we believe in, such as “the laws of universal gravitations are those established by Newton, or…. Napoléon died on Saint Helena on 5 May 1821” may alter in future with some new discovery/research, but incidents like “Little Red Riding-Hood is eaten by the wolf and then freed by the woodcutters” or “Anna Karenina commits suicides” will remain true for eternity. Stories are more stable and reliable than theories. Rabbya Naseer aimed at re-living the custom of strangers meeting at ordinary cafes and sharing their (life) stories.

For a number of other participants, words became a significant tool. In her sound piece, Madyha Leghari employed text to make us realise the brittleness of language. A stuttering woman pronounces her profession: contemporary artist. In her state of confusion and nervousness, she utters several variants of the words. This can be as valid as multiple mis-concepts of contemporary artist. In another installation, the sentence, “This message has no body text,” was split into other words and options - all auto-generated lines that we get from our gadgets. Our senses are tuned to reacting to these mechanised sounds which have replaced human voice/presence. Like “This message is 10 percent real, 90 percent auto-generated/10 percent intended, 90 percent fated”. The sound came from two sides of the room and you heard it while sitting in the middle, almost like attending a sermon on “post-truth”.

Truth is a problem for everyone, more so for artists like Mariam Waheed who sought to find out “Who I am” and some related questions in her text pieces that - like a mirror – reciprocated the dialogue of self-discovery. The identity, function and importance of an artist, have been concerns common among artists since the day artists were liberated from conventional patronage only to end up as a commodity in modern times where you don’t hang a canvas by Andy Warhol, but a ‘Warhol’. In her installation, a banner announcing “Artist is available for rent”, Waheed commented on the commercialisation of art. The fact that the premises were up for rent, complemented and added to the meaning, intention and complexity of the work.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore