People store water. It is supplied by city councils, distributed in tankers (in Karachi) and marketed by multinationals. Water is also a source of disputes between countries. There are disagreements, feuds and battles over water among individuals, communities and nations. Yet water is one of the most compromising elements of nature. The liquid assumes form and colour of its container. It flows beyond political boundaries and does not identity with a particular land. Humans identify many gulfs, seas and oceans but there are no clear frontiers as far as this substance is concerned. All waters of the world meet/ merge seamlessly.

Water is also vital for human habitation and eventually the emergence of civilisation. One of the ancient civilisations in our region is associated with the River Indus, or Sindhu (as it is mentioned in Rig Veda). The difference between Indus and Sindhu, or Al-Hind and Sindh, took another turn in 1947, with the partition of the subcontinent into two independent countries, which have different presents, but a shared past.

Two contemporary artists, Mahwish Chishty and Gunjan Kumar, from these two parts of South Asia, undertook The Sindhu Project, which includes “explorations of archaeological sites and artefacts in the expansive Sindhu (Indus) watershed, a geographical region stretching across northwest India and much of Pakistan”.

The artists hail from two different countries but have roots spread beneath the soil of culture, family and aesthetics. The two collaborators of The Sindhu Project produced Enigma of Roots. The exhibition was curated by Lise McKean in the USA. It was recently housed at the Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, NCA (November 16-26). It is a coincidence that Zahoorul Akhlaq, the artist, was born in Delhi in 1941. He had later migrated to Pakistan with his family. Various dimensions of physical migration and a displacement of cultural identities seem to be the real content of the exhibition, because Gunjan Kumar’s ancestors shifted from Lahore to Amritsar and Mahwish Chishty’s family moved from Amritsar to Lahore in 1947.

With their separate familial histories the two artists created a narrative about a shared history. An important aspect of their creations – in various formats, mediums and scales - is that they refer to matter; dominantly earth manifested as a map of the Indian subcontinent; or impressions of construction; laser cut and engraved drawings of patterns from historic monuments on clear acrylic shapes; bricks made in clay; canvases with fragments of clay sheets; in addition to organic pigments on mulberry paper and muslin stretched over wooden frames. Their preference for the ‘natural’ substance probably has a basis in their content. Human beings develop their distinct identities, create nations and build countries, but nature cannot be contained or segregated. Water flows from one political jurisdiction to other; dust storms travel from one country to the next; birds cross the air space between states; clouds move above man-made maps; winds reach the other, frequently enemy territory – merging the breath of one nation with its neighbours.

Two contemporary artists, Mahwish Chishty and Gunjan Kumar, from these two parts of South Asia, undertook The Sindhu Project, which includes “explorations of archaeological sites and artefacts in the expansive Sindhu (Indus) watershed, a geographical region stretching across northwest India and much of Pakistan”.

Just as elements of nature trespass current borders, they also go back in time. The work of these two artists, in The Sindhu Project, is an attempt to revert to the initial, essential point of identity. They have produced works that may relate to the past but are part of contemporary art, in terms of material, technique and formal sensibility. Mahwish Chishty, trained in the art of miniature painting at the NCA, has created a number of works incorporating patterns (rubbings as well as line based pieces) from various sources. She has also employed pages of an atlas, the geography of undivided India layering them with tea stains, or inscribing gold leaf (for instance in the layout of Jaulian’s Buddhist monastery at Taxila). In her mixed media, different facades of history embrace, from Gandhara to Mughal and colonial periods.

In the work of Gunjan Kumar, a graduate from National Institute of Design and Technology, New Delhi, who, like Chishty is based in the USA, the past takes another fold. It is intimate, fragile, sensitive, subtle, yet stable and solid. Kumar invests into materials: soil, pigments, fabric. Her works do not have a direct link to history or pictorials of the past. But these include elements, which remain contemporary through the passage of time. The soil of Mohenjo Daro cannot be much different from the dust in today’s Larkana. Likewise, pigments derived from organic sources have an unchanging history. Cotton used now has a history going back centuries.

Gunjan Kumar approaches The Sindhu Project, not like a historian, but in a poetic manner. One of the most amazing parts of the exhibition is her set of four red bricks, titled with its indigenous term Eent (spelt both in Hindi and Urdu script). Not only does the “sun-dried bricks… handmade in Kumar’s studio and then eroded with water over months, and finally riverbed soil applied to their surfaces” allude to an undivided heritage, the title of this work also confirms a common culture. It is the same word, having identical sound and meaning, but written differently.

Kumar wrenches her images from the boundaries of transcription, even translation, because her work, linked to two neighbouring nations in South Asia, can be connected to several other societies across the globe. Brick is not specific to Indian territory; bricks have also been excavated in the Mesopotamia and other agrarian settlements. Gunjan Kumar transforms that ancient object into a contemporary idiom by inserting segments of clay in frames on display (Broken Whole). Emanating from “ancient clay shards she saw dotting the Harappan site during her first visit”, these works more than seeking a whole, suggest that an epoch starting five thousand years ago, continues today.

This is mainly due to the material, clay. Because materials, like human instincts, do not change easily. Mexican author Carlos Fuentes has observed that our civilisation has evolved much yet the course of love making remains the same, from the archaic period to postmodern times. In the same lieu, the mankind’s involvement with covering bodies through a piece of cloth, a length of spun and woven fabric is as ancient and as contemporary as the clay brick. Gunjan Kumar, in her Void Structures, has created works with “layers and layers of cotton muslin, collected from various parts of India” which “parallels that painstaking process of excavation”. These impressive works, through their raw texture and slits, signify location, gender, substance. More than anything else, these remind us that history is not a monster or dinosaur of the past; it is a part of the present. Much like the River Indus, called Sindhu by Aryans in India, is still sailed by fishermen of year 2021.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore