B005OWFTDW EBOK (19 page)

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Kazi in NoMansland
, 2008

 

 

MUHAMMAD ZEESHAN
Cityscapes
, 2009

 

AHMED ALI MANGANHAR
Untitled
, 2006

 

MOHAMMAD ALI TALPUR
Untitled (Machine Drawing),
2006

 

BANI ABIDI (IMAGE ON PAGE 135)
Edition of 5. Inkjet prints on archival paper, 28 x 18.5cm each (x9).
Loaded with cultural representation, this body of work deploys fiction to subvert meaning and destabilize dominant myths of national origin. A quixotic young man – ostensibly a young Christian convert to Islam – makes incongruous appearances in public places dressed as the Arab hero Mohammad bin Qasim. In this particular image he is photoshopped against the landmark ‘Teen Talwar’ (three swords) in Karachi, meant to represent ‘Unity, Faith and Discipline’, a secular motto atttributed to Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

AYESHA JATOI
Dyed garments on fighter jet, C-print, photograph of installation/performance. Image courtesy of the artist and Asif Khan.
Decommissioned aircraft and armaments – missile casings, old jets and once even a massive submarine – are frequently installed as public monuments, indicative of the presence of the military in the civic realm. In this performative act of resistance, the artist washed a load of red garments and then draped them across the aircraft to dry.

BANI ABIDI
Duratrans Lightbox, 50.8 x 76.2cm each.
At dusk during the month of Ramadan most Muslims in Karachi are breaking their fasts, leaving the streets eerily empty. Abidi imaginatively reclaims public space by allowing the streets to be occupied by ordinary citizens from religious minorities – Hindu, Parsi (Zoroastrian) and Christian – who are part of the shared history of the city, but increasingly less visible.

RASHID RANA
Edition of 10, C-print, Diasec, 194 x 197cm.
This is a composite image of photographs that could be from a video or a stop-motion animation. Frame by frame, the artist dresses himself, changing garb several times, reinventing his image. In the ‘mirror’ image the process is reversed, but does not correspond perfectly, creating a sense of dissonance.

IMRAN QURESHI
Site-specific installation, Qasr-e-Malika (Queen’s Palace) Bagh-e-Babur, Kabul, Afghanistan. Emulsion and acrylics on marble floor and walls. Image courtesy of the artist and Turquoise Mountain, Afghanistan.
Qureshi uses the motif of foliage from traditional miniatures as a form, a weedy organic growth that seeps into architectural space. This installation in Kabul interacted with the play of light from the windows on the gallery floor, shifting the image with the passage of time.

NUSRA LATIF QURESHI
Digital print on transparent film, 65 x 870cm.
Qureshi’s practice deals critically with the politics of representation, fragmenting dominant historical narratives. Borrowed images are reappropriated and transformed, obscuring or refusing their original meaning. This work is a combination of the artist’s own ID photos, Moghul miniature portraits, early colonial photography and portraits by Venetian painters.

IFTIKHAR DADI
C-print Diasec, 64 x 52cm.
A suite of photographs of Urdu-language films shown on state-controlled television in the 1970s, examining television as a way of imagining and shaping collective ideas of ‘success’ or ‘urban modernity’ as exemplified by the interiors, fashion, personae and gestures of the films. Taken at slow shutter speeds, they capture scanning lines of the television screen and produce a grainy, blurred effect that suggests a dream or trance-like state, several steps removed from the ‘reality’ of the depicted scenes.

MANSUR SALIM
Oil on canvas, 81 x 122cm. Image courtesy of the artist and ArtChowk.
Mansur Salim’s surreal subjects include landscapes on a fictional planet, a space loaded with magical symbolism, layered with nostalgic memories, art-historical references, vernacular mythology and mathematical riddles. Disrupting notions of time and the context of place, this work is named after the ill-fated lovers in the Punjabi tale, while the faces strongly resemble film stars from the 1970s.

MEHREEN MURTAZA
Archival C-prints, 38.1 x 38.1cm. Courtesy of the artist and Grey Noise.
From a series of a dozen digital collages in which Murtaza playfully examines the latent presence of technology in urban visual space, merging globalized modernity with local landscapes. Referencing old war films or sci-fi fantasies, she creates charged images with a lurking sense of the absurd.

RASHID RANA
Edition of 20. C-print, Diasec, gilt frame. 45 x 35cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
At first a conventional portrait of the Moghul emperor Shah Jehan, on closer inspection the image reveals itself to be composed of photographs of billboards from the streets of Lahore, challenging exalted cultural forms by reconstructing them with visuals collected from the everyday.

STAMP INSTALLATION
Three sets of stamps, from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, all bearing the image of Kazi Nazrul Islam, a revolutionary poet claimed by all three nations as a national symbol.
SET OF 5 DIGITAL PRINTS
The first four images are of the fierce, grimacing eyes of Nazrul as he was forced to pose for official photographs, unable to voice his refusal due to a mysterious disease which affected his speech and memory. The last image is of General Ziaur Rehman of Bangladesh at Nazrul’s official funeral, which took place in Bangladesh against his own wishes and those of his family in India.

MUHAMMAD ZEESHAN
Digital print on canvas, 91.5 x 55.9cm.
A found urban image photographed by the artist, part of a series of abstract ‘paintings’ created by splatters of
peekh
on city streets, which are more visible on the footpaths and alleys in lower-income areas.
Peekh
is the spatout juice of the paan leaf, commonly chewed with tobacco as a mild relaxant.

AHMED ALI MANGANHAR
Acrylic and oil on slate, 18 x 22.5cm each.
Slates and chalk are used widely in rural and lower-income government school environments as rudimentary writing materials. History, erasures, memory and nostalgia are all themes that the artist explores. The top figure is Seth Naomul Hotchund – a prominent Hindu trader rewarded by the British for his services to the Crown and considered a traitor by Muslim landlords and Talpur rulers of Sindh in the nineteenth century.

MOHAMMAD ALI TALPUR
Printer’s ink on paper, 75 x 55cm.
Talpur used a mechanical printing press as an instrument to ‘draw’, varying the process to produce a series of works based on the form of the common exercise book. Although produced by a machine, the work registers a strong presence of the artist’s hand and his desire to subvert the predictable. This particular piece combines the formats used to write in Urdu (upper half) and in English (lower half), reversing the linguistic and class order determined by access to education.

All images, unless otherwise specified, are courtesy of Green Cardamom and the copyright of the artist.

Declan Walsh

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