Hanging Fire

NYT's reviews Hanging Fire an exhibit of contemporary art from Pakistan. I was surprised that this exhibition was so small, just one floor of the Asia Society. But it certainly provides a wide variety of mediums and ideas circulating in Pakistan today.
Rashid Rana's carpet was extraordinary.


Known to many New Yorkers primarily for art exhibitions, Asia Society is a grander entity than its Park Avenue galleries might suggest. According to its press materials, the institution’s overarching mission is to “promote understanding among the people, leaders and institutions of Asia and the United States” and to generate new ideas in “the fields of policy, business, education, arts and culture.”

Are those fields listed in order of importance? If so, it might explain why the work in the society’s surveys of new art, like the current “Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art From Pakistan,” tends so often to be topical in content, market ready in format and didactic in delivery.

One of the first of the society’s big one-country shows, “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” in 1998, sold itself on the notion that the most significant work emerging from China was all by brash, young, implicitly democracy-loving rebels in thrall to the Western media and eager to break with their own cultural past. This profile was meant to win Western hearts, and it did. That many artists still produced ink-and-brush landscapes and calligraphy and were subtly but radically updating these traditions was barely acknowledged.

In 2005, “Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India” focused heavily on art that addressed current social issues like sectarian violence and the effects of a global market economy. Not represented was a range of new abstract or near-abstract art and sculpture from South Asia that doesn’t necessarily look “Indian” and that is personal, and only incidentally political, in content.

This exhibition of new art from Pakistan, with its references to war, religion and consumerism, largely conforms to the Asia Society model, except for its size. The Chinese show had more than 60 artists, the Indian survey more than 40. Both were spread over two New York City spaces. “Hanging Fire” has 15 artists and takes up just two Asia Society galleries, one very modest in scale.

So it doesn’t pretend to be a survey. It’s a closely edited group show drawn from a small pool of artists, most of whom attended the National College of Arts in Lahore. Given these restrictions, it’s surprising that the show has the variety it does.

Lahore had been a cultural hub for centuries by the time Pakistan was separated from India in 1947, and it has remained so. After partition, the National College of Arts was forged from an existing colonial institution, and schools were also established in other cities. Various forms of up-to-date modernism were introduced, often by local artists who had returned from study in Europe.

But progress was never smooth. Contemporary art maintained an uneasy relationship with the country’s successive military governments and with the state religion, Islam. Social and cultural repression was particularly intense during the era of Islamization initiated by General Zia ul-Haq in the late 1970s, when women were discouraged from public participation in cultural life and only landscape painting, calligraphy and abstraction passed official muster.

Despite obstructions, and also because of them, art moved forward with an activist urgency that it has not lost. Catalytic figures appeared, many of them women. Salima Hashmi, the curator of the Asia Society show, is one. After graduating from the National College in 1968, she began to teach there, remaining an influential and vocal presence.

The senior artist she has chosen for the show is a former teaching colleague, the painter Zahoor ul Akhlaq, who had tremendous impact on younger artists before he died in 1999, the victim of a violent crime: he was shot and killed when someone broke into his home. As a teacher, he revived interest in manuscript painting (also known as miniature painting), the indigenous genre dating back to the Mughal dynasty, encouraging young artists both to master its demanding forms and styles and to infuse them with new content.
Several artists he inspired now have international reputations, most notably Shahzia Sikander, but also Ambreen Butt, Imran Qureshi and Saira Wasim. Mr. Qureshi, who was born in 1972 and has become an influential figure himself, has a series of paintings in the show of observant Muslims going about their lives. The style is crisp and deft, but the figures of bearded young men are clearly meant to pique our jihadist fears.

The show has direct references to violence, two of which involve images of animals. Rashid Rana’s gorgeous “Red Carpet 1” is collage of thousands of tiny photographs taken in a slaughterhouse. Huma Mulji’s “High Rise, Like City Drive” consists of the taxidermied form of a water buffalo set atop a neo-Classical column. Although the piece, made for the show, comes with elaborate socio-political glosses, it is, intentionally or not, a monument to the death of an innocent being.

A hyper-realist drawing of a single bullet by Ayaz Jokhio, Arif Mahmood’s photograph of a boy playing with a toy gun and Ali Raza’s image, collaged from burned paper, of a veiled and screaming woman are in line with an international view of Pakistan as one big danger zone. Faiza Butt’s confectionary, gender-blend painting of turbaned men surrounded by hair dryers, pistols and ice cream cones takes some of the edge off of this paranoiac view and is one of the more interesting of the show’s several exercises in issue-driven whimsy.

The others probably suffer from being seen in a Western institutional context, where they lose some of their complexity. They include Asma Mundrawala’s little pop-up versions of nostalgic fantasies; Adeela Suleman’s motorbike helmets for women, made from cooking pots; Hamra Abbas’s rocking-horse version of the winged creature who flew the prophet Muhammad to Jerusalem from Mecca; and Bani Abidi’s video of a Paskistani pipe band taking a stab at “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

This light-touch approach to politics has become common in contemporary art in the last decade, perhaps in reaction to heavy-hitting work of the 1990s. Wit can be effective but can too easily devolve into cleverness without some toughing edge of weirdness. Mahreen Zuberi’s gouache paintings of dental procedures have that edge. So do Nazia Khan’s semi-abstract drawings of — what? Cloth? Wrinkled skin? Damaged flesh? That we can’t tell is what gives the work some resistance, makes it feel personal rather than just an illustration of smart ideas.

This sense of the personal is very much present in a 1997 triptych by Mr. Akhlaq called “A Visit to the Inner Sanctum 1-3,” in which he acknowledges his debt to miniature painting but goes beyond it with a dark, near-abstract vision of birds and calligraphic characters that seem to emerge from a rain of ashes. Anwar Saeed’s gawky homoerotic figures, particularly those painted and collaged on the pages of a little printed book, similarly feel as if they’re about something that mattered deeply to the artist, that they’re a physical extension of him.

A student and teaching colleague of Mr. Akhlaq, Mr. Saeed was visiting him the night of the shooting and was badly wounded himself. The miniature-size pictures in the book were his first attempts to retrain himself physically to paint. That he returned to art with images considered morally unacceptable in his culture adds a political dimension to his work that intensifies it without entirely defining it.

In a neutral context, we would probably stop and look at these paintings because they are baffling and magnetic, as personal as diary entries. We might then become aware of the complicated skill that went into their making. Only last are we likely to want to place them in the political context of “contemporary art from Pakistan.”

If exhibitions encouraged us to approach art in something like this order, rather than the other way around, we might have an art experience deeper and more lasting than that given by even the most polished institutional package tour.