We spent a long time at the small galleries in Asia Society New York early this week viewing the exhibition. Without any preconceived expectation, I came out with a complex feeling of profound sadness and triumph at the same time. When art increasingly becomes another global commodity and the target of trophy hunting, it is beyond amazing to see again the art that is made as a mere self-expression, as a reaction to reality, and as a way of survival. A well documented war-torn country, one would think it is the last likely place for contemporary art to blossom. When the possibility of death becomes a daily reflection, imminent and random, art and what it represents, logically ought to be remote. Yet the exhibition radiates a powerful energy that is on the verge of emergency. There is so much to be expressed that it must be proportional to what has been suppressed.
Considered the forerunner of the contemporary art in Pakistan, Zahoor ul Akhlaq's work is moody yet rationale, his muted palates and calculated proportion seem to ridicule the turmoils of that country, yet somehow mysteriously forebode his violent death. When some gunmen broke into his house and shot him and his daughter. One survivor of that gathering, Anwar Saeed, spent next few years recovering from his injuries. In the following months during which he underwent surgeries and lost the function of his right hand, he started painting with his left hand on a book called "I Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual", which is the true story of a seventeen-years-old Frenchman who was arrested and kept in concentration camps by German forces in World War II. On the hospital bed, his drawing all deal with his inner fantasy of homosexuality. He hid the book for the longest time as a personal journal. The drawing is filled with such an earthly yearning that it can only possibly be drawn by someone who can never realize that yearning. There is something profoundly humane about a bullet-ridden gay muslin man, laying in the hospital, secretly express his longings in such a lucid and honest manner. No holding back. Obviously if the book ended in the wrong hand, it would not be hard to imagine what would have happened to him.
One of our favorite piece in the show is a photography by Arif Mahmood. On a typical Pakistani street, a man with a sack on his side was drawing a mysterious ladder that appeared without beginning or ending. The moment caught by his camera has a strange spell that demands the decipher of a social meaning. What was in the man's head when he was making such an endeavor. Where did he hope the ladder to lead from and to? and after all, would there even be such a place for the citizens of that country or the mankind in general?
Other artists we loved are Adeela Suleman, who probes into the gender issue in the society and Rashid Rana, whose monumental image of a rug made of collages of the slaughter house challenges the western view of famed Pakistani craft.
Throughout the show, there is a fresh sense of art-making by these artists, who bravely confront the issues of the society that are in desperate need of confrontation. Not only did I find that they have voices, but they have an overwhelming power to move. After the emotion of the chaos and suppression, what I ultimately ended up with was a feeling of long lasting courageous humanity.
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