Written by: Hamad Ali
Posted on: April 09, 2021 | 
Men and Cats by Marium M. Habib
The world is in the grips of a pandemic and it will be some time before travel restrictions become lenient, and people can take holidays to dust the monotony and spiraling ennui off our shoulders. To grapple with the anxieties surrounding confinement and social distancing rules, artists use their medium to create a vibrant, pulsating escapist world which could bring about a much-needed break. Arists Marium Habib and Asad Kamran came together for such an initiative with a show titled ‘Exotic Holiday’ that opened late March at Art Chowk Gallery in Karachi.
Karachi went into a fifteen-day lockdown in March 2020 and little did we know that we were entering an era of isolation, seclusion, and anxiety surrounding social gatherings and traveling. The show was centered around those anxieties and their extension of people’s imaginative geographies, which they manifested while confined in their homes. Habib and Kamran presented larger-than-life works with bright, assertive compositions depicting flora and fauna, often melting into their immediate surroundings.
Garden Collaboration by Asad Kamran
The postcolonial academic, Edward Said, conceptualized imaginative geographies in his seminal analysis, referring to the representation of landscapes that expresses the presenter’s desires, perceptions fantasies, projections and fears. The words of the writer come front and centre and are meant to be understood, as opposed to viewers bringing in their interpretations. A vital part of such imaginative geographies is the reification and dramatization of the distance between other and self, or between abroad and home, whichever places feel home the most.
Adil and Zehra by Marium M. Habib
While encapsulating the imagination of exotic holidays, the artists used a cheeky tactic of painting the entire gallery hot pink and covering all the windows, obstructing the commercial vistas of the Clifton area that surround it. This practice alluded to the COVID-19 induced lockdown and confined the visitor into the gallery space, forcing them to view the exoticized mapping of their home gardens and Karachi at large, without considering the outside world.
The woman is reclining with her head buried in her chest and in between her arms. She’s naked and indifferent, as she lays on an extensive patch of grass. She may be thinking or perhaps marinating in her thoughts and feelings for herself. ‘Languishing Woman’ by Habib is an ode to the people who felt distant, unproductive, decayed, and alone as they stayed at home. The woman’s body is marked with agitated strokes of dry and powdery pigment of chalk pastels, alluding to the besmirched self-love and burgeoning self-loathing felt with the bouts of stagnancy.
Languishing Woman by Marium M. Habib
‘Floating’ by Kamran, depicts a mélange of indoor and outdoor plants that the artist viewed when homebound. A figure clad in flowy shalwar kameez floats inside a leaf. This womb-like structure and the embryonic form of a fully-grown person reminds one of ‘Shrink’, a 1995 performance by Lawrence Malstaf, during which artists were suspended in a plastic sheet with only one tube of air to regulate air flow. It suggested claustrophobia one may feel as the imaginative walls of the house start to cave in and we begin to outgrow our surroundings. Both the blues in the foreground and the grid in the background allude to the dichotomies of the inside and outside, confined and free.
Floating by Asad Kamran
Habib’s canvases have defined figures and flora, and their presence is vividly felt in the gallery. On the contrary, Kamran’s work is loose and flowy, alluding to the fluidity of time. This chasm between the solidity of figures and paint's fluidity, implies the fluxation of memory and fleeting moments that both the artists tried to capture.
Another recurring motif throughout all the works was that of the palm tree, with its broad leaves and infinite shade. While Habib paints her palm trees in a semi-realistic way, with murky hues of green, Kamran stylized it with basic shapes and solid colors. Palm trees have been an integral aspect of the imperial and orientalist gaze, and according to Kamran, they’ve become a vital facet of an exoticization or ‘Dubaification’ of Karachi, making it seem commercial and welcoming. Palm trees aren’t local to Karachi, and they are artificially planted as a way to achieve the local government’s desire to transform Karachi into an exotic landscape that houses different cultures and commercial success, something more comparable to a Middle Eastern desert oasis rather than an older version of the city, or any other city in Pakistan for that matter.
Murky by Marium M. Habib
Both the artists explored their line of sight and the versions of what they saw during quarantine, bringing home the idea that home and ideas of the exotic holiday are intrinsically linked to each other. One questions a viewer’s idea of an exotic holiday, if they don’t have these particular images of green vistas in their sight. If not such a landscape, then who gets to imagine the exotic getaways and how would they manifest? The show is on display till 15th April 2021 and a must-visit for a vibrant and though-provoking escape.
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