Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: November 04, 2019 | 
| 中文
Saat Daryaon Ke Pani Se Dhuli Meri Rooh, Phir Bhi Rahi Gadli by Natasha Jozi
The artist takes on many a role in his lifetime: a student and a master, a storyteller and soothsayer, and perhaps most consequential of all, a historian. If art stems from personal or collective experiences, an artist is a chronicler, painstakingly recording events from the past and documenting histories, making sense out of bygone events and the many meandering aftereffects that stem from these happenings.
History, like a vivid tapestry, asserts itself to be an absolute, when in reality, in order to comprehend this tapestry, it is essential that one must look at the hands that have woven it. What if our history, much like all our other recalled experiences as human beings, is subjective? What if history is a shape-shifting entity, forever changing and altering form - a face that keeps transforming upon viewing?
Curated by Natasha Malik, Saher Sohail and Laila Rahman, in “Unmaking History” at the Research and Publication Centre in Lahore, an assortment of contemporary artists has put together a show that rewrites the past, while questioning the dominant perspectives that have shaped and contaminated history.
Anushka Rustomji’s “All’s Fair in Love and War (I)” is a faint image of a city gate, created by making miniscule perforations in paper. The drawing is that of the famous Babylonian Ishtar Gate, which was uprooted and transported to Berlin to be displayed at the Pergamon Museum. The illustration of the gate is intensely detailed, sharp perforations coming together to form an image that is highly textural and intricate and yet ghostly in its making. It appears to the eye as if the gate has disappeared from view, leaving behind a mere imprint of itself, becoming in the process a metaphor for the East after colonization from the West.
All’s Fair in Love and War (I) by Anushka Rustomji
Saba Khan’s “Neela Dharpan” draws a link between the glamorization of the subcontinent and the glamorization of local contemporary art that is steeped in tradition. In exploring one such aspect of South Asian contemporary art, Khan focuses on the motif of the carpet, which has become an emblem of appeasement, pleasing the colonizing sensibilities of the West. Khan uses as her surface an indigo-dyed cloth in remembrance of the East India Company’s coercing of the local farmers to plant indigo crops.
Neela Dharpan by Saba Khan
The image of a carpet has been stenciled onto this indigo cloth in dust that the artist has collected from excavation sites that have resulted from road expansions in Lahore. The artist’s drawing of the carpet has motifs of smoke billowing industrial buildings, adding another layer to a work that comments on colonization, industrialization, capitalism and orientalism.
Amna Suheyl’s series of aquatint prints, arranged as if frames in a visual story, has to do with the event of displacement, or perhaps the echoing aftereffects that follow. In retelling the story of the gigantic shift caused by migration, Suheyl has created a beginning and an end, presenting history as the relationship between cause and effect.
They Were Floating (detail) by Amna Suheyl
The color palette of her prints, in its blue blackness, is not only nostalgic but almost ethereal, creating a narrative that appears to be otherworldly, as if it exists not in the past or the present but in a third, unknown space.
Farazeh Syed’s “I Dance with You Between the Worlds” is a large painting in acrylics on canvas. A woman lounges comfortably, a plate in hand, surrounded by vibrant foliage and strange bird and animal forms. Syed explores the depiction of women, and the exoticism, sensuality and objectification that accompanies these depictions.
I Dance with You Between the Worlds by Farazeh Syed
In looking at how the male gaze has shaped the representation of the female gender in art, Syed has recreated the portrayal of the woman as a rebellion against art history, creating an experience that is free of patriarchal prejudice or preference. The woman in the painting is real and relevant, a subject instead of an object, larger than life not in her quality of being a feminine motif but in her air of imperfection.
When considering the reimagining of history, it is unsettling to consider how individual and collective narratives have been tainted by biased perspectives or dominant systems. In Unmaking History, nineteen artists have grappled with both personal and universal histories to rewrite their past and reexamine their present, a fruitful exploration that speaks volumes about the compelling power of word and image.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
- T. S. Eliot - Four Quartets.
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