Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: March 19, 2018 | 
| 中文
Aamir Habib's piece
To be an artist is to incessantly experience the ubiquitous need to understand the truth of existence, and to contribute to this truth. An assortment of twenty four artists put their heads together, as part of the first ever Lahore Biennale Festival, to do just this in a show titled “I, too, am a part of this history.” The Lahore Biennale Foundation aims to celebrate both ancient and contemporary art forms by having artists display their works at monumental public sites for two weeks. This particular show was the very first collateral event of the Biennale, held in collaboration with Art Divvy and curated by Zahra Khan, at the Fakir Khana Museum in the heart of Androon Lahore.
Standing tall since the 18th century, the Fakir Khana Museum is almost labyrinthine. Beyond the ancient wooden threshold, a bed of powdered charcoal awaited the visitors, causing them to leave a smattering of dark footprints all over the floor covered in white cloth. In inviting these scurrying traces, artist Hasan Mujtaba was creating a large non-representational drawing, letting his audience be the tool behind the mark making. Thus both artist and audience gave tangible form to the act of walking through the museum, tracing and retracing years and years of footsteps.
Above Mujtaba’s installation, a twisting, almost serpentine structure was suspended in mid-air. Assembled piece by piece, the wooden structure by Aakif Suri brought to mind the skeletal form of the human spine. Visible from all the central windows of the building, the structure was composed of carefully crafted and polished pieces that recalled the spindles and knobs of wooden furniture. In the middle of a courtyard that led to various staircases, this sculpture served as a metaphor for Fakir Khana itself, which is the cultural backbone of Lahore, holding centuries of its history together.
If Suri’s sculpture was the backbone, Ali Kazim’s was quite literally the heart. Encased in a delicate glass box on a wooden pedestal was a dark stone boulder. On closer inspection, a myriad of veins and arteries could be seen running across this structure, giving it the appearance of a human heart. In the dim light of the room, it seemed to pulsate and throb with life. In reality, it was simply a terracotta sculpture, created with magnificent sensitivity, finesse and attention to detail. It seemed perhaps to be the heart of the museum itself, weathered yet so alive, evoking a sense of belonging to something older and far greater than oneself.
Across from this room, above a narrow flight of old stairs, garbled music in an unfamiliar tongue could be heard. On the very top of the stairs, one could turn around to identify the source of the sound as a huge, gilded, golden frame around a blank white canvas. “Throughout history, we have made an effort to preserve the tangible, such as paintings and text based forms,” explained the artist Saud Baloch. The sound, it turned out, was a snippet of Balochi folk music. “The gold frame is my attempt to glorify this rarely preserved facet of art, culture and history: music.” Baloch’s work was a success. Though blank and viewable from only across a stairway, it captured the essence of what it means to be a part of an ever disappearing history. Across the room, on a red brick wall, hung an Irfan Hasan portrait, recognisable immediately from his signature style of a flawlessly painted head, the eyes intense and the head covered. In this case, it was the portrait of the artist Saud Baloch, and hence a wonderful dialogue was created, where Baloch was attempting to immortalise the history of his region, while Irfan was immortalising the artist himself. Both layers were bestowed further value through the text and sound based projection created by Mohsin Shafi, who questioned the role and survival of the artist in history. Words flashed on the mottled wooden ceiling, one after the other. “Not all art will go down in history, you will be forgotten.” In the background, the discordant buzzing of flies played in a loop, creating a jarring sense of decay. Is the act of creating art just a desperate struggle against the transience of life?
Suleman Khilji’s remarkable body of work posed a similar question. Nestled in a dark room, one work consisted of a cinderblock typically found on construction sites. Affixed to a tripod and lit from behind to reveal a small landscape in pencil and ink visible from its two holes, the structure evoked the idea of looking into a futuristic robot’s mind. The landscape was sensitive, transient, and being eaten whole by concrete. Khilji’s love for fleeting moments of beauty was apparent, as was his begrudging fascination with man-made structures that are consuming the natural world.
Scattered throughout the rooms, corridors and balconies, works by renowned artists mingled with the museum’s own antiquities and art, creating a strong sense of past and present seeping into one another to redefine history. Other artists included Aamir Habib, Affan Baghpati, Ahmed Faizan Naveed, Aisha Abid Hussain, Ali Baba, Farida Batool, Hurmat & Rabbya, Maha Ahmed, MamoonaRiaz, Noor Ali Chagani, Qurutulain Shams, Rehana Mangi, Saba Khan, Sana Durrani, Sana Kazi, Sophia Balagamwala and Wardha Shabbir.
The show was a resounding success, and for good reason. Art salvaged from the past and art created in the present had been woven together to ask a genuine question: in attempting to create, are we adding value to what already exists or writing over it?
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