During an insightful talk by Salima Hashmi and Shahidul Alam, two popular archivists of South Asia, the art and photography lovers of the City were taken on a journey to contemporary Pakistan and Bangladesh at the National Gallery of Modern Art recently.
Salima, who happens to be Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's eldest daughter, is an artist, curator and also the dean of the School of Visual Arts and Design at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.
Her talk, titled 'Sanctuary and Defiance: Contemporary art from Pakistan' focussed on the shocking but brilliant art and creative tolerance that emerges from her country, despite the state hostility.
From the ink-jet prints of Malcolm Hutchenson to Rashid Rana's 'Red Carpet', which includes photographs inside a slaughterhouse; from Faiza Butt's portrait of what goes on inside a suicide bomber's mind to Naiza Khan's description of the female form, Hashmi transported the audience to the darkest corners of a country unknown.
"Militarisation of society and the fragility of the human body engage young artists today. Some of it may be tongue-in-cheek while at other times, it's a compelling narrative," explains Hashmi.
"There's a lot of complexity in the labels that we use and what we call the 'war on terror'," she adds, with a wry smile. Interestingly, she refrained from showing any of her own works and played a video of Coke Studio Pakistan's Mori Araj Suno, which she translated to English to help her conclude her lecture.
The second speaker of the evening was Shahidul Alam, a popular photo-activist from Dhaka.
Unlike Hashmi, he took the audience through the notion of social realism and the changing role of the camera in his country, using photographs he himself clicked over the years.
In his talk, titled 'My journey as a witness: An insight into the evolution of contemporary photography', he primarily spoke of the salon movement of photography, the not so well-known Naxalite movement and of the 1988 Bangladesh floods.
"There was a time when even photojournalists looked at themselves as illustrators and not in an interventionist's role. Most of the work was commissioned or taken because something was pretty," recalls Alam.
"One day, we decided to take on an activist's role because we were blatantly looking at a social movement, into which we were embedded."
He showed some of the photographs by his contemporaries as well and concluded by saying "A new visual vocabulary is developing. We have gone from salon photography to social realism to documentary photography to what is happening now where there are constructed images and a new space is being explored."
The audience comprised of artists, curators, musicians and people from various other creative fields.
There is very little one knows about art outside our own country and it is important for us to know it.
Other than international shows, it's not often that we get to see for ourselves that dictatorship and military rule hasn't curbed art in these places. What they're doing is very important," says Vasudev, a local artist who was present at the talk.