Rabea Murtaza
The artists in Urban Myths & Modern Fables, trained in various traditions, including miniature painting and calligraphy, mercilessly fracture the forms available to them, ripping visual references out of their situated,local, global, consumerist and political meanings, splintering them and putting them back together into new,
provisional and contingent visual languages. The artists manufacture fantastical imaginary landscapes spliced
together out of far-flung skies and land, rearrange diasporic bodies into new mythic arrangements of play and subversion, and fragment and juxtapose familiar words and political aesthetics to jarring effect, commenting pointedly on the contemporary world.
The works emerge from specific choices along precisely calculated, multiple registers of difference in relation
to tradition, but also in relation to contemporary mini-ecosystems of aesthetic practice, geographically
situated slang, cultural idiom, visual motifs and media images; the artists know many places. The works in this
exhibition do not fetishize or romanticize cultural hybridity and fractured diasporic subjectivity. Some
reconstruct traditional forms, such as miniature painting, into specimen boxes holding paintings of bugs, or
holographic animations; some literally break words apart and write them into the optical patterns favoured by
Pakistani truck drivers and poster-makers — and as such, the pieces carry out a kind of cultural splicing that
comes from somewhere, has a history, and therefore a momentum that can be carried into the here and now
of today’s world, in the many places these diasporic artists arrive from and find themselves in: Canada,
Pakistan, India, the U.S., Australia, Germany. As a result, unpacking the pieces requires a kind of tangible,
practical cross-cultural education in multiple worldviews, slangs, motifs and cultural idioms.
Hamra Abbas’s joyous, childlike and yet conceptually sophisticated pop miniature Battle Scenes (2006) digitally
arranges contemporary bodies of different ages, backgrounds and genders into the famous composition of
two battle scenes from the Mughal miniature The Akbarnama. Recruited to pose in relation to invisible ancient
horses and arrows while hanging out in London’s Hyde Park, these irreducibly idiosyncratic citizens at rest
represent a pluralistic politics of the body profoundly counter to that connoted by the original sea of
interchangeable young male bodies centrally organized through violence in service of a Muslim imperial
master. The realism of photography (capturing many real bodies) replaces the realism of miniature painting
(depicting one type of body) in homage to the original. This homage simultaneously unravels a whole array of
ancient and modern fables of Muslim bodies that collide at ironic political intersections. Whose inner eyes
rearrange contemporary brown, black and white bodies at rest and play in parks into characters from a mythic
battle scene?
Pakistani artist Naeem Rana’s eye-popping digital geometrical abstractions burst from the page like flashing,
vibrating two-ton Pakistani trucks, blaring their content with noise and jangle, and featuring the same garish
palette of oranges, reds and greens, as well as cut-outs of weaponry juxtaposed against sexy silhouettes of
women’s bodies. Rana’s Urdu calligraphy, however, slyly blended and shaded into and within the visual
elements familiar from trucks, political propaganda and Lollywood posters, plays tricks both in Urdu and in
English translation.
In Jwani (2006), the text, cut off against a woman’s arched body silhouetted in geometric florals, possibly
reads Be-Iman Jawani, literally translating to Faith-less Youth, with the “Be-,” or “-less,” barely visible, teasingly
ambiguous. “Be-Iman” has two potential meanings in Urdu: dishonest, untrustworthy and unscrupulous, or
alternatively faithless, without religion, infidel, without conscience, unprincipled.[1] The scraps of text are
faithless and deceptive, both visually and in translation. In satisfaction guaranteed (2006), the Urdu text differs
radically from the translation provided by Rana: from “barai mushkil/do adad jet fighter/aek adad neak-surat
dosheeza” (“for every difficulty/two counts jet fighters/one count pure-faced virgin”), we arrive at Rana’s
translation: “for any solution/two jet fighters/one good-looking Sheila”; dosheeza, the Pakistani slang for
“virgin,” might sound like “Sheila,” the Aussie slang equivalent of “chick,” but they are different words,
creating a single image with bifurcated meaning depending not only on the linguistic background of the
viewer, but also on the viewer’s familiarity with both Pakistani and Aussie slang. The Urdu characters hook
and sling themselves over the breast, face and pubic area of Sheila/the virgin’s silhouette; the irony is that the
Urdu text in these works, when viewed in Western metropolises by non-Urdu speakers, is often assumed, out
of a casual Orientalism, to be sacred text. In other works, Rana incorporates collages of colonial as well as
contemporary images of war — smiling Tony Blairs, gas masks and white men on carts being pulled by
natives. The viewer inserts herself into the multiple juxtapositions of colour, pattern, text, shadow, colonizer,
colonized, Urdu and English; in so doing, she inhabits multiple subjectivities that become a multimodal
standpoint from which to engage with the political messages in the many forms of contemporary media
around the globe.
Henna Nadeem’s work Snow Melt (2000) is saturated with many places, enchanting space in a way that evokes
village fables of particular trees, rocks or bodies of water where the veil thins between the human world and
the alternative contemporaneous universe of djinns. Nadeem evokes these village fables using modern touristy,
consumerist images of African, American and Australian landscapes culled from magazines, merging wildly
varied places and their stories into imaginary diasporic landscapes. These landscapes are sites of radically
other, yet co-existing, worlds of difference and identity that move and swirl into one another, in the same
place, a hopeful and yet fragile vision of shared space.
Fantastical visions of hope, multi-nodal practices of reading media, acid-bath analyses, tongue-in-cheek
critical invocations of tradition, sly mistranslations and juxtapositions — the works by these diasporic artists
activate historically and locally intersecting forms of ethical, cultural and political engagement. Polyvalent and
activated along multiple axes of culturally mediated historical time, the pieces are not hermetic; they are meant
to be understood. The hooks embedded throughout these works may catch differently onto their many and
diverse viewers, from Sydney to Toronto; these scattered moments of meaning engender dynamic and
differentiated practices of interpretation, critical to historically situated ethical praxes, necessary in a complex
world of many singular realities.
Notes
1. Thanks to Shafique Virani and Usamah Ansari for translation. |
