The Armory Show is a major annual New York City art gathering. The Armory Show was started 23 years ago by young art dealers and it is the largest art fair in New York. It has seen ups and downs and competition from other initiatives like the Frieze Art Fair. Most such art shows generally display works by Western artists or those based in the West. However, the Armory Show is over the years trying to encourage work by artists from other parts of the world.
This year’s Armory Show held in March was curated on different themes or zones. More than 200 galleries from almost 30 countries displayed works from their artists. The “Focus” section had works from 12 diverse artists looking at how they link their present surroundings with their historical context. The “Presents” section had galleries from South Africa, UAE, South Africa and elsewhere. In addition, the “Platform” section presented performance, installation and site-specific work.
Ai Weiwei - 'Niao shen long shou shen'
The curator for the Platform section, Eric Shiner, tried to “present a series of incidents that start to change our relations with the art fair” – or to break the monotony of art fairs. The major display under the platform was in the middle of two of the first big halls of New York’s Pier 94, the installation by famous artist Yayoi Kusama, “Guide to the new world”. Her work took the form of several polka dot mushroom-like sculptures. Another was a giant Chinese bird by Ai Weiwei hanging from the roof of the Pier.
During the show, I particularly looked for work by Pakistani or Pakistani-origin artists and was delighted to see works by Shahzia Sikander, Imran Qureshi, Anila Qayyum, Rashid Arain and Amna Asghar amongst others.
The entrance to the show brought a most pleasant surprise with Shahzia Sikander's two works prominently and strategically displayed by New York's Sean Kelly Gallery
Imran Qureshi’s work was displayed by Galerie Thaddaeus. His five-foot acrylic painting, “This Leprous Brightness”, showed his signature red tones over gold leaf – giving the haunting effect of deep red blood stains. This series from Imran has a European classical look with rich red and gold but the overall composition is true to his miniature origin.
The entrance to the show brought a most pleasant surprise with Shahzia Sikander’s two works prominently and strategically displayed by New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery. The first was a high-definition animation “Disruption as Rapture” which she had originally produced for the South Asia Section of the Philadelphia Museum. The animation is based on a seventeenth-century Subcontinental love poem. The interplay of colours, especially the arrival of spring and the reunion of lovers in the installation, merges into a maze and makes for ecstatic viewing. The second work “Night Flight” had Shahzia’s calligraphic flowing lines evolve into birds in black and red: flying in a grid but emerging from a circular pattern. The Night Flight series reminds one of Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s fusion song “Night song” done with Michael Brooks in 1996.
Shahzia Sikander - 'Night Flight' (2015-2016)
Anila Qayyum Agha’s installation projecting geometric shadows from a finely cut cube created a powerful impact in the show, along with her other works. Images of her installations have been widely seen in print and social media and always caught my eye. Although the limited booth space of Aicon Gallery was not enough to experience the true impact of shadows projected, even then the available space pointed at the potential of installation when displayed in appropriate space. It widely captured attention of all visitors. Agha’s work with Islamic geometric patterns reinforces how tradition can be successfully and extensively drawn upon in contemporary art.
Aicon had also displayed the work of Rasheed Araeen, one of the leading senior modern Pakistani artists settled in England. His works from the 1960s and 1970s were displayed, showing the modern experimentation with figures and colours that was done by his generation of artists.
Imran Qureshi - 'This Leprous Brightness' - 2015 - Acrylic paint and gold leaf on canvas - 60 x 60 inches
Work by Amna Asghar, a young Pakistani American artist from Detroit was amongst the twelve artists in the “Focus” section. Her installation explored her Pakistani roots and was representative of how a US-born Pakistani-origin immigrant generation interprets some of traditional materials like vernacular newspapers and magazines, which their parents hold on to as a strong link with their soil. Amna took random pages from Urdu language digests – which were part of her parents’ collection or reading material – and designed multi-panel paintings on canvas-sized prints. Asghar’s work is generally done in a mixture of screen printing, airbrush and acrylic paint.
With these images she has created a cultural vocabulary of her own. It was interesting to see a young Pakistani-origin artist exploring her heritage and connections through objects found in a typical immigrant household. Amna’s work was recently displayed at New York’s Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery. Her work is generally done in a mixture of screen printing, airbrush and acrylic paint.
Other artists with links to Pakistan included British Shezad Dawood and Idris Khan. Dawood’s work on vintage textile had geometric lines in acrylic.
Blank Gallery from Cape Town showcased work by South African artist Turiya Magadlela, who works with coloured stockings to comment on South Africa’s history of race and gender issues. Parisian gallery Thomas Pogge, which looks into works of artists with a political consciousness, had a series of photographs by Sophie Ristelhueber capturing war and destruction – as wounded landscape without human beings in it. The photos from Lebanon and Iraq were a particularly stark reminder of how landscape is destroyed by wars. Sophie was criticised in the 1980s because her photographs did not have humans as subjects to show the destructive power of wars, but instead chose to demonstrate the same through landscapes. That was an unorthodox thing to do, back then.
The many big names displayed by different galleries included Bosco Sodi’s pieces in light red baked clay splashed on canvas, Kusama, Robert Rauschenberg, Anish Kapoor and Ai Weiwei amongst others.
The writer can be reached at smt2104@caa.columbia.edu
