Be it disturbing performance art in New York or religious bigotry on the streets of Lahore, nothing can dampen the festive season for him. Fayes T Kantwala spreads some Christmas cheer
I just got back from an art gallery where they were throwing a small party to mark the closing of their most recent show. I love closings. Like divorce parties, they inject joy and celebration into what would otherwise be a semi-morose event. And really, when is a little celebration not a great thing? The show was a series of grotesque paintings (gallery’s words, not mine), the kind where paint was squeezed straight from the tube onto the canvas in turd-esque shapes. The effect made the paintings look like pictures of skin diseases you might see in medical journals - were you the kind of person who willfully looked at medical journals. A friend had invited me to this but hadn’t shown up herself yet, and I was surrounded by tall and vaguely vengeful-looking strangers for the most part. This is a good thing, I reminded myself. I have been actively going to places where I don’t know people, in an effort to broaden my circle - and the great advantage of not being in Lahore is that you can strike up a conversation with a stranger at a party and not be thought of as completely mad.
“Do you like the work?” I asked a statuesque woman with dreadlocks
“The work doesn’t ask to be liked,” she responded and stared off into the middle-distance in the way that people think makes them look both thin and intelligent.
“Good thing too,” I chortled. “Looks like absolute vomit doesn’t it?”
She looked at me as if I had thrown coffee down her blouse. “I feel uncomfortable,” she said and stalked off.
I was happy to see that there was a giant rally of people dressed as St. Nick in Lahore
I stayed around for about twenty more minutes, chatting to less combative people until the gallery light turned down and a performance piece called “Santa births a biracial baby” began. I won’t go into vivid details (you’re welcome) but it involved several performers squeezing themselves through a suggestive tear in a giant canvas cloth while dressed as Santa’s elves lathered in Vaseline. Everyone was watching the “birthing ritual” through furrowed brows, as if the most important thing in the world were happening at that very moment. The serious, considered look is how most people react when they see performance art, usually because I think jeering loudly is frowned upon in the art world. Sometimes it gets ridiculous. Consider: At a busy art fair earlier this month, several dozen people looked on as a deranged Korean woman stabbed three people with a small sharp razor and it wasn’t until ten minutes into it - when one of the victims was crawling along a bloodied floor asking for help from the security agent - that people realised this wasn’t an impromptu performance piece by the hot new Asian artist.
After the twelfth elf had disengaged from the canvas tear and writhed on the floor for a few minutes while throwing glitter everywhere, the gallery director thanked the artist for her searing vision, and the woman with dreadlocks took a bow. I thought it best to make a hasty escape.
I won’t let a neo-natal massacre of my image of Santa dampen my Christmas spirit, though. I am all about being festive this season. Christmas trees are springing up and people are singing carols on the street corners. The shop windows are covered in tinsel and fake snow and if you stick around any street corner late enough, you are bound to see a man in a Santa Claus suit running away from crying toddlers. Part of me is nostalgic for the weddings and parties that are happening in Pakistan right now, but then I get a whiff of eggnog and sanity prevails. I was happy to see, speaking of Santa, that there was a giant rally of people dressed as St. Nick in Lahore. The rally was meant to bring attention to the holiday in Pakistan (where, like in Narnia, some plot for it to be always winter but never Christmas) in an effort to support our beleaguered minorities.
Bigotry on the streets of Lahore - targeting Ahmadis
Yay, I say. It makes a lovely change from the other rallies that have been carried out to keep Ahmadis out of Lahore’s tech mall, Hafeez Center. Police had previously taken down notices outside shop windows that had banned Ahmedis from entering since it was seen – rightfully - as discriminatory hate speech. Sure enough, the Main Boulevard was shut off while a large bearded crowd protested against the police, demanding their right to be complete douchebags. You want to know what will shut up most of the men in that crowd? Crack down on their porn. For all their religious, pious indignation at possibly having to meet an Ahmedi, most of Hafeez Center (as any Lahori knows) is choc-a-block full of porn movies. Attack the stash of the shopkeepers’ “blue movies” and I assure you, that rally would be a lot thinner.
But, as I said, let us not dwell on bad news. Instead let’s celebrate what is amazing among us all. In that spirit, I have a little holiday present for you. Some of you may have heard of the singer/songwriter Taimoor Salahuddin a.k.a. Mooroo. I’ve been a big fan of his work – as, I’m sure, have many of you. Now he just released what I think it the most ambitious stop-motion animation video Pakistan has ever produced and it’s definitely one of the best videos I have seen, from anywhere. A video for his latest song “Mariam”, it is one the most creative art pieces (I use the term deliberately) I have seen in ages and should be put in a gallery somewhere. I usually don’t wax lyrical about music videos, but this is so much more than that. I really encourage all of you to google and watch it now, and make your day a little brighter. The video is quirky, original, beautiful and thoughtful - and makes me feel all kinds of warm inside. I assure you, it beats seeing bi-racial Santa births any day.
