Many a time I have walked through the breezy aisles of the red-brick structure that is the School of Visual Arts and Design at Beaconhouse National University’s Tarogil campus - first getting to know the campus and its communities as visiting faculty in the school of Liberal Arts, and later as visiting faculty in the school of Visual Arts. However, aside from my interaction with first-year Visual Arts students I had previously not been exposed to the working methods or thought processes of students of the graduating class, who presented their thesis to the public in late April of this year.
A working method or style of art ought not to be understood merely as what the students chose to show as their thesis projects, but rather as the sum total of conversations had over the four-year university period, research, collective and personal education and elucidation, discussion, disagreement and most importantly, co-learning. Such are the elements that the university setting and its method of the “crit” (critique by peers) provide. These elements come together to allow the one mind to create a particular art work or art object (the final product). The “crit” (a platform for peer feedback), it must be noted, was a seminal model of art education practised at the famous CalArts (LA, U.S.) as early as the 1970s, as Sara Thornton writes in the book, Seven Days in the Art World.
Latifa Attai
A return to the idea of what artists (in this case, student-artists) make, but also to what they think, is most important. A precocious Waleed Zafar of the graduating class explains to me the influence of contemporary media artist Walid Raad. Last year, Moonis Ahmad also cited Walid Raad as an influence. Since then, Moonis has gone on to exhibit locally and to pursue graduate studies abroad on his work. But it is not only the exposure to an internationally lauded artist that influences these students. Waleed cites Risham Syed, Aisha Abid and Rabeya Jalil as faculty members who have guided him, and elucidated on themes in art history, as well as the contemporary. These are all professors at the university and working artists in their own right. Waleed uses techniques of erasure to create what we might call a leveling of the social sphere on the pictorial space. Using a personal archive of photographs from his grandfather’s collection, he isolates each figure in a photo and then comes up with rearrangements for the figures, as they are re-inserted into the same photographic space. What is the purpose of doing so? We can certainly ask the artist, but a possible answer is that the aim was to create a new set of relations within the “historic” photograph that begin to emerge for the viewing audience.
The “crit” (a platform for peer feedback) was a seminal model of art education practised at the famous CalArts (LA, U.S.) as early as the 1970s
What are the building blocks of visual language that these budding young artists picked up on? Toys were certainly a theme (dirty toys, and puppets as toys, picked up in Fine Arts and in Visual Communication and Design), symbols of the estrangement of the everyday: as witnessed in the work of photography student Sana Ullah, whose mundane bus trips from Raiwind to central Lahore found some highly charged moments, that were familiar but certainly not cliched. There was Hafsa Zahid, whose singular focus and obsession with animal bones must be taken seriously, for it took her a good two years only to collect these skeletal bodies which were then cleaned, stacked, displayed, arranged and contorted into multifarious configurations. With a dedicated tenacity, she exposes and exorcises the meat eater within.
What do I mean by dirty toys? The correct term would be stuffed toys, perhaps. We see them in the city perched on carts by the dozens, in Gulberg, around Auriga Plaza, near the Mayo Hospital landa bazaar (flea market) and in many other places. They litter as eyesore, but beckon as child’s play. Abdulaziz Hazara is mature student who had already trained in miniature in Kabul prior to enrolling at BNU. His move to Lahore marked a shift in his practice, from traditional to media-based work. One work that the artist chose to show was an intriguing installation of stuffed toys placed in a cascading arrangement, the toys stand in as proxy for the Afghan peoples and refugees - the displaced people - the secondhand toys making their way into Lahore’s city streets. What meandering paths do they take to get to their final destination? A separate video series shot in Gulberg brings a new sensibility of the visual into environs that Lahoris see around them every day: “I went early in the morning to shoot these scenes. The [neighbourhood] children would appear out of somewhere, all eager to partake.” At first sight, assuming Abdulaziz to be Chinese, the local communities were happy to engage with him and his camera equipment. But upon learning of his Afghan roots the dynamics of the relations would often shift - a poignant reality of Abdulaziz’s life, and also of ours. The artist plans to continue on a long-form film when he returns to his native Kabul, and I for one am very excited to see where this artist progresses. He is sure to be a favourite in the coming years.
Mohsin Taasha’s work is aesthetically very beautiful – working with the mediums of silver leaf, watercolour and wasli, one of the works incorporates the childlike and the graphic novel along with silver leaf. The work references the ingrained violence in Afghanistan, and how even a child’s comic is not spared imagery of guns, soldiers and violence. In his work there is the inclusion of the self-portrait also: a practice aiming to “represent an identity that lacks identity.” If you’re reading this article and would like to purchase something for your house, Mohsin would be your man, but alas at the time of writing this article his work was already sold out! However, market and price should not be understood as the only indicator of achievement. After all, the brief overview already presented above of the various types of budding artists serves to stress that BNU allows room for the growth of much artistic diversity.
Latifa Zafar works on themes similar to those of Mohsin Taasha. In one series she presents understated work where a beautiful needlepoint configuration perforates each skin of a small self portrait. Here needlepoint pictures become “not images, but words of a symbolic language.” Another series imbues tiny self portraits with bursts of colour. Both series indicate a desire for expression out of anonymity, a certain kind of exclusion that is experienced by a woman.
Asfandyar Alam’s project spreads across three rooms that recreate memory
Farsam Sheikh and Eeman Raja impressed visitors greatly - both dealing with the female body in a sense, yet their practices are fairly divergent from one another. For the 50-piece installation, What We Lost in Flowers, Farsam asked a woman to stitch for her the ambiguously-shaped “dolls” that were then stuffed with cotton fill. The bright patterns on the figures are what women find all around locally when shopping for loose fabric. The artist likes to wear such patterns herself too. There is definite play evident here, but the amorphous body has been the seed of various other co-related works by the artist. The central question for her has been to engage with the shape and size of a body, its social and performative implications and the codes of normativity that are broken many times over, in a performance setting or simply when presenting her viewers with these ambiguous figures that are neither flesh nor non-flesh, neither animal nor human.
The success of an art performance should not be based on the same criteria as an endurance training program. However Eeman Raja makes a mark, both through the raw footage of her content, and in the test of endurance that she inflicted upon herself, placing herself in confined situations for sessions ranging from eight hours to three days (with little food and nothing else, according to her) where she spent time in spaces ranging from the trunk of a car to a domestic room. These situations were being taped on surveillance camera the entire time and that is one of the final outcomes that we see in her video work. In the work she aims to chart the body-versus-mind dynamic, or body and mind in tandem. The building of layer upon layer does not attempt to do something that looks like art – its understatement actually allows it to flourish as art.
The methods of the projects presented by Farsam and Eeman may be juxtaposed with the more overtly ambitious projects such as that of Asfandyar Alam. His project spreads across three rooms that recreate memory. Haunting and labyrinthine, the room installations are impressive in their layout. They work with the idea of memory: the memory of the objects, the memory of the artist and the memory of the viewer. Several objects in the (all-black) room also “speak” to the viewers - so, for instance, an audio track plays back when one is in close proximity to them. Kainat Altaf, the only student to work with mechanical installation and kinetics certainly aims for the grand, but perhaps more often ends up as derivative of past works by BNU faculty. Whatever one might say of the work itself, perhaps faculty ought to be flattered!
On the whole, it would appear that BNU is very much at the vanguard of the different and the new. The graduating class of 2017 did impress one indeed. The hard work, undeniable achievements and flair for spectacle of these budding artists made it all look seamless. Under the direction of Dean Rashid Rana, it would appear this school will catapult many Lahore-based art students right into the very frontiers of the art world, well equipped to push forward the borders.
Talal Faisal offers a perspective on what the budding young artists had to offer
A week-long show at the Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design at Beaconhouse National University, featuring works by an estimated 80 students, was concluded on the 28th of April 2017. The degree show displayed works from students from sub divisions of the School of Visual Arts and Design such as fine arts, visual communication design, textiles, fashion and jewellery.
In the presence of Vice Chancellor Shahid Kardar and the parents of graduating students, the Dean of the School of Visual Arts and Design, Mr. Rashid Rana, seemed visibly proud to present the exhibition of the institute’s eleventh such batch. In particular, he made mention of the diversity of the works, which was due in no small measure to the immensely varied backgrounds of students from across Asia.
Latifa Zafar Attai from Afghanistan dealt with portraiture as content by weaving on printed self portraits: embroidery serving here as not merely a tool for decoration but as a means for presenting truths that society refuses to see or hear. She thereby expresses the agony of being considered an outsider in one’s own motherland. My personal favourite amongst them all was a work consisting of numerous passport- sized photographs displayed in rows, the faces weaved by her in various colours of thread.
Rudabah Azam, a most exciting prospect, had displayed photographic prints of scenes from the urban landscape that she belongs to and then doodled abstract landscapes on to the images. Exploring the idea of exchange of dialogue and emotion - how thoughts are generated in our minds and then uttered or conveyed to the other in the form of words - Rudabah gives them form, incorporating audio references.
Neha Maqsood was concerned with the process of painting in itself, consisting of layers coming one after another, in a manner quite analogous to how ideas originate and are then worked upon mentally. She said of her work: “It’s an opportunity to experiment with surface preparation, text, colour variation, composition and paint application.” Moreover she amalgamated paintings with video projections, the former being a still image with a moving image on the layer above. Arguably, that in of itself is a dimension with lots of room for exploration.
Mohsin Taasha also from Afghanistan displayed print and miniature works inspired by the social and political injustice within society. Using unique symbols of expression such as the veiled figures in red, the artist of Hazara background sheds light on the lust for tribal power or the supremacy of a majority over minorities and the related atrocities as personally witnessed by him.
Areeba Malik, a graduate in jewellery design, came up with interesting, brightly coloured and softly textured jewellery pieces. She took the opportunity to hightly child dyslexia not as a disorder or defect but a struggle that some children deal with and overcome eventually. In a similar manner, the viewer also takes time to register and then engage with the designs.
Graduate in Visual Communication Design Azeem Tiwana’s thesis was an attempt to create awareness about emotional and sexual child abuse. He believes educating parents and children regarding such horrors is imperative.
Eisha Liaqat, 22, a textile designer graduating this year from the School of Visual Arts and Design, used imagery from her ancestral home to weave a narrative of decomposition, portraying the idea of decay and the phenomenon of deterioration that exists not just in our very lives but also in the tangible objects and materials around us. To put it in her words, “The doors, the windows and the walls: everything speaks a unique language, thus fusing time and memories together.”
