Paradise is found in the most unlikely places. As Salima Hashmi began her lecture on Pakistan, she set out to break the stereotype of the militant lifestyle that the world sees as the terrorist’s breeding ground. Instead, she talked about the immense resource of culture that remains hidden from the rest of the world, using modern art from Pakistan as her rich, diverse medium.
Salima Hashmi is a Pakistani artist, writer, painter and a anti-nuclear weapons activist, one of the few to openly condemn the India-Pakistan nuclear programme in 1998. The daughter of one Pakistan’s most celebrated poets, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Hashmi also served as the head of the National College of Arts, Lahore, for four years, having taught there over three decades.
“Contemporary art in Pakistan brings real issues to light”, she explained. It is the voice of the oppressed and the downtrodden, a reflection of the true resilience (and fragility) of a nation embedded in suffering and turmoil, where bloodshed and upheaval are never met with surprise, just resignation. When Malcolm Hutcheson, a Scotsman by blood and a Pakistani at heart, recovered the works of street photographers, a universe was unearthed. “Street photographers have disappeared off the streets of Lahore, but Hutcheson bought the old negatives, developed them, sold the photographs and gave the proceeds to the families”, she explained.
‘Blessings Upon the Land of My Love’ is a beautiful installation by artist and miniature painter Imran Qureshi. It appears to be a blood-spattered courtyard, which, on closer look, is a stunning series of red flower paintings. “The sea of blossoms is reminiscent of the bloodshed and the massacres that Lahore has seen”, said Hashmi. The installation represents an extraordinary paradox, one that sympathises with the barbarism human beings are capable of.
“Rashid ‘Rana’s Red Carpet’ is actually a series of photographs taken in a slaughterhouse in Pakistan”, said Hashmi, speaking of an old friend and former colleague. What looks like a lavish carpet is actually a series of gory photographs depicting dismembered goats. “When Rana was taking these photographs, Benazir Bhutto made her way to Karachi. Her arrival, the bloodbath that followed her and the goats at the slaughterhouse all became one in his mind”, she said. Bani Abidi brings out the constantly confrontational, often ridiculous discourse between India and Pakistan.
For a nation born out of a time when brothers slaughtered each other, homes left behind and lives destroyed, will peace remain forever elusive? In the words of Faiz, should we seek another God?