Sept 8, 2009: Pakistan's Art

[xoxoxoBruce]

I was surprised to learn, Pakistan has, and has had from it's inception, a thriving art community... and since the '80s a contemporary art community.

“Hanging Fire,” which opens next Thursday, is the first major survey of contemporary art from Pakistan to be presented by an American museum. And for many artists and curators who have long worked in relative obscurity in Pakistan’s contemporary art world — one that has been thriving since the 1980s despite and perhaps in some ways because of the country’s instability — it is a highly anticipated event.

Ms. Abbas, who has given the traditionally human female face of the steed some of her own features, imagines it as a kind of life-size toy, one she has climbed up on and ridden herself, though doing so too publicly in Pakistan could court dangerous misinterpretations. “You have to be careful,” she said. “The smallest things can end up being big things — you never know. And the big things no one seems to notice.”

Though her work has dealt openly with sexual imagery and has been displayed cautiously within Pakistan — like much other contemporary work there — in private showings at galleries, she said that her reasons for sometimes pulling back from making work that might be too confrontational are mostly personal. “There are things I have thought of doing and did not do, in part because I didn’t want to offend my parents,” she said.

On a lighter note...

Ms. Mulji’s strangely stranded water buffalo (the one here, in an unanticipated conceptual twist, is American, stuffed by a taxidermist in Rhinbeck, N.Y., because of toxicity concerns about the original in Pakistan) grew out of the artist’s exploration of the strangeness of rampant development in a mostly rural, underdeveloped nation.

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