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dialogue All
that Jazz review Pattern
of abstractions
dialogue The government has
time and again been advised by the Pakistani Taliban to become serious if it
wanted to hold peace talks with them. Almost the same advice has
come from the government side, which wanted a positive response to its offer
of peace talks to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). From their statements, it
seems both sides doubt each other’s seriousness about the proposed peace
talks. The trust needed to start the dialogue is missing and they have a
long way to go before the formal talks could begin. And in a worst case
scenario, the talks may not even commence in the near future due to a host
of factors. One such factor was the
first official visit of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to the United States.
Five months after the May 13 general election that his party, Pakistan
Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), managed to win, the Prime Minister visited
Washington for keenly awaited talks with President Barack Obama, Vice
President Joe Biden and Foreign Secretary John Kerry. As Nawaz Sharif
disclosed after meeting Obama, he sought US support for his government’s
planned peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban and got assurances to this
end. The kind of assurances he
received were unclear as both sides refrained from publicly discussing
certain issues. It would be a major departure from the hitherto known US
policy if it has promised help to Pakistan as Nawaz Sharif claimed in
pursuing the peace process with Pakistani Taliban. Until now, the US has
been opposed to peace agreements between the Pakistan government and
Pakistani militants. In particular, the US publicly and bitterly opposed the
September 2006 peace accord between the military and the militants in North
Waziristan. On other occasions, it has
put pressure on the Pakistan government not to hold peace talks with the
militants and has even carried out drone strikes against high-profile
Pakistani Taliban commanders or assets to foil any such attempt. One
assurance that Nawaz Sharif would have sought from the Obama administration
is halting, even if temporarily, its drone attacks. It would help if the US
halted the drone strikes by the CIA in Pakistan’s Federally Administered
Tribal Areas (Fata) as the militants have made this a condition for holding
peace talks with the government. Even if the peace talks
started, a drone strike by the US against the militants could cause
immediate disruption of the process and trigger retaliatory attacks,
including suicide bombings, by one of the numerous militant groups. It is unlikely that the US
would have given any assurance of ending the drone attacks because it is
convinced that these strikes are effective and, to quote an American
official, ‘the best game in town’ in hunting down fighters belonging to
al-Qaeda and its allied groups in largely difficult and inaccessible Fata
terrain, particularly North Waziristan and the adjoining South Waziristan.
Besides, the US has rejected accusations by credible organisations such as
the Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that the missiles strikes
by the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) amounted to extra-judicial killings and
violated international law. The US would want to
retain the right to use the armed drones not only in Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Yemen and Somalia, but also in future conflicts and acceding to
Islamabad’s demand to end its drone programme would prompt other countries
and organisations to seek a halt to the missile attacks by the unmanned
aircraft. However, the drone programme could be temporarily halted to let
the Pakistan government explore the possibility of a peace agreement with
the Pakistani militants provided Islamabad came up with a counter-terrorism
plan and took action against the al-Qaeda-linked groups, including the
Haqqani network, in the two Waziristans, made a determined attempt to
prevent cross-border infiltration by the militants and denied the use of its
territory to those plotting attacks against the US and its allies. This is going to be a tall
order and, therefore, unimplementable. In the unlikely scenario
of the US helping Pakistan in its peace talks with its homegrown militants,
Washington in return would want Pakistan to play a more active role in
persuading the Afghan Taliban to first resume peace talks with the US and
then agree to do so with the Afghan government. Pakistan has repeatedly
promised to make every effort towards this end, but the Mulla Mohammad
Omar-led Afghan Taliban have refused to budge from their stated position of
not recognising the government of President Hamid Karzai and refusing to
enter into dialogue with it. There has to be a quid pro quo as making peace
with the militants in Pakistan alone won’t serve the US interest because
in such a case the Pakistani Taliban and jihadis would be freed up from
fighting against Pakistan’s security forces and would cross over to
Afghanistan to join the Afghan Taliban and fight against the US-led Nato and
Afghan forces. It needs mentioning that
the issue of the controversial drone strikes by the United States in
Pakistan’s tribal areas is being highlighted as never before. The Nawaz
Sharif government in keeping with the PML-N promise during the election
campaign has raised the issue at every forum and put pressure on the US to
take note of it. The international human rights organisations and sections
of the media too have entered the debate and spoken out against the drone
strikes. There have even been suggestions that the US officials involved in
these attacks could be prosecuted for war crimes. The past is also haunting
Pakistan following revelations that previous governments in the country and
both civil and military leadership may have endorsed the US drone attacks
while publicly criticising the strikes. The peace talks in Pakistan
haven’t started yet, but the drone attacks have become the most talked
about issue.
All
that Jazz One had heard of
the Sachal Studios and the music that it had released on CDs, the net,
television channels, and through vast media coverage, especially since last
year when its performance coincided with the London Cultural Festival in the
run up to the Olympics. However, it was only last week that the Sachal Jazz
Orchestra gave its first live performance in Pakistan at the Alhamra in
Lahore. One remembers its CD
releases of Mian Sheheryar’s kafi and folk numbers composed and sung by
him, ‘Lahore Ke Rung- Hari key Sung’, the rendition of raags by Ustad
Fateh Ali Khan Hyderabadi, the pristine numbers of Reshman, Mehnaz’s songs
composed by Wazir Afzal and Qadir Shaggan and the superb vocal performance
by Ustad Nazar Hussain. It was clear that it wanted to do something that was
different from the beaten track, the usual stuff that is either produced for
a very niche audience or is overtly commercial in intent. It appears that jazz which
has caught the attention of the Sachal Studios’ core team comprising Izzat
Majeed and Mushtaq Soofi is more abiding. Besides the personal liking and
the early exposure of the creative team to it, the other reason could also
be some essential similarities between our music and jazz. Given the history
of jazz, its underground existence and association with the ghettos, it has
survived primarily as an oral tradition. The oral transmission of intonation
and structure from one generation to the next has helped it to retain to a
very large degree the improvisational nature of the process of music making.
In our music too, due to very different reasons, the musical knowledge has
been transferred orally from one generation to the next “seena ba seena”,
and the true essence of creativity lies in its improvisational nature. Jazz intonation is
different from ours as it does not rely so much on the subtle uses of the
microtones but it avoids the tempered scale of the Western classical
tradition and follows like our music the natural scale which is not
mathematically determined. These days it is
fashionable to fuse one musical tradition with another. Though fusion had
been taking place under different names all these centuries, now with the
pace accelerating, it has become a kind of a genre in itself. World Music is
a good reflection of that accelerated rate of coming together where the
compositions originated in one culture are usually played on the instruments
of another culture or instruments that have currently come into the ambit of
music production like computer generated sounds. One way of doing so which
has been mainly followed by Sachal Studios is to play the familiar and
well-known compositions or numbers with a different orchestral arrangement
and instruments mostly of local origin. It has been playing the jazz
standards and in doing so bringing about a difference of flavour to
something totally original. The numbers played at the
concert were Stevie Wonders’s ‘You Got it Bad Girl’, Roger &
Hammerstein’s ‘My Favourite Things’, Henry Mancini’s ‘Pink Panther
Theme’, Duke Ellington’s ‘Limbo Jazz’, Edu Lobo’s ‘Ponteio’,
Marcos Valle’s ‘OS Grilos’ and Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’. The local numbers were
‘nahar wale pul tey bula key’, a film song originally composed by Salim
Iqbal, ‘tere ishaq nachaya’ a Bulleh Shah Kafi composed by Wazir Afzal
and ‘pahari bossa nova’. Some of the most
outstanding musicians form the orchestra. Nijat Ali, the son of the late
Riaz Hussain, conducted the orchestra. Riaz Hussain was the original
conductor but after his untimely death the mantle has passed on to his son.
Ballu Khan on the tabla, Hidayat Khan on the sitar, Rafiq Ahmed Khan on the
naal, Najaf Ali on the dholak, Asad Ali on the guitar, Baqir Abbas on the
flute, Chand Ali on the bass, Ali Shahba on the percussion, violinists Altaf
Haider, Saleem Khan, Kalim Khan, Javaid Khan, Akbar Ali Noshay, Akbar Ali
Abbas, Mukhtar Hussain, Aqeel Anwar, on the cello Ghulam Hussain, Omar Daraz,
Ghulam Abbas, Gohar Ali, and Asif Ali on the chung are all part of the
orchestra. Usually Nafis Khan plays
the sitar but for this concert Hidayat Hussain Khan played this string
instrument. He is the son of the great Ustad Vilayat Khan. He travels around
the world spending more time in New York; he is now part of the orchestra.
It was a pleasure to listen to him for in a manner it was paying homage to
one of the greatest sitar maestros of twentieth century subcontinental
classical music. Sachal Studios of Lahore
credits itself for having taken Pakistan’s music all over the world. The
first jazz album topped the world’s music charts and the late, great Dave
Brubeck’s ‘‘Take Five’’ went viral and brought Pakistan to the
attention of music lovers globally. It is still growing on You Tube with
over 600,000 hits. After having played at the
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London last year, the Sachal Jazz Ensemble brought our
masters of music before the world. The Sachal Jazz Ensemble was invited to
perform at the prestigious Marciac Jazz Festival in France with the
collaboration of the master of jazz, Wynton Marsalis and his musicians. On
the third of August, the concert was broadcast on the internet and streamed
globally. It seems that Sachal
Studios with its state of the art equipment is dispelling the impression
that as a facility it is underutilised. With the passage of time, as
activity picks up, quality Pakistani music with contemporary sonic feel will
be created and introduced to the audience at home and abroad.
review Photography has
been breaking down barriers not only between mediums but also between art
and life itself. The difference between mere reportage or photojournalism
and photography intended as art lies in the art photographer’s more poetic
and insightful selection of subject, better cropping and composition, and
richer and more elegant printing. The photographers in the
recent exhibition entitled, ‘Who Am I To Blow Against The Wind’, held at
Satrang Gallery, Islamabad, Lali Khalid and Shalalae Jamil aren’t pulling
off a shocking expose. We’ve always known that photography could never be
entirely realistic because no map can ever equal the territory it charts. At
the end of the day, photography tells only half the story of the medium’s
perch between purveyor of reality and conduit for an artist’s
subjectivity. “I always thought of
photography as a naughty thing to do,” wrote Diane Arbus. “And when I
first did it I felt very perverse.” In photographing strangers without
their knowledge or consent, the photographers in this show deploy the
medium’s voyeuristic naughtiness much more literally than Arbus did. Khalid and Jamil are the
impassioned historians of love in the age of fluid sexuality, beauty,
glamour, violence, death, and masquerade. An uncanny attention and
attraction to the drama and the commonplace of life structure their
photographs. As they continue to take pictures of their friends, their
families and themselves, they begin to accumulate their histories, and
history itself emerges as an imperative that would govern their operation.
By capturing the past, they instinctively know that the record would
ultimately deliver a past. Out of the flux of
experience, they capture moments that cumulatively tell stories of love,
friendship, desire, and their aftermaths. Their camera freezes the comings
and goings of the social experience of desire: love and estrangement in
intimate relationships; moments of isolation, self-revelation, and
adoration; the presentation of the sexual self freed from the constraints of
biological destiny. Nor is theirs an abstract history. It is recounted
through the lives of people who are part of their lives, with whom they
dance to the music of time. In their work, the vastness of experience boils
down to remembered incidents: the flux or duration of life can be captured
in images of days and nights of familiar people. Although an individual
image may be devastating in its intensity and beauty, Khalid and Jamil, like
a novelist or filmmaker, think both of single images and of sequences of
linked images that form a narrative. A group of Shalalae
Jamil’s photographs are at first glance dismissible as mere snapshots. But
their informality and intimacy so engages Jamil that she retains their
aesthetic. These portraits and snapshots depict various family members who
constitute a ‘family’ for her. The snapshots slowly
reveal a transformation from unaware adolescence to self-conscious
adulthood: the photographer cuts her hair or let it grow, try on dresses and
shoes and make-up; and as she poses for the camera, she is the person she
dreams of becoming. Jamil’s world is one of self-definition in a
constructed, self-created space, recorded by constant picture taking.
Unburdened by traditional stereotyping, she reinvents herself, inspired by
the films and fashion magazines through which she learns about the visible
manifestation of desire. The self-contained
pleasure of the women, who appear in Jamil’s suite of photographs, is
devoid of the rhetoric often associated with feminism. Their gaze allows the
pleasure to emerge in the beauty of the colour, light, and space of the
settings and in the intimate expressions of the women with whom she has been
close enough to record. The sequence of Lali
Khalid’s self portraits is a sequel and necessary partner to the earlier
work, and it rearticulates her project: to make work that connects with
one’s life, to replace the abstraction and distance of the document with
an empathetic and frank confrontation of personal experience and emotions.
While achieving a new simplicity by eliminating a surfeit of competing
detail in a manner that recalls the stark compositions and restrained
formalism, Khalid’s photographs of herself, her husband and her child
nonetheless reek sensuality through their range of colour and light, which
is regulated to convey the varying degrees of passion, love, ecstasy, and
despair in this relationship. Though the titles of her
works seem purely descriptive, some of them convey shades of Khalid’s
fantasies and projection. The clichés stumbled upon by her predatory eye
are never boring; though hewing closely to the expected, life comes as a
titillating shock. What is striking about
these photos is Lali Khalid’s brutal self-examination. She presents
herself in pain and calm. In a later self-portrait, taken probably after her
maternity release from the hospital, natural light streaming in a window
symbolises the revisualisation of the world without the hyper intensity. In
subsequent images, the child lies on the bed, while Lali Khalid pulls the
veil over him like a tent, and generally makes a ruckus – anything to
avoid sleep. This glimpse of a child’s private mischievousness feels
refreshing and innocent when contrasted to the adult dramas. The insight, honesty, and
rawness of these works are touchstones for Lali Khalid and Shalalae Jamil, a
baseline for the evolution of their own seductive and forceful documentary
photographic sensibility. The beauty of their pictures comes from a grasp of
both formalism and the snapshot aesthetic, from an innate and shrewd
handling of light, and an appreciation of the rich, sensual, and
oversaturated colour noticed in offbeat places. But the ultimate power of
the pictures would come from the intensity of their relationships with their
subjects. They are portraitists, and in the obsessive act of making
diaristic photographs of themselves, they compile extended and serial
portraits of people whose shifting emotional realities they respect. They
would not reduce their images to caricature. Nor would their images be
veiled in euphemism or tasteful classicism. The meaning of their
pictures, seen repeatedly over time, in different combinations, is fluid and
never completely fixed. In the end, the work can be understood not as single
frames but as shifting constellations of images. Like the rays from the moon
that Bellini’s Norma serenades, the light captured in each photograph
becomes an illuminated piece of the past. Unable to make the pictures
powerful, they gave us pictures of life and loss and turn them into pictures
to live by. In their quiet
sensationalism, Khalid’s and Jamil’s photographs remind us that closed
door allows individual freedom and moral latitude. Ethical concerns aside,
the images allow us to see our own vulnerabilities reflected in the lives of
imperfect ‘strangers’.
Pattern
of abstractions Two recent
exhibitions held in two different cities had, accidently, a few traits in
common. Sadaf Naeem showed her paintings at Taseer Art Gallery in Lahore and
Rokeya Sultana exhibited her prints at the Koel Gallery in Karachi. Both
artists may have been aware of one another but one doubts if they have seen
each other’s work. Sadaf Naeem graduated in painting from the National
College of Arts while Rokeya Sultana, a Bangladeshi artist, is a former
student of Shantiniketan, India, and University of Dhaka, where she is
currently a Professor and Chairperson the Department of Printmaking Faculty
of Fine Arts. Even though the two belong
to two different art practices and two separate countries, the presence of
pattern seems a unifying feature in their work. Sadaf Naeem’s paintings
are based on sections of spaces, landscapes and female figures; a majority
of surfaces covered with intricate designs in the form of a curtain or a
shawl. Rokeya Sultana’s series of prints are made with forms that are not
identified easily but are scattered as if a pattern (may be an organic one)
was broken and spread. Both artists in the past
have been known for distinct figurative paintings. After her graduation from
NCA, Naeem exhibited works with female figures in the environment. These
canvases of loosely-painted areas, sensitively-rendered human bodies and
partly imaginative backgrounds were quite convincing. Sultana is well-recognised
for her expressive figures drawn in strong and vivid colours. Her
simplification of human form and child-like treatment of pictorial substance
made her distinct and popular in Pakistan too, where she held a number of
exhibitions prior to her solo show at the Koel Gallery. One wonders how and why
both artists are shifting from the recognisable human figure into a domain
of pattern and abstraction (since Sultana’s work can not be classified
strictly into patterns). Even though traces of body are still found in the
two artists’ works, one can imagine how they are drifting away from the
method of natural representation towards another system of image-making. Their preferred course of
abstraction — precise patterns in the art of Naeem and loosely-arranged
shapes in the case of Sultana — may be due to their personal fascinations.
An artist can not keep repeating the same body of work and baggage of images
and has to move away or forward (which means the same while talking about
the creative process!). In the history of modern
art, the idea of abstraction is primarily associated with the American
artists of New York School, who were active during the mid-twentieth
century. These painters, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz
Kline, Clifford Still, Philip Guston, Adolf Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell,
Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. All, except the last three,
have been known for their gestural strokes, large canvases and expressive
marks. Interestingly, all these artists were men and represented a
stereotype of men dealing with a large scale in a savage-like act. Even
though two female painters, Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, were also
part of the movement, but their presence has stayed marginalised. If the abstract art —
seen at its most celebrated stage — is linked with large surfaces daubed
in urgently-laid marks, it still can’t be contained into one category.
Because the concept of sublime, projected by these artists particularly, was
also dealt with in other times and places. For instance, in the Muslim art
of decoration on religious buildings and manuscripts, the geometric patterns
were used for metaphysical meanings and spiritual purposes. Hence inlays on
mosques’ facades, arabesque on buildings, motifs in illuminated
manuscripts invoked a series of profound ideas, related to divinity. But in those cultures
where geometry enjoyed great prestige and position, another form of
abstraction was also practiced. It manifested in the making of tapestry,
embroidery, patchwork by women for domestic purposes, added with the
painting on pottery and making decoration on house walls and ground. In a sense, history and
art history — unjustly — have allocated separate spheres of abstraction
to different genders. Men are expected to create huge pai The example of Aisha
Khalid can be quoted whose work, beginning with female figures in shrouds
and burkas, has now moved more into the direction of pure patterns.
Likewise, the recent works of Sadaf Naeem and Rokeya Sultana indicate how
these female artists, perhaps unconsciously, are picking a diction that is
rooted in the tradition of female image-making. However, these links with
conventional pattern-making are just one aspect of their work; both artists
offer a wide range of meanings. The receding landscape and
diminishing females in favour of a dominating pattern from Naeem’s
canvases can be an allegory of position of women in our society where female
exists in the shadows of conventions that are proclaimed and imposed by men.
And the imagery of Rokeya with its overpowering abstract forms, in one way,
is linked to the tradition of abstract painting from Bangladesh. It is also
a means to suggest the disintegration and dislocation of a person in
today’s world of market, machinery and information technology, which has
reduced humans — both men and women — into users or commodities.
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ntings
with vigorously-applied pigments while women are supposed to engage with
patterns and designs on a smaller scale without these being categorised as
art. However, in the present times, the boundaries of art are blurring; thus
a quilt stitched by a grandmother in Georgia is considered as great an
example of creativity as an oil-on-canvas created by a famous artist living
in California. This shift in understanding of art includes several practices
previously seen as primitive or mere craft now being understood as art; at
the same time, this has allowed a number of artists to adopt forms which are
different from the usual concept and convention of art. This includes a
number of female artists whose works serve as a bridge between the craft of
pattern-making and high art.
