ON LOCATION
Karachi: Cultural Safe Haven
By Allison White

An ethnically diverse metropolis of 15 million, the port city of Karachi lies on Pakistan’s southern coast. Geographically and socially removed from the northwestern tribal areas that Western commentators call “the most dangerous place in the world” because of its reputation as a hotbed of militant fundamentalism, Karachi is the country’s financial capital. The city breeds a steely, enterprising spirit that has fueled the development of its artistic community and a local art market driven by young collectors from Karachi’s new upper class.

Pragmatic yet innovative, the contemporary art produced here reflects the cosmopolitanism of its artists and the experimental agendas of the city’s local arts organizations, most notably the nonprofit Vasl and the progressive Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS). During the last couple of years, new art spaces and commercial ventures such as Koel Gallery, initiated by textile artist Noorjehan Bilgrami, and Gandhara-Art, sprung up almost on a weekly basis in the affluent neighborhoods of Clifton and Defence Housing Authority.

The global economic instability that now threatens many of these fledgling galleries felt remote at a recent opening for young photographer Izdeyar Setna, a member of what the English-language newspaper Dawn dubbed the “Karachi fraternity” of leading photographers. By the middle of the evening, the buoyant crowd at the ten-year-old Canvas Gallery had snapped up three-quarters of Setna’s impressionistic, double-exposed photographic portraits of women. In late March, Sameera Raja, the owner of Canvas, moved the gallery to join others in Clifton.

What Pakistan’s largest city lacks is a major museum. With the attention and resources of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party devoted to maintaining law and order in the Northwest Frontier, the government has few residual resources for the arts. Pakistan’s first national art museum, the National Art Gallery (NAG) opened in Islamabad—700 miles northeast of Karachi—in late 2007 after decades of planning. But a museum in far-off Islamabad has little impact on Karachiites. Canvas Gallery’s Sameera Raja believes that private citizens need to do more to support the arts: “We are a country of rich people and poor government, so the people need to take ownership.”

Karachi’s artists aren’t waiting for a government-sponsored museum. Instead they are launching their own initiatives with entrepreneurial zeal, fulfilling a crucial role by integrating global art-making practices into the local scene. The artists’ collective Vasl, Urdu for “to come together” or “a meeting point,” was founded in 2001 by a band of artists including painters Anwar Saeed, Naiza Khan and sculptor Khalil Chishtee. In December 2008, Vasl partnered with British filmmakers Karen Mirza and Brad Butler on The Museum of Non Participation, a London-Karachi project commissioned by UK-based nonprofit Artangel that questions, in the words of Vasl coordinator Auj Khan, “the systems of modernity underlying the cities as well as systems of making art.” In Karachi, this exploration included a food vendor who used a newsletter created by Mirza and Butler to wrap up naan bread for takeout customers. The artists also painted bilingual English-Urdu signs on walls throughout the city that read “The Museum of Non Participation,” an appropriation of the graffiti typically used by political parties and businesses.

The expansion of Karachi’s art community has been supported by the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, founded in 1989 by a group of now-established artists and designers including architects Arshad and Shahid Abdulla, sculptor Shahid Sajjad and textile artist Shehnaz Ismail. Despite the very real implications of Pakistan’s unpredictable political and economic environment, the arts are rapidly attracting interest in Karachi as a viable career path. IVS ceramics professor Raania Azam Khan Durrani, who is in her mid-twenties, ran one of Karachi’s first alternative, interdisciplinary art spaces, the Commune Artist Colony from 2005 until it closed in 2008. In her own characterization of Karachi’s art, Durrani cites the artistic possibilities borne from Karachi’s freedom from tradition, allowing artists to experiment with materials, interrogate the boundaries of art and craft, and incorporate the motifs that shape daily experience in the frenetic city. Fellow IVS faculty member Adeela Suleman works with housewares like stainless-steel drain covers, kitchen tongs and tea kettles, which she morphs into sculptures resembling human forms or fashions into colorful helmets—a nod to Karachi’s massive contingent of motorcycle riders.

According to artist and professor Durriya Kazi, who established the visual studies department at the University of Karachi in 1999: “There is a social and cultural divide among artists as much as there is in Pakistani society. Art schools to a large extent shrink this divide.” Unlike IVS, many of the students who study fine art at the University of Karachi come from low-income families, but through the two schools and Vasl, artists from both sides show together. Kazi’s former student Abdullah Qamar recently started the Dhaba Art Movement; he and fellow artists organize art activities in the roadside tea stalls, or dhabas, where most of Pakistan’s citizens have cheap meals, an effort to bring art to poorer areas.

As a relatively safe haven from the fundamentalist violence plaguing northern Pakistan, Karachi is a place where contentious cultural issues can still be investigated. In late January, the London nonprofit gallery Green Cardamom brought their three-city exhibition “Lines of Control,” supported by the Rangoonwala Trust, to the Karachi’s VM Gallery. Work by Karachi natives Bani Abidi and Roohi Ahmed was shown alongside that of Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar and multimedia artist Nalini Malani, addressing the controversial legacy of India’s 1947 Partition.

In March, however, Pakistan’s evolving political turmoil gripped Karachiites as lawyers led non-violent demonstrations demanding the re-instatement of the supreme court chief justice ousted by former president Pervez Musharraf. Seen as part of a larger anti-government corruption effort, the protests and chief justice Chaudhry’s eventual re-instatement electrified the art community, inspiring hope for political change.

Abroad, Karachi’s artists are earning growing recognition. Representation of contemporary Pakistani art has been dominated over the past decade by the neo-Mughal miniature painting movement based in Lahore at the National College of Arts, among whose most notable graduates are painters Shazia Sikander, Imran Qureshi and Aisha Khalid. In “Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan,” which opens in August at New York’s Asia Society, curator Salima Hashmi will include IVS graduate Huma Mulji, now based in Lahore, whose sculptures with taxidermy animals—a camel shoved into a suitcase, a water buffalo stuffed into a drainpipe—are metaphors for development gone awry. Hashmi has also picked IVS faculty member Naiza Khan, known for her layered abstractions and metal sculptures of women’s garments. As Karachi’s art community steps onto the international stage, it challenges perceptions that Pakistani art is limited to one location, one medium or one history.