IN LOVING MEMORY

The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.—
(Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle - Thesis 37).

    Cinema is one of the most glaring manifestations of a ‘spectacle’, to the extent that cinema is synonymous with spectacle. It conjures images of extravagant display and performance, much of whose appeal derives from its visual power and ability to hold the gaze of the viewer. This spectacularity of the filmic medium, organized around the production and consumption of images, is highly dependent on the skills of its actors. Through this consumption, in the sense of belief or to give credence to, the actor elicits emotional responses from the audience, becoming exemplary heroes of the spectator’s life. Such an exemplary hero is the subject of the exhibition, titled ‘Icon’, organized jointly by the Lahore Arts Council and the Rohtas 2 Gallery to pay tribute to Rani on her 18th death anniversary. The driving force behind the exhibition is Rabia Anwar, her daughter, a painter, whose work has always been inspired by the woman, Rani.

    Rani, whose acting career span over almost three decades, needs little introduction especially among my parents’ generation. My father remembers her as an electrifying performer while my mother still bears in mind, her dialogues with that trademark wit and rhyme. Admired for her picture perfect beauty, her versatile acting and dancing that has rendered, some of the songs picturized on her, as classics in the history of Pakistani cinema. Rani is an icon, functioning as visual shorthand for a particular cultural era. 21, notable and emerging artists were asked to make work for this tribute show, including; Asim Akhtar, Abdul Jabbar Gul, Adeel Ahmed, Adeel uz Zafar, Ahsan Jamal, Ali Azmat, Amber Hammad, Asad Hayee, Atif Khan, Hassan Mujtaba, Madhia Sikander, Mohammad Ahmed, Muhammad Ashraf, Risham Syed, Sadaf Naeem, Saeed Akhtar, Saira Dar, Sheraz Faisal, Zeeshan Memon and Rabia herself.

(left to right) Ali Azmat, Icon, acrylic on canvas - Sadaf Naeem, Untitled, oil on canvas - Mohd Ashraf, Untitled, acrylic and embroidery on canvas stretched oner tonga roof.

    Since its Rani’s face, whose form directly reflects the thing it signifies, most of the works in the show presented a physical likeness, picking key images that define her iconic status within her acting career, yet sticking to the face. Such an approach on one hand links the development of celebrity culture within the technological development of modern day image making while on the other hand, to be interested in a portrait as a record of what the subject looked like is not the same as being aesthetically interested in the portrait as representation. Some of the portraits ended up being mere surrogates for their subject, lacking an aesthetic interest, as Scruton writes, “that an aesthetic interest in representation is not only for the sake of its subject but in representation for its own sake”, (Arguing about art: contemporary philosophical debates by Alex Neill, Aaron Ridley, pg 193, Routledge, NY, 2002) which makes one wonder about the works’ reason to be, why recreate a replica of her image, when it already exists as an image, does changing the medium alone help? However, there were a few works in which this confrontation with Rani’s image is accompanied by some other visual codes/clues that help the viewer read the work beyond its face value.

Adeel Uz Zafar, Star, 20" x 24", mixed media on photographic paper, 2011.

Amber Hammad, Count the Circles, digital print on canvas, 2011.

Zeeshan Memon, Untitled, oil on canvas, 2011.

Adeel uz Zafar’s mixed media on photographic paper, titled ‘star’, uses humor, irony and exaggeration, combining romance and horror in an attempt to thrill and terrify the viewer, in order to present an idealized portrait of a difficult life. Amber Hammad’s perception of Rani was bi-fold: an object of desire and a role model (perhaps). Her digital print on canvas is a reproduction of Rani’s image from a dance performance, manipulated to replace Rani’s face with Hammad’s. Such impersonations are a recurring feature in Hammad’s work. Zeeshan Memon’s 3 feet by 4 feet oil painting, speaks of the Pakistani Cinema in general and the cultural/gendered stereotypes it instills. The image presents two (male and female) headless bodies, possibly the hero and the heroine, holding hands, the hero wearing a kurta is holding a klashenkov in his other hand. The heroine’s fat thighs, flabby arms and a pot-belly are revealed through fitted flowery tights and a bright (short) kurti. The visual clues provided here speak of romance, violence, pleasure, irony of the armed act of romancing, gender codes and a very different notion of beauty that Punjabi or Pushto cinema promotes. Memon’s painting also makes subtle references to the, now obsolete, tradition of cinema board painting, but the scale defers that reference.
    The act of looking at these works is not any less voyeuristic than the cinema itself, at once hallucinatory and distanced, suggesting the space of an imaginary world, with which the viewer is engaged privately but disconnectedly. Also, it reproduces traditionaist/ symbolist reading of the female as either muse or femme fatale. Just as the narrative of film’s effect locates the power of the gaze within male spectatorship, similarly the works intentionally (I hope) fetishizes the female into a sexual object and spectacle. Asad Hayee’s tie, titled ‘theater of indifference’ is a good example here. Rani’s two images, as a cabaret dancer and a tawaif (courtesan), repeated on a digitaly printed canvas to make the tie speaks of pleasure and consumption, presenting the female as an ‘image’ while the male as the bearer of the look, referring to the automatic assumption of a male spectator, common in a society like ours. Similarly Ahsan Jamal and Madiha Sikander’s ‘untitled’ collaborative piece, which unfortunately was enclosed in an acrylic box, appears to be an interactive book (perhaps). The cover of the book is an old Nikon film camera, with a peeping hole in place of the lens, through which a ‘dream girl’ kind of an  image of Rani is visible. It is the same cabaret dancer image that has also been used by Hayee on the tie. Jamal and Sikander are also making references to the way camera reflects, reveals, and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference, the camera’s phallic presence and the attributes associated with a camera, such as; shooting, aiming, e.t.c makes it even more masculine. The voyeuristic feature is so prominent that it would be hard to give an example of a work where its absent.

Asad Hayee, Theater of Indifference, digital print on canvas, 2011.

Ahsan jamal & Madiha Sikander, Untitled, mixed media and gouache on wasli, 2011.

    Themed shows are a very ambivalent thing. It is often a pretext to the show and a framework for the works but not an aim in itself, yet it has the potential to turn into an aim and that’s when it becomes mere illustration. It is important for the theme to sit nicely in the space, not be imposing and remain a pretext. Despite the fact that this bridging of high art and popular culture is a unique idea for us and more so, the show intends to raise funds for a noble cause of facilitating a free ambulance service for the patients of Rani Rafiqun Memorial Hospital and not to mention that despite all setbacks it liberated an art exhibition from the boredom and confines of the burqa, guns, the flag, the missiles, and the minarets, acknowledging fantasy, play and spontaneity, the works demand a little less space and a lot more light than the Alhamra can offer.