An Interview; Risham Syed:

                        I arrive at Risham Syed’s parents’ house, off Sherpao Bridge to meet her for the interview. She receives me at the gate and we walk into the house, past the young boy playing Sitar, taking the stairs to a room on the second floor. This being our first meeting, I introduce myself to her. We chat about our experience of teaching and the conversation slips into comparing NCA and BNU. We head to the laptop on which Risham shows me some of her works, followed by a long and nonlinear discussion against the backdrop of live classical music. She speaks softly and gently.

            Risham Syed needs no introduction. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at prestigious art venues, including The Harris Museum, Preston, UK, Museum of Asian Art, Fukuoka, Japan and the Barbican Center Gallery among others. Born and raised in Lahore, Risham received Bachelors in Fine Arts from the National College of Arts in Lahore (1993) and a Masters in Painting from The Royal College of Art, London, in 1996. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Visual Art, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. Her work explores issues of gender, class, power, history, inheritance and violence through a striking assemblage of (art) historical allusions and traditional and nontraditional artistic mediums and crafts.

            The works that she showed me, while we chatted, were from various periods of her artistic career. We jumped right into talking about the use of embroidery and stitching in her work.

Risham Syed: It was post 1999 I started using thread and needlework, after I had Abdullah (her first child) – after looking at those baby sets that I made when at school. You know, missionary schools have this tradition of grooming the potential home makers.You learn needlework at a very young age and when you are making these things you don’t even know why. But later when you use these knitted or embroidered sets for your own babies, you realize that you have been preparing for the moment all this while.

Rabbya Naseer: which school did you go to?

RS: Sacred Heart, Convent!

RN: interesting! so they made you do this at a very young age?

RS: Yeah, like you began when you were six. For example I found this tiny baby panty, my first hemming lesson that I must have done at six – and the first cap I knitted, must have been at the age of seven or something because I used to wear that in class 3.

While looking at the Line Between series, she stopped at this particular panel and said;

RS: I was actually thinking of the Afghan war. I was thinking of using the Afghan burqa. But even at that time it was already overused so I didn’t want to bring it in directly. The idea then was to hint at it and use just the particular blue colour and a traditional motif.

RN: They strike to me as an interesting replacement for the burqa or an addition to our otherwise limited visual vocabulary when it comes to representing women. But these are more like bikinis.

RS: These are tiny bikinis juxtaposed with a traditional kurta motif. I think it had to do with the shirt as a covering, how when you look at a woman, the embroidery on the shirt or even any kind of garment is supposed to be decorative as are the bikinis. The gaze then filters through the decoration on the surface that plays the role of ‘the skin’. The idea behind this nevertheless was the burqa.

After going through a few more images, I stopped at Needle Work Lesson, 2002.

RN: I have never seen this work in person, but I have been told that this is not a real pillow cover, the lace is made out of newsprint, the quilting is achieved through gouache, the buttons and babies are collaged. And I wonder, about the choice of medium. Of course there are a billion ways to do ‘a’ work, but these are conscious decisions that one makes, especially for a mixed media artist like yourself.

RS: Mimicking or imitating something is also, I feel, an important part of my work, like when I copy classical paintings, make a replica, and I do it in acrylics. That is also a conscious decision, an act of representing these historically relevant paintings in a certain context, in a certain way. It’s the same here. I didn’t use real lace, you know the physicality of it. Somehow I felt that I needed to replace that with something as disposable as newsprint and then this act becomes a statement in itself.

RN: Also, one sees this as a highly ironic and affective, tongue-in-cheek resplendency that distinguishes "low" from "high" art or perhaps blurs the boundary between the two.

RS: I think the boundary is blurred in my practice as ‘craft’ easily moves in and out in my work. I think this has to do more with a more personal connection with embroidery. I’m not looking at it as craft but as something that I’m taught, to make things beautiful around me!

RN: Interesting, because to be able to paint well, to paint beautiful pictures is another Victorian gender code that has been passed down, its important for a woman as much as embroidery and stitching.

RS: Yea, the two small diptychs that you saw (referring to the ‘Line Between Series’) were also done with that intention. I juxtaposed two painted ‘landscapes’ with embroidery that I got done from a regular machine. The pattern that I gave him to copy was from the foreign pirated pattern books/catalogues. Because of the bad printing quality, the colours sometimes turn out jarring or completely off. This then doesn’t look Victorian or European, it actually became quite desi (local), and then I painted around it, really flatly, on the cloth, so that the embroidery became more like a collage. The stems I drew in pencil, as if it was the negative of the embroidery. The lower half has the image of a launch of a missile from the Afghan war, which is the ‘landscape’. Finally this is finished with a henna stamp, as a final validation, from an authority.

RN: I have noticed that there is always this division, either vertical or horizontal within the painting.

RS: its funny that I’ve also thought about this recently after all these years. Yea, I think whenever I have painted, I have always thought about the three-dimentionality of the work. I like the elements of the work to be in dialogue with each other.  I’m trying to just analyze why I do that. I think its trying to break away or extend the boundaries of a two-dimensional surface, and also to bring in another context for layering or multiplicity of interpretation.

RN: Even without the presence of this physical division within the painting, there is always this double meaning, sometimes in the contrast between medium and subject matter or medium and imagery, merging seemingly different views, almost in dialogue with each other yet totally independent, even contradictory, is it at times an aesthetic decision or only conceptual?

RS: Yea, because I think it adds an irony but then it often becomes aesthetic also in the sense that these (Line Between Series 1) could have been pretty flowers, but they are quite ‘ugly’ and ‘pretty’ at the same time…

Pausing at Still Life (diptych made in 2007), Risham explained;

RS: I made this for a show at National Gallery, Islamabad, called Outside the Cube. It was for the entrance, outside the gallery. You know, how each entrance has these niches for the portraits of Quaid and other notable personalities. So I made these two large portrait sized works, with plastic grass and plastic flowers, and wanted hidden air-fresheners for artificial scent. But at the end the administration didn’t care much about contemporary art, so these two ended up as two panels on a wall, next to each other, and the air fresheners were kind of lost in the space - whatever!

RN: so how do you feel about this new form they took?

RS: I don’t know, the meaning changed. The gilded frames were to give them that kind of value or position, which was totally lost. It didn’t have that narrative anymore, but they did that to almost all the works in ‘Outside the Cube’.

RN: But in that case, it would have been a site-specific work, but now it has a life beyond that space/show.

RS: yea, I didn’t think about it then, it was a total shock, and I didn’t care about the work’s life beyond that show, because the show was called “Outside the Cube”. Taking it back on the walls, into the gallery, defied the purpose.

RN: That defies the purpose of the entire exhibition then.

RS: in a way, yes, wherever they could find a space they just put up the works.

RN: So the gilded frame -You are one of the first ones to start using them as a readymade object and since then there has been a lot of followers.

RS: A whole lot of us, in the late 80’s and then the 90’s at NCA were inspired by Zahoor Sahb, who broke the border, the format of the miniature painting. He questioned it and played around with it. So the frame is coming from there. Also when I went to London I saw these heavy gilded frames in the museums, I was thinking of him and our concerns that are almost inherited. I link these frames again to our connection with the Victorian history.

RN: Tell me about your experience at Royal College.

RS: Going to London was an eye opening experience that I wouldn’t have had if I had gone there at another stage in life. The way it opened up new avenues for me, had to do with the kind of work I was doing earlier on, which all of a sudden became totally irrelevant. Here (in Lahore) I was using imagery from life and people around me and there, my subject matter was lost. Lahore is an experience, the buildings of Lahore, they are part of me. But then when you see London as an extension of Lahore or Lahore as an extension of London, this whole colonial history and the references, they open up so many questions and I think that was something I experienced. This became a really strong content in the work, and embroidery and my childhood, my upbringing, my environment, my mother, my experience of my mother and her education, how she saw me and how she saw my upbringing, so all of these things, I started thinking about them, projected onto my work. This was something totally new for me.

RN: What kind of training did u have at Royal College, was it very conventional?

RS: It was conventional in the sense that, they wanted you to paint. They apparently gave you all the freedom, saying that all these departments and facilities are for you but at the end of the day they wanted paintings. There wasn’t much theory. Lectures were open but not compulsory. So all in all it was a solid studio based programme.

RN: When we are in our home country, we take certain things for granted, such as the subject of ‘identity’ but when you are away, its hard to resist that, issues of identity become relevant almost naturally, did that happen to you?

RS: I don’t know if I thought about identity as such, but generally, I somehow became very angry. My course director was aware that I was angry. This wasn’t to assert my identity, but somehow it was something more personal that I was dealing with. It was strange that through a historical perspective, I was talking about a rather personal experience that was stemming from being away from home, Lahore! So may be in that sense you can say that the element of ‘identity’ was there. Embroidery came much later after I had Abdullah, but even then when I was at Royal College, I was painting lace patterns etc which was a Victorian craft. At a conscious level it was about composing present day with history through my personal experiences. And I think I was more into proving my identity as a painter, and was thinking of the lace my mother collected for my dowry and where that was coming from historically and the pride she took in her collection.

When I was studying at NCA, initially I wanted to do miniature, but Zahoor Sahib said that I should do painting and learn miniature as a minor, learn the skill etc. But the two remained quite separate in my practice till I went to London. There I experienced infusing the spirit of miniature painting in my work. The first panel that I made had tea washes. I threw paint on it, used old photographs, stains, transfers. It was more like a diary. There was the context of miniature and Lahore, colonial Lahore, my upbringing, everything together. Later I gradually sifted through this and made many other works out of it.

RN: Working our way backwards, lets talk about how it all happened, you becoming an artist, the journey? Also, I have heard a lot about the weekly gatherings at your parents’ house, discussing classical Punjabi poetry, presenting classical music, the absence of television, the environment you grew up in, what role did that play?

RS: There was music all around me, always, because my mother is a singer and my father is a poet, a government servant all his life, but basically a writer. For him basis of their marriage was music. As a child I had classical music around me in the house. I never painted and had no connection with visual arts as such. Since childhood I had learned Sitar and Kathak. I did this with an inclination of taking it up as a career. But a Syed girl couldn’t take up dance as a career, so my mother thought that wasn’t happening. My father was all up for whatever I wanted to do. I mostly I worked with Maharaj. I think I was 5 or 6 when I started, but living in Pakistan now I think there was not a lot of potential in exploring that medium. People from NCA, artists, were all friends of my parents, but my mother being a very conservative, strong kind of a traditional woman, never thought that I would go to NCA, especially given the reputation at that time. I ended up doing math and economics. Went to Kinnaird and thought I would do my MBA. I was good at math, and before going to LUMS, I had to do an internship so I was doing that when I realized that this wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Incidentally I had a friend who was preparing for the NCA test, and I ended up sitting with her through her drawing sessions. Zahoor Sahib was there, who encouraged me and so did my father. Somehow I picked it up very quickly. So I think the pleasure I took in drawing was the deciding factor. Every other day I would have someone sit for me and I would show my drawing to Zahoor Sahib. Somehow my mother did not resist it too much. I guess I wasn’t a 16 year old kid, I was an adult, had done my BA. She took it with a pinch of salt but it was ok. My father I know was very happy.

RN: What did going to NCA mean?

RS: I didn’t think, eventually what would happen. Didn’t think of it as a career. But of course if I had decided to give up LUMS, there must have been a reason. But how seriously I would pursue it, I never gave that much thought. It wasn’t to brush up my drawing but to explore something I enjoyed doing. NCA was to explore and that was the ultimate goal. I think MA at Royal College was to pursue art professionally.

RN: So at that time, what did it mean to be an artist, like what did it mean to be doing this for the rest of your life?

RS: I don’t know. It’s been a question. When you know you are an artist what do you expect from yourself? That is the question. You make work which is critical of the system. But then buying and selling comes in. Like when I came back after MA, I thought it was ridiculous to sell work. The first time I had my paintings up as part of a show, at NCA gallery. I did these mixed media small works, and somebody asked me for the price and I was like how do you sell work. Maybe you can just take it or whatever. But they insisted, so I said ok, you can pay me for the framing, and they ended up paying me Rs.1500 for the framing. That was the spirit. Then you have these discussions with friends and it’s a whole long debate. You critique the system in your work and you become a victim of it by selling your work. The selling aspect does change a few things, and now students sell their works even before they step out of college. On the other hand if you don’t sell your work what do you do with it? I have never been able to price my work, its quite absurd and tough.

RN: So how do you handle the business side of it then?

RS: I don’t, which is why I don’t sell a lot of work. The galleries that I have shown with, handle it.

RN: Also, what role does this kind of recognition, not the selling aspect but the fact that you are an international artist, who has shown at museums, what does that do for you?

RS: That is again a question. I try not to think of the ‘international’ part. As an artist one feels one is connected with the process of art making even if one is not physically producing work.The fact that I am self critical also sometimes becomes a hinderence. I think that’s the reason why everyone tells me that I’m not very ambitious. My friends think I’m not ambitious enough because I don’t go all out to do business in the sense of marketing etc. I tend to think too much about my concerns and what happens to the work eventually!

 RN: So what is art making to you, of course it’s a language, making sense of the world we live in, its self expression and all but what does it mean to make art, for you?

RS: Critiquing the world that we live in.

RN: So it is important that it reaches a larger audience?

RS: of course.

RN: We live in an age where marketing your work, not just in terms of selling but making it available to masses seems important, everyone has websites, you don’t.

RS: yea, I’m thinking about it. Often when I look at other artists’ websites, they seem mechanical in format. But of course its essential. Its important to make work accessible. But then it is accessible through other means as well…so lets see.

RN: Your work is more than often written about as feminist, of course autobiographical introspection is a primary source for art making, so being a woman any work one makes could be termed ‘feminist’, but do you personally consider yourself a feminist artist, is it intentional?

RS: I don’t think about the ‘ism’ part as such, but of course I’m thinking of the woman, her role in society, how one is looked at, those things are there. But I’m not thinking about feminism as such. Its more to do with personal experience.

RN: Your work is so informed by your immediate environment, I wonder why technology, which is such a major part of the present times, is slightly missing?

RS: I have been thinking about that for some time now…technology and accessibility of work. Even though I’m not somebody who finds gadgetry hard to use, may be mentally I’ve not yet taken a decision? There is definitely a block there, but film or video is something I’m interested in.

RN: And how does your career as a teacher, inform your practice?

RS: I often think how I would function as an artist if I were not teaching. It’s the connection with the new psyche, new ideas. You remain active, connected, learn a lot. Teaching for me is more of an interactive two way thing.

RN: Tell me about the Lahore 2010, exhibited at Rohtas, its very different?

RS: Well the trendy house, ideal house, has been a recurring feature. The house I grew up in, was over a hundred years old. So I lived in an old house without a television (because my father thought we could be more productive without it). How you explain that to friends? My father never learned to drive so every morning going to school the question would be ‘do we would take a bus or tonga’? So may be the ideal home thing is coming from there. Its tongue-in-cheek. Now the new residential schemes in Lahore have houses that have their façades finished, with the three unfinished sides. That is because eventually the three sides will have other houses covering them. I thought it was a great representation of the psyche of the people. Did you see the show?

 RN: I did and I loved the cemented wall. But I remember asking myself, if the paintings were on the other walls and the cemented wall was bare. Or how would I respond if there was no cemented wall, because the paintings themselves are clearly what they are, representing the photograph, and the new Lahore, that is being built by running over the old mansions in Model Town and Gulberg, but the presence of the wall definitely worked.

RS: yea, but I’m still thinking of a solution for the wall, because the wall itself was nice and I thought it was a work on its own, but I don’t want the wall as a prop as such and want the paintings to stand on their own. I was clear about the fact that I didn’t want the paintings to be on the white walls. These were intended as postcards. Painting is also a way of possessing these ideal homes and these are small, handy and convenient to carry.

It was only after Risham’s daughter started to get impatient, that I realized that it had been two and a half hours already.

RN: I think I must take leave now – Thank you very much for your time – sadly, there is so much more that we didn’t speak about - I think it needs more than one such session for all of this to be collated – Thank you one again.