Kahani ek Shehar ki

Farida Batool’s ‘Kahani ek Shehar ki”, displayed at Rohtas 2 gallery, Lahore (from April 8^th to 20^th), presents us with her walk through the city streets, told in a first person singular voice ‘I’, as well as a collective ‘we’ or ‘they’ at the same time. She is both the native Lahori and the wandering tourist, placing a certain sense of displacement that can be appreciated on multiple levels and interpreted from multiple perspectives. The use of lenticular technique for printing these documents relies upon the active participation of the viewer and enables the viewer to become a silent witness as well as a participant with Batool in her meanderings through these streets. The technique involves layering two or more images to form a single image that has the ability to change/move/morph as the image is viewed from different angles. The movement of her body across these landscapes relates easily to the viewer’s own movement where you don’t have to adjust or dissociate what your eye is seeing from what you know your body is doing, i.e; walking. By design, they literally move each viewer’s body making the viewing experience completely subjective, as we animate her images and she animates our bodies.

The technique recalls, what has adorned the covers of musical records, children books, greeting cards and commercial advertisements throughout the marketing and communication mix, for decades now. What it does is, elicit our sense of wonder or makes one consider the possibilities of acquisition of space; space that the mind and the body occupies. Perhaps a clever critique of the consumer culture, also, blurring any borders between mainstream art and low/popular art.

What Batool is above all conscious of is the dialectical relationship between ‘what’ is said and ‘how’ it is said, regarding the latter as constitutive of the former. Something all art strives to achieve. Her form and content allow an interweaving of open-ended socio-cultural, political, economic, personal and aesthetic meanings, and the only form that can do so is one in which the form itself is the content.

Her ghost like presence, appearing and disappearing against graffitied walls, littered side walks, security barriers, street vendors, security guards, state buildings, cars, tongas, rickshaws and men, might not be the complete representation of the city but certainly provides the viewer with all the necessary clues, rather covertly presenting us, the city streets as a space where civil protection potentially breaks down, especially for women, since there is a particular absence of women in these public spaces which may or may not be a conscious decision but nevertheless significant.

These accidental yet staged scenes, suggest fragments from a narrative loaded with gender and identity politics, continuance of documentary style photography’s critical capabilities in the twenty-first century and for art objects to connect the personal with public. The presence of the camera (not physical of course) also points at the limitations of the medium of photography in embodying such an experience.

The work at large provides a fine balance between the creative endeavour of the artist and the creative projection of emotion and feeling on the part of the viewer, which Barthe refers to as the punctum. He writes, “the punctum is what I add to the photo and which nonetheless is there already”.