Memory is indeed a funny
thing….I remember spending hours going through drawers after drawers filled
with torn, cut, scribbled, written over photographs of my/my-family’s past, accompanied
by my father’s (in fact my entire family’s) favorite pass-time activity; telling
and retelling countless often contradictory stories about each one. Often there
is no agreement on the ‘truth’ about the photograph amongst its various
narrators, perhaps reversing their function as; an object of evidence. Family
photos do not preserve meaning in themselves, it is the narrator of the
photograph that helps us understand what lies beyond the physical object. The
narrator lends an ‘I/eye’, making one wonder, whether it is the past that
shapes the present or the present that influences the past.
From using the family album
imagery as references for the drawings, highlighting the posing, the smiling,
the performing of the photos, to using actual photographs (of her mother
perhaps) morphed into her own, and everything in-between, Nusra Latif’s ‘Desires of Memory’ makes rather direct
comparisons with family albums on various levels, perhaps a little too direct and
a little too varied, by compromising the metaphoric quality and in-depth scrutiny
of the analogy.
Since I’m working from memory, penning down ‘my’ experience/selective
perspective of the exhibition, I cannot help draw the comparison with
inventing/reinventing stories around family pictures. At times the photograph
doesn’t match our memory and other times our memory defies explanations because
our stories around those photographs have more to do with present than the
past. Similarly the events leading to the exhibition and the time in-between
experiencing it and writing about it adds to the subjectivity of my perception.
My account might have nothing to do with the works or I might have overlooked
other ways of accessing them. I feel there is a close affiliation
between ‘experience’ and ‘document’, they both become themselves only by
disappearing and have a troubled relationship with ‘reality’. Similarly, in
this process of representing the represented, Latif’s memoir is interwoven with
the present more than the past, appropriating, disturbing and manipulating
images that look simple, naive and sacred, resulting in distortion, disorder
and disintegration.
A necessary condition for remembrance is distance, both
physical and temporal, for (re)negotiating a sense of self. This search for an
image of one’s self or validity or a sense-of/longing-for belonging usually
originates from an overwhelming sense of self-consciousness in a foreign land. Although,
we are all perhaps equally displaced in one way or another, living
in-between selves, marking differences while our boundaries under continuous
negotiations leave us in a state of domestic exile. But this search for a logical sense of identity
is crucial in today’s ‘global’ world, particularly for diasporic artists. Living abroad did facilitate a vaguely similar situation for
me to have experienced alienation and integration simultaneously. Before living
in Chicago (that too only for two years) I had not thought much about what it
meant to be a ‘Pakistani’ ‘Muslim’ ‘Woman’. My identity defined as ‘what I am
not’ rather than ‘what I am’. Perhaps,
identities are constructed through difference alone.
Despite the similarity with her earlier works on both; formal and
conceptual level, Latif’s latest body of work is a step towards a rather
personalized/self-directed exploration as opposed to the neo-miniaturists over
generalized narrowing representations that reinforce that exotic (collective) otherness,
of course executed in the name
of critiquing/challenging those prescribed
categories of identities BUT with the use of veil, guns, oppressed female
bodies, arabesque patterns, beards, claustrophobic spaces, Mughal references
e.t.c that instead proved supplementary in reinforcing cliché’s.
Sensuous Dimesions was a work, whose presence continues to
trouble me and in spite of all effort I fail to conjure up any relevance with
the rest of the work, asking myself whether all the works in a show need to be
in conversation with each other? But regardless of its relevance the work was
the least convincing in both its execution and display. This digital print is a narrow strip of
images of eyes (over life size, hanging at eye-level), caught in the act of
applying kohl overlaid with references of eyes from Moghul miniatures, and runs
along the length of two walls that make a corner at the farthest end of the
gallery.
Despite the very obvious clues,
such as; the birds that symbolize migration and “belong nowhere”, the drawings of the flora and fauna that (perhaps)
are the inhabitants of Lahore, the medium of gouache on wasli as an integral part of Latif’s artistic identity (or perhaps it
is my personal desire to give some relevance to the medium), the mother as a
metaphor for ‘home’, e.t.c, the work lacks what Barthes calls the punctum. That thing which ‘touches’ one,
without submitting itself to mere meaning or aesthetic. Latif shares everything
else besides the punctum, unlike
Barthes who is particularly discreet about that one photo that he is touched by
and which embodies the true essence/‘air’ of his mother (or the mother who ‘he
knew’ that he was trying so hard to locate in photos of her), and decides to
never show that particular picture to us. He writes, “It exists only for me. For
you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand
manifestations of the ordinary.”[1] Perhaps
it is true that, “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or
close your eyes”[2].
