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”.

THE LOOKING GLASS:

The widely accepted practice of women being the model and muse of male artists, has been a subject of much debate for most of the 20th century. However, women artists have used their work to disrupt this tradition and also the tradition of self-portraiture as a means for the male artist to assert ‘his’ identity, rarely have the women been presented as the subject of self-portraiture in the history of art.

Saira Sheikh’s Mirror Mirror on the Wall, an exhibition that opened last month at Rohtas 2 in Lahore, is a multi-layered project, creating a dialogue about the relationship between self-portraiture and mirror, perhaps casting doubt upon the seemingly similar characteristics between the two. The work is a radical departure from the conventions of art making in Pakistan, challenging, upsetting or perhaps reinforcing pre-conceived notions about art, for a bunch of reasons.

The gallery filled with drawings of the nude artist, is an investigation into the notion of ‘self-portraiture’, beyond the conventional portrait representation of the self. These unsigned drawings, sitting on easels or resting against the walls, are a combination of artist’s own rendition of the self in the mirror and drawings of six or seven other artists who were invited to the gallery a day before the opening of the show, where Sheikh modeled nude for a duration of six hours, as a living sculpture creating a hybrid of sculpture and performance. Performing the self-portrait is a way of coming into representation as both the subject and the object and like all performance-based art, it deals with aspects of control, the acquisition of an audience and subjecting them to the artist's "control" which involves another aspect of body art - endurance; both hers and the audience’s. The performance of actions is also a shift from the study of objects to a study of processes, in an attempt to articulate the self in everyday life and establishing a social identity based on everyday acts shaped through the practice of daily rituals.

This investigation into the nature of; self-representation, self-portraiture, autobiography, endurance, performance, objectification, perception, identity, socio-cultural acceptability, authorship, ownership, viewing/looking and artistic process, asks the viewer to think of art and the nature of artistic enterprise anew, particularly in this part of the world.

Sheikh is the creator, subject and the object of the work, both observer and the observed. This dichotomy is further highlighted when the viewer, upon entering the gallery is encountered by a mirror, on the façade of a small white cubicle, the size of a standard try-room perhaps. The reality of the looking glass is revealed to the viewer upon entering the cubicle from the back, which acts as a mirror from one side and a window from the other.  So upon entering the gallery the viewer watches him/herself, while from the inside of the cubicle the viewer watches the ‘others’ watching themselves, without the awareness of being watched, caught looking in on a private moment, overlapping public and private domains. The act of looking at the drawings is not any less voyeuristic than the experience of the cubicle, at once hallucinatory and distanced, suggesting the space of an imaginary world, with which the viewer is engaged privately but disconnectedly, hence the presence of one compliments the presence of the other, while also allowing the viewer to engage with the work more actively.

On one hand Sheikh takes control over her display by extending this invitation to be drawn, to reject subjection, an act of naked defiance or a sudden confrontation, that places the viewer in an equally vulnerable position, while on the other hand she stands motionless after extending that invitation, playing a submissive role, making herself vulnerable, reinforcing the prevalent ideas of female subjectivity, in a confrontation with the thin line between celebration of female sexuality and objectification of the female body, a rather tricky relationship to explore the many levels of self.

The exhibition despite being viewed within a controlled environment, by a small circle of seemingly like-minded people (plus some accidental viewers) who were invited to view the exhibit, is nevertheless going to act like a lightning rod (perhaps even by some of the readers of this review) for conflicting views of feminism, propriety, social responsibility, art-world economics, reputation-building and artistic license, which is a healthy dialogue, both in creative terms and for an ever expanding definition of art, as long as its constructive.