Jeenay ke hain chaar din: a tender ode to friendship

Picture this: On a chilly winter evening, three friends visit the Karachi Fish Harbour at Keamari. One becomes obsessed with an iridescent, 5-kilogram fish.

“I was instantly drawn to this one beautiful fish," recalls Safwan Sabzwari, Karachi-based multi-disciplinary artist, when asked what inspired his latest exhibit. He went on to joke about how his friends would not, for practical reasons, let him purchase the beloved sea creature. Faced with a limitation, the artist, fascinated by beauty he cannot possess, tuned in to a different kind of hunger.

After the curious encounter with the fish, Asad Kamran, multi-disciplinary artist and founder of Cinema 73, an independent community space in Seaview Township, Karachi, reached out to Safwan with reflections on fascination, playfulness and art-making.

Fast forward a week, and the duo has cooked up a storm, showcasing a series of larger-than-life paintings celebrating the dynamism of friendship and intimacy in a fast-paced, urban city.

As the new year began and December festivities drew to an end, the duo deep-dove into an intense, marathon painting session at their studio in Badr Commercial, spanning four consecutive days. Their goal was to communicate with eacother about the city they love and their place in it through a medium that was strictly non-verbal.

The second I stepped into the garage-turned-studio, I was intoxicated. Bollywood wedding hits played on the loudspeaker, garlands of marigolds and roses adorned the walls, and Asad gently invited all his guests to apply rose-scented ittr to their wrists as they moved through the space. The walls were lined with bold, whimsical expressionist paintings whose playful titles – ‘Please Don’t Leave’, ‘Machli Jal ki Rani Hai’ and ‘Fragility ki Mala’ to name a few – were chalked onto the blackboard walls.

Even among the clutter of sounds and smells, the bright, bold strokes on each canvas stood out. The artwork, like the city it celebrates, confronts you from all sides.

“The story is an amalgamation of images or snippets of a relationship being formed in a city that is chaotic and unnerving… but then finding this playful way of just… being in it,” says Asad.

What I found more fascinating than the commanding presence of the work itself was the fact that, no matter how long you look at each canvas, it was difficult to distinguish Asad’s stroke from Safwan’s.

“There were times when we were making stuff and the other person was just embracing it, and it was okay,” says Asad, “there was no talking at all, there was just doing.”

Driven by an intuitive calling to beauty and truth, as well as a desire to challenge modernity’s emphasis on the individual genius of the lonely artist, this collaboration takes a subtle jab at the pretentions of the art world.

“I told him [Asad] from the start. There is no good or bad… you just have to create. Whether it’s good or bad I don’t know, that’s not on us," offers Safwan.

Following this, Asad, reflecting on his artistic manifesto, chimes in:

“Take life first and art second. Friendship first and everything follows. There was a phase that I went through where I was observing art as a commodity. And then I was like, no: life first. Art is a way of seeing yourself, adorning yourself, smelling, looking… it’s a perspective! And what you create is a result of that.”

When an artist taps into their intuition, their work takes on a life of its own. If the hand that strikes the canvas is guided by an honest desire to channel life, whereby the artist becomes a vessel for a transcendent truth, then the created work absorbs from the world what needs to be witnessed.

As the night came to a close, I asked Asad how his experience working with Safwan was. He praised the spontaneity and speed of Safwan’s mark-making, an approach to painting unlike his own, yet one he is increasingly inspired by.

“My stroke is wavy… maybe I’m dancing a little bit, but I’m also in my head, thinking. And that has something to do with the fact that I’ve left Karachi, so whenever I’m back here I tremble a little. That’s why I need people like [Safwan] in my life who will tell me, no, intuitively there’s truth in you; just say it.”

“I feel like I can see [Safwan] more clearly,” he says at the end of the show, and hearing this I am filled with unbridled joy.

Isn’t that the point of it all? Learning to see each other, to relate to each other, and in turn, reaching out to touch the most intimate, complex parts of ourselves.

And to think, it all began with a fish.