Artist makes the rich buy their own visual criticism

Sadaf Khan presents her school thesis based on two bipolar cities: Boston and Lahore.

Saba Khan, an artist who boasted selling her satirical art on the Pakistani elite to the subjects of her work, has come a long way.

“Before coming to Boston, my paintings had satirical, cultural nuances of subjects from the elite, ruling class of Pakistan, where humorous tools were developed to criticise them,” explains Khan.

At her first solo show in Karachi, titled ‘Culture Shock’, Khan presents the shock of switching from two bipolar cities: Lahore, her hometown, and Boston, where she was studying. This collection contains pieces that she presented during her Masters in Fine Arts.

“Living in Boston I had to adjust to a more democratic class system, a different kind of sunlight, a greyer colour palate and solid colours in contrast to heavy patterns that were used as backgrounds for my previous works,” Khan says. But soon she realised that the country was not as democratic as she had conceived.

“There was also a constant struggle with preconceived ideas about my region and religion, created by the American media,” Khan adds. And this is perhaps why she made a chain of paintings in reaction to the prejudices she encountered. “I painted flat American stereotypes with a blunt humour from the point of view of an outsider.”

Khan explains that her series on suicide bombers came about during a summer break in Pakistan “when I was watching a fresh, unedited video of a bomb explosion on television”. Khan made a series of images where one can see a decapitated head, separated from the body and lying in a pool of blood. “The motif of a head in the paintings is to come to terms with the devastation and carnage that is going on in the country. I imagine the explosion from his point of view, happily thinking he is shooting off to ‘paradise’.”

For her first show, Khan has priced her paintings lower than the norm. Her painting titled ‘America’ can be bought for Rs70,000 while ‘Shooting off to paradise’ is priced at Rs95,000.

The exhibition opened at Canvas Gallery on Tuesday and will go on till Thursday, January 27, between 11 am and 8 pm, excluding Sundays.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 19^th,  2011.