Happiness is a warm gun : Artist tries to make sense of Salmaan Taseer’s murder

When everyone has a different version of events, making up your mind is not easy.

KARACHI:

On January 4, the murder of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer ushered in a period of confusion and heightened emotions all over the country. Picking up on this debate, Imran Mudassar, who is a National College of Arts graduate, decided to work through it. The results went on display at Karachi’s Chawkandi Gallery on Thursday.

“There were a lot of anti-Taseer banners plastered all over the place,” explained Mudassar while talking to The Express Tribune on the phone from Lahore. “At the same time, there were plenty of pro-Taseer ones too. I have used religous patterns, with Cobra helicopters and fighter jets to add to the confusion.”

Mudassar claimed that all his work has a predisposition towards war and violence. “In my recent works, I deal with the idea of life and its destruction by creating a dialogue between my own body and objects and events related to war.”

His medium of choice varies - some pieces are pencil sketches, but he sometimes employs a more complicated ‘panni printing” method. The print, most commonly used to adorn religious books, involves pressing the golden panni foil into the book cover, using a heated zinc plate. The artist etches his design into the metal plate beforehand. Mudassar likes to experiment on different surfaces, both conventional and non-conventional, such as canvases, ceramics, leather binding and digital printing.

The artist’s use of designs is reminscent of those used by mosques and as religious decorations is no mere coincidence. He strives to depict the blurred line between religion as a faith and religion as a mask for acts of terrorism. In many pieces, he achieves this by superimposing the gilded panni designs with weapons and war planes.

One of his pieces is a two-sided, black-and-white sketch. On the left side, black flies attack a body protected by a suit of armour, on the right side, the same body is bombarded with white insects issuing from a tank. “I’ve used flies as negative symbols. On a white surface, the flies are black and attacks white, while the white flies attack black. Even though white is a symbol of peace and purity, the white flies are still attacking. How do people know who to trust, and who to blame?”

The situation is by no means limited to a city, or even a country. “The news keeps talking about how people are dying in Karachi, but two weeks ago I got mugged at gunpoint a street away from my house. Violence is prevalent everywhere.”

Mudassar believes people have become used to this by now. “About 12 years ago, when we used to see people dying in Kashmir and Balochistan, it would scare us. Now when we see killings on the news, our reaction is, ‘Oh, only 10 people died, that’s OK then.”

Published in The Express Tribune, April 8^th,  2011.