KARACHI:
Andy Warhol’s obsession with cans of Campbell’s soup led to one of the biggest revolutions in the art world. The 32 canvases of ‘pop art’ firmly placed his name next to that of Picasso and Klimt. He once told an art critic that his inspiration came from the fact that he “used to drink it, I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years.”
Pop art in Pakistan is very different. Truck art and paintings on mazaars are admired from afar, words like ‘quaint’ and ‘tradition’ are thrown around, but never by people who actually frequent those mazaars or travel in those buses. Six artists used the Poppy Seed Gallery as a stage to challenge this hypocrisy in an exhibition titled ‘What’s Hot?’ that is up until April 17. They put together work which, in their individual lives, represents popular culture.
“Popular culture is not a culture at all - it is commerce which perpetuates the hegemony of capitalism,” says Danish Ahmed’s rather cynical artist statement. “The function of popular culture is to create a need which can never be satisfied in order to enslave a new set of consumers.”
His work shows bottles of Coca-Cola as he tries to explain that the brand name ‘coke’ has managed to seep into everything from music to sports. “In this exhibition, I tried to detach the designed image of ‘spirituality’, ‘beauty’ from the innate reality which still exists. My works are frequently in the form of diptychs or a panel sliced visually to introduce two sections in an image.
Sumaiya Jilani, on the other hand, refuses to get too worked up about it. “Pop to me is just another name for fashion or maybe vice versa. You like to flaunt stuff which is currently hot.”
Jilani designs T-shirts that feature sketches of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. She claims that ever since his centenary he has become a “fashion symbol”. His poetry acquired a fresh angle after being used in songs by big artists and Tina Sani and Nayyara Noor and even the band Junoon. “Here I am to give people another platform to show their pop love for Faiz Ahmed Faiz through these T-shirts.” Jilani is referring to the bandwagons that are weighed down each time a fresh trend or new idea comes around.
Similarly, Malika Abbas taps into this mob mentality in her work that focuses on the lawn clothing industry. “We, Pakistanis, have great ability to go over the top with all trends, be it in advertising, fashion or any other field. We make it so common that there comes a point that it can never be repeated again.”
Her artist statement explains that it is when the fabrication of a fashion trend hits corner street shops that it truly gets out of hand. “We saw the spread of machine embroidery starting from Threads and Motifs, moving into other similar shops stocking the same work and finally ‘it’ hit the ceiling and every corner market had a cheap rip-off. This season we saw a similar boom in the lawn industry.”
Sehba Maruf’s ‘Circus of Trends’ leans in the opposite direction. Her work slams the “quintessential social butterflies” who frequent lawn exhibitions that are morphing into “popularity performances”.
“My work focuses on how women are always striving to be accepted. Vain women give up their individuality and personality to be attired in the same if not a better lawn as the Jones’s.”
Meanwhile Muhammad Ali’s humble ‘Green Tea without sugar’ is a depiction of “how the elite of our society exploit the less privileged.” He says it highlights social and cultural “hegemonies, conformity, uncontrollable consumerism, obesity, mundane urban life and death” - pretty much every problem that plagues the self-proclaimed ‘upper-class’ in Karachi.
While Sophia Mairaj derives inspiration from the ‘Khawateen Digest’, claiming that “these illustrations are the only visual representation of characters in the stories and they have been looked up to as the latest fashion trends throughout the years.” She uses pictures cut from 1990 to present-day editions of the magazine.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 11th, 2011.
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