Congratulations, dear Sarah Ahmed, on "painting the town red"! By embracing the title of the show 'Tum apni karni kar guzru' at the Faiz Festival 2025, you did "what you must" have. Your presentation challenged societal conventions on multiple levels. To begin with, it contests the somewhat negative rhetoric associated with the idiom; from a slang meaning of reckless debauchery or wild extravagance, the "red" enabled you to make the point loud and clear.
What can one do when justice is "grey" and peace is "black"? [Grey and black are the colours of confinement, sadness, oppression and lack of vitality]. In times when "true blue" is out of fashion, "evergreen" nature is no longer a fountain of wisdom, "royal purple" is unreliable and "white's" purity and virtue are questionable, RED and only red is the answer.
Red has a range of symbolic meanings across cultures, including life, health, vigour, war, courage, anger, love and religious fervour. The common thread is that all these require passion. In moments of rage, lust or embarrassment, bright red oxygenated blood rushes to the skin's surface as a response to fight or flight. Your works serve both purposes. They are loud and piercing due to their colour and scale.
In this way, they provoke a fight, while the metamorphic visual forms and metallic golds [in 'Fractured Alchemy' series] convey opulence and exclusivity guaranteeing an airlift towards success. I shall admit that my obsession with the colour owes itself to experiencing Mark Rothko's 'Red on Red' composition at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. I was advised to spend time with the huge colour field painting which evokes intense emotions and creates a sense of depth and atmosphere. The work does oscillate and create a sense of movement eventually consuming the onlooker, cutting him/her from worldly tragedy and ecstasy to doom and peaceful contentment. Similar was the scale of human feelings, the human drama in your exhibition.
I had often found the structure of Allah Bux Gallery at Alhamra Art Center a bit bothersome. The pillars, the staircase and the spandrel restrict the view of the exhibits and hinder the smooth flow of display. But not in the case of this show. You conquered the space well. As one entered the gallery significant red walls cast a spell while large and small drawings and constructions led one into the wide and narrow areas under the mezzanine and up to the staircase.
The bird forms constructed with collaged photos of mountains and glaciers of Gilgit-Baltistan titled 'Parwaz' resonated well with the flight of stairs. Once the viewer is entrenched with the red, gold and abstract or stylised forms it is time to encounter more brutal imagery of mounds of clay with colourful embroidered caps.
Caps are often left on graves as a sign of respect and reverence for the deceased, acknowledging their importance and dignity. These tangible reminders of the deceased help keep the memory alive. Traditionally, mothers, sisters and wives embroider caps for men as a symbol of love, care and pride. I am not sure if it was the case of missing persons or the pain and sacrifice of the women that grappled one more in these photographs.
The manipulated photos of Northern Pakistan rightly claim to represent the acts of disappearance of men, activists and journalists as well as the ecological system in the face of climate disaster. From this point of view, it is the men who mourn the destruction and erasure of the motherland. In both scenarios the loss and pain is a collective emotion. It goes without saying that they are universal too. How else the Lahore audience would relate to the American Dream? It is the dream we all can relate to. After all the message of rebirth, resurrection and hope is a common aspiration around the globe.
More later.
Love Bano
March, 25
PS: American Dream is the re-installed Greenwood Art project of 2021 comprising a tent promising shelter. It entices the viewer with a passage decorated with marigolds, real and crafted with fabric, and fancy lights only to press the dark realities of terror and destruction as an ultimate reality.
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