Summer residency: Drains, trees, towers…garbage off the street

9 NCA artists put work on display after Lahore Art Council residency.

LAHORE:

For three months, Julius John, a fine arts student at the National College of Arts (NCA), has been snapping upstream-downstream shots of the drains across Lahore.

John, one of the nine NCA students working at Lahore Art Council, during summer vacations, says he wants to document the state of the city’s infrastructure.

“Christmas trees converted” is a collage formed by putting together several shots of palms on Gulberg’s Main Boulevard. “This is my comment on how the government is insisting to beautify the streets of Lahore by adding a foreign species of tree,” John says.

John, who lives near Kot Lakhpat, has also displayed digital prints of the Arfa Karim Tower and half-demolished buildings opposite Walton Road and Ferozepur Road intersection.

“Arfa Karim Tower highlights the social and economic divide.” The exhibit opened on September 3 and was to run until Saturday. It will now stay on display until Sunday. “The response has been tremendous. We decided to keep it on display for one more day,” says Tanya Suhail, curator of the three galleries at the Lahore Art Council.

“Residency is a programme started by five NCA students in 2011 to use the LAC premises as a studio to paint during summer vacation,” says Suhail. “Last year, five students painted for two months before their best work. We had nine students this year. It is becoming an increasingly popular platform for NCA students,” she said.

Three students – Zahrah Ehsan, Uzair Amjad and Julius John– had also participated last year. Now they want to take it a step further and set up a Facebook page.

Zahid Mayo, 24, from Alipur Chattha, has nine pieces on display. “I roam around and photograph whatever is intense, beautiful and striking. Then I transfer it to the canvas,” says Mayo, who is displaying his work for the first time. Mayo likes sketching and working with acrylic paints. A mix-media painting highlighting the eyes of a village boy in shades of blue, says Mayo, is a piece he developed from a picture he took in Alipur Chatta. Another piece captured both urban and rural life on a corrugated sheet he picked from a roadside garbage heap.

A mixed-meda piece shows commuters on a bus in the rear-view mirror. “I was on my way to Islamabad from Lahore, when I captured these shots inside the bus,” Mayo says. White Rabbit by Nyrah Mushtaq is the only installation at the exhibit. It highlights “element of grotesque,” Mushtaq says.

“I collected old pictures of some class fellows and distant relatives and scratched the faces. I drew my inspiration from the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. As one grows older, the fantasy world of Alice seems real as the real world itself is crazy, violent and scary. Removing clues to time and space by scratching some faces using a nail cutter is an act of disassociation. It represents coldness and detachment, she says.

Uzair Amjad, 22, has overprinted transparencies of personal bed space. “I did not mean to make it appear disturbing. It is just an attempt to make one’s presence felt,” said Amjad.

Amjad said setting up a fund for art students from across Pakistan to live in Lahore and use the gallery space is an idea still being discussed among his peers.

“I was among the first students to have started this. So far only artists living in Lahore have benefited from it.

Once we are done with our thesis in January next year, we will look into the possibility of getting sponsors to fund a regular residency programme,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 9^th, 2012.