LAHORE: As summer comes to a close, the cultural activity in the city kicked up a notch with two art openings and the start of a German film festival on Wednesday.
The Alhamra Art Gallery played host to Shaheen Ka Khuda Aur Hai Kargis Ka Khuda Aur, Qaiser Khan Shinwari’s exhibition of drawings and sculptures. Arif Mahmood’s solo photography show, The Silver Lining, opened at Rohtas 2. Finally, the German Film Festival kicked off at the National College of Arts (NCA).
Shinwari’s sculptures were made with bricks to signify a ‘rebellious approach’ to life. He said, “These are not simply bricks, rather it is what is inside of them. A rebellious approach towards life and relationships is always stamped with insignificance and excommunication.”
Art critic Nausheen Saeed said, “His sculptures have a close connection with burnt bricks, objects that are discarded due to their poor quality and unsuitability in the construction process but acquire a greater visual appeal. Qaiser had manipulated these two aspects and created works that attract a viewer as well as invoke a number of queries about our existence, extinction and the idea of recreation. Recreating or recycling is explored in myriad ways in his new works. His new works are multi layered in their formal and conceptual values. His work reaffirms the importance of an artist who is young but passionate, skilful yet keen on establishing a dialogue with his surroundings using intellectual, pictorial and poetic language. He is a pleasant, positive addition to Pakistani art.”
Shinwari went on to say, “Bricks, even when they are broken, even when they are sold in heaps, even when they are crushed into pieces . . . are used in filling foundations of skyscrapers. It is so because they provide concreteness.”
Arif Mahmood, a self-taught photojournalist, received praise for his work at Rohtas 2. Mahmood’s work was part of the Asia Society Exhibition “Hanging Fire, Contemporary Art from Pakistan” in New York in 2009. Arif Mahmood documented the cell in a Hyderabad jail which was occupied by Faiz Ahmed Faiz during the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case trial in the 1950s. The photographs were for the up coming publications for the Faiz Centennial in 2011.
“This is a very personal compilation: it’s the beginning of the Sufi Trail essay series which I have been working on most extensively for the past six years. Although it began in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s, the images actually started coming together in recent years. I have focused mainly on the helplessness of the individual when it comes to a mediator between him and God. This fascinates me. The rituals are an anthropologists’ dream and the highlights of a photographer. But as the journey through the viewfinder became intense the intricate complexities of interlinked relations started revealing their colour. As far as I am concerned nothing is ever complete, you can work on a concept for a life time” he said.
On the first day of the German Festival, Feo Aladag’s When We Leave was screened at the NCA.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 30th, 2010.
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