Bang, bang, he came back to town

Aamir Habib, with this series of installation pieces strongly marks a reemergence on the art scene.

KARACHI: Aamir Habib’s solo show ‘Anything Goes’ opened at ArtChowk Wednesday night with a bang - the bang of colorful balloons, and Ak-47s, and exploding coffee cups. This is Habib’s first solo show in over five years, and with this series of installation pieces, he strongly marks a reemergence on the art scene.

Habib describes this work as the everyday, under-the-breath ranting of an ordinary person living within Pakistan’s current social and political milieu. Thus, the aptness of the show’s title, ‘Anything Goes’, is better rendered in Urdu: Sab chalta hai. The apparent lightheartedness of the title and the playfulness of the works themselves, at immediate engagement, almost belie their somber content. What emerges, however, is a satirical articulation of much deeper, graver, and unquestionably political concern.

For Habib, the work arose from a frustration with the “inactive elite and the compliant masses that make the unthinkable possible and the ludicrous acceptable”. Such is the state of affairs that citizens have learnt to turn a blind eye to everything as long as it doesn’t land directly in their own backyard. Not only this, but they have also learnt how to condone it at some level as the natural condition of their circumstances. It is here that Habib exits onto a route of black humor in an attempt to shake us out of our apathy.

Perhaps the most effective piece in this context - and what could well be seen as the jewel in the crown of this show - is RGB, the life-sized, gold-plated AK 47, above which surreally hover three cheerful balloons. RGB not only comments on the fetishistic value that colours the acquisition of lethal weaponry, but also highlights the increasing commonality of their use against human life.

With Coffee Break, a large frothing coffee cup out of which come exploding several jets of what one can imagine to be steaming hot coffee, Habib puts forward his vision of the current circumstances as a melting pot on the verge of eruption. If one is to consider the culture of coffee drinking as one that comes to us from the west (versus the chai culture of the subcontinent), then Coffee Break becomes a direct insinuation at the precarious bubble in which the moneyed classes cocoon themselves. The walls of this bubble have in recent years, become much thinner, more transparent and harder to hide behind, and the reality of the political climate much harder to ignore.

Works such as Shutup Democracy address much the same issue - the increasing thinness of the veil that barely masks the holes that emerge when you import lauded political systems and impose them on a set of circumstances whose underlying frameworks do not necessarily even hold the foundational principles necessary for their successful implementation. Stereotyping, the celebration of our flaws, and the self-serving game that is politics in Pakistan are addressed in works such as Bad Architecture is Terrorism and This is Not Untitled.

Through this show, Habib has firmly persuaded us of his capacity to handle several media and not just as a matter of skill that was never in question. Given this, however, his comic-inspired digital prints — featuring the Mughal emperor Akbar — fall somewhat short when juxtaposed with large sculptural installations. Although they are in keeping with the satirical vein that threads his work, the three-dimensional pieces are suffused with a level of intrigue, engagement, and multi-layered complexity that the digital works are hard put to compete with. Still, the exhibition in its entirety holds strong, and defies its own title - a tendency that has gripped recent contemporary art. For Aamir Habib, obviously, Sab kuch nahin chalta.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 22^nd, 2010.