Remember Me: Four friends lean on their past to create art for the present

Artists display their mixed media installations in a two-day exhibition, titled ‘Remember Me’.

KARACHI: Four friends, Abdullah Tariq, Danial Hyatt, Shoaib Rizvi and Zeerak Ahmed, travelled back in time and inspired from their journey down memory lane, displayed their mixed media installations in a two-day exhibition, titled Remember Me, at the VM Art Gallery.

Artists occupied the space with their pieces to create a remembrance of the past left behind. Danial Hyatt’s video game was the depiction of his early years, recreating ‘Pong’, one of the earliest video games. The Pong is known as a game of defeating the opponent in a ball game, but he chose to recreate his past with a twist. In this recreation, the players had to work with each other as opposed to against each other. The game created a sense of alliance, an interaction with the self as well as with the other player. “I felt a responsibility of representing the video games as art, so I went back to the beginning,” Hyatt told The Express Tribune.



Similarly, Shoaib Rizvi’s ‘Ripe/Rotten’ represented the three stages of life, where he created a dollhouse, briefcase and a coffin out of mango crates. “Mangoes are the treat of the summer,” Rizvi said. “They are transported in primitive containers [pieces of wood nailed together], which for me represent Pakistan as a whole, containing valuable lives and different ethnicities accumulated together,” he explained. The coffin had mangoes wrapped with newspapers with old photos inside them. Each mango represented a life event, while the newspaper signified worldly events. Rizvi’s final piece was ‘The Funeral’ representing death. Another mango crate was wrapped in newspapers and in the box a video of a mango being sliced was played. A human being was shown being cut up layer by layer to represent different stages of life. Even for someone who does not understand symbols, Rizvi’s pieces spoke volumes. The newspaper wrapping a single mango symbolises that news about death in Pakistan can be so important to one but completely irrelevant to another. The mundane and profound nature of his work is aimed at making people remember their past.

Zeerak Ahmed’s projection, ‘White Space’, was a video that recreated the act of shampooing hair. “When a baby is born, we bathe him/her in order to purify, but it is born in the purest state and we cover it with the impurities of worldly things such as, soap,” said Ahmed. The powerful installation leaves one questioning what purity is. It poses as a reminder that in our attempt to purify ourselves we cover ourselves with impurities and come so far away from our original state that we can no longer remember what purity really is. Purity becomes a perception and we do not fit in either state - we are neither pure nor impure, she added.

Abdullah Tariq translated the concept of chaos, perception in his work made out of barrels, conveying movement in time. The tubes were made by linking the barrels to depict the stages of life. Covered in black cloth, the abstract piece investigates the idea of perception and the chaos within us - a theme sometimes best left untouched.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 16^th, 2014.