100-best posters exhibition: Visual artists from across the globe drive home the ‘housing problem’

The best posters were selected from 3,461 entries received from 122 countries.

KARACHI:

An exhibition of 100-best posters depicting ‘A home for everyone’ opened at the Arts Council of Pakistan on Friday. The theme of the exhibition was exciting enough to pull a large crowd but due to the uncertain law and order situation, only a handful of people and art lovers made it to the show.  

Poster for Tomorrow in collaboration with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and the Arts Council of Pakistan have organised the exhibition to unveil 100 best posters selected from amongst 3,461 entries received from 122 countries for the contest. The exhibition ends today [Sunday].

The posters by various visual artists depict the miseries of people who sleep on footpaths. The artists have portrayed the need and meaning of a good home, a place where one lives with dignity, where one entertains friends and takes rest after working all day.



The posters show that for some people, having a home has become a dream - a thing beyond reach. Many are living on footpaths and streets, where a bench at a bus stop serves as their bed, some old newspapers as their blanket and a stray dog as their friend.

An artist, Caroline Koegler, from Australia, has shown the life of a street sleeper in a poster, ‘Home is not on the street’. In another poster, she shows a house atop a hill which people are watching from hundreds of feet below. They have no elevator or stairs to reach the top, indicating that it is almost impossible for them to reach the house.



Artist Diego Becas from Chile in a poster, ‘Small places are not homes’, depicts that a man’s life in a one-room house is just like a dog’s life. Artist Leblanc Daniel’s poster from Canada shows a person who reads classified pages every day in newspapers to find a house at a reasonable price but he crosses one advertisement after another because they are beyond his economic means and towards the end, the entire page is crossed out.  Looking at Daniel’s poster, noted architect and urban planner Arif Hasan smiled and said, “This one is also good. Majority of the Pakistanis can’t afford to buy a house.”

“Every poster gives a very beautiful explanation of the housing problem which exists everywhere in the world. Where there is more poverty, the problem is more severe,” said Hasan. In Pakistan, the poor can’t afford to build a house as they have no land. And even if they are given land, the poor people do not have the money to construct houses for themselves, he added. Housing loan schemes are also not available. “The population density of the city has increased enormously which has affected the social fabric and many gangs have emerged,” he said. One-floor housing units have rapidly changed into multi-storey flats and owners have turned into renters but the country has no procedures for renting houses. “The government has 4,000 acres of free land in Karachi on which it should construct low-income housing schemes and give them to the people on soft loans. The transfer of ownership should be withheld for the first 15 to 20 years,” suggested Hasan.



The organiser of the exhibition, Khuda Bux Abro, told The Express Tribune that they are approaching art schools and institutions to give projects to their students for the next contest of Poster for Tomorrow which will be on the theme, ‘Right to Work’. Abro informed that only one poster from Pakistan was received in the competition. Speaking about the strength of using visual art, Abro himself a noted visual artist, said, “If you put a line or two on your visual art piece, its impact increases and touches human feelings directly.”

Published in The Express Tribune, January 26^th, 2014.