Lok Mela: Helping artisans tap into the market

Lok Virsa teams up with NCA to turn event into networking opportunity.

ISLAMABAD:

With the arrival of spring, a festival of artists and artisans from across the country is in full swing in the capital. The annual 10-day folk and cultural festival at Lok Virsa puts a human face to their arts, crafts, history and traditions.

Artists and artisans from the four provinces, Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan have put on display their unique culture, crafts and lifestyles perform folk dances and music attracting huge crowds from the twin cities.



The festival provides an opportunity to the artisans and performers to interact with each other and enables visitors to familiarise themselves with forgotten folklore. It also presents the rich cultural diversity of Pakistan for the world to see.

This year, the National College of the Arts (NCA), Rawalpindi and Lok Virsa have joined hands to take the decades-old festival a step further.

By bringing artists and artisans in direct contact with the market, they aim to eliminate the middleman. Teams of first-year students and faculty of NCA are spot-checking to ensure the artists’ authenticity.

Teams from NCA Rawalpindi and Lok Virsa are working in sync to document the festival and looking for means to turn it into a networking event for artisans. They will also issue a report to highlight the gaps and issues faced by artisans.



“The festival offers an insight into all these ancient techniques, traditional materials and motifs nobody has seen. This is not mainstream art, it is craft,” said Rawalpindi NCA Director Dr Nadeem Omar Tarar.

Tarar hopes to address this inequality between art and craft and between artists and artisans by bringing them together. Artisans have no social respect in this country, he pointed out, whereas no matter how bad he or she is, an artist gets an alleviated status.

This inequality stems from intellectual distinctions between art and craft. “As if craft is for the people and art is for the elite. It’s not like that anymore, it’s a global world. Craft sells at very high prices,” said Tarar. “We can export handicrafts to the West. All these opportunities are completely lost here.”

First-year students have come to get reacquainted with their roots. “I believe an artist has to come of his or her cocoon to engage with local culture. That’s what will make them distinctive, not copying from the West. You learn craft and you take a step further,” added Tarar.

Lok Virsa Executive Director Shahera Shahida said, “Ensuring that the artisans are genuine is a major concern and we’ve sent lists to the provinces for verification.”

However, limited funds are a problem and Lok Virsa has sought donations from multinationals. The donors are themselves awarding the amount so it is a transparent process,” she added.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 19^th, 2014.