Feast for the Eyes, Nourishment for the Soul

Mehvash Amin

Our Editor in Chief was at the Karachi Biennale KB24. Here she talks about the experience.

Two years ago, Madeline Clements of the Teesside University in England got in touch with a few publishers and editors who had been interviewed by Maham Khan and Sadia Akhtar for a project. I was one of them.

Madeline’s idea was to get together women publishers and editors in Pakistan under the aegis of an umbrella organization. After that first meeting at The Last Word bookstore, where Madeline, myself and Niilofur Farrukh, Managing Trustee of the Karachi Biennale, were all present, a constructive outreach to many other women editors and publishers was initiated and PAPWE was born… the Pakistan Association of Women Publishers and Editors.  Eventually, it was decided that Teesside University would fund a project whereby four researchers, two from Karachi and two from Lahore, would archive parts of publications run by women—publications which for one reason or another had had to fold up. The four researchers chosen were Hira Azmat and Mahnoor Jalal from Lahore, and Taazeen Hussain and Veera Rustomji from Karachi.

Niilofur Farrukh readily incorporated a session dedicated to the researchers’ work. They would present a brief esquisse of their research under the able mentorship of Madeliene, with a more detailed digital handbook to be added to the websites of The Aleph Review and the Karachi Biannale (to be sure PAWPE members like myself and Niilofur were part of this journey and provided input and ideas, but the main person guiding the researchers and doing the organizational work was Madeline).

I was very excited, not just for our session, but also because I would have the chance to see the art at the Karachi Biennale and attend other sessions. The theme of KB24 was Rizq/Risk, the first word denoting the sustenance the Creator provides to his all his creation: food, water, healing from plants, and so on. ‘Risk’ obviously denotes food security as well as food corruption in the brave new world of GMOs and pesticides. I was keen to see how artists had translated this concept in their art work.

The Teesside Archival session, led by Madeline Clements:

This was the apogee of three months of work by the four very invested researchers, and comprised three components: Madeline’s introduction and a seven-minute talk with a slide show by the four researchers followed by a Q&A, then an interactive session with the audience where they would be given ‘postcards’ and prompted to write about anything they could think of that they felt should be archived—or their reactions to what they had just heard. The last section would be a talk by author Tooba Masood-Khan about the research she and fellow co-author Saba Imtiaz had done on their book Society Girl, about the notorious murder of poet and civil servant Mustafa Zaidi, following an affair with Shehnaz Gul, a contracter’s wife. The book, yet to be launched in Lahore, fit in with the session’s stress on the importance of archives, since the authors spent seven years doing archival research for their book. 

Veera had worked on She magazine, a very well-known lifestyle publication that was published monthly from 1963 to 1973 and then again from 1983 to early 2020, Hira on material from Simorgh Publications, a feminist endeavour that had started up after the infamous Hudood laws of 1979, Mahnoor on Paper magazine as well as some Women’s Action Forum (WAF) newsletters that she had unearthed, and Tazeen on Nukta Art, of which Niilofur was a founder-member. All these magazines stopped publishing at one time or another, and though most of them had folded up due to financial constraints, it was interesting to note that Paper, a lifestyle magazine with some art and social awareness content, was self-funded, with no lack of money, yet chose to close.

All the presentations were excellent and informative, and some of the archivists talked about the problems they faced in their archival journey, such as gate-keeping by publishers or their unwillingness or tardiness in responding etc.

The team is excited that their work, briefly presented at KB24, will be organized as a digital handbook by Madeline, and then put up on the websites mentioned—not just to access the actual findings of the group but also to learn about the difficulties of archiving.

After a robust question and answer session, it was time for the audience to participate in this session by writing down their impressions and suggestions. Then, Tooba regaled the audience with her stories of journeys to various libraries (the Punjab Public Library in Lahore received an honorable mention), to Mustapha Zaidi’s house and the graveyard where he is buried. It seems Tooba encountered some serendipitous, indeed almost (in her words) supernatural interventions!

All in all, an excellent session with keen audience participation.

Under the Pier at Bagh ibn Qasim:

I was honoured to be able to speak about the journey of The Aleph Review in the pop-up reading room that was the brainchild of a PAWPE member, author Maniza Naqvi, also supported by PAWPE. Other installations from KB24, Like Daniala Zambrano’s “Colonial History of Potatoes”, lined one end of the causeway and “Artists of Gaza Live in our Hearts Project”, comprising poignant tapestries about one of the worst genocides in history, floated in the warm afternoon breeze. These impressive tapestries were made by the students of ten schools and one of them, by the Textile Institute of Pakistan, was presented a prize at the closing ceremony. Another installation I loved was by the Irani artist Bita Razazi, with boxes encasing beautifully curated photographs of mostly kitchen items that make up a typical Irani dowry, in this case collected by Bita’s grandmother.

After the talk, which included critic and writer Muneeza Shamsi talking about her book Hybrid Tapestries, we stepped outside for the unique experience of seeing how Pachamanca is cooked, a Peruvian dish of potatoes, meat and vegetables infused with herbs and cooked with hot stones after being covered in banana leaves and earth. It was a unique performative project tying up to Zambrano’s installation about the history of potatoes, and reminding us that this universally popular spud was unknown to the rest of the world till the Spanish conquered what is now known as Latin America in the 15th century.

It was lovely to feel the warm afternoon morph into a cool Karachi evening as Waheeda Baloch, the curator of the Biennale, chatted about the projects on display, while others sat on chairs or on the floor waiting for the Pachamanca to cook.

Frere Hall:  

The next day, Madeline and I made our way to the spectacular Frere Hall to see the art work of several artists. Constructed by the British in the 1860s, its colonial vocabulary is an important element in the work of artist Ayesha Jatoi. Her installation lined the staircase and its balustrade—steel eating bowls and plates alternately filled with a red liquid and rubble. As you walk past this work, you are reminded that there are “still children starving in Gaza”, in the artist’s words. The backdrop also reminds us that the last of the world’s settler-colonial enterprises continues to oppress and genocide the colonised on an unprecedented scale.

A haunting chant drew us inside. Under the spectacular—though unfinished—ceiling painted by one of Pakistan’s greatest artists, Sadequain, three young people chanted and undulated on the floor. This was live art by Tino Sehgal, an artist of German and Indian descent who describes his work as “constructed situations”.

After seeing so many installations, tapestries, live and performative art, I was happy to see actual oil canvases by Naiza Khan! The paintings, in the artist’s words, “depict the entanglement of bodies of water, landscapes and infrastructures, both historical and contemporary, weaving issues of land contestation, borders, and the extraction of naturel resources.” I thought the canvases were stunning, drawing one in again and again to find new elements that had gone unnoticed at first glance. I particularly liked the depiction of a (beached?) whale in one such smorgasbord of disparate elements made harmonious.

Maheen Zuberi’s installation was visually rich, a construct of gold and white, more cerebral than organic (as some other works were) and hinted at “local systems of belief and knowledge through the positioning of the divine rizq against material ideas of food security.”

The Image Starved—A talk by Emilia Terraciano

Madeline and I attended this profoundly unsettling talk on the 1943 Bengal Famine by Terraciano—about food scarcity taken to the endgame of famine. The visuals that were splayed on the impressively large screen of the Sambara Art Gallery auditorium made me squirm; more so a particular suite of photos depicting skeletal human beings who were forced to pose by the photographer. In another photo, we found out, a dog had been made to attack a cadaver; in yet another, the remains of victims had been arranged in an S shape for ‘better’ photographic impact. It was a sobering thought that colonisation is still around and that the object of using photographic testimony for a given purpose still persists, though in starkly different contexts. 

Sambara Art Gallery

This gallery housed the work of some wonderful artists. Prominent amongst them were Salim Bayri and Ghita Skali of Morocco. Their ‘Sunflower Seed Project’ was visually stunning, tables draped with ‘tablecloths’ of sunflower seeds atop which roasters were placed, allowing the visitor to roast the seeds and even take them home in self-made paper cones… used paper was strewn on the floor for this purpose, such as our itinerant food sellers use to sell hot channas in. This installation is a step forward from the duo’s previous one, entitled ‘Sunflower Seeds are for Birds’, and seeks to explore the feasibility of replacing other food with seeds.

Asif Khan’s aerial film of rice being planted looked like fine embroidery in progress. French photographer’s Enora Lalet’s playful and colourful suite of ‘food portraits’ is a treat to the eyes. Organic food is used with human subjects in tableaux that give life to creatures that possess a magical, almost surrealistic quality… the concept of conventional ‘tableware’ is thus stood on its head. Nabiha Khan’s curtain of spices titled ‘Spice Un-scape’ is “an aromatic narrative that is nostalgic and political through an interplay of top, base and middle (scent) notes”. The work encourages the viewers to question political, social and trade hierarchies.

Alliance Française

As one enters the open courtyard of the Alliance Française and Goethe Institute Building, one sees the elongated purple diamond of Turkish artist Muge Yilmaz’s wall installation. Titled ‘Three Hundred Sisters’, the surface is artfully covered with 300 varieties of maize amidst oak wood sculptures of corn of the cob. The work illustrates the biodiversity of this important staple food. Going up, I came across one of my favourite installations, that of Peruvian artist Eliana Otta Vildoso. Beautifully embroidered ‘protest banners’ of foods common in both Peru and Pakistan are mounted on the mismatched shoes of agricultural workers. Around these, grains and legumes weave intricate and colourful patterns that echo Peruvian traditions of making offerings to the soil.

Farida Batool’s steel wheat field “addresses the issues and politics of modern wheat cultivation”. It is indeed a powerful message, the soft organic sheafs of wheat rendered so starkly in bristling steel. This is accompanied by a video and sound installation exploring the role of women in “preserving culinary traditions amidst threats to food security in Pakistan and Gaza.”

I also attended a very informative talk, called ‘Food for Thought, Thought for Change’ by Dr Kylie GilChrist on the importance of food in the oeuvre of Rasheed Araeen, but sadly could not make it to the final venue, NED University.

All in all, the biennale in the city by sea was a nourishing experience, full of conceptual vigour and painstaking work and peppered with thought-provoking talks and seminars. It was also worth noting that most of the work lived up faithfully to the theme of Rizq/Risk, approached in so many different ways by as many different and effervescent minds. Kudos to all those involved in producing this fabulous feast for the eyes and the mind, as well as all the people managing its day to day running. Sunday the 10th of November saw the end of the biennale, and the start of its careful dis-assembling. Before long, I am sure, the powerhouses who run it will already be thinking of the next iteration in 2026.

Godspeed.

Please visit Karachi Biennale for more information about KB24. Also please note that the writer did not cover all the installations or talks.