Shameen Arshad
My first painting was more of an attempt to put forth any ideas lingering in the back of my mind. To make the process spontaneous I worked out my imagery directly upon the prepared surface without a specific plan in mind. "Paint something, anything" was the instruction so that is exactly what I did. I felt this was a good exercise to see what my current concerns were without consciously pushing my work in a particular direction and to see how these concerns can be translated into works in the future.
The painting, unexpectedly turned out to be an abstract depiction of my parents, in their natural setting, adorned in traditional Pakistani attire, strangely very different from my former practice that consisted of clean and precise text based paintings.
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My reference photos were nothing out of the ordinary back home, however, the act of recreating that visual in a foreign setting, seemed to make me question the chosen image more and what it meant in reference to my current surroundings. An image that was perhaps in the past read as portraits now turned the discussion over to the attire and the traditions endemic to my home country. This exercise made me realize the shift in context when using an image outside of a space that its normally witnessed in. This was further made obvious my the way my painting was interpreted by my classmates during the peer critique. It also made me aware of the difficulty of getting individuals to connect to my work if they were unaware of the social and historical significance of the selected reference images.
My second painting was based on a bus journey back home. I came across an incident where a group of brown girls were bullying a little white girl, forcing her to do humiliating antics just to get a snack. I immediately took a snapshot as I felt that moment was a little glimpse into a very large problem we experience worldwide. Perhaps with the ideas of inequality of power, race and social hierarchy running around in my head I interpreted the event as a shift in power dynamics. The incident caught my attention because of the absurdity of it in a larger sphere - the white being bullied by people of south Asian origin.
I changed my mind several times about the treatment of the image. From using colour to a painting with only three colours. Somehow I felt either treatment was not doing justice to the idea at hand. However, I was happy to choose an oddly shaped canvas as I wanted the visual to seem just how I had witnessed it, from the corner of my eye. I chose a surface that tightly confined the character within its frame to mirror the subjects compromised position.
I continued to sketch images on public transport and of crowds around London, overlapping visuals, to give shape to the chaos and disorientation I initially felt on moving to London. Having made the work I mentioned above I realized the commonality within the different pieces - the idea of race, displacement and belonging.
My last artwork ( a diptych) was based on the event of 23rd of January, 2012, involving a racist rant by Jacqueline Woodhouse’s on the tube in London. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obppkW1zR0g&t=4s) I started the project by sketching clips from the video. These however were not successful as they lacked innovation and my personal input as an artist. Thus, I turned my attention from just simply reillustrating the video to picking out words from her speech. I picked the phrase “ Where did you come from?” that on the surface seems like a harmless statement, however this very statement has been repeatedly used with a hostile undertone in many reported events of cultural intolerance.
This further encouraged me to bring up other such seemingly harmless statements, amongst which “Go back home” is one of the most popular ones, sometimes altered as “Go back to India”. What I find particularly unsettling about the latter statement is how even today where our country has gained popularity or rather an infamous status we are still sometimes seen as interchangeable with Indians and are not acknowledged as a separate nation.
I prepared my surface (cardboard sheet) by applying gesso unevenly across it to retain the crudeness of the material. I feel the roughly prepared surface helps add to the acerbity of the remarks. Furthermore, the repetition of these statements are the literal depiction of the persistence of Woodhouse’s words in my thoughts. Through this repetition I also aimed to show the profuseness with which such remarks are used today as well as how I as a Pakistani combat such profanities by writing them out quite a few times to the point where they lose all meaning to me.
After my tutorial with Geraint we both that it was a good idea to look into creating my images on actual cartons. The idea behind using Urdu script on the outside while using English inside is my way of shedding light upon the importance of language to our a national identity or any for that matter. Language has paid a very crucial role in the history of Pakistan. It has been a way to solidify sovereignty by one race upon another repeatedly, first by the British on Indian and later by West Pakistani on East Pakistanis. In the case of the subcontinent, native languages were suppressed as English was established as the official language since the time of the British rule in India. This was a technique used to disconnect a larger population from their culture and a means to strengthen the hold of the English in the subcontinent. Till today Macaulay’s idea (the person responsible for establishing the hegemony of Western Education in India) of English being a superior language prevails. Thus our concentration on having a command on it has made us neglect Urdu or even embarrassed of it.
By plastering the outside of the carton with Urdu script I comment on how we seem to want to reinforce ourselves as an autonomous identity, yet cling onto our past endorsing cultural imperialism. Clinging onto Urdu is one of the ways we determined ourselves as an independent state in the past as well as do today .However, this contradicts with our use of the English language to determine our self-worth.
Having had English as the medium of instruction in school I seem to have a greater comfortable level with a foreign language than my own. Having this affinity for English has cut me off from local literary works, music and other forms of cultural expression. This artwork is a sort of self- portrait representing this idea. It is also my way of talking about how my physical appearance connects me to my home country but in actuality I seem to have adopted more western ideals than eastern ones.
Added below is the final version of the painting. I kept going back and forth to the idea of adding some Urdu text into the mix. In the end I decided against it as I felt the point I was trying to make was achieved despite it's absence.
Furthermore, I added the pattern as I felt that it instantly echoes of old Islamic manuscripts and Miniature paintings. The pattern is often seen to enclose images or text that is given a sort of reverence - whether it be royal commissioned paintings or even seen in the Quran. I felt it was appropriate to use it in the painting, where it encompasses the English alphabet that in our society is seen as a special language. My painting is a comment on how it holds a sacred space in our community where the people that speak it fluently are regarded as superior to others.
I also felt that the process of repeating alphabets has a sort of fanatical undertone to it just like the process of learning our "keydah" in our childhood- the repeating of the Arab alphabet till we knew it by heart.
Wanting to move further beyond my comfort zone, which I felt was reflective of my wrestle with my subject, I turned to exploring mediums that were not as straight forward as painting itself. This time around I felt that my ideas were better captured through digital artworks. This gave me a chance to polish my rusty Photoshop skills to bring my concepts to life. This required a tedious amount of time struggling and experimenting on screen.
As digital medium is synonymous with the influx of vast and varied information I felt it was rather appropriate to capture my findings from an eclectic collection of sources through it. This quality of the medium also better mirrors the overwhelming complexity and contradictions of the South Asian identity.
Also, I feel the digital space is a platform on which you can very easily draw parallels between the past and the present where shifting between paradigms of time is just a click away. This thought occurred to me while working on my Unit 3 project where I had images of 1900s postcards as well as that day’s published newspaper articles side by side on my screen. The preservation of different time periods in such a way gives it a kind of ageless quality. This made me more interested in employing some modern techniques as I was hoping to gain some of timelessness in my work where I make references to history as well as the contemporary Pakistani landscape on a single surface. Soon I started composing my future paintings on Photoshop as the flexibility of the medium helped me explore several different possible ways to conceive my image.
My site specific installation“ Are we there yet?” revolves around the concept of physical as well as metaphorical displacement by contemplating over the idea of a “ home”. This project was inspired by my everyday walk to and from college where I come across numerous suburban homes with low or in some cases no front wall.
Somehow the idea of having one’s personal space so accessible to passersby repeatedly made me uncomfortable. Having come from a place where the standard boundary wall of houses is becoming higher with passing time, to the point that the front of the house is sometimes not visible, I found the lack of one unsettling. This discomfort spoke of a much bigger issue of security and vulnerability. Through this artwork I am trying to talk about the feeling of vulnerability in both spaces, my homeland as well as a foreign country.
This artwork is to show the contrast between both living spaces yet the prevailing sense of defencelessness. I wanted to talk about what makes a space more secure It is also an attempt to see how each visual is read by the audience, especially the one with the wall covered in barbed wire.
Furthermore, I decided to add a stereotypical representation of a “home” . I wanted to show the irony behind drawing images of brick houses throughout my childhood that holds greater resemblance to the kind of houses I had not encountered until now.
I also wanted to talk about people's ability to adapt to changes, a process where they become less acquainted with what was once familiar. I chose to show this by overlapping a blue print of my house in Pakistan over the view outside my window in London . The gradual disappearance of the map reveals the growing disconnect with my own house or in a greater sense my own home country.
Taking my initial digital images, I moved onto recreating them in the form of painting. The intention behind this change was to see how the image changes and the nuances of each art medium. I feel the image that I was working with needed to capture two things; the presence of the artist in terms of work down by hand and a variety of medium to stay true to the nature of the subject. Furthermore, l felt that the rough quality of loose brush strokes contrasted with rigid lines and photographs gives the work a kinetic quality. I was hoping to create an image where the viewers eye does not slide off the surface. By doing so I was hoping to depict the less than calm nature of work. By "less then calm " I mean to built imagery that reflect my acceptance of my own reality yet with hints of discomfort.
Furthermore, I wanted the change in technique or treatment to reflect the multifariousness of an individual.
I wanted the work to cover several issues that I feel are worth discussing when talking about the Pakistani identity. Amongst these are the use of language in the country and the transition from the language of instruction from Persian that was labelled as the language of "dissidence" to Urdu to English. I have tried to reveal this transition in the painting by placing the alphabets from each respective language. The viewer's eye moves from the persian alphabet at the top of the canvas to English placed at the lower end. By leaving the english alphabet incomplete I am talking about how in the south Asian society non fluency while speaking in English is preferred over speaking articulately in your local language.
Furthermore, I wanted to talk about another characteristic that has been attached to the country since the day it was created - our muslim identity. Since partition the idea of Pakistan being the "land of the pure" has been reinforced time and again. Land that was home to people that observed many different religions was now rejecting a major part of its community to justify its creation. The country was depriving itself of the multi multiculturalism that existed within its boundaries for centuries.
Even today internationally Pakistanis are recognized for hardly anything beyond religion. Even today it is a defining factor and every other quality is secondary. However, the context and the light in which it is now seen has greatly been altered.
Thus, I felt that the only recognizable part of the busy market landscape in the background, should be the minaret. The thought of leaving the minaret as an identifiable feature came to me after a few conversations with new acquaintances where the religion I followed was the subject of discussion right after I answered the question "where are you from?". These conversations led me to think about how Pakistani's are identified internationally.
To further familiarize myself with the international perception of Pakistanis, I went created a survey and shared it with a largely diverse group. I than converted the responses from the survey into visuals that I super imposed onto my self portraits. The photos are models on passport size pictures or shots that are normally used for some form of identification. What was interesting to observe was how irrelevant my physical appearance became as a form of identification as I covered, overlapped or even defaced the photographs with the opinions shared with me by other individuals.
With my last painting I tried to keep a more spontaneous approach to constructing my imagery. I chose images that spoke to me on a subconscious level. For this painting I choose an old image ( photograph from colonial times) to talk about hybridity. By making strong references to the past I am trying to comment on the condition of many Pakistanis today,
I chose to use the particular image shared above as the strange familiarity I had with it despite never having come across it before.The composition of the photograph reminded me of many old family photographs that were modelled in the same fashion. The individual of most significance, as in most choreographed group pictures, sits at the centre of the image. What interested me most about the photo is the Britisher that was seated at the centre of the frame,pulling most of the focus to himself.
The photograph is symbolic of the colonial hangover in this region. To me the image represents the "gora complex" prevalent in Pakistan; the idea of being inferior to our western counterparts that is deeply entrenched in the society.
By converting the photograph to a more simplified or stylized image, I suppressed the individuality of the locals whereas the Britisher can easily be recognized by his helmet.The image is constructed in a way to present to the inferiority complex.
Furthemore, the diversity captured within one frame is indicative of the concoction that is the Pakistani nation.