ARTISTS TALKING

‘Beyond the Page: Contemporary Art from Pakistan’, shown as part of the national Festival of Muslim Cultures, opens up the possibility of a particularly prescient dialogue between Eastern and Western ways of thinking, doing and making. Utilising the history of the miniature painting not so much as a common theme but more as a common point of departure, the eight artists whose work is shown here work both with and against the tradition.

Originally trained in the discipline of the miniature but now based internationally and working with a range of media, each of these artists, in diverse and personal ways, fuses the traditional and the contemporary, the technical and the technological, and in so doing makes tacit reference to the collapse of both physical and temporal distance.

In Rashid Rana’s works, for example, miniature reproductions of old paintings, photographs of billboards in Lahore or of piles of waste combine to produce digital prints such as that of the profile of a Mughal emperor. And in Aisha Khalid’s real-time, twin-screen video Conversation, in which the hands of an Asian woman (the artist) are seen meticulously embroidering the outline of a rose on one screen whilst the completed embroidery is seen being unpicked, one stitch at a time, by the hands of a Caucasian woman on the other, modern technology is used to highlight in painstaking detail the discrepancy between traditional ways of making and contemporary ways of viewing.

What is most noticeable about the artists in this show is the way that, by recycling and re-contextualising traditional ideas, skills and images from Pakistan in relation to contemporary and occidental approaches to practice, the works address an important exchange between cultures, between past and present; and, in ways that are thoughtful, playful and pertinent, they succeed in re-presenting each to the other.