“Ride 2” by Hamra Abbas, based on the Prophet Muhammad’s horse; in the background is “My love plays in heavenly ways,” a painting by Faiza Butt.

Contradiction Remains Vital to Pakistan and Its Art

As a crew of riggers finished hoisting a big taxidermied water buffalo onto its surreal perch the other day at the Asia Society Museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, there was a certain logistical satisfaction for those who looked on. “Watch the tail, guys, the tail!” one rigger yelled as the beast was pivoted into place atop a tall Ionic column, where it seemed to have climbed in its confusion.

But the sense of symbolic accomplishment in the feat was much greater. The water buffalo is a ubiquitous presence in many areas of Pakistan, where its tail is often painted red with henna. And the ascension of one onto a pedestal — to create a comically eerie sculpture by the artist Huma Mulji — was an apt metaphor for the larger exhibition being installed around it that morning in several of the museum’s galleries.

“Hanging Fire,” which opens next Thursday, is the first major survey of contemporary art from Pakistan to be presented by an American museum. And for many artists and curators who have long worked in relative obscurity in Pakistan’s contemporary art world — one that has been thriving since the 1980s despite and perhaps in some ways because of the country’s instability — it is a highly anticipated event.

“I think it’s difficult for people outside Pakistan to understand what this kind of recognition on an international stage means within the country,” said Melissa Chiu, the museum’s director. “It’s a big moment.”
The exhibition features the work of 15 artists, almost all of whom live and work in Pakistan. Most have passed at one time or another through the National College of Arts in Lahore, an influential force in the country’s artistic life, where the show’s curator, the painter and writer Salima Hashmi, taught for many years. (In the exhibition’s catalog the novelist Mohsin Hamid lovingly describes the school as a microcosm of creative Pakistan; many of his friends went there, and he remembers it as a place where “people who prayed five times a day and people who escaped from their hostels late at night to disappear on sexual adventures in the city could coexist.”) Pakistan’s reputation in the contemporary art world has often suffered from a simplistic conception that it is a society inhospitable to free expression. And certainly during several periods in the country’s 52-year history, its visual arts, theater and film have been hemmed in by restrictions imposed under sharia, or Islamic law, and under military rule.
But even amid the country’s poverty and recent turmoil — an increase in bombings and kidnappings, the deep inroads made by the Taliban insurgency even as Pakistan has become enmeshed in the United States’ strategy in Afghanistan — a network of commercial galleries, art schools and studios has flourished. And work is being made that deals head on with difficult issues like religion, political oppression and the status of Muslim women.

Hamra Abbas, a 33-year-old artist who was educated in Lahore but spent several years working in Berlin, said in a recent interview at the Asia Society that when she moved back to Pakistan from Germany, her work grew more sophisticated, in part because she was able to find the kind of resources artists everywhere need: affordable space, a tight-knit artistic group, a network of friends and colleagues to collaborate with and help her.

Ms. Abbas’s piece in the exhibition is a huge purplish-red winged fiberglass rocking horse based on the popular imagery that has grown up over centuries of the Buraq, Muhammad’s steed. While the horse is “a culturally loaded icon,” as Ms. Hashmi, the curator, notes, it is also seen everywhere in Pakistan, like a brand logo or cartoon character, and seems to be particularly popular as a way to beautify the sides and backs of trucks. Ms. Abbas, who has given the traditionally human female face of the steed some of her own features, imagines it as a kind of life-size toy, one she has climbed up on and ridden herself, though doing so too publicly in Pakistan could court dangerous misinterpretations.

“You have to be careful,” she said. “The smallest things can end up being big things — you never know. And the big things no one seems to notice.”

Though her work has dealt openly with sexual imagery and has been displayed cautiously within Pakistan — like much other contemporary work there — in private showings at galleries, she said that her reasons for sometimes pulling back from making work that might be too confrontational are mostly personal.

“There are things I have thought of doing and did not do, in part because I didn’t want to offend my parents,” she said.