Nimra Khan’s essay

Memory is a fickle agent; while we pay little mind to it, how and what we choose to recall has the capacity to define who we are, as a person and as a people. Our past experiences influence the way we view the world and respond to it, while our collective memories define our values and culture that aid in identity formation. If the sum of our recollections were erased, would we still be the same people we are today?

The Taaza Tareen 14 artists’ residency ‘And So It Happened’, invites four artists to respond to memory as a concept, and “examine the ways in which memories have assisted in the construction of knowledge, beliefs, desires, values and fantasies.” Lujane Pagganwala, Tooba Ashraf, Ume Laila and Zainab Zulfiqar use the notion of memory as theme and process, subject and medium, metaphor and mediator, to explore deeper concepts. Memory becomes a tool to unlock personal and collective histories that allow for better understanding and resolution of past experiences, of different kinds. From this, several intertwining threads emerge, visual and conceptual concerns overlap and interesting truths about the nature of memory are revealed.

As a writer in residence, it was a privilege to witness this process as it unfolded. A residency provides artists with the opportunity to step out of their comfort zones and experience a new environment, associated interactions, and take advantage of pertinent resources made accessible. More than anything it provides the luxury of time, albeit in a limited duration, and undivided focus to boost creative output. Through their engagement with this unfamiliar space the artists are able to re-contextualize their individual practices in an alternate framework, approaching it through a new conceptual lens, expanding their ongoing inquiry, or discovering new perspectives from which to view an existing approach. The artists were able to do this to varying degrees of success, and for each, the experience presented a different kind of opportunity depending on their own priorities, from breaking out of a confined creative bubble, or engaging with a new city, to refocusing on a different conceptual aspect of their existing practice or expanding it to more collective historical implications.

The interaction of time and memory is expressed through explorations of space – personal, temporal, physical, socio-political, imagined and metaphorical – that allows the artists to contextualize, process and resolve personal and/or collective traumas, and this becomes a unifying theme that runs through all the works. Investigations into the various manifestations of memory are launched – in culture, oral and literary history, inherited identity, communal and societal structures, and the architecture of the city itself.

Ume Laila instigates and explores conversations around communal marginalization and constructs of social division and othering through the evolving physical structures of the city, held in communal memory. Her practice looks at the idea of space and how the relationship of those occupying a space influence it. Here, she expands this exploration from private space and starts looking at the city through its collective lived spaces. Her investigation began with documenting the architecture of Karachi, where the common element of the grill covering every window and entire balconies emerged as a point of interest. A home is a place that should give you comfort and a balcony is an open space that connects you with the outside, yet here the opposite was happening, where a sense of confinement, claustrophobia and alienation was created through cage-like structures in the name of security.

Through conversations with the locals the artist discovered that many of these areas were exclusively reserved for certain minority communities, which was interesting for her as an outsider coming from a city without an ethnically and religiously diverse population. The grills then began to take on a metaphorical significance; a means of protection and privacy instigated by collective memory and trauma, yet a cause of isolation, social division and segregation.

As a result, Laila began to isolate this image of the grill, in a way that decontextualized and deconstructed it in order to reconstruct the city’s structure through repetition and created a more united society. These societal structure form over decades and centuries and have painful histories attached with them, the marginalized communities left with little choice in the spaces they create for their own safety. However, due to time constraints, these conceptual depths could not be explored by the artist. The grills act as a barrier to witness or access the experiences of the communities that live behind them. From creating work about intimate interior spaces, here she is rather unable to access these lives and remains an outsider to the city’s intricate socio-politics. 

In Zainab Zulfiqar’s work, on the other hand, a more personal form of othering is processed and vocalized. The major themes in her work are inspired from ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, where Albert Camus talks about the daily futile rituals of mundanity that is the unfulfilled existence of modern life, normalized and even romanticized by the daily grind. Zulfiqar links it to the family unit, viewing it as an agent of social and political control. Its construction and isolation turns it into a self-perpetuating and -sustaining system, the indoctrination of its values and beliefs never addressed in the absence of greater perspective and context. One cannot comprehend its absurdity since it is a part of socialization, and thus normalized, only becoming apparent as one grows out of the system itself. However, anything that deviates from the rules that sustain the system and threatens the romantic notion of the nuclear family is simply cast away and the system actively works against them, turning them into imposters.

Zulfiqar addresses this form of alienation by attempting to recontextualize the romanticization of heteronormative structures, creating a safe space from personal memories and experiences. Zulfiqar tries to accomplish this by using Persian miniature techniques and stylization, with its distinct narrative and themes of world-building in order to make a fantastical narrative, which recognizes the absurdity of living through the familiar, filled with a sense of isolation. The relatively lesser-known technique and its subsequent re-stylization allows for a level of subjectivity, while also enhancing the systematic form of othering for the viewer, so that they can finally address the othering that many within the system have always faced as a minority or with dysfunctional lives. This process again reflects the notion of deconstruction and reconstruction seen in Ume Laila’s work, but where she spoke about safe spaces and resulting isolation created by others, here the artist creates her own safe space.

 

This is then fused with imagery that is purposefully both recognizable and strange, and is inspired from various literary and academic sources to narrate significant events and memories from daily life and mundane instances through a kind of fantastical vocabulary. At times, it is a reference to a symbolic narrative already existing within our culture and the city with the combination of references to the queer historical narrative present in the collective. Her painting piece for this residency features her character frozen in a scream, a recurring visual device inspired from ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ (1967), a short story by Harlan Ellison which questions what it means to be human within a mechanized system, which is something that Zulfiqar’s characters also ponder over – they have a mouth and they are screaming, but there is no one to recognize them, for they have always been watched but never seen.

Her second piece for the residency, which features a ceremonial wedding garland, and more directly critiques marriage as an institution and a form of systemic abuse. For this, Zulfiqar experimented with an already existing medium within their work – clay foam, using it to reconstruct and recontextualize the ornamentation on the garland with bright colors, which add a kitschy aesthetic to the piece and serve to enhance the romanticization being addressed. This time, using already existing silicon molds and cookie cutters with decorative stones and pearls, Zulfiqar tries to give the ornaments a much more stable shape. This process, coupled with the decision to display the garland on a literal pedestal, set against red velvet within a glass box frame, signifies the concepts of indoctrination of the concept of marriage and the glorification of the perfect nuclear family. 

The notion of space becomes more palpable in the structures created by Lujane Pagganwala, where it presents as both subject and medium. Through an intersection of materiality and memory drawing from nostalgia, barriers between people, objects, spaces, and time are broken, fusing them to give birth to infinite new spaces of experience.

For Pagganwala there are three kinds of space, physical, experienced and imagined space. The latter she finds most interesting, because it is a space that exists without a corporeal form, providing vast and endless possibilities. The theories of Carl Jung relate the three levels of consciousness to building structures, and similarly Pagganwala looks at space as not a structure of walls and ceilings with a function as an architect might, but as a living entity in itself, as a psychological phenomenon, existing beyond physicality. However, it became a challenge for Pagganwala for the same reason; it was near impossible to capture this abstract idea in materiality. Experimenting with countless materials, she began to sense commonalities that traced back to the root of her interests in the structures created during childhood play as safe spaces, forts fashioned out of cushions, pillows and sheets. In her work, memory is merely a tool that allows her to articulate her ideas into the material plane. Here again the idea of a safe space comes into the work, in both physical and conceptual form, and with it, again the idea of isolation.

Thus, a language began to take shape, fed further by interactions with the city itself and its slum areas, where scarcity of material was a common element and led to reuse of a variety of scrap material put together in a clash of textures and surfaces, a process the artist mimics. The resulting structures are haphazard, playful, and transient, at once inviting the viewer with its informality, yet creating a sense of uncertainty with its dilapidating aesthetic. They are kind of reminiscent of treehouses or playground structures yet with a skeletal, decaying façade that displaces it in the current reality as a remnant of memories long abandoned, reoccupied and revived through our interactions.

This is explained through the theory of Hauntology and the aspects of material memory in her work which she focuses on more overtly during this residency. She talks about how the past brings itself back through objects and infuses it with energy, which is transient, eternal, indestructible, but transferable from object to object and from people to people. “Every time I use a material, its stories bleed into my work. Memory is not in our control and because of that my structures are also not in my control; they develop with a life of their own.” The recycled scrap materials she uses carry the past through them. These daunting and overbearing structures allow the artist to confront the past embodied by them, which can at times be overwhelming and uncomfortable. Here again the concept of deconstruction and reconstruction comes in through the process and concept of recreating memory spaces.

Interacting with Pagganwala’s work brings out a sense of playful nostalgia, a part of oneself that one is compelled to push down and suppress as an adult. It creates a moment where it becomes socially acceptable to isolate yourself in a safe space or explore this peculiar structure so disconnected from its surroundings, spontaneously popping up like an obstruction in reality without any real purpose – a liminal space or “flash space” as the artist dubs it. As adults we no longer have that luxury, but perhaps still have that need. These structures are nothing yet something, they exist in an unknown and unknowable space. The artist views it as very performative in that way, coaxing many forced reactions and interactions.

On the other hand, Tooba Ashraf dismantles notions of nostalgia, expanding investigations into borrowed memory and generational experiences in identity formation to look at collective history and the construction of Muslim masculinity and nationalist rhetoric by examining literary historical narrative. For this purpose, she is looking at three important literary figures, Atlaf Hussain Hali and his Mussadas e Hali, Allama Iqbal and his concept of ‘Shaheen’, and Naseem Hijazi and the drama series “Akhri Chattan” based on his historical fiction novel. According to Ashraf, these authors and poets were instrumental in using fake nostalgia and romanticization of the golden era of Islam, when we were supposedly complete human beings, to create a very constructed and rigid notion of Muslim masculinity. This was done through the image of the submissive and weak Muslim woman who stays home and looks after the family, who needs to be protected from the enemy by the glorified Muslim warrior.

The artist is re-interpreting these ideas into paper pulp paintings which combine dyes with paper pulp to create abstract shapes inspired from these writing. For instance, an image of a mother holding her son’s sword with the words “phoolon ka taj pehen kar mera beta Jannat main chala gaya” from the Drama series “Akhri Chattan” symbolizes the glorification of jihad and martyrdom through a woman and her ultimate sacrifice.

This makes us question what really is a ‘Muslim’ identity, and how it coincides with our South Asian roots. Identity itself is complex, an interplay of religion, culture, ethnicity, and geography. Influences come from various places due to invasions and migrations, but when a Muslim tries to adhere more to a Middle Eastern notion of religious identity and rejects the more organic influences from closer to home, it becomes very constructed and inauthentic and lead to an othering of our own ethnic and geographic neighbors.

Ashraf is also talking about the development of Muslim nationalism through different eras, from the time of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan till Gen Zia ul Haq’s re-appropriation of Maududi’s ideas into his Islamization campaign. These small-scale sculptural pieces used paper from history books, to create blocks to symbolize the construction of nationalist narratives and identity from the layering of history. These are like blocks of identity formed in a very constricted space, and then excavated like archaeological displays showing the different layers of history. The process itself is very symbolic, and again reflects the notion of deconstruction and reconstruction, this time of historical literature, taking a piece of historical writing and rebuilding another perspective from its fragments. This was emphasized by the artist through an installation of her tools and materials at the final display.

Through these explorations we are compelled to contemplate the authenticity of historical narrative and the importance of alternate views, while at the same time acknowledging its significance in influencing beliefs and mindsets. “I have read a lot about partition and depending on the author’s nationality, biases come in. You have to look at commonalities to establish a dominant narrative of what might have happened and come to your own conclusions. And of course, as a Muslim Punjabi woman my own biases will also come into my own interpretations,” she says. 

The development ideas for the four artists was not always linear, and limitations of material, time and logistics drove decision making as much as conceptual reasoning. The calm in the studio turned to chaotic energy as it all came to head in the last week, where most of the works took shape after four weeks of research, planning and experimentation. It was also interesting to witness the various processes, working styles and approaches of each artist.

The artists were developing their work as they went. Ashraf, for example, whose residency experience was based around research and exploration of materials such as paper pulp, resin and natural rose dyes, was creating pieces and researching side by side. These identity blocks were meant to range in color from orange to green to red to symbolize the various eras through which nationalist identity was constructed. The green came from the red rose dye changing color with time, which to her worked symbolically, the roses representing a glorification of martyrdom which is used to then instigate nationalist fervor, yet is rooted in violence. However, the paper blocks were not receptive to these dyes and did not hold the color, and the artist also decided against displaying the resin piece, thus the final sculpture took on a very different shape from what had been planned.

Ume Laila also went through a process of trial and error when choosing her materials. She had initially planned to use actual metal grills to create her sculptural piece, but had to rethink her medium when told it was not a practically feasible option. She then considered steel, white acrylic, and transparent acrylic sheets, contemplating visual and conceptual merits, and also their responsiveness to the process of laser cutting. The artist went with white acrylic sheets which were then laser cut through vectors of intricate grill patterns, offering an aesthetically sound solution that brought the piece together successfully. 

With Pagganwala’s structures, however, there was spontaneity and unpredictability even as she worked with familiar materials. The artist has a rough sketched idea of what the final structure will look like, but it keeps evolving as she responds to the material and to the environment. She usually works on-site, however , she had to work in her home studio and design the structure in removable parts that could then be assembled two days prior to the opening. 

Apart from the obvious engagement with space, time and memory, there were other visual and conceptual similarities that emerged in the works as well, whether consciously or subconsciously, perhaps through the artists’ interactions during the course of the residency. There is an element of layering, repetition, geometry and patterns in all of the works, from Ashraf’s layered historical narratives into cuboids, to Ume Laila’s repeated grill patterns one on top of the other, to Pagganwala’s three layers of space and Zulfiqar’s repeated patterns of miniature rendering.

The most interesting of these, however, is the idea of memory as binding and restrictive, which appeared in each artist’s work on a level which was never directly acknowledged. This was reflected visually in some of the works, but in others it was subliminally present in the themes, concepts and metaphors. Collective memories repeated over generations create values, cultures, traditions and rituals which define our way of life and major life decisions. Traumatic memories, both personal and collective, can lead to isolation and patterns that dictate our present behaviors. We do not decide how and what we remember, and when these memories can flood in unexpectedly, influencing our experiences. Collective memory and historical narratives can shape our identities in ways we do not control or even recognize, and those identities can be difficult to break or alter, defining who we are. All these concepts, expressed in the four artists’ works in one way or another, present the idea of memory as a binding force for our present selves and this idea hits at the core of the nature of memory. It can be a controlling mechanism, whether unknowingly or weaponized consciously by outside forces, enslaving us to the present through our past.