KARACHI – “Poets, writers, journalists, revolutionaries and CSP officers used to gather over a cup of tea or coffee for intense discussions on the social, political, cultural and literary concerns of the day. Modernisation and its accompanying frenzied pace of life have all but excluded this forum for cultural exchange and discourse,” says Nafisa Rizvi.
Rizvi was recently a guest curator at the Poppy Seed gallery, which had organised an art exhibition titled ‘Tea House’ that hoped recreating the milieu of dhabas of urban Pakistan where artists, writers, thinkers, poets as well as common people engaged in debate and discourse over a cup of tea.
Envisaged as an intellectual space, ‘Tea House’ invited seven contemporary artists/sculptors, each of whom chose to collaborate with a professional who is not associated with gallery art.
Madiha Sikander, a miniaturist from the NCA Lahore, collaborated with scholar and translator Taimoor Shahid, combining text and imagery in a book of maps.
Durriya Kazi, an artist, sculptor and academician, teamed up with journalist Muneeba Kamal to examine the correlation between the news of the day and text messages that do the rounds in response.
Marium Agha, an installation artist, decided to link her practice with an ‘information provider’, as she called him; her collaborator Dilshaad Ahmed is a karigar skilled in zari work.
Ahsan Jamal, a miniaturist from the NCA, invited a visually impaired sociologist and cricketer Salman Elahi to try his hand at painting.
Munawar Ali Syed, a multi-disciplinary artist, worked in tandem with Ismail, a welder at KU’s Visual Studies Department; both of them created objects in metal.
Sohail Abdullah, a ceramic and photographic artist, collaborated with Sameer Khan, a medical practitioner and poet; they juxtaposed picture and text.
Aamir Habib, an installation artist, collaborated with Rehan, a whiz-kid mechanic who can fix almost any piece of machinery; they created sculptures with found objects.
Photos courtesy Poppy Seed gallery
