KARACHI – Since Andy Warhol, popular culture has been equated with an ordinariness that is antithetical to bourgeois taste, said a press release issued by the Poppy Seed Gallery where an art exhibition titled ‘What’s Hot?’ is running until April 17.
The participating artists are Sehba Maruf, Danish Ahmed, Sophia Mairaj, Malika Abbas, Sumaiya Jilani and Muhammad Ali.
Whereas Warhol’s soup could symbolise ‘common’ experience, Warhol himself claimed to partake of it.
In contrast, when local tropes of popular culture – such as the truck art aesthetic, the mazar and the dhaba – are used, they have most often been external to the artists’ own realm of lived experience.
In the use of popular culture as muse then, a subliminal assertion of class affiliation is at play.
‘What’s Hot?’ asked the artists, whose work reflected an interest in ‘the popular’ (in terms of subject matter and/or materiality), to investigate through their own particular subject positions and locales where contemporary popular trends perforate class boundaries.
The artists found these sites to be lawn prints, lace, Mills & Boon romances, the Urdu digest, cooking shows, Coke and, inescapably, religion.
Photos courtesy Poppy Seed Gallery
