Exploring effects of social, cultural, religious situations

KARACHI – How the social, cultural and religious situations and manipulations affect one’s mindset and direct us to become who we are is a very interesting process, says artist Amber Hammad. “My work is about these catalysts and their outcomes. What we call a global village has absorbed more things from certain western cultures or countries, instead of flow of energy moving both ways,” Hammad explains. Certain generations of certain places have been affected strangely to have formed a new culture that is neither indigenous nor western, but has its own identity.
Hammad’s initial works were about the acceptance of that identity by using visual language that comprises some local, some borrowed and some western concepts. She mostly uses her own self as part of the visuals that are photographic and/or digital.
The political happenings that have shaped the history of the last decade or so have increased people’s fears. The media provokes the noises in our heads and we are scared in anticipation.
Seeing a man with a beard in our childhood symbolised somebody wise, and that image has been replaced with a religious Islamist fundamentalist suicide bomber.
“I am trying to question these fears. Even though I believe that all of us as the human race are one in every sense, but being that one universal entity cannot begin to happen for any individual if that person does not accept who he or she is,” she says.
It does not matter where, when and who you are born as.
What matters is the acceptability and understanding of it in relation with everything happening around you. No matter where we go or how much we try to change our identity, whether it is the nationality, nicknames or religion, we would always be Pakistani.
Photos courtesy VASL Art