Highlighting the social and political issues after the 9/11 in the backdrop of discriminatory policy of the West against the Muslims, Canada-based artist Asma Arshad Mehmood presented her drawings and video installations at Hunerkada College of Visual and Performing Arts on Saturday.
Talking about her work, Asma said his recent work was centred on “shalwar”. “It is a unisex garment, comprised of traditional pants worn with long shirts, and I see its design as representative of the conflicting values that exist in my Pakistani Muslim community and my own status as a Muslim Canadian of Pakistani origin. “The politics of social and communal life are areas of special interest to me. The sexual, social and political representation of South Asian communities is just as complex as the image of the shalwar itself.”
“The contrast between religion and secularism or democracy and theocracy is intriguing in its relationship to representation. This disparity is more pronounced against the backdrop of an immigrant experience,” she said. A show that critiqued resistance to cultural transformation in the diasporas and ruffled feathers was ‘In To, Out of and Away’, based on an installation and video. Asma invited women to contribute their worn shalwar for the installation in which they were displayed in their folded form with a statement of the contributor.
The short video showed a below the calf view of a woman stepping out of her shalwar and male hands folding them. According to Asma, she faced resistance from the beginning when South Asian artists expressed their discomfort at giving their intimate garment for a public display till they gradually understood its symbolic significance. When viewed by the community through the prism of their fixed notions of modesty, the exhibition to them conveyed only one message, that of flaunting modesty.
The provocation did, however, manage to open up a debate on double standards for genders, the need to rethink outdated modes of humility and a review of the unrealistic social expectation from women in the South Asian community. This unexpected break from the nostalgia that usually informs the mood of the community at heritage shows made the voice for change heard via this controversial show, she said.
“‘Three yards of dogma’ is a cathartic journey of my times and conditions. As a visual artist, I have attempted to address and respond to my innermost thoughts, some of which I was not even aware, on paper and canvas.” According to Asma, she uses images and material forms as metaphors and traditional techniques to evoke the ideas of migration, integration, rejection and assimilation.
“My intention was to address the current difficult issues of identity facing my community by creating a faux traditional painting style that borrows from historical and classical miniature paintings. I reshape the representation in these narrative paintings and change their appearances to suit my ideas.”
“I use Mylar as a surface for the paintings and the drawings. This semi translucent plastic material both supports my paintings, and provides a way to distance myself from the ‘romance’ associated with traditional miniature paintings from the subcontinent. The traditional details of miniatures (hand made paper called Wasli, ground pigments and squirrel hair paint brushes) are excluded from my paintings to enhance the efforts of recreating culture in a different and unlikely environment.”
The simplicity of the pattern of shalwar is in sharp contrast to the complex form it takes when worn. “To me, this is similar to what has happened to Muslim faith as is practiced now; the simplicity and modernity of a fourteen hundred year-old faith is corrupted and transformed into the complex dogmatic shape of today,” the artist said. The artist, originally from Lahore, said she had attempted to address the social, religious and historical contexts of the immigrant experience.
“The shalwar symbolises those personal experiences that many of us have been through at one stage or the other as an immigrant. I have used the garment to cipher the origin of various taboos and dogmatic beliefs in Indian subcontinent. This topic has relevance for the larger Canadian community as we are currently at war with Afghanistan, a Muslim country where these symbols and signs are a daily reality,” she explained.
