As a crew of riggers finished hoisting a big taxidermied water buffalo onto its surreal perch the other day at the Asia Society Museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, there was a certain logistical satisfaction for those who looked on. “Watch the tail, guys, the tail!” one rigger yelled as the beast was pivoted into place atop a tall Ionic column, where it seemed to have climbed in its confusion.
But the sense of symbolic accomplishment in the feat was much greater. The water buffalo is a ubiquitous presence in many areas of Pakistan, where its tail is often painted red with henna. And the ascension of one onto a pedestal — to create a comically eerie sculpture by the artist Huma Mulji — was an apt metaphor for the larger exhibition being installed around it that morning in several of the museum’s galleries.
“Hanging Fire,” which opens next Thursday, is the first major survey of contemporary art from Pakistan to be presented by an American museum. And for many artists and curators who have long worked in relative obscurity in Pakistan’s contemporary art world — one that has been thriving since the 1980s despite and perhaps in some ways because of the country’s instability — it is a highly anticipated event.
“I think it’s difficult for people outside Pakistan to understand what this kind of recognition on an international stage means within the country,” said Melissa Chiu, the museum’s director. “It’s a big moment.”
The exhibition features the work of 15 artists, almost all of whom live and work in Pakistan. Most have passed at one time or another through the National College of Arts in Lahore, an influential force in the country’s artistic life, where the show’s curator, the painter and writer Salima Hashmi, taught for many years. (In the exhibition’s catalog the novelist Mohsin Hamid lovingly describes the school as a microcosm of creative Pakistan; many of his friends went there, and he remembers it as a place where “people who prayed five times a day and people who escaped from their hostels late at night to disappear on sexual adventures in the city could coexist.”)
Pakistan’s reputation in the contemporary art world has often suffered from a simplistic conception that it is a society inhospitable to free expression. And certainly during several periods in the country’s 62-year history, its visual arts, theater and film have been hemmed in by restrictions imposed under sharia, or Islamic law, and under military rule.
But even amid the country’s poverty and recent turmoil — an increase in bombings and kidnappings, the deep inroads made by the Taliban insurgency even as Pakistan has become enmeshed in the United States’ strategy in Afghanistan — a network of commercial galleries, art schools and studios has flourished. And work is being made that deals head on with difficult issues like religion, political oppression and the status of Muslim women.
Hamra Abbas, a 33-year-old artist who was educated in Lahore but spent several years working in Berlin, said in a recent interview at the Asia Society that when she moved back to Pakistan from Germany, her work grew more sophisticated, in part because she was able to find the kind of resources artists everywhere need: affordable space, a tight-knit artistic group, a network of friends and colleagues to collaborate with and help her.
Ms. Abbas’s piece in the exhibition is a huge purplish-red winged fiberglass rocking horse based on the popular imagery that has grown up over centuries of the Buraq, Muhammad’s steed. While the horse is “a culturally loaded icon,” as Ms. Hashmi, the curator, notes, it is also seen everywhere in Pakistan, like a brand logo or cartoon character, and seems to be particularly popular as a way to beautify the sides and backs of trucks. Ms. Abbas, who has given the traditionally human female face of the steed some of her own features, imagines it as a kind of life-size toy, one she has climbed up on and ridden herself, though doing so too publicly in Pakistan could court dangerous misinterpretations.
“You have to be careful,” she said. “The smallest things can end up being big things — you never know. And the big things no one seems to notice.”
Though her work has dealt openly with sexual imagery and has been displayed cautiously within Pakistan — like much other contemporary work there — in private showings at galleries, she said that her reasons for sometimes pulling back from making work that might be too confrontational are mostly personal.
“There are things I have thought of doing and did not do, in part because I didn’t want to offend my parents,” she said.
A thread running through much of the work in the exhibition, one that speaks to the experience of life within the country and to the country’s perception by the West, is the difference between reality comprehended close up and from a great distance.
“No Two Burns Are the Same” by Ali Raza, part of a forthcoming show at the Asia Society.
“Moderate Enlightenment” (2006) by Imran Qureshi.
Rashid Rana builds large hazy images from mosaics of thousands of tiny photographs. One work appears from a dozen feet away to be a lush medallion-patterned Persian rug, but as the viewer approaches, its dark-reddish hues slowly resolve themselves into individual pictures of bloodied animal carcasses and workers that Mr. Rana took in Pakistani slaughterhouses.
Ali Raza, an artist who has spent many years working the United States but who returned to live and work part-time in Pakistan in 2006, makes large collages using scraps of lushly illustrated advertisements and pages from art books and other publications that have been partly burned so that their incongruous imagery and texts peep out from the mostly blackened paper. As they do in Mr. Rana’s work, the tiny elements coalesce into large figurative images, in one case a doubled portrait of a man screaming, based on a newspaper picture of a violent street protest.
Ms. Mulji’s strangely stranded water buffalo (the one here, in an unanticipated conceptual twist, is American, stuffed by a taxidermist in Rhinbeck, N.Y., because of toxicity concerns about the original in Pakistan) grew out of the artist’s exploration of the strangeness of rampant development in a mostly rural, underdeveloped nation. She describes Pakistan as a place existing “300 years in the past and 30 years in the future.”
In many ways the exhibition, which continues through Jan. 3, illuminates the contradictions of Pakistani contemporary art itself and of its being recognized, especially now at such a crucial juncture in the country’s history, in such a prominent international fashion. Quddus Mirza, a Pakistani artist and critic in Lahore, contends in an essay in the show’s catalog that many artists working in the country have often become “exiles at home,” whose work is “slowly drifting away from the local art scene.”
Yet “the more it is uprooted from its native soil, the more accolades it receives in the mainstream art world,” he adds, a paradoxical kind of success.
Ms. Hashmi, whose personal tribulations have often mirrored that of her country’s precarious art world — she was placed under house arrest during the imposition of martial law in 2007; she was not far away from a recent deadly bomb blast — does not necessarily disagree, but adds that the benefits of such success can outweigh the costs.
“The contemporary artist symbolizes a strong hope for Pakistan,” she argues. “Those who gain a foothold in the international art discourse serve as a conduit, inviting a chance to dialogue with those inside — a conversation that may startle, beguile, enlighten and hopefully enrich.”
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