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In and out of Pakistan

Under its third military regime since Independence in 1947, Pakistan, caught in its own traps of feudalism, fundamentalism, corruption and threats of war with India, hovers on the brink of economic and political disaster. How are artists reacting? If the British show 'Pakistan: Another Vision' offers any clues, they lie hidden within its confused message of 'art-historical business as usual'. Pakistani artists over three generations are presented either as maintaining the production of painting more or less related to 'authentic' traditional miniature and calligraphic techniques or modernists, often inspired by contact with the West, but never in any critical way. This is the stuff of 'Go': diplomatic gameplaying, only too familiar from the hegemonic histories of British cultural colonialism, ludicrously yet deliberately out of touch with reality. The experience in Pakistan is very different. Artists there are as angry as any other group trying to think and work within the constrained social space. The crucial need for dialogue with artists beyond their limited geographical frontiers is however gradually being realised: discreetly but defiantly, and mainly due to the collaboration between the women's groups on both sides of the Indian-Pakistani border. The force of their shared will to overcome their isolations produces a creative spirit long lost amongst the disillusioned intellectuals in Pakistan. One such collaboration by female curators produced 'Mappings': a show of Indian and Pakistani artists (male and female), which took place, not without difficulty, in Lahore and in Delhi in early 1998 to remember their respective experiences of Partition. All limits presupposed by questions of nationalism were exceeded by the sense of a common struggle. Reacting to the comparative isolation experienced by Pakistani artists in relation to the globalised art world/market, younger galleries in both India and Pakistan are now exchanging works of a radical nature. Three such recent exhibitions in Lahore illustrate the current determination to dispute any curatorial politics of identity or authenticity.