THE Eye Still Seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art, edited by Salima Hashmi and published by Penguin Books India, aims to bring together a wide selection of work produced over the course of the last 20 years by contemporary art practitioners from Pakistan. This “unusually prolific species” frequently confounds both critics and curators, in Hashmi’s words.

As is explained in the book’s opening note, this striking volume’s restless title is taken from Dawn of Freedom, a translation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Urdu poem Subh-e-Azadi by Shoaib Hashmi. The line’s connection with Pakistani art can be traced back 14 years to 2001, when it was used as the title of an exhibition co-curated by Salima and Sue Rowley at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney. According to architect and artist Martand Khosla another exhibition, conceived alongside the newly published book, was also planned to take place in New Delhi but — thwarted perhaps by the governmental “sabre-rattling” to which Khosla’s foreword also alludes — now “appears indefinitely postponed”. It seems the book, for now, must bear the burden of its contents to India alone.

Returning to the poem, we discover that the line, as it exists in English and in full, runs on: “And the heart still aches, and the eye still seeks and will not be still / And this togetherness, it will not suffice”. While the first part seems to prepare the reader for what follows — a search or enquiry into contemporary art from Pakistan without a single resting point or something specific upon which to fix, or to find — the second perhaps suggests that any sought-for sense of a unified whole can never, in fact, be satisfied. Faiz’s words might therefore be understood to provide an apt prelude to a work which endeavours both to draw attention to what — to paraphrase Khosla’s comments at the book’s Lahore Literature Festival launch — we might term the peculiar distinctness of Pakistani art-making and, simultaneously, to undermine attempts to confine its creators to a particular ‘national’ identity or co-opt their practices to fit a prescribed narrative, whether historical, political, religious, gendered, or violent. Nevertheless, the book is proffered as a bridge between Pakistani and Indian art communities, and in the hope that “a composite South Asian cultural identity” which runs counter to ‘divisive’ discourses of state might be reclaimed and reformed.

The colour prints of paintings, miniatures, sculptures, video art, installations, site-specific works and performances dating, with a few exceptions, from the mid-1990s onwards, and produced in locations both local and diasporic, provide an opportunity to sample the oeuvres of over 70 artists, some now highly familiar to international audiences and some less known, and at different stages of their careers. These include Asim Butt, David Alesworth, Bani Abidi, Ghulam Mohammad, Khadim Ali, Faiza Butt, Mohammad Ali Talpur, Ali Kazim, Nausheen Saeed, Saira Wasim and Shahzia Sikander, in addition to the other artists whose work is discussed elsewhere in this article.

Their work is given space to breathe over the course of this substantially-proportioned book’s 300 luxurious pages. The delicate, leaf-patterned feet of Imran Qureshi’s ‘This Leprous Brightness’ (2011), for example, form a two-page spread, their luminous red seeming to blotch and bleed into the vasli, and indeed into the book itself. In Hashmi’s mixed-media work ‘Pursuing Radiance’ (2004), a reaching, disembodied hand stretches across a white expanse for an elusive scrap of a paper flower, which seems destined to float off the page. Meanwhile Mariam Ibraaz’s unbeautiful-yet-radiant female subject, with a door flung open, her hand pressed to her chest, and her eyes fixed on something other than the heavenly landscape that dominates the frame, is poised forever on the threshold of ‘I Knew You Would Come’ (2009). Moving back and forth between them, the reader cannot help but begin to make connections, to piece together from these aesthetic fragments the semblances of stories linear and non-linear, idiosyncratic and collective, even as their diversity dissuades one from attempting to marshal these artworks as representative of the entirety of Pakistani art practice, or as events that may be combined to form a definitive narrative.

Arresting and absorbing though they may be, what distinguishes The Eye Still Seeks is not solely the art works it contains but, additionally, the ways in which these are framed by the creative writers, artists and critics, whose essays, reflections and conversations are interweaved between them. Virginia Whiles has observed that the networks forged between artists and writers within Pakistan may lead to a “different imagination around art history”, providing alternative ways perhaps to the still-seeking eye, of ‘seeing’ Pakistani art in its wide-ranging formal, philosophical and political contexts.

In the case of the contributions by the novelist Kamila Shamsie and the artist, curator and art educator Naazish Ataullah, these provide thoughtful meditations on, and weave intimate narratives around, the creation of the works of Naiza H. Khan and of Anwar Saeed that form their respective points of focus. In ‘Her Body in Four Parts’, a sensitive unfolding of what — deploying musical metaphors — she describes as the “four movements” from the “score” of the artist’s work, Shamsie captures the fragility, sensuality, solitude and strength of Khan’s edited drawings, paintings, site-specific projects and installations. The personal narrative Shamsie extricates from ‘Exhale’ (2004), a charcoal work which depicts a woman in various stages of emergence from and submersion in a container-like object, involves, at its climax, the rebirth of the woman and the possible venting of acrimonious feelings. Rather than foregrounding the oppression to which the drawing also gestures, Shamsie both identifies moments of potential empowerment, and points to the instruments of confinement with which they are juxtaposed. Without limiting its expressive potential, she succeeds in linking “Naiza’s most personal work ... to the wider context of society where a woman’s desire for independence and self-expression can be the very reason for hemming her in”.

Ataullah’s quite beautifully crafted study ‘Of Whispers and Secret Callings: On Anwar Saeed and Lahore’, draws on her decades-long friendship with the artist and his intriguingly “complex relationship” with his urban environment. Here, the writer Ataullah’s knowledge of the artist’s meanderings through the city (perfectly conjured in her prose) provide a means of entry into the “poetic, sensitive, sensuous, brutal, truthful and intensely emotional yet quintessentially private” discourse in which Saeed’s art-making is immersed. Her essay becomes another kind of narrative, one in which we walk with Saeed through the different phases of his “inextricably bound” art and life, and are exposed to some of the stimuli, and the personal and aesthetic affinities that have shaped them. Thus Ataullah’s writing prepares us to approach the reproductions of Saeed’s works which follow — whether saturated with indigo, shadowed by innuendo, or honed by “the edginess of desire” — with deeper interest and sensitivity. The somewhat quirky, off-beat, anecdotal perspectives of Mohsin Hamid on his “buddy” Rashid Rana and of Mohammed Hanif on the late and prolific Asim Butt, with whom he shared a fascination for “what’s written on our walls”, seem to centre the creative writer as a means to understand the artist. Hamid compares the process of assembling his written piece on Rana with Rana’s own assem-bly of an image: “I am starting to wonder whether I am assembling a mosaic, as Rashid often does in his work, a digital mosaic, made of words, yes, but the words [are] composed of letters that are of course images, with me as the Rashid-figure, assembling them, or whether I am just one of a thousand component figures inside a different, larger mosaic, this essay just a dot in the many-pixelled textual representations of Rashid that already exist”.

Literature, like art, remains a matter of individual taste. For some Hamid’s playful passage may perfectly conjure the ways in which Rana, too, composes his digital prints; others may be less enam-oured of its somewhat limited and narcissistic scope. A conversation between the “artists and marriage partners” Aisha Khalid and Imran Qureshi also included in The Eye Still Seeks dispenses, inter-estingly, with the need for the interventions of a writer entirely as a means to elucidate their work. Instead, anecdotal insights and recollections hint at the narratives that lie, for example, behind the use of flowers in Khalid’s album work, or of a diluted red pigment in Qureshi’s paintings and installations.

A more conventional (though by no means unwelcome) mode is adopted by Quddus Mirza. He writes with his customary ease and acumen on Adeela Suleman’s manipulation of a range of objects from the domestic to the industrial as a means to engage — humorously and ironically — with her sculptural work’s shifting foci from the female subject and the body in her earlier productions to an excess of violence in her more recent work, overcast by the long shadow of the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing ‘war on terror’. Likewise, Nafisa Rizvi’s essay, ‘The Feminine Construct’, offers a welcome critical overview of the women artists based not only in Pakistan but also abroad, who currently “make up the larger picture of aesthetic production”. In Rizvi’s descriptions of a variety of works from Roohi Ahmed’s skin-stitching video performance to the stuffed fabric female forms of Ruby Chisti, and in the colour plates that follow her essay, Pakistan’s women artists certainly come across as some of the most dynamic and experimental.

The concluding essay by Hashmi situates contemporary art practice from Pakistan in its pedagogical and historical contexts, and then seeks to illuminate the remaining works (mostly by younger artists) included in the volume. She introduces her discussion by dwelling on “the urge to spin a story when casting an eye over contemporary Pakistani art”. In her opinion, this can provide “one way of avoiding labels and categorisations” because once some storytelling has been embarked upon, “one may instead meander along its trails and unpredictable tracks”, circumventing “discussions on Pakistani identity as a post-1947 construct or a more ancient Islamic one” and instead “unwrapping the work, and allowing it to define itself”. With the assistance of the seven other writers — eight, including Khosla — rallied in support of her project, she has certainly achieved this.

The Eye Still Seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art

(ART)

Edited by Salima Hashmi

Penguin Books, India

ISBN 978-0670087419

303 pp.