Hurmat Ul Ain is an interdisciplinary artist and art educationist. Her work is performative and deals with the concerns of the body, with food, hospitality and service.

Her work has been shown in the US, UK, India, Dubai, Japan, China and Pakistan.

Dawn caught up with her while she was in Rawalpindi to exhibit her work.

Q: Why did you chose performance art?

A: All contemporary art uses time in some way especially the digital media including videos, photography, sound and live performances. They are all variations of time and space.

Performance art is the recognition of time as medium in its production, interaction and experience.

My work requires an ongoing engagement with the subject and audience, so the audience are not passive spectators.

They have to participate for the meaning of my work to be complete.

Performance art allows art to transcend the form of an object like a painting or sculpture and come alive in experience. My art is something I do instead of something I make.

Q: What inspired the exhibition in Rawalpindi?

A: Self, the everyday, the mundane, the documentation of life itself, they all feature in my work.

Most of my work is a re-enactment of moments already captured in photographs. The narrative tends to continue in plots and subplots; frame within the frame; like the Russian doll effect.

The ‘Guest room effect’ is a re-enactment of what happened when I stayed at people’s houses. The phenomenon of the guestroom was a very intriguing and recurring feature.

The lines of private-public, familiar and the strange, self and other were constantly being blurred and revisited; the work is an attempt to capture traces of memory through self portraiture and re-enactment.

The pieces were displayed in a rented room for 2 nights and the narrative of the hotel room became an essential context in the reading of the work.

Q: Is it possible to make a living producing performance/site specific art?

A: Performance art or live art as a discipline is retaliation against the commodity based art culture of the western white cube. It revels in the subliminal space that cannot be bought or traded.

But performance artist must eat and pay their bills as well. A lot of museums and art institute around the world have begun to support the production and documentation of performance art.

There is a lot of room for exploration in performance and a crop of young artists in Pakistan are coming up who want explore these practices first.

Published in Dawn, December 24th, 2015