The Alhamra Arts Centre, one of seven venues of the Lahore Biennale’s maiden edition, is displaying the works of 16 artists: Atif Khan, CAMP (a Mumbai-based studio for transdisciplinary media practices), Halil Altindere, Hira Nabi, Kay Walkowiak, Komail Aijazuddin, Naeem Mohaieman, Naila Mahmood, Naima Dadabhoy, Salman Toor, Seema Nusrat, Shahzia Sikander and Shezad Dawood, with performances by Salima Hashmi, Naiza Khan and Zambeel Dramatic Readings. The centre is one of two sites (the second being the Lahore Museum) that are essentially exhibition spaces, unlike the other stations of the biennale that —being historical monuments, religious sites or public parks — had to undergo various degrees of transformation to host the contemporary artworks allocated to them.

The Alhamra Arts Centre, therefore, looks ostensibly unchanged and may prove less exciting to visitors compared to, say, the Summer Palace at the Lahore Fort with its combined traces of Mughal history and official negligence. But the appearance of an exhibition space is no reflection on the breadth and adventurousness of the works that is displayed inside.

The artworks range from Aijazuddin’s site-specific installation in red and gold to Dawood’s mixed-media paintings revisiting the more eccentric chapters in the history of US-Pak relations, to Mahmood’s at-once sweeping and intimate, journalistic and poetic, photographic survey of kitchens from Karachi’s congested innards.

An important stop in the Lahore Biennale circuit, the Alhamra Arts Centre displays artworks based on themes of urbanisation, cultural disparity and alienation

The artworks loosely integrate themes of urban growth, technological evolution, dislocation and nostalgia. Toor’s ‘Are You Here?’ — a stretch of paintings and collages with a spatter of multilingual text — is one of the highlights of the exhibition. It is a smorgasbord of wry observations on class, culture and pretensions to both. Toor not only continuously delights with his succinct handling of paint and colour but also offers numerous little glimpses of the anxieties and contradictions that underpin Pakistani culture. He employs empathy and wit in cataloguing a culture’s contestation with another, as seen in the life of a displaced individual. And we realise — looking, in particular, at a painting of a bookshelf — that, as a people once colonised and repeatedly conquered and converted, we are all displaced. The shelf in question is occupied by titles such as Muhammad and Portraits by John Berger and a paperback on Freud.

A similar confluence of signs takes place in the series of prints by Austrian artist Walkowiak titled ‘Rituals of Resistance’. Walkowiak has a long-standing interest in the idea of the abstract, geometric form as both receptive and resistant to meaning. Through much of his filmic and photographic work, he has explored minimalistic, three-dimensional forms interacting with various spaces, attracting and repelling associations by the mere fact of being ambiguous — primal and futuristic, sacred and quotidian, simple yet inscrutable.

In ‘Rituals of Resistance’, a variety of columnar forms inhabit courtyards that seem to belong to temples or shrines. On each of these spotless forms, framed by a grimy arch or encircled by sooty walls, perches a monkey. The absurdity of a monkey navigating an austere, geometric form vaguely recalls Beckett before the mind does what it does best and offers up interpretations — here, the order and deliberation of architecture are being contrasted with the desultoriness of nature; here, the obsolescence of religion is being suggested by the complete absence of human life from the premises and the indifferent presence of the wild.

Despite a few logistical setbacks (Sikander’s work, for instance, had yet to be put up when we visited the centre), the exhibition manages to bring together recent works by Pakistani and international artists in a largely harmonious fashion. Dadabhoy’s installation of strange and spiky, whorled and wispy natural specimens in glass cases of various shapes and sizes, addresses the artist’s concerns with decay and rebirth. It is perhaps the only incongruous element in this exhibition that casts a discerning look at cities, cultures and traditions’ tussle with modernity.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 25th, 2018