Anwar Jalal Shemza, a 20th century British-Pakistani artist, was one of that post-colonial generation of modernist painters who questioned traditional fine-art training and attitudes, and sought to redefine this for themselves in the context of their own non-Western cultural aesthetic.

Shemza is best known for abstract works which centre around the basic visual vocabulary of the circle and the square. His work essentially moved in this direction after he made the conscious decision to move away from the Western figurative tradition and, instead, use a visual language more linked to an oriental and Muslim aesthetic.

Shemza, who was born into a Kashmiri family and trained at the Mayo School of Art (the present National College of Arts) in Lahore, spent the last two and a half decades of his life in Britain, where he died in 1985, at just 57 years of age.

Although Shemza’s work is in major collections in both countries, he has not quite been accorded the status he merited in either Pakistan or Britain. But now, a multimedia project is introducing Shemza’s work and aesthetic to a whole new generation and is trying to bring it into the 21st century.

A multi-media project in Britain highlights the art and visual language of Pakistani-British artist Anwar Jalal Shemza

This project is an interactive initiative called shemza.digital [accessible online via this exact address]; it introduces people to Shemza’s aesthetic and invites them to submit their own works digitally in Shemza’s style and visual language, using the tools provided: the circle, square and the ‘squircle.’

Till now, more than 2,000 works have been thus submitted and these are being archived with “a view to create physical collaborative artworks in the future.” The plan is to eventually turn these works into an installation which will tour Britain.

The Shemza digital project was launched last year in November 2020, and it is spearheaded by the painter’s 32-year-old granddaughter, Aphra Shemza, an artist who works with multimedia, especially light sculpture. She is the manager of Anwar Jalal Shemza’s estate and a professional artist herself, but it was only recently that she was able to connect her work to her grandfather’s.

“I’d been cataloguing the archives of Anwar’s that we have in the family,” she recalls, “press clippings, exhibition catalogues, his writing, photographs… and, as I was doing this, I thought this is really interesting. And then the pandemic happened and this project is a result of that.”

She explains that the project was born out of that time of national lockdown as she was unable to visit her own light sculptures and installations and, “I wanted to find a new way of working, which would allow me to reach out to people while we were in the pandemic.”

Aphra Shemza says that she took two key elements of her own practice — interactivity and technology — and combined them with Shemza’s art to create a computer art project. But she explains that there were also other factors that drove the project forward, which were to do with events that coincided with the pandemic and led to the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It felt [as if] in the pandemic and with Brexit, that we were in a kind of polarised society, so this felt very timely coming off the Black Lives Matter protests,” she says. “It just sort of made sense to me to think about how I could introduce Anwar’s work to the public, try to have mass public engagement and also to think about it as a way to decolonise the art world and think about all those ideas of decolonisation and diversity and championing other stories and things like that.”

She says that Shemza has only really had major recognition in Britain in the past decade or so, and while his work is now in several major collections and “conversations have started in art circles in major institutions, children don’t know about his work in the UK, so I wanted to find a way for outreach and wanted to make this a sort of community outreach project.”

This is also the idea underlying the workshops which complement the digital project. Many of these have been specifically for school students and youth groups and Aphra Shemza says these events seem to spur many youngsters into thinking about their own heritage and their parents’ and grandparents’ stories.

Her hope is that this will encourage young people to be proud of, and value, their own community histories and cultural traditions and be confident about what they, as immigrants, bring to their society.

Anwar Jalal Shemza himself spent over 25 years of his life in Britain. He came to London in the late 1950s and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and University College London. Although he moved back to Pakistan with his wife and fellow painter Mary Katrina Taylor for a short period, they returned to England fairly soon.

It was while at the Slade that Shemza went through a crisis which proved a turning point in his artistic direction. He was reportedly extremely upset by the art historian Ernst Gombrich’s remarks in a lecture, where Gombrich dismissed all Islamic art as purely functional and declared that it had no place in the history of art.

This rejection of the aesthetic and creative tradition of his cultural heritage created a crisis for Shemza as an artist. He is said to have been so angered and upset by this that, after much agonising and reflection, he apparently destroyed all his old work and started afresh — consciously moving away from the didacticism of Western and representational art, towards an aesthetic closer to the Oriental and Islamic tradition.

Shemza’s experience of having his artistic and design heritage branded as being merely ‘utilitarian’ created in him a sense of marginalisation and rejection and seems to have pushed him into reassessing what that aesthetic was actually all about. He created his own design parameters through a simplification of elements and his quote used on the shemza.digital page expresses this: “One circle, one square, one problem, one life is not enough to solve it.”

There is also in his art, repeatedly, a nod to the traditions of Eastern manuscripts and textiles. His work combines Western modernism with Eastern influences and allusions, and his granddaughter says that the fact that he was from a family of carpet weavers informs his work, in particular his ‘Magic Carpet’ series. Some of his other series, such as ‘Meem’ and ‘City Walls’, also reference his Muslim, Kashmiri and Lahori heritage.

Whatever prism we choose to view Shemza’s art through, this interactive project should, in some measure, be able to not just bring more people to look at his work, but also to look at the parameters within which artists are assessed. Not to mention the value of the different and varied stories that immigrants bring to the table in terms of creative expression.

For more, visit shemza.digital. An exhibition of artworks submitted is planned for early next year. Works from Shemza’s ‘Meem’ series will feature in the Tate’s 2022 exhibition ‘Radical Landscapes’

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 19th, 2021