Dubai is a city that has been a good place for Risham Syed in terms of her career as an artist. Similarly other Pakistani artists and organisations have found similar opportunities in the city. Art Dubai and the other institutions in the city have presented the work of Pakistani artists, launched important initiatives like the Lahore Biennale Foundation and the Karachi Biennale, and offered opportunities for artistic growth. For Syed, the art fair has meant that she could develop her practice in meaningful ways. In the past, she was awarded the generous and prestigious Abraaj Capital Art Prize that is displayed at Art Dubai. She received funds to put toward an ambitious, large-scale work of art.

This year at the fair, the artist had a solo presentation in the booth of the Mumbai-based Project 88 Gallery. Included in the exhibition were small-scaled paintings alongside found objects. Although art fairs have a reputation for being frivolous, Syed’s works offered serious debates for visitors to consider about the increasingly globalised world. And (if running out of information sheets on her project is any indication) viewers wanted to know more about her complex work.

The paintings in the exhibition are postcards of Lahore — a city she knows well and one that seems to be deep in her heart. The impression she provides of Lahore is perhaps not the representation one would expect in a format associated with tourism such as the backs of houses and construction projects in progress. They are not depictions that showcase the best of the city’s heritage to entice would-be tourists. Instead they embody urban development at an ordinary level. This increasingly growing blight is not a glorified rise of a city. As the artist explains, “The new upper-middle-class quarters have emerged hurriedly overnight. I have chosen to paint the back walls of these houses that are left unfinished, usually simply cemented or covered in tar.”

At the annual Art Dubai, Risham Syed presented images of her favourite city

Still, Syed’s postcard-size paintings draw in the viewer and offer beautiful depictions of the everyday, ugly landscape of a city. The details of the images can be compared with colonial pictures that the British made while ruling the Indian subcontinent. In these photographs and paintings, the coloniser documented their newly acquired lands and the people and animals within them. It was a way to cement their possessions, often as a way of showing off what they owned. Syed’s pictures counter that expectation of exotic beauty and instead put forth industrial detritus. She literally puts garbage on display by including objects like rusted scaffolding alongside the paintings. By doing this, the artist legitimises the overlooked, abject elements of a city.

The look back at Pakistan’s colonial history is something found in other works on display in her solo exhibition. She suggests the past is present in the world today. Conflicts between the previous colonisers and the colonised continue to shape global interactions.

One image shows a scene that is found frequently in the daily news — smoke rising in a metropolis from an apparent bombing. It is juxtaposed with dainty objects associated with a Victorian sitting room that could symbolise the British Empire in its heyday. In placing these seemingly historical objects and a much more recent picture side-by-side, the artist suggests the relationship between the colonial past and contemporary strife.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, April 3rd, 2016