The world can be a dark place, rampant with socially impacting concerns due to increased commodification, decreased emotional connections and indifference toward spiritual communication. But why stress; one may just go and grab a favourite comestible (a sweet, feel-good soda most likely) and simply continue with life.

In this case, artist and educator Danish Ahmed would like to bring your condensed attention span — thanks to the augmented reliance on gadgets for streaming entertainment, digital social media, and now used from primary to higher secondary education — toward the notion that your life is one big robotic mess. Hold your gaze with his drawings of soda bottles and withered plants for a while and the insight that we are chained to consumerism will hit you at an alarmingly swift rate.

As seen in the exhibition ‘The C Word’, Ahmed’s aesthetic concerns with full-bodied and flat forms, material application and colour have evolved into sophisticated and conceptually cogent imagery that achieves visual symmetry, simplicity and coherence via multiple diptychs and paintings.

The I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke series seeks inspiration from American Pop Art from the 1960s where mass produced and commercialised food items like cans often made it into the imageries of Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton.

Danish Ahmed’s modern-day vanitas make us aware of how chained we are to consumerism

The series paints nine pitch-black silhouette busts of popular political world figures as they sip from red soda bottles. The works depict industrialist visions of world leaders who have cultivated hyper commercial cultures via outsourced (and underpaid) labour, especially in the post-colonial Global South, and that too often under the pretext of progress.

An obsessive worship of the industry (read cosmetic, dining, fashion and media conglomerates, among others), has resulted in a chaotic reality that is infatuated with spending, even if leads to cumbersome debt and living within concrete walls glued to our expensive and luxe gadgets.

If Ahmed’s previous works strongly forecasted avaricious cultures pervading every aspect of current civilisation, his new drawings and paintings loudly announce that product obsession has now been wholly interwoven with the fabric of our daily lives. In fact, the works reveal darker undertones; the artist knows that you are cognisant about your material practices but are in no mood to give up any percentage of this hyper consumerism. It is addicting, after all.

Most of us are product addicts. Black soda, linked to disastrous health effects because of its chemical contents, but a symbol of happiness and contentment in our family gatherings and solo moments, tops the list, as it makes its manufacturers billions of dollars in annual revenue.

For the past few years, the popular glass soda bottle has been a recurring design in the artist’s works. Identical red and flat painted iterations signifying mass production, ubiquitous dissemination, and extreme consumption can be seen in every work. Silhouettes of these bottles and desiccated tree branches in Coke Jaali (2022) remind us of spiritual cultures from Muslim majority regions in the past.

However, right now, these rich histories of learning via spiritual guides and literary traditions in the tranquility of airy architectural structures with outdoor courtyards, has been overshadowed with indoor digital learning and the focus on the next big product and app launch.

Think about the last time you considered meditating, gardening, giving up purchasing items you do not need, contemplating over your daily habits and the reasons why you do what you do.

Charcoal menacing clouds, red bottles, distorted black rectangles and branches in multiple diptychs titled Ice Cold Sunshine (2022) are not premonitions anymore; they scream the existence of postmodern reality, where artifice is superior to nature, leading to deforestation and loss of ecological species, airbrushed concepts of beauty and continuation of hegemonic power structures.

It’s not just you who has conformed to this coveted consumerist web and remains isolated from nature. It is all of us. Danish Ahmed’s portentous and carefully drawn works, full of symbolic reminders of dull, vain, and fleeting living, have us reassess our priorities.

‘The C Word’ was exhibited at Chawkandi Art Gallery in Karachi, from January 27 until February 10, 2022

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 27th, 2022