Written by: Nimra Khan
Posted on: August 07, 2023 | 
| 中文
As The Tale Was Told by Shanzay Sabzwari
As products of a colonial past, traversing Pakistani identity can be problematic in many ways, especially for those who choose to make a life for themselves outside the country. With an interrupted and altered course of history, the nation is part of a region that has been under foreign rule, lands plundered, people subjugated and their sense of self-worth diminished. The complex created with regard to identity have been passed down through generations, and even as we go through a slow process of decolonization, the fact that this vast period in history is a permanent and undeniable aspect of our identity remains an inconvenient truth, and looms over any attempts to assert our agency.
Of Lifetimes by Shameen Arshad
In a recent two-person show at Koel Gallery, artists Shameen Arshad and Shanzay Sabzwari draw from their own personal experiences toiling with questions of identity when travelling to and residing in the country that once colonized our own, and address our collective post-colonial baggage. The curatorial note for the show states, “Both the artists explore themes of identity, displacement and a certain hybridity that arises due to changing governments and political authorities, cultures and lifestyles. They explore the multi-faceted Pakistani identity by studying politics, society and popular culture and the extent to which it has become embedded in South Asian lives.” Both artists’ works emerge from personal experiences, at times inspired from anecdotes instigating postcolonial commentary with broader socio-political implications.
Shameen Arshad reflects on her diasporic existence and the ways in which Pakistani identity and the concept of identity as a whole is fluid and in constant flux, an amalgam of all that it comes in contact with and absorbs. She is negotiating her own dualities, reflecting on an existence between lands, identities, cultures and civilizations, while also reflecting on the ways in which the past not only influences our present, but also continues to repeat itself and re-emerges with new faces in our everyday experiences. It makes us introspect about our identity and our position relative to time and space.
The Plague by Shameen Arshad
Her textile-based works combine embroidery and paint on velvet material, to create tapestries that appear to be suspended between cultures and time periods. The velvet and color palette gives a regal air that invokes images of British monarchs, while the gold embroidery adds a touch of subcontinental Shahi finery. The works are inspired from her own personal stories that signify our inherent inferiority complex and the racism and imperialistic attituded of the West. She uses her visual narrative to layer both, in order to reveal our double standards and discrepancies that perpetuate the injustice.
“The Plague” presents a printed map of the UK layered with an invisible embroidered map of the Subcontinent, swarming with embroidered flies. At first glance it speaks of the ways in which Pakistani immigrants are demeaned and othered in the UK, seen as an infestation or a disease. But layered within is a reversal of the narrative, seeing the colonizers as the plague that devastated our region, and which is paradoxically both the symptom and the cause of our current malaise.
Borrowed Waters by Shameen Arshad
“They’re Everywhere I and II”, has a similar message, where the blue and gold piece with multiple windows in the style of the Westminster Cathedral shows silhouettes of characters from Mughal miniature, and the red and gold piece with windows of the Lahore Fort has silhouettes of Victorian figures within. The work is about ownership and occupation, and questions the right to space. As the title suggests, it calls out anti-immigrant sentiments which opposes the integration and assimilation of different peoples and cultures, while pointing out the irony of the British infiltration and occupation of an entire region and its people.
“Of Lifetimes”, shows a fence covered in a creeper grapevine, drawing an analogy with the slow and subtle progression of occupation, and how its influence has become seamless enough to appear natural and nondescript. “Borrowed Waters”, is about displacement, and how this new dual identity creates a sense of in-betweenness that suspends one in limbo, unable to fully own and embrace your own identity, yet also othered the new land that you choose to call home. To Arshad, water represents this fluidity of a hybrid identity, pulling and assimilating elements from all directions, and flowing every which way.
A New Life by Shanzay Sabzwari
Shanzay Sabzwari’s work carries similar themes of post-coloniality, articulated through her ongoing engagement with archival prints of currency notes from various nations and time periods, intervened upon with images from Mughal miniature, literature, nature and popular culture used as symbols and metaphors in order to comment on the economy and politics.
The relationship between different currencies and their varying levels of strength relative to one another, are explored and countered. The queen is erased from the pound and the king is erased from pre-colonial banknotes, while a Mughal figure holds him at gunpoint. A use of the dollar note in “A Secret Tale” and “Spread your Wings”, seems to establish a correlation between post-colonial realities and our current geo-politics and Western Imperialism, exercised through an exploitative and dominating economic policy and funding of the war machine.
Aisi Zameen aur Aasman by Shanzay Sabzwari
While the currency notes themselves are a symbol, they carry many symbols within them that the artist also plays around with to build her narrative. In this current series of works she has used several symbols of hope, rejuvenation, transformation and new beginnings, as we move towards a phase of healing the gloom and doom of the pandemic years. The lotus in the old one-rupee note is one such symbol, along with the phoenix and the butterfly. Yet, one questions this hopefulness in the midst of an ongoing global economic crisis, exacerbated in our own country due to the ongoing political instability, a plunging dollar rate, inflation and a government teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. It is interesting that the artist uses symbols of currencies as tools of Western hegemony, but seems to have a more personal sense of hopefulness.
The largest work in this body of works, “As the Tale was Told”, is a step away from the printed banknotes. It is a fantastical narrative that unfolds with fire breathing dragon lifted from Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent, and a Mughal prince engaged in battle. Many other pre-existing images from pop culture, fantasy literature and Mughal miniature surround the two, providing some form of moral support. The work in a way questions the black and white nature of good and evil, and suggests grey areas which move with time, space, cultures and our own knowledge and understanding of historical events. In a way one can view this as the East (the Mughals) in conflict with the West (represented by the dragon from Western pop culture), yet the Mughals were also not all saints and perhaps viewed critically by those whom they conquered. The image of the dragon itself is viewed differently in various cultures, whereas in Eastern cultures it is not regarded as evil, and in fact is perceived as a symbol of strength and fertility.
In Arshad’s work, the dichotomies and double standards of East and West becomes apparent, the same act can be deemed right or wrong depending on who commits it. Residing in a country not your own not only raises questions of hybridity, for it means that while you are carrying both identities within you, yet you end up not belonging to either.
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