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Mulji
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Murtaza Vali
With an essay by Adnan Madani
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Essay
Mulji
Abraaj Group
Art Prize 2013
Foreword Savita Apte
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An extra | ordinary Introduction
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Murtaza Vali
A Collecting of the World
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Huma Mulji’s Cabinet of Curiosities Adnan Madani
Inventory of Things The Matter of Loss
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Huma Mulji in conversation with Murtaza Vali
Biography, Exhibition History and Bibliography
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Writer's Biography
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Acknowledgements
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Photography Credits
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Foreword The Abraaj Group Art Prize was established to showcase exceptional artistic talent from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and to focus inter national attention on the multiple loci of creativity in the region. Since its inception five years ago, the prize has been both a stepping stone and a turning point in the careers of many of its winners. Over the years, it has consistently grown and evolved so that it remains pertinent to the demands of the artistic community it serves. The cast of winners now numbers twentyone and each acts as an inspiration to an upcoming generation of art practitioners from this region. The prize is made possible thanks to the Abraaj Group, which is now the leading private equity investor operating in the global growth markets of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. The daunting task of selecting works that traverse national, regional and linguistic borders whilst being firmly rooted in the region as well as pushing the boundaries of mediums to their limits is no mean task. The Abraaj Group Art Prize is distinctly fortunate
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to have the expertise, patience and good will of an exceptional selection committee. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Antonia Carver, Dana Farouki, Glenn Lowry, Salwa Mikdadi, Jessica Morgan, Nat Muller, Elaine Ng, Julia PeytonJones and Murtaza Vali. The Abraaj Group Art Prize is grateful to its curator Laura Egerton and to the 2013 guest curator Murtaza Vali for their immeasurable support and calm guidance in ensuring that the ambitious proposals from each artist are transformed into works of art that engage the viewer by sharpening our attention to the ordinary and everyday in our lives. It gives me enormous pleasure to congratulate the 2013 recipients of the Abraaj Group Art Prize and leave you to enjoy their new artworks: A Very Short History of Tall Men by Vartan Avakian, Common Elements by Iman Issa, The Miraculous Lives of This and That by Huma Mulji, Background by Hrair Sarkissian and FIRE/ CAST/DRAW by Rayyane Tabet. This publication has been conceived by Murtaza Vali and designed by the New York based firm Project
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Projects. We are delighted to have commissioned in-depth essays from key voices focusing on the artists’ practice and their commission for the Abraaj Group Art Prize. Walid Sadek and Nat Muller on Vartan Avakian, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on Iman Issa, Adnan Madani on Huma Mulji, Vali Mahlouji on Hrair Sarkissian and Haig Aivazian on Rayyane Tabet. We thank them for their scholarship and insight. I welcome you all to extra|ordinary: the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013.
Foreword
Savita Apte Chair Abraaj Group Art Prize
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Murtaza Vali
Essay
An extra | ordinary Introduction
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‘Ordinary’ is derived from the Latin ordo, meaning order. To be ordinary is to be a part of the natural order of things, to be normal, regular, routine, to display no special or distinguishing characteristics. Given this etymology it is hardly surprising that the incorporation of the ordinary and everyday into intellectual and artistic discourse began in earnest in the years following World War II. Obliterating any and all traces of prior order and routine, the war brought the banal and quotidian aspects of human life, usually overlooked and taken for granted, into stark relief. For the various thinkers and artists who championed a post-war recuperation of the ordinary, this strategy was not simply restorative, not a conservative return to lost order. Instead, the rupture of the war served as a reboot of sorts, priming everyday life for reevaluation and renewal. For philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, whose Critique of Everyday Life, first published in French in 1947, triumphantly declared the quotidian as a register worthy of theoretical and critical attention, this register, or “level” as he called it, was where the human condition was fully
realised and realisable: “The human world is not defined simply by the historical, by culture, by totality or society as a whole, or by ideological and political super-structures. It is defined by this intermediate and mediating level: everyday life.”1 For Lefebvre, and others who followed, the disrup tion provided an opportunity to refresh the status quo, creating a blank slate on which one could reimagine the potential of daily life, and through it work towards a better and more just future world. Routine would be reset and the ordinary and everyday would serve as the wellspring for subsequent social, political and artistic revolution.2 Additionally, the incorpora tion of specifically those aspects of life and culture traditionally deemed insignificant or unimportant by high art and elite culture seemed to be a truly egalitar ian gesture; by emphasising the most common parts of human experience, post-war art and literature opened up to the broadest possible audience, bringing art one step closer to life.3 Working in places where the burden of history and politics is strongly felt and can be oppressively
1 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore, Verso, London and New York, 2002, p. 45. 2 Lefebvre asserts, “it is in everyday life and starting from everyday life that genuine creations are achieved, those creations
An extra | ordinary Introduction
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which produce the human and which men produce as part of the process of becoming human: works of creativity.” ibid., p. 44. 3 Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effer vescent Body, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1993, pp. 119-123.
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over-determined, where the certainties of daily life are far from certain, the five artists in ‘extra|ordinary’, like their avant-garde predecessors, seek out the wisdom of the routine, the less significant, and the easily overlooked. Though varied in subject matter and media, their works all spring forth from the rich bedrock of the ordinary, tapping into its democratic promise. They all draw on and occupy that minor register of culture, history, politics and contemporary life that encompasses not only the quotidian, but also the private, personal and domestic, the popular and vernacular, the lost and forgotten, and the ludic world of children. These works are not produced by heroic gestures of creation but through processes of gradual accumulation, through the meditative repeti tion of small acts of making and selecting, seeing and showing, a mode of production firmly grounded in the rhythms and spaces of daily life. Fragmented, wholes made up of many, often small, parts, these works emphasise—to borrow a turn of phrase Susan Sontag used to describe the unique dramatic logic of Samuel Beckett’s plays—“microstructure”, at the level of
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subject matter, process and form.4 Finally, they ask us to recalibrate our vision and attention, to lean in and get a better look, scour backgrounds, pay close atten tion to details, read all the fine print, allow the dense web of information and association embedded within to leisurely unfold. They do not strive to transform or transcend the ordinary. Instead, they humbly remind us of all that is extra in the ordinary itself.
Huma Mulji’s The Miraculous Lives of This and That (2013) re-presents the material and affective realities of everyday life in contemporary Pakistan through the form of the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. First appearing in mid-sixteenth century Europe, these unruly antecedents of modern museums reflect a collecting culture driven not by the rational pursuit of knowledge but by wonder, curiosity, superstition, obsession and personal taste. While Mulji’s cabinet specifically reinvigorates this whimsical mode of acquisition, categorisation, organisation and
An extra | ordinary Introduction
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4 Quoted in ibid., p. 120.
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display, it also acknowledges a very local type of nonmuseal collection: the ‘showcase’, the centrepiece of middle class living rooms across South Asia, which typically houses family photographs, fine china, and a variety of souvenirs, mementoes and tchotchkes. The many compartments and drawers of Mulji’s cabinet—a purpose built, slightly larger than life, ornate wooden structure—are stuffed full of a variety of ordinary and extraordinary objects, inspired by the sorts of things she regularly finds and encounters in the bazaars and on the streets of Lahore. As her magic realist fable-like title seems to suggest, Mulji deploys the cabinet as a story-telling device, using its spatial structure and its many chambers to create multiple, simultaneous, non-linear narratives that unfold differ ently depending on how the viewer navigates its many facets. Following a Surrealist logic, Mulji creates an air of wonder and mystery simply through shifting frames and incongruent juxtapositions, opening up the full signifying potential of the objects on display. Coated with just a bit of dust—a substance that indexes both disuse and disregard, and time’s
passing—the taxidermy animals, porcelain imitations of cheap plastic dolls, copper votive objects in the shape of body parts, and arrays of rotting teeth included in the cabinet are all surrogates or metonyms of a body haunted by decay and inevitable death. Straddling the threshold between the animate and inanimate, between use and obsolescence, these objects challenge clear-cut distinctions between dif ferent material states of being. Finally, Mulji’s cabinet is a poignant existential meditation on the mortality of all things, both living and not, and on the very matter of life.
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A Collecting of the World
Adnan Madani
Essay
Huma Mulji’s Cabinet of Curiosities
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I. What is certain, at any rate, is that the work of art is no longer, at this point, the essential measure of man’s dwelling on earth, which, precisely because it builds and makes possible the act of dwelling, has neither an autonomous sphere nor a particular identity, but is a compendium and reflection of the entire human world. On the contrary, art has now built its own world for itself. —Giorgio Agamben1
Giorgio Agamben, in his essay on the medieval cabinet of curiosities in The Man Without Content, draws a picture of the pre-modern experience of art, describing a sharp line between the modern gallery and the distinctly un-aesthetised nature of the Wunderkammer, as possessed and organised by men of wealth and learning. The cabinet of curiosities, he claims, represents a microcosmic or metonymic rela tion with the universe of Man and God, one which he portrays as vastly different from the ideal or Kantian disinterested experience of the art object in a gallery
1 Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1999, p. 33.
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or museum—exemplified by the de-eroticised appraisal of the body in nude paintings and sculpture. Where the medieval collector assembled objects in a setting where their meaning derived solely from their spatial relationship, i.e., their unity within “a sort of microcosm that reproduced, in its harmonious confusion, the ani mal, vegetable and mineral macrocosm”2 as envisaged by the religious or technical episteme of the period, the modern museum, or rather the curator, attempts to sever the link with the world outside to an extent that allows the artwork to gain autonomy and thus aesthetic value, within a system proper to art itself, with its own laws, history and telos. This much, of course, is generally accepted as more or less given in studies of modernity and in the early history of European art, and philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy3 have also pointed out the relatively recent congealing of the concept of Art as a singular spirit that incorporates all the various arts. Plato, for example, spoke of the ‘arts’ and would have been unfamiliar with the fundamental cohesiveness we ascribe to Art as a category. This cohering was
2 ibid., p. 30.
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3 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1996.
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entirely contingent, made necessary, more or less, by the parallel emergence of the museum and of the disciplines of art history and aesthetics.4 Agamben’s argument, however, reaches a step further by tracing a loss, an irretrievable banishing of the communion between world, object and spectator that was still possible in the earliest manifestations of the Wunderkammer; he characterises this as the loss of the very possibility of the experience of a divine terror. The emergence of the Renaissance episteme, with its mathematisation of perspective in drawing and knowl edge, transformed the cabinet into the ideal gallery as described by Marco Boschini in La Carta del Navegar pittoresco, his 1660 poem guide to Venetian painting; Agamben characterises this new space for display as “a sort of ideal connecting fabric that is able to ensure a unitary foundation to the disparate creations of the artists’ genius, as though, once abandoned to the stormy sea of painting, they could reach dry land only on the perfectly set up scene of this virtual theatre.”5 This fabric served to disconnect art from its previously held potentiality, from what it was thought to be able
4 A simplistic institutional ist reading of the situation would, in fact, reduce the en tire notion of art to a product of the discourse surrounding early modern institutions such as the museum and the university, and the role of state sponsorship of cultural learning in France and Prus sia. My aim here is to accept the institutional hypothesis
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only tentatively, and to follow Agamben in maintaining the historical continuity and evolution of a certain human subject of artistic experience beneath a gradual process of art’s rupture from the world at large. This allows me to locate the subject itself as the point of value in work which lies outside the context of Europe ‘proper’, while
admittedly surrendering some of the emancipatory promise inherent in a formulation of art as a universal and singu lar concept. 5 Agamben, The Man Without Content, p. 32.
to accomplish during Plato’s time, who banished all poets from the ideal state described in the Republic, or from the sin of idolatry, which necessitated the well-developed Judaic and Islamic polemic against the representation of living creatures in visual imagery. In short, the transformation of the cabinet into the museum or white cube was part of the process of an essentially religious worldview being consigned to the jahiliyya of the Enlightenment, a European hinterland where the world-spirit was still enveloped in its own murkiness and the scientific or technologi cal had not yet taken charge of human affairs and destinies. But what is this connection between world, spectator and object and what might be at stake in the loss or retrieval of this trinity? Ultimately the root of this connection in Agamben is Martin Heidegger and his insistence on the power of art to unveil or bring to presence something of the object itself. In this formulation, the work of art mediates between man and the world, bringing into the Lichtung, or clearing, that objecthood or essence of the object otherwise con cealed.6 There is something of a parallel between this
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6 A discussion of Heidegger, worldviews and cabinets of curiosities can be found in Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, Routledge, New York, 2003.
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process of temporary effacement of the representative image and the way in which, according to Agamben, the medieval visitor to the Wunderkammer would look at the objects contained within not as works deserving aesthetic appreciation or wonder, but as measures of his own universe and its boundaries. Additionally, there is a clear rejection of Classicism and an aesthetics that reduces the power of art to terrorise, stupefy and confound. In this rejection, Agamben sides with Friedrich Nietzsche against Immanuel Kant, when the former rails against the figure of the cold and dispas sionate spectator and demands an art for artists. This line in the sand, drawn at the moment of the birth of the museum also joins another well-known critique of the display of art, exemplified by Theodor Adorno who points out in ‘Valéry Proust Museum’ that: “The German word, ‘museal’ [‘museumlike’], has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying…Museum and mausoleum are con nected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art.”7
7 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Valéry Proust Museum’ in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983, p. 175.
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How do we determine the relevance of this line here and today, this pre-modern/modern, religion/ technology opposition that catapults us eventually into post-modernity (and, less convincingly, into contemporaneity) for the world that is outside Europe and its historical destiny, a world removed from the constellation of events that define the coherence of the West and its culture by an annoyingly persistent if now contracting belatedness? Perhaps the ultimate significance of this disjuncture is hard to approach, but nevertheless this temporal remove or lag has sig nificant effects remarkable for their prevalence, even, perhaps, ubiquity in post-colonial art. Museums and art academies in South Asia, for example, operated as places where often outdated styles (according to the colonising power’s narrative of progress, that is) and ideas about art were installed, instilled and absorbed with little regard for their original cultural and histori cal contexts. Untethered, these styles and ideas came to be understood as universal or timeless, rather than historically, culturally and temporally specific, and susceptible to innovation and change. Examples of
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such dyschronia abound: witness the persistence of cubism as a formal device in a certain type of Pakistani art, or the recurrent stories of shock or disappointment experienced by the greatest Pakistani painters upon their arrivals in the art capitals of Europe (Ahmed Parvez, with his framed paintings hanging around his neck, wandering disconsolately through London). It is the realisation of this time-gap, this disadvantage that is pressed home by the relentless movement of cultural trends within First World institutions and the relative inertia of the Third World peripheries, that has produced in more recent times various attempts to re-imagine art outside the terrifying grip of a universal ist art history, in ways that allow the local, specific and untheorised to gain some kind of attention.
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II. Huma Mulji’s cabinet of curiosities is a logical extension of her past oeuvre and the ideas and concerns circu lating through the art world from which she emerged. In a sense the cabinet is a summoning of the spirit of the magpie collections of popular cultural artefacts
that developed and informed the practices of artists such as David Alesworth, Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi, and Durriya Kazi, all of whom were associated with Mulji’s artistic education and formative years at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, where she was born and raised. For a time in the 1990s, Pakistan’s bustling commercial hub struck a clear path away from the formal painterly concerns of Lahore’s National College of Arts, and through the influence and activities of these artist instructors a space was created for art and artists to engage with the specific urban environment or life world of local commerce, culture and practice. This attempt at renegotiating the balance of local/global concerns was intimately tied to a complicated, but never concealed, tension between two simultaneous but distinct approaches towards popular and vernacular material culture, towards objects of mixed industrial/ craft heritage, of bastard global/local pedigrees: the enthusiast’s exuberant joy balanced out the intellectual need for critical distance. For instance, collecting objects such as hand-painted cinema
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posters, plastic toys, photographs of monstrous concrete apartment buildings and decorative truck art, carries elements of both an anthropological project and a promiscuous relationship to the visual that escapes the autonomy of art history. In this way, collecting became the model for a kind of relationship with objects that looked away from the modern hierarchies of fine art, the opposition between high and low that has continued to plague even the most emancipatory post-modern and post-colonial artistic projects. Indeed, works such as Alesworth, the Dadis, and Kazi’s Heart Mahal (1996) or Alesworth and Kazi’s Arz-e-Maood (Promised Lands) (1997) could find no fitting language for their hosting of objects and processes than that of the container or cabinet, over spilling with excesses of signification and historical or social points of attachment. In stark contrast to the parallel development in Pakistan of styles such as neo-miniature painting, which sought to invigorate an archaic and pre-colonial form by infusions of irony and sharply delineated systems of signification and hybrid vocabularies, the Karachi artists looked to create an
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opposite David Alesworth, Elizabeth Dadi, Iftikhar Dadi and Durriya Kazi, Heart Mahal, 1996 Stainless steel panels, truck accessories, mirrors, chamak patti, lights 240 ďż˝ 240 ďż˝ 600 cm
above David Alesworth and Durriya Kazi, Arz-e-Maood (Promised Lands), 1997 Interactive mixed media installation Frere Hall Gardens, Karachi, Pakistan Dimensions variable
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altogether new suture between the art object and the world outside. But what precisely is Mulji’s relationship towards this external world, and how does her presentation of a subjective position in relation to this outside differ from that of her predecessors, as well as her contem poraries? Mulji remains one of the more confounding artists in contemporary Pakistani, or even South Asian, art insofar as it appears impossible to associate her for any length of time with a style, a single formal or even cultural concern or set of skills. Her training as a sculptor predisposes her to attend to objects, with an eye towards their crafting, their processes of coming to be, but much of her work, relying as it does on manipulating loaded signs of cosmopolitanism and globalisation—like suitcases, pylons, plastic toys, and domestic furniture—remains free of conventionally sculptural qualities. In this matter of presentation, Mulji bears an unexpected similarity to her artistic near-contemporaries, YBAs like Damien Hirst who are essentially painters producing sculptural objects. While it is easy to overstate the influence of these artists in
an account of Pakistani art through the late 1990s it cannot be entirely disregarded either; a certain scale, swagger and obsession with ‘bad’ taste are the global legacy of this period. Nevertheless, I maintain that the sculptor in Mulji directs herself and her viewer towards a more nuanced examination of the objects she tends to collect, position, photograph and reanimate. Reanimation is, perhaps, the major recurring element in Mulji’s oeuvre and emerges repeatedly as a desire and logic and an ambition that fails—or is destined to fail—as often as not. The plastic toys, dolls on a child’s swing hopelessly overburdened with the task of somehow representing the complexities of an urban environment that is both hyper sexualised and comically obsessed with concealing the fact of gender and sex (Do Parallel Lines Ever Meet (2004)); the stuffed animals, water buffalo stitched into contor tions and accidents with oddly scaled pylons (Heavenly Heights (2009)) and stuffed into actual concrete water pipes (Her Suburban Dream (2009)); a camel stuffed, jack-in-the-box style into a strangely large (but still too small!) suitcase (Arabian Delight (2008))—there
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Do Parallel Lines Ever Meet?, 2004 Inkjet print on Hahnemühle photographic paper, edition of 5 74.9 � 100.3 cm
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Heavenly Heights, 2009 Taxidermy buffalo, metal rods, powder coated steel, cotton wool, ceramic and cable 434.3 � 188 � 300 cm
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Her Suburban Dream, 2009 Taxidermy buffalo, metal rods, duco paint, welded sheet metal, cotton wool 76.2 � 99 � 330.2 cm
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Arabian Delight, 2008 Taxidermy camel, rexine suitcase, metal rods, cotton wool and fabric 144 � 155 � 105 cm
is throughout a strange, ungainly and even awkward language, and a return to the staging of things that were once alive, now grotesquely and half-convincingly repositioned in simulations of life. One question that forms around this tendency, this obsession with the traces of departed life in inanimate objects, is why Mulji usually excises the users of these objects, including herself, from the work. This separa tion marks a sharp distinction from the populist ethos of the sprawling works of her predecessors, which found their logical development into interactive, extramuseal events, drawing communities and craftsmen together under the aegis of an artistic and directorial power. Perhaps for Mulji, these dolls and urban crafts remain things, visual metaphors and signs, because her relationship to the world of the museum and gallery is more fraught than that of these earlier artists. III. What then can we do with art histories of the Subcontinent, and, perhaps, formerly colonized lands in general, that cannot be traced in a simple linear
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manner, or that do not readily take to the imposition of teleological narratives and the rhythms of epistemic ruptures? Can we adopt or adapt the methods that Agamben and many other philosophers and historians of ideas have used to trace the parallel destinies of institutions and culture, interlinking the contingent, chance operations of politics and ‘real’ history with the unfolding and post-dated operations of art and literature? One immediate problem that arises when attempting to listen to or record the particular rhythm of a cultural history such as Pakistan’s is that there is no presumed underlying subject to whom these various epistemic changes, evolutionary or revolutionary, can be applied in neat succession leading up to the present.8 Perhaps more relevant to this discussion is the absence in Pakistan of any entrenched tradition of public display of art and hence, a lack of discourse around museums, museology and curating. This does not mean that the museum does not exist as part of the structure or circuit within which art such as Mulji’s functions. The museum does exist, but as a ghostly other, without a convincing physical
8 Whereas Heidegger could trace an affinity or destiny beginning with the Greeks and culminating in German language and thought, no such homogenization of the rough, discordant grain of history has taken root suc cessfully in the philosophy of South Asia. The closest are, perhaps, nationalists such as Iqbal and Gandhi, and the
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unsubtle state cultures of Islamisation and Indianisation that have followed in their tumultuous wake. Despite the pervasiveness of these nationalist ideas and the subjectivities they propose, I, nevertheless, must maintain that these were proposed in a dialogue or confronta tion with the West and its Universalism.
manifestation, a rumour of authority and certainty that exists elsewhere—away from the chaotic, supposedly underdeveloped and unrecorded currents of the local (which is always consigned, as it were, to orality). That is not to say that Pakistani museums do not exist and that the public display of art and antiques has not occurred at all; this would deny the tremendous efforts of the British to bring their own systems of collection, archiving and display to India in the nineteenth century. The Lahore Museum, located in the city where Mulji currently lives and works, and curated in its earliest days by the devoted John Lockwood Kipling, is a model of its kind, bringing together artefacts from the region’s vast geographic and historical scope, simultaneously marking the boundaries of a national imaginary while producing an effect of temporal depth and continuity in the midst of a culture that remained committed to a mythical and religious world-view.9 The question is whether this colonial model—inextricable from Darwin, dinosaur fossils, agnostic churchmen, aristocratic scientists, spinning jennies, race-obsessed anthropologists,
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9 It is certainly more than coincidence that in local parlance this grand museum was known as the Ajaib Ghar or House of Wonders, which is more or less a translation of Wunderkammer.
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Orientalist philologists—ever took in a meaningful way at all. I remain sceptical about whether the world-view of the museum in India, and what later became Pakistan, ever established common cause with the genius of its various peoples, with the world-views of a region so vast and incoherent that perhaps only the efforts of a museological imagination could, paradoxically, project a single history or boundary on it. Evidence for this unfinished Enlightenment, or incomplete modernisation, is clearly visible in the general decay and neglect of these institutions since the colonisers departed. And the public exhibits pro duced in their absence, such as those displaying images and the personal belongings of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Father of the Nation, betray a hagiographic impulse that overrides any sensitivity to the material on dis play—comically wafting an odour of sanctity over even the most Europeanised relics of the whisky drinking, Savile Row attired gentleman and constitutionalist.10 The cabinet then, as Mulji seems to intend it, becomes a place where this heterogeneity of Pakistani time—religious, secular, and the in between—is staged,
10 It could be argued that in Pakistan’s case narrative history works around a fundamental horror of historicizing the events of early Islam, which occupy a tense zone between the temporal and the eternal, the miraculous and the historically attested, and that this traumatic configuration produces some of the more
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peculiar characteristics of Muslim modernity.
and is allowed some kind of conflicted existence in material form, embellished wood and all. The individual compartments, with their distinct contents, function almost like a pair of quotation marks, within which the oddly made, the hybrid, the heterochronic are set off, like so many phrases of Babu English included for the amusement of those with better or more discerning tastes. It is, nevertheless, this uncomfortable vantage point, of being placed in a position of authority over the objects in question that puts the objects and their selection in question. A first impulse at seeing this motley assortment of objects, these by-products of indigestible modernities, might be to laugh; but what allows us to laugh if not an experience not that far removed from colonisers confronted with the naïve superstitions and cult practices of the natives? To adopt this gaze, which one must at first, means to arrive at the point where questions of order, historiog raphy, archaeological structure, might be unsettled or even transformed in particular, local contexts, without having to abandon a more general, un-prescriptive kind of modernity.
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IV. So far I have read Mulji’s oeuvre and her present interest in the historical cabinet of curiosities as a kind of extended reflection on the relationship between art and its constitutive outside, between the museum and the ‘real’ world surrounding and supporting it, between the modern, pre-modern and the extra-modern. I have argued that this engagement indicates a concomitant desire to make an art that escapes the sterility of purely aesthetic, historical or stylistic judgement and in doing so, moves towards a visual practice that more adequately accounts for ways of living in the non-Western world. This is not a far-fetched claim to make, given Mulji’s regular engagement, as artist and teacher, with public spaces and urban environments generally ignored by a middleclass Pakistani art world that models itself on a distant, dimly perceived, and antiquated Western art system. Additionally, the museum in Pakistan was and is merely a spectral presence, an imaginary legitimating institution in the absence of any effective physical institutions. Indeed, Mulji’s own contribution to the
first major public collection of contemporary art, the National Art Gallery in Islamabad—an installation using common, humble charpais or beds along a section of this new and prestigious showpiece of a museum— attempted to critique the exclusive ambitions of such an ordered, elite and hierarchical space in an overwhelmingly poor, fractured nation whose complex and multi-temporal modernity cannot be adequately represented by simply fitting some historical sequence of works within a larger sequence of global art history and its conventions. Nevertheless, Mulji’s critique— like other comparable disruptions or penetrations of the museal space such as the works of Jannis Kounellis, Walter DeMaria and Daniel Buren, amongst others—relies on this very space of privilege for its effect. As Adorno says of Valery, he is “too ingenuous in his suspicion that museums alone are responsible for what is done to paintings. Even if they are hung in their old places in the castles of aristocrats….they would be museum pieces without museums.”11 What is Mulji after all critiquing or questioning through this kind of reordering of systems, and through
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11 Adorno, ‘Valéry Proust Museum’, p. 184.
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her increased fascination with decrepit or inefficient records such as the medical archives at Lahore’s King Edwards College, with their badly preserved specimens, like the dismembered foot that retains—in a most unscientific manner—the grotesque individuality of the donor/victim? What is being said through the ironic evidence of the insufficiency of the Linnaean or systematic, scientific universe? It is not enough to say that ordering equals dominion and colonisation, and that disorder equals enchantment and authenticity; this would be to subscribe to a terribly simplified understanding of the colonial world-view following Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt accompanied by an army of scholars. This binary would also risk falling into alignment with a weak irrationalism that sees the extra-modern, magical or unsystematised world as a viable claimant to a notion of truth, rather than as a supplement to complex and, as yet, not properly under stood processes of globalisation or mondialisation.12 I have already pointed out Mulji’s connection to Karachi’s globalised urban environment and to the emergence of a culture of collecting popular crafts
12 “Mondialisation” is Nancy much richer term for world-forming. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2007.
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and objects, specifically those that display a hybrid language or a local take on a broader theme (in the way that images of Princess Diana and the Playboy bunny underwent a semantic drift to become regular decorative motifs on Pakistani trucks and buses). In particular, amongst Mulji’s earliest interests were plastic toys and dolls, with which she has a personal connection. Iftikhar Dadi has described these objects as confounding oppositions of handmade/ industrial and authentic/imported: “This tenuous sense of popular culture in urban-craft is thus located at the axis of a double translation of modernity, pointing towards both the homogenising depredations of the global culture industry as much as it indexes a specificity of the local that refracts and pluralises modernity—a local that is not homogeneous but already bears within it a complex genealogy of prior translations.”13 For Dadi then, these objects do not speak of a romanticised outside of Westernisation, and still less are they marks of an incomplete process of modernity; instead, they are the very stuff of globalisation itself, implicitly placed between the
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13 Iftikhar Dadi, ‘Plastic Toys and ‘Urban-Craft’ in South Asia’, Prince Claus Fund Journal no. 10a, 2003, pp. 142-153.
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Enameled porcelain dolls, 2013
instant, simultaneous and transactional nature of international commerce (the use of cheap materials displays a lack of concern with longevity or aesthetic value) and local adaptations and resistances to these accelerations (echoes of traditional motifs, family or cottage-industry modes of production, ignorance or wilful violation of copyright). What occurs across Mulji’s practice, in the reanimations and enactments, in the collections of urban detritus and the photographs of human remains, in the failures or parodies of modernity and the cre ation of Borgesian taxonomies, is an extension of this double-translation indicated by Dadi. This process of translation continues through the mutation of cheap plastic to porcelain into the realm of artistic production itself, where the possibility of a re-enchantment of art is indicated not through the sterile operations of histories and techniques proper to art or through disinterested critique, but in the opening of art itself into a world that is increasingly complex and uneven in its engage ment with globalised ways of living, and of producing, handling and perceiving objects of everyday use.
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Inventory of Things
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PK-s1515 Galvanized steel pail with clothes from an unidentified male body King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-f1497 Beaten stainless steel fish from the back of a rickshaw Samanabad Lahore, Pakistan 2009
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PK-f1489 Burma teak cabinet with taxidermy sparrow Riaz Old Furniture, E. I. Lines Karachi, Pakistan 2012
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PK-w1401 Gas meter R. A. Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2013 PK-w1403 Petrol generator Shahalami Market Lahore, Pakistan 2010
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PK-t1303 Plastic doll with glasses, one of a pack of twelve China Market Shahalami Gate Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-s1501 Littauer dental stitch scissors Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2012 PK-s1513 Rusted handsaw David Alesworth’s studio Lahore, Pakistan 2013 PK-t1351 Plastic bedpan Butt Brothers Surgical Suppliers, near
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Mayo Hospital Lahore, Pakistan 2012
David Alesworth’s studio Lahore, Pakistan 2013
PK-t1350 Plastic urinal with green lid Mohammed Surgical Mart Neela Gumbad Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-s1502 Frankfurter Kuche, exhibit Museum der Dinge/Museum of Things Berlin, Germany 2012
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PK-s1503 Cast iron shears David Alesworth’s studio Lahore, Pakistan 2013 PK-t1301 Plastic doll with yellow hair China Market Shahalami Gate Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-w1404 Black Faisal switch Hamid Electric Corporation Saddar Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-c1585 White porcelain insulator Beadon Road Lahore, Pakistan 2009 PK-w1409 Master single light switch Saddar Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-f1492 Plastic stool with cardboard seat Shapes Health Club parking lot, Gulberg Lahore, Pakistan 2010 PK-s1519 Tin of Pakistan jointing solution
PK-c1581 Damaged concrete lion Near Bakkar Mandi Bund Road Lahore, Pakistan 2004
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PK-h1582 Hind limb bones of frog, embedded in resin Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2012 PK-s1512 Vintage pint oil can David Alesworth’s studio Lahore, Pakistan 2013
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PK-f1499 Porcelain fish, exhibit Imperatorskii Farforovyi Zavod/Imperial Porcelain Manufactory St. Petersburg, Russia 2012 PK-f1496 Damaged fiberglass shark Kashmir Highway Islamabad, Pakistan 2010 PK-d1422 Preserved fish on dusty mount Medical specimen shop Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-s1516 Dental calipers Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2012 PK-s1509 Dental explorer Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2012
PK-s1507 Surgical knife with blade Artists’ toolbox Karachi, Pakistan 2012 PK-s1517 Dental mouth retractor Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-f1498 Concrete Fish Kadir Topbas intersection Wapda Town Lahore, Pakistan 2011
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PK-c1590 Black hawk cast in resin Expo Center Intersection Johar Town Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-c1573 Cast concrete minaret top LDA Avenue Intersection Riwind Road Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-c1586 Fiberglass lion Kashmir Highway Islamabad, Pakistan 2010 PK-c1588 Faux bronze fiberglass lion Johar Town Lahore, Pakistan 2011
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PK-c1571 Broken concrete head Kadir Topbas Intersection Wapda Town Lahore, Pakistan 2011
PK-s1521 Home made spirit lamp General Post Office Shahrah-e-Quaid-e-Azam Lahore, Pakistan 2013
PK-h1590 Hind limb bones of various animals Karachi Scientific Store Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2013 PK-s1512 Moore-Graves speculum Butt Brothers Surgical Suppliers, near Mayo Hospital Lahore, Pakistan 2012 PK-c1582 Broken concrete soldier Kadir Topbas Intersection Wapda Town Lahore, Pakistan 2011
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PK-h1584 Drum mallet collection, exhibit Museum der Dinge/Museum of Things Berlin, Germany 2012 PK-t1367 Medical chart, exhibit Kunstkamera St. Petersburg, Russia 2012
PK-c1587 Concrete relief of minaret LDA Avenue Intersection Riwind Road Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-w1402 Gas meters R. A. Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2013 PK-t1361 Taxidermy mole, exhibit Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford, U.K. 2012
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PK-t1362 Taxidermy hedgehog Karachi Science Store Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-t1305 Porcelain figurine, exhibit Imperatorskii Farforovyi Zavod/Imperial Porcelain Manufactory St. Petersburg, Russia 2012
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PK-c1572 Concrete lion fountain Expo Center Intersection Johar Town Lahore, Pakistan 2011
PK-t1302 Plastic squeaky doll in packaging China Market Shahalami Gate Lahore, Pakistan 2013
PK-t1312 Porcelain figurine, exhibit Imperatorskii Farforovyi Zavod/Imperial Porcelain Manufactory St. Petersburg, Russia 2012
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PK-t1309 Cindy, singing and dancing doll Shahalami Market Lahore, Pakistan 2009
PK-t1304 Plastic squeaky doll, unpacked China Market Shahalami Gate Lahore, Pakistan 2013
PK-t1353 Plastic bride and groom Unknown provenance Lahore, Pakistan 2008
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PK-t1307 Plastic dolls with hijab, pack of twelve China Market Shahalami Gate Lahore, Pakistan 2012
PK-t1308 Rubber baby doll China Market Shahalami Gate Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-s1511 Stainless steel dissection table King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2011
PK-t1306 Plastic doll with bedroom furniture China Market Shahalami Gate Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-t1213—PK-t1224 12 human teeth, extracted for infection Collected from various dentists Lahore, Pakistan 2012-13
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PK-t1310 Plastic doll with spectacles and lipstick China Market Shahalami Gate Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-t1354 Human tongue key card Scientific specimen supplier Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2012 PK-t1311 Doll head Celluko Industries, SITE Karachi, Pakistan 1998
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PK-t1352 Plastic bedpan Butt Brothers Surgical Suppliers, near Mayo Hospital Lahore, Pakistan 2012 PK-s1508 Purpose made plastic instrument Celluko Industries, SITE Karachi, Pakistan 1998
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PK-f1494 Stainless steel stool King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-f1495 Stainless steel stool King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-s1518 Stainless steel dissection table, with body King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2011
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PK-f1490 Stainless steel storage cabinet King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-t1359 Taxonomy unknown, exhibit Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford, U.K. 2012
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PK-t1364 Preserved human heart Karachi Science Store Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-c1589 Fiberglass tiger Near Expo Center Intersection Southern Bypass Lahore, Pakistan 2011
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PK-c1574 Broken concrete boy fountain Kadir Topbas Intersection Wapda Town Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-f1486 Black Magic chocolate box Haji Sharif Furniture E. I. Lines Karachi, Pakistan 2012 PK-h1583 Damaged street lamp Main Boulevard, Gulberg Lahore, Pakistan 2011
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PK-c1560 Broken concrete head of a woman Kadir Topbas Intersection Wapda Town Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-h1588 Airline safety instruction card Oman Air 2011 PK-f1493 Recycled tin sheet storage box Khajoor Bazaar Karachi, Pakistan 1999 PK-c1575 Broken concrete woman with water pitcher Kadir Topbas Intersection Wapda Town Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-t1357 Plastic doll and bedroom set, pack of six China Market Shahalami Gate Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-t1367 Medical specimen storage cabinet, with human spine King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2012
PK-f1492 Cardboard box label, pack of 12 Main Shahalami Market Lahore, Pakistan 2009
PK-f1489 Medical instrument storage cabinet King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2012
PK-t1366 Unknown preserved specimen King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-d1423 Dust covering old mirror Riaz Old Furniture E. I. Lines Karachi, Pakistan 2012
PK-f1488 Medical specimen storage cabinet King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2012
PK-w1412 National switchboard with fan regulator National College of Arts Shahrah-e-Quaid-e-Azam Lahore, Pakistan 2013 PK-d1425 Snow globe with rusted cityscape, edition of 3 Artist’s studio Lahore, Pakistan 2011 PK-t1365 Preserved specimen of child King Edward Medical College Lahore, Pakistan 2012 PK-d1427 Dust covering old cabinet Riaz Old Furniture E. I. Lines Karachi, Pakistan 2012 PK-f1491 Air-conditioned enclosure with two men Badami Bagh Circular Road Lahore, Pakistan 2009
PK-c1231 Wall lizard embedded in resin Scientific specimen supplier Urdu Bazaar Lahore, Pakistan 2012
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PK-d1429 Recycled tin storage box for nails David Alesworth’s studio Lahore, Pakistan 2013
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PK-h1586 Poster with photograph of Mohammed Ali Jinnah Urdu text reads: The last moments of the Quaid-eAzam’s life. When there were just a few breaths of life left in the Quaid-e-Azam, out of his mouth came: Allah, Pakistan. Freedom Movement gallery Lahore Museum Lahore, Pakistan 2013
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PK-h1587 Exhibit labels Hindu and Buddhist gallery Lahore Museum Lahore, Pakistan 2013
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Huma Mulji in conversation with Murtaza Vali
Essay
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Huma Mulji
Murtaza Vali Your work frequently engages the popular and vernacular culture and the structures and spaces of Pakistani cities, specifically Karachi, where you were born, raised and went to art school, and Lahore, where you currently live, work and teach. What draws you to the Pakistani city?
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Huma Mulji My ongoing engagement with this particular aesthetic is linked to my artistic coming of age in the Karachi of the 1990s. Iconic works like David Alesworth, Elizabeth and Iftikhar Dadi, and Durriya Kazi’s Heart Mahal (1996) and David Alesworth and Durriya Kazi’s Arz-e-Maood (Promised Lands) (1997) were significant parts of my early creative imagination, and subsequently coloured the way I saw the world. Invested in and drawing from a popular visual culture specific to contemporary Pakistan, these artists raised not only questions of taste, challenging the opposition of high versus low art/culture, but also initiated important conversations on collaboration and interactivity, questioning the legitimacy of the white cube gallery as
the only space for contemporary art by highlighting who and what such spaces structurally and systematically excluded. Subsequently, the use of popular visual culture in fashion, graphic design and art in Pakistan exploded and eventually, the very important early questions these artists were asking got reduced to the exotic cliché ‘truck art.’ I am very interested in the frayed or fraying edges of modernity: specifically, malfunction in a city, the sudden breakdown of routine day-to-day operations and the city’s ability to take it in stride. An excellent recent example of this sort of imagination is Mohammed Hanif’s 2012 novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, which elegantly and hilariously uses an inventive popular idiom to explore shockingly dark subject matter. His language is visceral, almost three-dimensional in its descriptive richness. Whether describing a place, an emotion, a killing or a silence, the syntax displays a dispassionate urgency and contextual specificity that becomes inseparable from the work’s content. In retrospect, my practice also demonstrates an abiding interest in flânerie and, specifically, its particular manifestation in urban South Asia. Many of the region’s cities have undergone profound changes in recent decades,
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transformations comparable in intensity to those experienced in nineteenth century Paris. In addition to years of wandering through the markets of both Karachi and Lahore foraging for material to work with, driving through the city streets in my small, slow car, insulated, aurally, from the outside world but visually flooded by roadside stimuli, has been a powerful catalyst of ideas and has provided the space and distance to leisurely deliberate on them. There are many other such cities in the world but Karachi and Lahore, being home, are more meaningful and have the ability of move me in ways that are essential to making art.
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Given that you are a sculptor, it is hardly surprising that your art is object obsessed. But your practice engages with a specific and uncanny category of objects, those that straddle the threshold between animate and inanimate, between things living and not. What drives your interest in these things, in the broadest sense of that word, and the cultural meanings that accrue around and within them?
I am generally interested in notions of failure and, specifically, in the dysfunctional or disused object, in that category of things that continue to live long past their utility. In our spectacle and commodity driven times these things, that seem to relish their obsolescence, display an anti-heroism that I admire. Their uselessness becomes their function and they embody a kind of boredom and sadness that they bear triumphantly as badges of resistance and courage. They are resolutely non-gadget, non-celebrity, and their slowness is maddening in our fast paced globalised information age. Perhaps all this comes from years of frustration in Lahore where, I think, everyone lives on a kind of agricultural time, always and endlessly waiting: for rain, for spring, for the harvest. I am also interested in specifically how the ageing and aged, the ill and the broken, in terms of both objects and bodies, are viewed and understood in our contemporary societies, where youth and the new are fetishised and capitalised. Plus, another type of body, the body in pain, continues to haunt my imagination. Increasingly, this humiliated body has become a permanent part of our public visual imagination. These concerns were what drove me to
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ex tr a make Lost and Found (2012), a tortured, bloated body of a drowned man, slightly larger than life and clad in buffalo hide that lies, un-heroically, directly on the ground and not on a plinth.
Huma Mulji
How did you first get interested in taxidermy? Why do you continue to use it?
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I totally stumbled upon the use of taxidermy as an artistic device. Somewhat paradoxically, using actual skin relieves some of the demands of mimesis. As the object is undeniably real, the viewer’s main response is no longer to evaluate its mimetic success, opening it up to abstract and multiple interpretations. It is comparable to the Duchampian device of the objet trouvé, whose incidental and given materiality shifts focus away from questions about the success or failure of facture to more conceptual concerns. Some of my strategies also stem from a growing unease with demands from dealers and buyers for slickly produced work, for work that will last forever. For me it is far more vital to retain the smell of camel than to politely obey the health and safety guidelines for those audience members
Lost and Found, 2012 Fiberglass, buffalo hide, glass eyes 193 � 106.7 � 38.1 cm
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who come within three feet of my work. The badly crafted works are a conscious, stubborn resistance to such obligations. I like to say, “If a chipkali falls off my painting, just pick it up and stick it back on.”
Though cabinets and vitrines frequently appear in contemporary art, these display formats are usually linked to works engaged in institutional critique. For me, the cabinet is a narrative device, a non-linear method of telling a story. I created unexpected narratives through the incongruent juxtapositions of ideas, images and things in my early works, which could also be considered collections of a sort,
Ode to a Tubelight (detail), 2011 Enamel paint and mixed media on canvas 213 � 183 cm
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The Miraculous Lives of This and That (2013) is a twenty first century Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities. While it continues many themes and techniques of earlier work it is, possibly, your first work about collections and the cultures of collecting, about the sorts of obsessions and fascinations things elicit from those who possess and accumulate them. Why this new interest in collecting? And did this interest result in a marked shift in your approach to things?
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ex tr a though on a smaller scale. I most closely associate cabinets with collections of historic and scientific ‘fact’, which are presented as objective and true knowledge of the world. However, the early, pre-Enlightenment Wunderkammers were more ambiguous and interesting, more about not knowing than knowing. It is this quality that I seek to retain in my cabinet of curiosities. I am attempting to rock the certainty of fact, a little. Blur the edges between fact and fiction. The cabinet juxtaposes numerous objects or ‘things’, as I prefer to call them, as they are not all strictly objects in a material sense. These juxtapositions create collective and, sometimes, conflicting narratives, as well as isolated, playful asides. I would like the viewer to be unmoored upon first encountering the cabinet. How and where do they begin to make sense of this world of things? And slowly, as they move around the cabinet, the overt and hidden narratives will be revealed. Each face of the cabinet tells the story differently, or tells a different story, fragmenting the illusion that there is only one narrative, one perspective, one way of seeing and knowing. The encounter is akin to a slow accumulation of information and meaning, the gradual creation of a chain of references and associations.
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The Miraculous Lives of This and That is organised using a classification method commonly used in early Wunderkammers. The collection is roughly divided into ‘naturalia’, ‘artificialia’ and ‘memorabilia’, but not without irony. For example, ‘naturalia’ includes a taxidermy cow but also pseudo-scientific charts and resin embedded bone specimens. Human teeth, porcelain ears and copper votive objects are all ‘memorabilia’, while the porcelain dolls fall under ‘artificialia’.
Of course, but I had little interest in dolls while the factory was still operational. That interest actually developed in 1996 when, having graduated from art school, a couple of other artists and I set up a studio in one of the factory’s storage warehouses. The Pakistani marketplace had suddenly expanded, opening itself up to comparatively cheaper products from neighbouring China, including toys. My father refused to compromise on the quality of
Working Drawing with Copper Votive Offerings, 2013 Collage and acrylic paint on paper
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Dolls appear frequently in your work. Is this recurring interest related to the fact that your father owned a toy factory?
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above Working Drawing for Panel with Teeth 2, 2013 Pencil, ink, and human teeth on tracing paper
opposite Sirf Tum (Only You), 2004 Inkjet print on HahnemĂźhle photographic paper, edition of 5 74.9 ďż˝ 100.3 cm
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In works like Sirf Tum (2004) and Full Mood Mein (2004) you photographed a naked male and female doll, sometimes arranged in intimate embraces, in various urban sites often capturing the response of bystanders on the street. These dolls serve as surrogates for people, testing the limits of public nudity and intimacy in Pakistani society. In contrast, in The Miraculous Lives of This and That dolls appear
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his product just to survive the market and was unable to compete price wise. Around this time, Karachi became completely dysfunctional; the city was frequently shut down, industries and small businesses were unable to survive and were either taken over or disappeared. The factory acquired huge debts and, eventually, closed down. We worked in that studio surrounded by thousands of toys, many unassembled. There were huge piles of arms, legs, heads and eyes everywhere. No one was buying and there wasn’t enough secure storage, so the toys got rained on and became unsellable. They literally disintegrated. Perhaps my interest in decay and the ravages wrought on things by time germinated back then.
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Huma Mulji
as object not image and occupy a very private space, sequestered in an ornate wooden cabinet. Are the dolls still surrogates for people or do they signify differently? Are all the objects included in the cabinet merely surrogates for real bodies?
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Sirf Tum was as much a performance as a photographic work. I bought the dolls from hawkers selling second hand toys around Landa Bazaar and placed and photographed them in public spaces, all the while being watched. The confrontations that arose were central to the work. By 2008, when I produced a second body of doll photographs, Lahore had changed politically. Fear and insecurity were growing and so the camera’s presence was perceived as suspicious and I had to get permission from all sorts of authorities just to take photographs in the streets. To circumvent this I turned to Photoshop to create the juxtapositions I was interested in. But this changed the work and in this second series, already, the dolls are more objects than surrogates for people. Now, the dolls largely represent ideas. The cheaply produced plastic dolls that I am using now are local
Finished porcelain dolls, 2013
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copies of Chinese dolls that are themselves copies of dolls from elsewhere.
Porcelain transforms them into decoration pieces. They accrue value and content through the new material and context; a cheap imitation becomes a little bit truer. But the original plastic dolls are like Chinese whispers in object form, copies of copies of copies of copies that are resolutely inauthentic and already cross-cultural many times over. I am also questioning how vernacular subject matter is transformed into high art, especially for the consumption of an audience who may not get the nuances and ironies of an ‘authentic copy’. The porcelain dolls simultaneously suggest and resist the fetish of the local that an international audience might seek.
But porcelain is hardly a material for high art. It is more commonly used nowadays for souvenirs and tchotchkes.
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You chose to translate, or rather transmute, some of these plastic dolls into porcelain. Why?
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ex tr a True, but porcelain does denote a higher value in this context. The porcelain showpiece occupies pride of place in any china cabinet, as its very name indicates. And porcelain makes the act of imitation obvious. When it comes to souvenirs, imitation is usually of something larger, grander and ungraspable. I reverse this logic to lay bare the mechanics of imitation.
Huma Mulji
The Miraculous Lives of This and That also explores ideas of dust, death and the passage of time. In some ways your cabinet of curiosity is meant to be a relic, a dead structure filled with dead things that has suffered the ravages of time. Is one of the main themes of this work existential, a melancholic meditation on our inevitable mortality and our ageing bodies? What motivates this interest in mortality and disuse? I have wanted to work with dust for a while now, maybe since I moved to Lahore. Here dust is omnipresent, physically coating all things, and in concert with the summer heat, it can be all consuming, bringing life to a grinding
halt. It reminds me of Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes, a Japanese novel about an amateur entomologist held captive by a village threatened by ever-advancing sand dunes. Though the inhabitants’ pass their lives endlessly shovelling sand away it eventually covers everything, gets in everywhere; they can’t help but ingest it and finally lose their eyes to it. The work can definitely be understood as a melancholic meditation on mortality, in its broadest sense. We live in old times. In the 1960s, the world felt exuberant and young, anything and everything seemed possible. Today, mortality is pervasive and palpable. On a personal note, my parents are ageing and this, along with the recent deaths of some close family members, has sharpened my attention to such things. Entering the homes of the elderly, or the recently departed, and encountering their idiosyncratic and eccentric methods of collecting or, rather, simply ‘keeping’ things, many that haven’t been moved in decades, has been overwhelming. One of the most profound manifestations of age are the challenges our elders face everyday battling to live in and understand the world as it is today, struggling to remain relevant and useful.
Early experiments with dust, 2012
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The idea of twilight, the title of my 2011 solo show at Bombay’s Project 88 Gallery, encompasses some of these themes. No longer fully day and not yet the dark of night, it is a moment when time is ‘suspended’. And in the particular and peculiar fading light that is characteristic of this interstitial period it is hard to see properly, it is difficult to register the difference between black and white thread. Twilight also marks a corporeal threshold of sorts, after which the body, exhausted from the day’s exertions, slows down and prepares to ‘die’ for the night. If I were a painter I might try and capture the specific quality of light in paint but as a sculptor I try to do it through material and object, through the choice of things, their arrangement, and by playing with texture, surface and sense through devices that are not immediately visible, like dust, and in the case of taxidermy, through smell. Somewhat unexpectedly, The Miraculous Lives of This and That bears an uncanny resemblance to taʿziya. On an elemental level my cabinet is a commemoration of loss and a monument to death so, maybe, it is interesting to think of it as a contemporary, secular taʿziya.
Staining and waxing a taxidermy crow, 2013
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Muharram procession with ta’ziya, Chiniot, Pakistan, 2004
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Huma Mulji Born 1970 Karachi, Pakistan Lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan EDUCATION 1995 BFA, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, Pakistan 2010 MFA, Transart Institute, Berlin, Germany SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2011 Twilight, Project 88, Mumbai, India 2010 Crystal Palace and Other Follies, Rohtas 2 Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan 2009 High Rise, Elementa Gallery, Dubai, U.A.E. 2008 Arabian Delight, Rohtas 2 Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2013 Salaam Bombay: Beauty and Chaos in the Urban Environment, Twelve Gates Art, Philadelphia, U.S.A. 2012 Salaam Bombay: Beauty and Chaos in the Urban Environment, ART ASIA, Miami, U.S.A. Beautiful Life: Memory and Nostalgia, Pier-2 Art Center, Kaohsiung, Taiwan 2011 Beautiful Life: Memory and Nostalgia, South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell, U.K. and Creative Hinckley Gallery, Hinckley, U.K. The MENASA Studio Dispatches, Art Dubai, Dubai, U.A.E.
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2010 The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art From Pakistan, 1990-2010, Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi, Pakistan Home and the World, Aicon Gallery, New York, U.S.A. The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, Saatchi Gallery, London, U.K. Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan & Bangladesh, Whitechapel Gallery, London, U.K. and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland As the Land Expands, Al Riwaq Art Space, Adliya, Bahrain Resemble/Reassemble, Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India 2009 Half-Life: New Work, David Alesworth/Huma Mulji, Zahoor-ul-Akhlaq Gallery, National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art From Pakistan, Asia Society, New York, U.S.A. 2008 15-An IVS Alumni Collective, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan Six Degrees of Separation: Chaos, Congruence & Collaboration in South Asia, Anant Gallery, New Delhi, India Farewell to Post Colonialism: The Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China Desperately Seeking Paradise: Pakistan Pavillion, Art Dubai, Dubai, U.A.E. 2007 Take Away, Zahoor-ulAkhlaque Gallery, National College of Art, Lahore, Pakistan
Outside the Cube, National Art Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan Love, National Art Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan Moving Ahead, National Art Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, U.S.A. Destination Asia: Non-strict Correspondence, Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Almaty, Kazakhistan 2006 256 Shades, V.M. Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan SubContingent: The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy Flights of Fancy, Royaat Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan 2005 Sirf Tum, Rohtas 2 Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan Something Purple: Media Art from Pakistan, Artist Commune, Hong Kong Beyond Borders: Art from Pakistan, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, India 2004 Along the X-Axis: Digital Art from India and Pakistan, Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi, India 2003 Darmiyaan, Nehar Ghar Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan Open Studios, UpRiver Workshop, Lijiang, China 2002 Aar Paar II, various venues, Mumbai, India The Brewster Project, various venues, Brewster, U.S.A. 2001 Open Studios, Gasworks, London, U.K.
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2000 Selections: Six Artists from Pakistan, Jay Grimm Gallery, New York, U.S.A. Diversity and Direction: Contemporary Art of the 90s, Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, Pakistan Pakistan: Another Vision, Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, U.K., Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield, U.K., Oldham Art Gallery, Oldham, U.K., and Victoria Art Gallery and Hot Bath Gallery, Bath, U.K. EXHIBITION CATALOGUES AND BOOKS 2010 Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan & Bangladesh. Steidl, Göttingen; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur. Chiu, Melissa and Benjamin Genocchio, Asian Art Now. Monacelli Press, New York. Khan, Naiza H. (ed.), The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art From Pakistan, 1990-2010. Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi. Rana, Rashid (ed.), Resemble Reassemble. Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi. Sullivan, Graeme. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts. Sage Publications, Los Angeles. 2009 Hashmi, Salima (ed.), Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art From Pakistan. Asia Society Museum, New York; Yale University Press, New Haven. Holborn, Mark (ed.), The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today. Jonathan Cape in association with Saatchi
Gallery, London. Malik, Maha, High Rise, Elementa Gallery, Dubai. 2008 Gao, Shiming, Sarat Maharaj and Tsongzung Chang (eds), The Third Guangzhou Triennial: Farewell to Post-Colonialism. China Academy of Art Press, Guangzhou. Tuqan, Salma (ed.), Desperately Seeking Paradise. Art Dubai, Dubai. 2007 Dalmia, Yashodhara and Salima Hashmi, Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. 2005 Doshi, Saryu and Quddus Mirza (eds), Beyond Borders: Art from Pakistan. Young Presidents’ Organization, Mumbai. 2006 Bonacossa, Ilaria and Francesco Manacorda (eds), SubContingent: The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art. Electa, Florence; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. 2002 Hashmi, Salima. Unveiling the Visible: Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan. ActionAid Pakistan, Islamabad. 2000 Wilcox, Timothy (ed.), Pakistan: Another Vision. Arts & The Islamic World (UK) Ltd, London.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 2012 Cawkwell, Chris ‘Huma Mulji – Twilight’. Chris Cawkwell Blog, January 14, http://chriscawkwell.com/ blog/2012/01/huma-muljitwilight/. Hashmi, Salima ‘“Sinful Women”: Women Artists from Pakistan’. n.paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal, no. 29, January, pp. 90-95. Murray, Rachel ‘Huma Mulji’s Suspension in Twilight’. Interface, http://www.a-n. co.uk/interface/reviews/ single/1801087. Subramanyam, Aishwarya and Anam Mansuri ‘Another Pakistan’. Vogue India, September, pp. 236-247. 2011 Ali, Salwat ‘Current realities, new perspectives’. DAWN. com, January 30, http:// dawn.com/2011/01/30/ exhibition-currentrealities-newperspectives/. Cheng, Enoch and Phoebe Wong ‘Interview with Huma Mulji’. Diaaalogue, April, http://www.aaa.org. hk/Diaaalogue/Details/996. Editors ‘Art Night Thursday Returns Tonight’. Mumbai Boss, November 10, http://mumbaiboss. com/2011/11/10/artnight-thursday-returnstonight-2/. Nagree, Zeenat ‘City Light’. Time Out Mumbai, October 28-November 10, p. 82. 2010 Ali, Atteqa ‘The Crystal Palace’. NuktaArt, vol. 5, no. 2, October. Malik, Maha ‘Mirror, mirror’. The Express Tribune, May 23. Mirza, Quddus ‘Mirror as a metaphor’. The News on Sunday, May 16,
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http://jang.com.pk/ thenews/may2010-weekly/ nos-16-05-2010/enc.htm#2. Mirza, Quddus ‘The Rise of the Sentimentalised Cityscape’. Art India, vol. 15, no. 3, September, pp. 45-47. Vali, Murtaza ‘A Deferral of Judgement: Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art From Pakistan/Asia Society’. NuktaArt, vol. 5, no. 1, May, pp. 38-40. 2009 Budick, Ariella ‘Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Asia Society, New York’. Financial Times, September 14, http://www.ft.com/ cms/s/0/0a2cf2d6-a14711de-a88d-00144feabdc0. html#axzz2Jxlk3QqF. Bukhari, Munir ‘Two in Two’. DAWN Images, March 8, http://archives.dawn.com/ weekly/images/images18. htm. Cotter, Holland ‘Activist Energy With a Light Touch’. The New York Times, October 2, p. C25. Dhar, Jyoti ‘Huma Mulji’s ‘High Rise’ at Elementa Gallery, Dubai’. Asian Art News, July/August. Genocchio, Benjamin ‘Pakistan Report: On the Verge’. Art in America, vol. 97, no. 1, January, pp. 59-62. Grove, Valerie ‘Huma Mulji: High Rise’. Nafas Art Magazine, March, http:// universes-in-universe.org/ eng/nafas/articles/2009/ huma_mulji. Hashmi, Salima ‘Contrary Signs: A New Generation of Artists from Pakistan’. Flash Art, vol. 42, no. 265, March/April, pp. 76-78. Kennedy, Randy ‘Contradiction Remains Vital to Pakistan and Its Art’. The New York Times, September 3, p. C1.
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Korp, Maureen ‘Half Lives’. The Friday Times, March 13-19, pp. 16-18. Melwani, Lavina ‘Pakistani Art from the Heart’. Lassi with Lavina, December 2, http://www. lassiwithlavina.com/art/ pakistani-artists-art-fromthe-heart/html. Mohammed, Arsalan ‘Huma Mulji’. Khaleej Times, May 27, http://www. khaleejtimes.com/ TravelInsideNew. asp?xfile=data/travel/2009/ May/travel_May17. xml&section=travel&col=. Mirza, Quddus ‘As Unpredictable as Art’. The News, February 22, p. 36. Qureshi, Mariam ‘Of Cows, Trees and Archives…’. Daily Times, February 18, http://www.dailytimes. com.pk/default. asp?page=2009/02/18/ story_18-2-2009_pg13_9. Wolff, Sarah ‘Burning Down The (Art) House’. Forbes. com, September 15, http://www.forbes. com/2009/09/14/pakistancontemporary-artopinions-asia-society.html. 2008 Ali, Salwat ‘Darlings of the Desert’. Newsline, April 1, http://www. newslinemagazine. com/2008/04/darlings-ofthe-desert/. Aspden, Peter ‘Polemic and ‘Paradise’ in the Pakistan Pavillion’. Financial Times, March 22-23, p. 9. Kazi, Ambreen Noon ‘Oasis of art in the desert’. The Friday Times, March 28-April 3, pp. 16-. Mirza, Quddus ‘Show Me the Money’. Art India, vol. 13, no. 1, March, pp. 56-59. Noorani, Asif ‘Pakistan Art 11: All Set to Conquer Dubai’. DAWN Gallery, March 15, http://archives. dawn.com/weekly/gallery/
archive/080315/gallery1. htm. Rehman, Saeed Ur ‘Against contemporary greed’. The News on Sunday, September 14, http://jang. com.pk/thenews/sep2008weekly/nos-14-09-2008/ enc.htm#2. Sheth, Samira ‘Creative Commerce’. Art India, vol. 13, no. 1, March, p. 70. Singh, Devika ‘Whose Paradise is it Anyway?’ Art India, vol. 13, no. 1, March, pp. 68-69. Usman, Ali ‘Arabian Delights enthral art enthusiasts’. Daily Times, February 29, http://dailytimes.com. pk/default.asp?page=20 08%5C02%5C29%5Csto ry_29-2-2008_pg13_6. Vali, Murtaza ‘Salima Hashmi: Paradise Found and Lost’. ArtAsiaPacific, no. 57, March/April, pp. 106-109. 2004 Sambrani, Chaitanya ‘Printing Across Borders: The AarPaar Project’. Art Monthly Australia, no. 171, July, pp. 12-15. 2003 Sinha, Gayatri ‘Across the Border: A Dialogue with Naazish Ata-Ullah’. n.paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal, no. 11, January, pp. 80-87. 1999 Mirza, Quddus ‘A Particular Language: Contemporary Artists of Pakistan’. ART AsiaPacific, no. 24, Winter.
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Writer's Biography Adnan Madani is a Pakistani artist and writer. His work ranges across sculpture, photography, video and performance and includes several collaborative projects. He has written widely on contemporary Pakistani art and artists. As a theorist, his interests include philosophies of time and temporality, nonWestern experiences of history, the work of Martin Heidegger, Islamic modernity and Muslim subjectivities. He teaches at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, Beaconhouse National University in Lahore and at Goldsmiths, University of London where he is presently pursuing a PhD.
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ex tr a Acknowledgements Huma would like to thank: David Alesworth, Amandine Arlot, Patrick Audevard, Nadeem Bashir, Zaib Haider, Altaf Hussain, Asif Jadoon, Komal Naz Khan, Asim Rehman Khan, Emeline Lefèvre, Stefanie Oberhoff, Sharmini Pereira, Beate Terfloth, Emanuelle Waekerle, Simone Wille and Mohammed Yousuf
Murtaza would like to thank: Laura Egerton, the heart and engine of the Abraaj Group Art Prize, without whose good humour and tireless effort the realisation of this book, and the exhibition it accompanies, would have been impossible; Huma Mulji, my collaborator on this project, for generously sharing her work, time, ideas and creative process, and for humouring both my hair brained suggestions and criticisms with equal degrees of openness; Adnan Madani for his rigourous and scholarly text; Savita Apte, Chair of the Selection Committee, Abraaj Group Art Prize, FrĂŠderic Sicre, Partner, Abraaj Group, Antonia Carver, Director, Art Dubai, and the rest of the 2013 Abraaj Group Art Prize Selection Committee: Dana Farouki, Glenn Lowry, Salwa Mikdadi, Jessica Morgan, Nat Muller, Elaine Ng and Julia Peyton-Jones; Adam Michaels, Kim Sutherland, Prem Krishnamurthy, Aileen Kwun and Won Choi of Project Projects for their flexibility and patience and for their elegant yet playful design of the object you are currently holding and the accompanying exhibition; Jaret Vadera for his constant, warm and thoughtful support; Sipokazi Cetu-Quick for her invaluable assistance with childcare; Uzma Rizvi, truly my partner in life, who gracefully and silently bore the burden of my half of our life together during the months I dedicated to this project; my daughter, Zainab Sophia, whose joyful presence provided both much needed distractions and reality checks; and, finally, my family, Shakir, Nargis and Fatema Vali, and Hussain Kutiyanawala, for grieving and persevering with me. This book is dedicated to my brother Mustafa, who left us too soon but taught me the simple wisdom of always dreaming beyond. 118
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Photography Credits Listed by page number: 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 50-91,102, 103, 107, 109: Courtesy the artist; 46: Photo: Emeline Lefèvre, Courtesy the artist; 104, 110, 112: Photo: David Alesworth, Courtesy the artist; 106: Photo: Zaib Haider, Courtesy the artist; 113: Photo: Stefanie Oberhoff, Courtesy the artist.
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extra|ordinary is published on the occasion of the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013, exhibition at Art Dubai, Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai, March 20-23, 2013. Copyright © 2013. Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013, Murtaza Vali (Curator), and the Artists. Texts. Copyright © 2013. Murtaza Vali (Editor) and the Authors. All works by Vartan Avakian, Iman Issa, Huma Mulji, Hrair Sarkissian, and Rayyane Tabet. Copyright © 2013. The Artists. © The photographs in this publication have been provided by the artists whose work is represented and Abraaj Group Art Prize. Exceptions are indicated directly in the image captions/photo credits. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from Abraaj Group Art Prize and the respective authors. Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. If proper acknowledgement has not been made we ask copyright holders to contact the publishers. ISBN: 978-9948-444-77-0 Editor: Murtaza Vali Essays: Haig Aivazian, Adnan Madani, Vali Mahlouji, Nat Muller, Walid Sadek, and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie Interviews: Murtaza Vali Editorial advisor on behalf of Abraaj: Laura Egerton Copyediting: Murtaza Vali Proofreading: Murtaza Vali, Laura Egerton Book design: Project Projects, New York Printed by Emirates Printing Press, Dubai Typeset in Executive and Tiempos