Recently, there was a report in newspapers about a night lasting only for five minutes in one city of Finland. In its neighbouring countries, like Iceland and Sweden, some parts have nights lasting 31 or 54 minutes at this time of the year.
For somebody living near the Equator, this phenomenon of white nights is unbelievable. Joseph Brodsky in his essay on Petersburg writes about this: "A white night is a night when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours -- a phenomenon quite familiar in the northern latitudes. It’s the most magic time in the city, when you can write or read without a lamp at two o’clock in the morning, and when the buildings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It’s so quiet around that you can almost hear the clink of a spoon falling in Finland".
A Muslim living there may not be enjoying the magic of white nights, because during Ramzan his concern is as to how to observe a fast that lasts for 23 hours. Most believers residing in those regions may have adjusted their fasting time as per their home countries or according to the Saudi Arabian schedule.
This indicates how a person exists in two places without moving physically. Hence, a family in Finland does the routine work according to its actual environment but matters of religion transport it to places that may be thousands of miles away.
The other most prominent change witnessed in this month is the fascination with food. Although a believer is not supposed to eat or drink or smoke during the day, this whole time is spent cooking and imagining food. If you go out in early hours, most eateries are swarming with customers who want to consume as much as possible before the call for morning prayer. So, if fasting in spirit is about practising restraint, we have turned it into an occasion of excess and festivity.
Food that becomes the foremost concern during Ramzan emerges as an image, motif and idea in the works of some artists from Pakistan. Although, a few have made occasional works dealing with food (as was observed in the exhibition Take Away at the Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, NCA, 2007), it can be seen as a recurring image in the work of Atif Khan, Nausheen Saeed and Saba Khan.
Atif Khan creates visuals -- using different printing techniques -- with repetition of small cookies crowded with insects. The use of round biscuits in a circular arrangement and the cluster of flies alludes to the contradictions of a culture that survives within the parameters of delight and disgust. The juxtaposition of food and flies, which is normally experienced -- and ignored -- is evident in his work; in an ironic manner because both biscuits and flies are composed as indispensible part of each other.
Food stands for ideas other than just nourishment in some of the works by Nausheen Saeed. She replaces human body with an edible substance, or creates a connection between a female figure and consumable food. Saeed has been using female form to convey ideas about a culture that views women in an unequal and unjust light. Yet her work, instead of being a critique of that tendency, is an attempt to indicate and examine the issue. She has converted female torso in shapes connected to milk containers.
Her other works of human hands, heads and whole body (but sliced into two halves -- titled Delicacies) made in baked bread signifies the same subject, rather extends it. The cast of female body in dough and then in its final state, the bread, suggests how the woman exists as part of a household is treated in public by voyeurs as something to devour. This reduces a human being into a tasty serving. This phenomenon does not take place on our roadsides only; it can be witnessed in the world of media, advertisement and fashion.
Another artist, Saba Khan, focusing on food as a vehicle to denote ideas about our contemporary existence, also makes delightful items. Her work includes images of edible stuff but these signify the larger concerns of a society that is upwardly mobile; thus exists in the struggle to have good taste, accumulate power and affluence. Her work illustrates how the society is projecting ideas which deal with the concept of comfortable living and the image of perfect domestic setting. Her work is not about the society’s surge to find an ultimate solution of happiness and comfort. It actually mocks the ‘standards’ of luxury; because grand houses in posh localities are an after-effect or result of dispossession of deprived classes in a society.
The society is not formed merely on the division of classes; it is segregated on the basis of beliefs too. Saba Khan paints the images of meat and bones sold at shopping malls under the label of Halal. Her depiction of mutton and ribs packed in a Styrofoam container and secured by a plastic sheet are reflections on a culture that is becoming more obsessed with the notions of prohibited and forbidden (so much so that you come across signs of ‘halal’ honey making one wonder about non-kosher honey!). At the same time, the idea of eating meat which is considered normal, in a sense, reminds one of man’s act of killing another living being. Saba Khan presents the parts of animal’s body, neatly packed, which allude to the presence of violence which has become so normal that it ends up into oblivion.
Along with her meat pieces, Saba Khan paints a number of sweetmeats, pastries and cakes in her work. Like the meat paintings, rendered in an immaculate manner, these convey the idea of a perfect, prosperous and ideal household that exists in our midst. Here, along with gaudy furniture and kitsch decoration items, display of dishes with sumptuous cakes and pastries is a matter of pride.
Khan uses all these fantasies to create images in which a plate laden with a big cake, a tray filled with sweetmeats and pastries placed on a serving table, embody how we love to admire not food but the symbol of a certain way of living. Thus her work is not about the depiction of food but encompasses the ideas of an ideal life, projected with this stuff.
The way of making food items and other objects in her work is as delightful to look at as it is to bite a delicious piece of cake. The works of Saba Khan and other others signify that food is not just a means of survival; there are other concepts that can be communicated through food. Yet like the Chinese cuisine, which is expected to have good presentation, aroma and taste, the works of art created around the idea of food fulfil the desire for delightful forms and complex content.