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Friday March 29, 2024

Depicting a true and confoundingpicture of society from the inside

By News Desk
July 08, 2019

The Sanat Initiative is hosting Ghulam Hussain’s solo art exhibition titled ‘Parde Mein Rehne Do’ until July 10. He graduated in 2009 from Lahore’s National College of Arts in miniature painting.

“My artwork is craft-based due to my initial inspiration from my family, which is skilled in craft,” reads his artist statement. “I weave interesting compositions which stimulate the viewer’s imagination and exploration of one’s own memories.

“My current body of work deals with the seductive imagery of Pakistani films as popular culture of my day. What I see around me are ads for the promotion of local film industry, like posters, Panaflex and banners.

“Walls and streets are casually and excessively used for displaying these ads and this is what I’m encountering on a daily basis. This is not the case for a sanitised society living of the rich but the majority areas inhabited by the middle and lower classes of my society.

“I have woven multiple posters to create a sense of irony, the Pakistani lifestyle in real as compared to the Pakistani cinema. I have a strong connection with the movement of op art which is intrigued by the nature of perception.

“I have created optical effects with illusion in characters and titles of the posters which are woven in such a way that it takes a satirical form on the two perspectives of the situational identity of the film’s characters and titles.

“These posters make up the fabric of my culture and paint a true and confounding picture of what our society looks like on the inside where the freedom of being is inescapable.” Curator Saulat Ajmal is quoted in the catalogue released by the gallery as saying: “Falling in love with a place like Lahore can happen at a glance, but to continue to stay enamoured, one has to get accustomed to its people, sights and places.

“This is a slow, unravelling process that comes through breathing in the culture with patience and openness. The colourful, bustling and overly stimulating streets of Lahore mesmerise and baffle as you move through them.

“To capture the city’s culture for himself, Ghulam Hussain ‘Guddu’ began by looking for its pulse, and through the course of years now finds himself fully immersed in it. It was the local, Punjabi film industry and the commercial world of advertisements, media and the street culture that first caught his attention.

“Guddu has keenly observed such advertisements, which he encounters on a daily basis and deciphers the code of culture through these commercial posters in his work.

“These visuals range from movie posters in the Lollywood film industry to advertisements by local ‘healers’. However, alongside, if not layered under and over these posters, are just as poignant flyers advertised by various religious groups.

“Another closer look at these visual floods and you notice advertisements from home-grown doctors and alchemists. This idea of conflict is what comes through and hits you in the gut when you look at Guddu’s work.

“He represents the fabric that he breathes in through the visuals that he chooses to weave so precisely, that it becomes a task to decide if you should be amused or offended. “Growing up in a small town in Sindh and moving to Lahore to attend the National College of Arts was a transition he bridged through this process of weaving.

“Coming from a family of artisans, weaving was a traditional craft he learnt and practised from a very young age. The National College of Arts introduced him to miniature painting, another traditional art form.

“It wasn’t until Guddu started cutting up his own drawings, paintings, posters, pamphlets and canvases that he found a way to bridge the gap between craft and high art. “Weaving a found material, like pre-existing posters and images is where tradition entered the contemporary world and we start viewing the mundane as a vital strain of survival in our society.

“When Andy Warhol was asked to paint his immediate reality, something that he saw every day, he chose the Campbell soup cans that he regularly had for lunch. They were readily available and inexpensive. Something that reached the masses and fed the modern consumer culture.

“The Campbell soups pieces were produced in 1962 for the first time, followed by portraits of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, mass produced through silk-screening processes, mirroring the consumer driven culture of the time. The ‘every day’ had become novelty, and celebrities and consumerism were the rage.

“What Andy Warhol did 57 years ago in America was to represent the popular culture through reproducing the most sensational and readily available images from the news, movies and what you saw casually in every grocery store or kitchen cabinet.

“High art can no longer be seen on a pedestal set apart from craft. Like Warhol, Guddu also manages to tap into the culture but picks up on the fast pace of modern life and weaves it slowly, one strip at a time for a new reality to emerge through his craft.

“This is the reality of a society that is split between extremism and being played on basic human desire. When viewed through Guddu’s works, we see how society has a skewed view of itself while its reality is hidden in plain sight on walls and billboards of the city streets.”

Ghulam Hussain is a contemporary visual artist belonging to Sindh’s Hyderabad city, a home to the world’s oldest civilisation, the Indus Valley. He is a trained miniature painter and works with high and low craft and art to represent the beauty within stark contrasts of what is considered high and low.

His work is based on geometric pattern and overlapping techniques through weaving which gives a unique impression in the form of art. His work is distinct due to its technique and simplicity and opens up a range of possibilities both for the artist and the audience.

Going back to his roots in Sindh, he is challenging the notion of the high craft by integrating forms of low craft, such as weaving and brick building, with the miniature style of painting.

Ajrak and Sindhi topi have been the symbols of the province’s culture and civilisation for thousands of years, connected to the civilisation of Mohen Jo Daro built around 2500 BC. Sindhi culture displays special designs and pattern in Ajraks, Ralli, charpoy weaving and bed sheets which associate Hussain to his childhood memories.

Inspired by children’s sensibilities and recollection, he constructs his images like the pattern weaved through in paper on canvas. His work deals with the idea of folk art and the innocence of expression both combined and blended in a new manner.

His work has been exhibited and recognised both nationally and internationally. His repeated visits to New York connected him to the works of Piet Mondrian and he came up with his flourishing body of work titled ‘Woven Narratives: Dialogue with Piet Mondrian’ in 2015.

His body of work in 2017 from the solo exhibition ‘Mind=Blown’ exhibited at the Sanat Initiative confronts the op art with the Sindh craft art, a step towards opening a dialogue in the art world regarding high art and low craft.