hough the genesis of Ahsan Javaid’s new paintings, currently on display (May 6–15) at Canvas Gallery, Karachi, lies in the writings of authors he approached for their short fiction or poems, once the original material – words – was translated into brushstrokes, a blend of varying voices from multiple eras began to emerge. The solo exhibition, Two Pasts Meet Memory, quite literally presents layers of the present, overlapped with recent and not-too-remote pasts, to conjure a collective recollection.

The word memory is often invoked casually and carelessly to resurrect personal and shared pasts. In truth, photography – the mechanical method of recording an incident, the likeness of a person, or the details of a location – has altered the conventional notion of memory. Now we remember not what we saw, but what the camera might have captured – hence the term photographic memory.

However, the human mind is more complex than a mechanical device invented in the early half of the Nineteenth Century. It draws on references from various sites, exposures and experiences to create a kind of club sandwich – except that the layers never match in scale, appearance or impact. What we are left with is a pack of glimpses: part eroded, part creased, even torn, faded, discoloured, undated and contradictory – causing confusion between reality and imagination, as anyone who has crossed a certain age can testify. They regularly face the problem of recalling whether a particular event actually took place or is merely a fabrication of the mind, and whether they visited a famous tourist site physically, or if their fascination has conjured an illusion of having been there.

Ahsan Javaid, an artist born in 1992, has created an archive of images from our time – the post-photographic era. In his paintings, visuals from diverse sources are brought together to unfold different narratives. All references and compositions lead to a loosely connected idea, reflecting on the past through the lens of the present, and the other way round. In the process, the viewer gathers fragments and clues about the nature of politics, the membrane of history, the structure of violence and the ordinary people affected by them.

For instance, meetings between individuals representing political parties and ruling authorities often result in decisions that can — and do — lead to carnage, displacement and dispossession suffered by ordinary people. This is happening now in the Middle East, and it did in 1947 in the Indian subcontinent. Ahsan Javaid illustrates the ironic contrast between luxury and comfort, and death and desertion, particularly in the context of South Asia, in his work Tea is Fantastic. A brownish interior from the mid-Twentieth Century is overlapped by ghostly outlines of members of the Cripps Mission, finalising the borders of two newly carved states. What connects the two images, characters and backgrounds is a set of teapots, painted with such precision that it visually fastens these two levels of society together.

In a sense, Javaid’s content revolves around the relationship between power and the public; between order and freedom. It involves snippets of violence, episodes of terrorist attacks, the miseries of the disappeared and stories of genocide. In his artist’s statement, Javaid writes: “My practice explores the intersections of identity, memory and power, engaging with how histories are constructed and obscured and with the dialogue between language and image.” He further explains that the texts he engages with “provide a loose framework, carrying layers of meaning, history and memories.”

The juxtaposition underscores the irony of past targets transforming into today’s oppressors.

One could read Ahsan Javaid’s work like a book. Like a piece of literature, one could also fathom its subtext. Eight of the 13 paintings included in the show follow an identical structure. A large part of each canvas is painted and physically joined to a thin strip of folded cloth cuttings. The fabrics, in multiple shades, complement the colours the artist has applied in the painted sections — but there is another, much more complex connection at play. In his words: “Through deconstruction and re-assembly, I shape compositions where fragmented histories, collective memory and lived experience converge into fluid, evolving forms of visual storytelling.”

To some extent, these visual narratives are chronicles of conflict. Some paintings present explicit concerns; others refer to unnoticed incidents. One example: not too long ago, gardeners at Lahore’s Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park shaped a large bust of the famous bard the park is named after. As this homage by unschooled workers failed to meet the standards of ‘high art,’ it was ruthlessly criticised on social media and eventually removed by authorities. In Javaid’s painting Iqbal Park, the outline of the poet appears amid a spread of flowers, suggesting that the memory of his white plaster sculpture lingers in the garden — a short-lived battleground between the nameless plebeians’ love and the power of the state.

The contrast comes into focus in his Terms & Popsicles, which combines the map-like lines of a historic photograph of the founding fathers of the Islamic Republic with the image of men on the street, including a fully and remarkably rendered vendor selling inexpensive children’s sweets. The saga of war is witnessed in another painting, The Line of Fire, where skeletal Jewish prisoners in Nazi extermination camps are interjected with the outlines of Indian soldiers (some of them Muslim) who fought in the World War II as part of the Allied army against Nazi Germany. The juxtaposition underscores the irony of past targets transforming into today’s oppressors.

Heroes turning into terrorists is a familiar sight for citizens of a country that, in the early 1980s, supported Afghan militants, and later fought a long war to eliminate them. The aftermath of those years of explosions, target killings and suicide attacks still lingers in the darker corners of national memory. Javaid, in several paintings, reflects on that past — a past which has not yet passed. In One Late Afternoon, shoes are left beside rows of prayer mats, splattered with blood. Both the footwear and the rugs are superimposed with drawings of bullet casings. Practice Makes a Man Perfect, derived from a popular saying, depicts a Pathan warrior training young boys in the use of arms. This body of work also recalls the recent Jaffar Express incident — more explicitly in Once Upon a Time in Bolan, where the outlines of a train are intermingled with vine-like forms. Infiltrators? Invaders?

Socio-political content is most convincingly tackled in Return if Found, a work constructed as a double entendre. Dominated by the towering contours of the small Dancing Girl statue — excavated from the Indus Valley Civilisation but now housed in the National Museum, New Delhi — the painting alludes to the sculpture’s disappearance from its original location during the Partition. This emblem of the region’s identity hovers above a group of Baloch women holding posters bearing the faces of their disappeared sons, brothers, fathers and husbands.

Ahsan Javaid, a graduate in fine art from the National College of Arts, is a uniquely skilful painter. A variety of techniques, subjects and sensibilities have been consistently visible in his previous work, but his current body of work is a significant accomplishment. Perhaps this is because, unlike many of his contemporaries, he is deeply attuned to the political dynamics of our epoch. Another reason may be that the depth of subject and style emerges from his interlacing of visual practice with diverse texts — a phenomenon that might be better expressed by altering the exhibition’s title from Pasts Meet Memory to Words Meet Visuals.

The writer, a visual artist, art critic and curator, is a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be contacted on quddusmirza@gmail.com