Critics and historians seldom know what to do with art practices that evolve along an unpredictable trajectory. They are difficult to pigeonhole and discuss in relationship to established frameworks. The discourse around such art practices, however challenging, can also be about the freedom to discover new modes of thinking and expressing ideas.

While reading about Ceclia Vicuna from Chile, an artist from the 1960s who was fully discovered and understood almost five decades later, I came to the realization that perhaps this was because she followed her creative voice more than the canons and isms of her time. Mediums, often ephemeral and unconventional carried her concerns; genre was something to be synthesized into a new expression like fusing the visual, performative and poetic to the extreme at a time when interdisciplinary boundaries were less fluid. The artist liked to start with nothing—no pre-notions; this gave her the autonomy to chart new territories of thought that were both visual and textual, with sound and movement. In an exhibition dedicated to her entire oeuvre, curator Miguel Lopez brought the desperate strands together to unveil how the artist spontaneously crossed frontiers to be true to herself.

One of my earliest memories of Fauzia Minallah, which dates back to two decades, is her face lighting up in the dark potter’s workshop in Saidpur as she spoke about the ustad’s special skills that created the timeless ceremonial vessel and his ancestral practice that was fast disappearing. Later I was to learn that the rapport I saw between her and the potter was typical of the way she relates to people who she feels have an intrinsic connection to the valley of Islamabad.

In the early years I was trying to absorb, rather than trying to understand, Fauzia Minallah‘s creative practice which can be best described as something where diverse strands converge; a catchment of ideas that constantly often overlap to lend each other strength and evolve into an asymmetrical architecture of concerns and creativity. As I followed it for all these years my training insisted on compartmentalizing her work till very recently, when l stood under the 100-year-old banyan tree—the site of her recent exhibition. As I opened myself to the experience, it somehow all began to make sense in a way I had not grasped earlier.

Our critical receptors are often trained to accept established patterns and theoretical constructs which are easier to develop arguments around, critique and validate. Once you begin to open yourself up to the experience, all senses respond at levels that had not been a part of your intellectual processing. Usually, this awareness is informed by emotion, intellect and intuition and as you learn to trust your instinctive intelligence, it can shape fresh discourses. Minallah’s creative impulses are informed by a desire to change and preserve, her creativity trusts intuition to create experience and memory. In her recent show, the visual and the sound were in sync with the vibrations of a 100-year-old miracle of nature, the Banyan tree. It displayed her current work dedicated to women who have suffered violence, created on fabric, translucent and almost disappearing in the sunlight. It was as fragile as the lives of the victims; the most recent one being Noor Mukkadam. It came together with a recital of Kishwar Nahid’s fierce feminist poetry and they both, the artist and poet, transformed the space by anchoring it to something deeper, something unexperienced, in the exhibition rituals that take place inside a ‘white cube’.

Minallah’s deep connection to the land comes into focus as the pivot of her practice. When she speaks of her walking on the trails, along the ancient pathways into the Margalla hills as a youth, she remembers the location of the most breathtaking old trees, like the homes of friends in a familiar neighborhood. To save, preserve and bring attention to them, she began to unveil the history of the Potohar valley, where Buddhist pilgrims to the region, venerated the Banyan and Pipal trees. Muslim and Hindu Shrines were invariably built and expanded under trees. In the light of oil lamps the artist created a meditative moment; she arranged her own slate carvings of Buddha below Banyan trees, at the heart of a city obsessed by concrete and steel. Fauzia ancestors come from the mountains of Sirikot; her frequent travels to her village have connected her to the slate mountains and the craftsmen who carve it. She began exploring big sharp-edged slabs painstakingly carving portraits, mostly of Buddha, leaving the surface and its patina undisturbed. With this she began to draw attention to the material and artisans who practice this atrophying craft.

Her paintings are where you catch a glimpse of her inner world. The artist layers washes of pigment and patterns crafted from dots to masterfully emulate that flow of the energy; a salve for the women and children—her protagonists—whose lives have been devastated by violence and injustice.

For Minallah, genres and disciplines only are seen as forms of extending her message. Her two books are compendiums of Islamabad’s land identity and chitarkari (slate carving). The title of her first book, Glimpses into Islamabad’s Soul, takes you on a walk down the history of this part of the ancient Soan Valley of the Potohar Plateau, with its living legacy of the ancient trees—on which an urban plan, insensitive to its natural landmarks, is being imposed with the bulldozer. To this day she continues to fight, for the survival of every tree, with endless protests and negotiations. These are many more strands of her practice: environmental conservation with sculptures from plastics and foil waste, and the AMAI books series where illustrations carry stories of peace and universal connectedness to children. Moved by conflict and lives of young refugees in the past decades, Minallah began to use art to create moments of hope. I remember accompanying her to a refugee camp, where for a few hours the children painted memories of flowers and butterflies of their village gardens, and even if for a short time, it helped them deal with their violent flight.

Artists who follow an unorthodox path to understand the times they live in, and instrumentalize art in response to their conscience, can easily be marginalized as they defy the canons validated by the academy and the market. The academia which tends to focus on established frameworks is cautious in its response to the rapidly changing realities, while the market that looks at artists as products that generate profits on which they thrive support ‘stable’ models. The art critics have more agency, as they are relatively free to push the discursive boundaries and change the rules in the evolving creative landscape of un-tread creative paths.

Title image: Ancient Banyan tree in Giri Valley near Taxila.
Photo Credit Fauzia Minallah, from her book Glimpses into Islamabad’s Soul