Art today can be best described as a mutating organism that fed by imagination expands into new directions and disciplines. The departure from the traditional forms has led to the big question, is all we see in exhibitions art? But then isn’t art expected to be avant garde, to subvert known ideas and establish vanguard posts with innovation. Conceptual art with its deprioritizing of the tangible, has initiated conversations on how art can exist as an idea, independent of aesthetics. With NFTs, art lives in digital space and is owned and traded by multiple owners creating the contours of a new virtual landscape.
During the present century in Pakistan, artists took to experimenting with materials and techniques, this inventive recycling created unfamiliar combinations to yield fresh visual sensations. Intertwining installation and performative works— the still and the moving— into a dance of ideas, caught the creative imagination. Sound (as the spoken word), melody, and rhythm were added to the tool box to assemble evocative pieces. The traditional miniature painting negotiated the experimental with ease as the artists learnt to push it beyond established thresholds. Leaning towards the scientific, research-based work gained traction, and numbers and statistics started to be communicated as art form. The journey from the passive to the sensory also added many sites of interaction and exchange.
Art, as a soapbox to register concerns, still holds strong simply because Pakistan’s political and social tensions have to be navigated on a daily basis. Art started its own decolonization with a growing consciousness of inclusivity and a will to make art available to public audiences. This practice, that privileges the gaze of the audience over commerce is a movement to expand and create new public spaces for culture. This interface, with a public audience, has raised questions about cultural sensitivities and accessibility.
The new generation of artists are growing increasingly comfortable with NFTs that has opened new democratic spaces sans traditional gatekeeping institutions. Its digital portals are open to all who are willing to put their work on digital sites for ‘gas money’ and have multiple owners. The system is a hybrid between an online art dealership and commodity brokerage, dealing in bitcoins, that gives open access to artists and buyers.
The slow and gradual entry into digital technology has now picked up in the country as the art academia has opened up to it and online digital tools become more accessible.
The diasporic artists are also sharing and facilitating the process. Possibilities offered by technology can be euphoric, and just as frightening for it has the potential to alter the very DNA of art. Just as NFTs are altering art connoisseurship, trade and ownership, ideas conceived within digital frameworks of augmented reality, altered reality, artificial intelligence, robotics etc become a marriage of creativity and technology mediated by the internet, its lifeline. Algorithms become the pigment and the paint brush to an art that is often seen, not with bare eyes but ocular lens and other digital devises.
The third Karachi Biennale which exhibited cutting edge art at the intersection of technology, on a scale never seen before in Pakistan, opened a window into future possibilities but it also became a time to reassess and reflect. In our cities availability of something as basic as an uninterrupted power supply is not assured, in such situations the import of complex and expensive equipment to showcase tech-based art raises a new set of questions on resource allocation. Recently the large carbon footprint of NFTs set off alarm bells even in developed economies and forced an inward scrutiny, technology which is not as benign as it is perceived to be needs well thought out balanced application for an environmentally friendly model.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the seeds of the ‘concrete jungle’ as a symbol of progress were sown and where policies were developed and decisions made by state and citizens to chase this dream. This development, when seen through the lens of damage to ecology and quality of life has led to a new consciousness. The merchants of these dreams of progress are knocking once again on Pakistan’s door with their technological inventions. The need of the hour is to create our own blueprint of progress with an eye on long term impact, and not be bulldozed by neo-imperial interests that control the production and trade of tech hardware and software. Taking control of the narrative of progress based on collective priority will be crucial to our struggle for climate change.
Social and ecological responsibility and balance have to be the keywords to prevent rampant integration of technology that can take us towards another irreversible crisis under the guise of development. For art is to be a part of social, economic and technological decolonization in the coming decades, it needs to participate in the deeper debate on the future of Pakistan and the future of the planet.
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