One of the most challenging and stimulating characteristics of creative work is to visualize it and then crystalize it into form through one’s practice. The whole premise of this book is to help us embark on Adeela Suleman’s expansive journey of being an artist who is piercingly sensitive to her surroundings. The monograph engages in a visual and textual dialogue with its reader and has tremendous power to clamp them into reflection and introspection. Published in Italy by Skira editore S.p.A. and edited by Rosa Maria Falvo the hard-bound book, spread over 211 pages, comprises four essays and an interview of the artist by Falvo. Heavyweights such as Professor Salima Hashmi, Hameed Haroon, Professor Quddus Mirza and Mohammad Haneef have provided a comprehensive insight into Suleman’s artistic practice. Not Everyone’s Heaven which extravagantly displays rich quality colored plates of her works, spread lavishly throughout the book, concludes with a detailed timeline of her artistic journey.

Like the ravaging belly of a beast, Karachi heaves with the broken sighs of its martyrs, tainted in crimson and lurid strokes that whisper tales of volatility. Adeela Suleman’s practice sprawling over two decades chronicles the dark, tumultuous history of the city. Not Everyone’s Heaven offers a panoramic view of the artist’s career, wrought in earnest with fables and mythical musings. Suleman’s work is deeply rooted within the political and the symbolic, lulled by restrained allegory. Foraging through the sweltering cataclysm of carnage her work emerges as intimate portraits fraught with emotion and vulnerability. Her practice in retrospective offers a means to negotiate with the politics and sentiments in place at the time of creation.

Published in 2020, Not Everyone’s Heaven is a compilation of Suleman’s work wherein Salima Hashmi articulately sets the tone into motion with her the prefatory essay, by expanding on the trepidations and trajectory of the artist, through poignant notes. Hameed Haroon and Quddus Mirza’s essays delve deeper into the nuances of her practice. The essays offer means to critically engage with Suleman’s work. An interview of the artist conducted by Falvo allows for candor to seep in as the artist retells personal stories that have helped shape her career and concerns.

Suleman’s work evokes a sentience tethering at the cusp of the city’s frightening resilience, like a gleaming armor, it waltzes with resistance. A rogue activism foraged through the abysmal, emerging from the withdrawn and sleepless states of turmoil. Art as a noun functions in a state of dormancy, but as a verb it renders itself agile. Suleman’s art is fashioned with the same agility.

Judith Butler in Frames of War describes grievable life through a deployment of interpretative structures that regulate the recognition of life and loss. Suleman attests to the vulnerability of lives that have never lived, and lives that were never recognized therefore cannot be considered lost.[i]  Butler also references Susan Sontag’s musing on photography’s role in political conflict and attests that photos do function within a perceptible frame that may gear our response to the norms, that recognize the life that is to be mourned. Suleman avers that the creation of art may ultimately portray more accuracy than a photograph.[ii]  Thus, her work becomes more objective: a symbolic gesture to the grievable life.

Hameed Haroon in writing about Suleman’s practise, refers to the found objects used within her large scale works as alphabets. These alphabets acquired from recluse states of latent indignation, morph into complex mosaics, like an exasperated choir paused in states of steady consort, brazenly woven into grand tapestries unfolding into armors and veils.  Housing a thousand clamorous clinks, they synthesize into ambivalent effigies, shrouded in layers of metaphors, buried tales of infancy and inherited public loss. The intricate and the ornate in rendezvous with the harrowing tales of loss and misfortune.

The artist also speaks of fetishization of violence. Suleman refers to Islamic histories of battle, contemporary acts of violence, stories she has encountered and inherited, ultimately rendering the contemptuous articulation of loss and the precarity of life. And, interpreting the camouflage of delight in the aesthetics of atrocity. Reconciling with fetish and violence poses a vulnerability with individual and collective morality. Imagery of violent acts has been part of religious traditions, from the crucifixion of Jesus Christ to the beheading of Imam Hussain ibn Ali (the grandson of the Holy Prophet SAW). Perhaps this reaffirmation of the vulnerability of the exposed human body[iii] and acknowledgement of morality becomes a stronger case in rendering the frame of violence as an effective tool. Since these are woven within the familiar reading of religious histories, it’s a more palatable way to navigate through violence as an ornament.

The beautification of weapons of war and ornamental armors also is a tradition that Suleman finds fascinating. Perhaps in a way that ethos more convincingly shapes the dichotomy of beauty and violence within her work. Quddus Mirza’s meticulous musings on Suleman’s practice further elaborate on the evolution of this depiction through multiple narratives. Mirza draws on religious traditions, political and literary digressions to unpack the visuals within Suleman’s underlying narratives.

Further examining the exhibition of violence as a tool for effective reconciliation with the past, Amy Sodaro in her book Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and Politics of Past Violence, refers to such exhibition as “politics of regret” and allowing the public access to evidence so the act of violence becomes undeniable, furthermore offering an archive to fill the literary gaps and giving a more balanced account of history rather than glorifying the victor.[iv] Using the text as a reference, Suleman’s work can be seen through the same lens, that offers an archive. “Fly My Pretties” is an elaborate chandelier created from hundreds of interlinked, hand-beaten steel sparrows. Suleman’s work is a testament to a life-lived in a conflict-drenched zone, where death is a notion that resides in close encounter with the lives of the citizens. As part of her practice Suleman began producing a bird for each person killed in her hometown but very quickly there were too many deaths to keep up with. Her work forms a kind of cenotaph to these people.

Not Everyone’s Heaven offers, to its reader, an unfolding of the city’s volatile history negotiating with atrocity as cause and effect, resigning dissonance into a state of cordial agility that provokes the viewer and valorizes acts of resistance.