In the late 1700s, wealthy Europeans eating from pewter plates died when they consumed tomatoes. For over a hundred years they feared the fruit, ignorant that their tableware combined with a tomato’s acidity caused lead poisoning¹. In the subcontinent, brass and copper kitchenware had undergone the process of kalai–a coating of tin or silver², and this humble step by a Kalighar, made the difference between life and death, and established tomatoes in the desi pantry. ‘Metal Elemental Resonance’, curated by Nurayah Sheikh Nabi at Koel Gallery uses the lens of metal to explore ideas of value and worth, and the changing way we consume and create. The show has many strands: fifteen artists celebrate “metal’s alchemical journey” in Nabi’s words, “through the perspectives of our bazaars, the maker and the seller, our craftspeople, and contemporary visual artists” inviting “reflection through stories of making, practical tools, household utensils, body ornaments and individual works of expression.”

The display opens with a life-size photograph of the market from David Alesworth because Nabi wanted audiences “to enter through the bazaar”. His works, photographs and texts are a love letter to Karachi’s ‘making markets’ and warm the waters for viewers. He effuses over the ‘joy’ and ‘infinite depth’ these bazaars offer artists, crediting Durriya Kazi for introducing them to him. Within his pieces, Teddy’s Bear and Probes, one can also trace the story of Karachi’s contemporary art scene— in the 1990s, works by him, Kazi, and others referenced street culture and added to a discourse on rampant commercialization and its consequences for the city’s skyline³; art students from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) were bussed to these markets to learn from craftspeople— subsequently producing artists who started turning to metal as a medium.

The exhibition explores categories of production, questioning what is considered informal, and hence deficient or lacking in power. Alesworth’s striking Teddy’s Bear crafted from patinated welded copper, speak to what he calls “an implication of restraint of power, that of the most powerful over the weakest.” He presents the motif contrapuntally, its origin story (President Theodore Roosevelt’s refusal to shoot a captured, exhausted bear on a hunting trip, calling it unsportsmanlike, thereby the incident inspired a toy maker) combined with its presence in Pakistan’s street markets, where used soft-toys from the West begin anew “amongst the poorest of the country” and are part of the fee of displaced Afghani children acting as porters at Itwaar Bazaar Karachi. Alesworth names the sinister objects “part war child’s toy and part improvised explosive device, reminiscent of the tiny Russian PFM-1 aerial mine (‘Butterfly Mine’) often tragically mistaken by Afghani village children for toys.”

Metal Elemental Resonance includes the IVS Box Portfolio, a 2009 initiative of the Department of Fine Art at the IVS. Nabi credits her contemporary, the late artist and Associate Professor Ussman Ghauri, who passed away in 2011. He conceived of a sculpture portfolio akin to boxed print ones. Packed in a crate, ‘Cast Rituals’ 2012 features pieces by 11 artists, out of which 5 works crafted in metal, by Adeela Suleman, Saba Iqbal, Amin Gulgee, Abdul Jabbar Gull, and Aamir Habib are displayed.  Suleman’s piece is a flower-like mesh bowl, Habib’s playful resin ‘cheese slice’ houses a miniature rifle, Saba Iqbal fashions a large metal bullet that evokes a filigreed lipstick.

In the works of Gulgee and Jabbar Gull, one can trace a progression, according to Nabi, with the inclusion of separate pieces from Jabbar Gull’s The Symbols (2024), in brass and gold leaf (return to his fascination with language and thought) and Gulgee’s Better Angels (2010), in cast aluminium and copper, hang on another wall, its surface disrupting a classical image. Metal Elemental Resonance is the first in a 5-part series, with subsequent exhibitions on clay, textile, stone, and paper.

Arshad Faruqui’s, Newton meets the craftsmen, has Newton’s cradle with its elegant demonstration of physics and mechanics’ fundamental laws⁴— crafted in copper by Ustad Mohammad Naseem whose expertise spans 65 years and is featured in a documentary in the show, Metal, through the Lens of a Master Craftsman. This interplay of ustad ka haath, with scientific theory fascinates Nabi. Newton’s theory is scrawled like a shadow on the back wall.

Brass and copper pitchers, tiffins, cows and elephants, cauldrons, and samovars line a wall. These objects from The Vintage Gallery speak to the material’s life in Pakistan’s tumultuous history. The owner, Khwaja Aamir charts the changing fate of metalwork in a second video Metal, through the Lens of a Buyer and Sellers Market’. After partition his grandfather Yasin opened his shop on Saddar’s Elphinstone Street, and his sons excelled in three different trades: carpets, metals and wood.

At its peak, The Vintage Gallery was in one of Karachi’s leading hotels, frequented by international flight crews, tourists, and traders. Gradually, especially after 9/11, tourism dipped and diplomatic staff transitioned from lavish accommodations to flats in compounds; previously women would decorate their homes with these objects and acquire them for gifting when they travelled.

In Metal, through the Lens of a Master Craftsman, the documentary follows Ustad Mohammad Naseem as a witness to, in the words of filmmaker Farjad Akhtar, “the shifting tides of consumer economies, changing geographies, and upheavals that have affected not just Ustaad Naseem’s craft but the entire culture surrounding metalwork.” In both videos, the power of generational knowledge, and ustad shagirdy is on show.

It also serves as an allegory on metal’s fall from grace and beauty. From crafting exquisite deghs and thaals, which gleam at the entrance of the show— filled with raw wheat, and chillies, alongside 200-year-old urns— to creating door handles and metal numbers outside people’s gates, Ustaad Naseem saw heirloom craftsmanship and communal living “swapped” for “disposable, individualized consumerism”. Copper with all its health benefits, was slowly replaced by aluminium, stainless steel and melamine.

Nabi is struck by pedagogies, particularly the apprenticeship prevalent in metal making. She cites Lev Vgotsky and Americans John Dewey and Howard Garner—philosophers who acknowledge the ustad as a more experienced person, the importance of real-life settings in proficiency, and talents that transcend exams and A grades. Shahid Sajjad’s dramatic Woman in Motion I, from 1979, reifies these ideas. Crafted in bronze, the figure is at once powerful and organic. Sajjad, the father of sculpture in Pakistan, was one of the founders of IVS, and cautioned against Western education models, offering alternatives in Tagore and the ustad-shagird relationship.

In works on paper, Hammad Anees creates a series of rubbings, and re-traces the underlying grid on antique metal objects, decoding the beautiful calligraphy and engravings on a hookah base and mortar and pestle. Azhar Sheraz’s intriguing Metallurgic Poetry uses preserved rust to ‘paint’ a silhouette of machinery.  Zahra Asim and Masooma Syed add an elegant dimension to the show. Cleverly displayed, Syed’s five delicate pieces sprout from floating cinder blocks. In Sunehrey Badal (Golden clouds), rain pours in golden chains, cloud tufts in copper and brass form golden Dhuan (smoke).

Fashioned with a playful eye, Syed is adept with a variety of materials, employing fingernail clippings to form ‘Lillies’. With charming titles like Raat ki Raani, and incredible detail, she delights the senses. Zahra Asim studied with metal craftspeople before forming the jewel like scrolls in the exhibition. In Anbaar, her painting unfurls on metal. She says the elaborate composition ‘explores the private spaces of old-town residential areas’, their teacups and household electronics on display.

Adjacent, a dramatically lit work by Naiza Khan is in dialogue with itself: Cloud Corset (2004) opens like undone shackles and a feeling of weightlessness, above, a piece from her armour series hangs, evoking chastity belts of the past. There is a domesticity to this section of the show, the missing woman in Naiza Khan’s piece, and the figure absent from Zahra Asim’s paintings of a home.

Gulgee once called his workshop a ‘medieval’ space, and it would have been interesting for this exhibition to offer some tangible specimens into the timeless alchemy of metal makers by including their tools; similar to miniature painter Naveed Sadiq’s display of pigments like malachite from his practice, in his solo show.

Once you walk through the whole gallery, Metal Elemental Resonance seems to conclude with the two videos projected on a wall. As Ustad Naseem speaks, there are images of the market, and in your mind you return to Alesworth’s description of a “wall to wall warren of burnished mud” that “could belong in almost any age of man”. The exhibition space has this parenthesis: Ustad Naseem and Alesworth’s work conversing with each other, and in between the vanishing skills and vessels is interwoven a history of Pakistan, of power, dispersion and survival, all merging into sculptured metal.

The group show, Metal Elemental Resonance, curated by Nurayah Sheikh Nabi, was displayed at Koel Gallery Karachi from October 15^th to November 9^TH, 2024.

Title Image: Arshad Faruqui. Newton meets the craftsmen. Copper. Installation. Size Variable, 2024

All images, courtesy Koel Gallery.