I- Grey Vents, Black Diamonds

By Zehra Hamdani Mirza

In the 1960s, Michael J. Arlen wrote a series of columns about a rectangle: the ‘luminous, oracular, electronic avatar called television’¹ and its impact on the coverage of the Vietnam War. He likened viewers watching the war as “a child kneeling in the corridor, his eye to the keyhole, looks at two grownups, in a locked room.” The child knows there is an argument, but the view is limited, the voices indistinct, and we never see “the other grown up”.² Artist Danish Ahmed’s work evokes such apertures.

In a two-person show, Spaces in Retrospection at O Art Space, curated by Adeel Uz Zafar, Ahmed’s cuboids and hyper-cuboids float and morph on stark surfaces, faintly revealing images underneath. Sharp as nails and faceted like gems, they are immaculately constructed from charcoal powder and crushed pastels. The artist creates severe sectors and quadrilaterals of colour with great skill, so perfectly saturated they look collaged or painted on. The works are united by amazing depth and assemblies of Baroque-like clouds: they drift and coalesce in dramatic heaps. But we see them in corners and edges, never fully released, because Ahmed ensconces them in skewed cages. In one work, this black shell contains tree branches fanning out like lightning, and tufts of cloud hang like shaving cream in another.

The works use the language of mathematics and science, the vocabulary of floor plans, spreadsheets, and safe deposit boxes—things you can measure and accumulate. As a result, the forms seem to encompass all the authority, lucidity and factualness that these disciplines evoke. Ahmed surgically slices the paper, zoning the white surfaces like a map; in a series of diptychs, Untitled 6 and 7, the murky planes are like x-ray films, with shadowy images. There is a sense of innovation—literally cutting edge—these dark diamonds conjure pinnacles and peaks, ambition and drive. Ahmed’s watertight forms have neither the patience nor the room for magnanimity and faith, and this is the artist’s preoccupation. Ahmed laments humanity’s avarice and insatiability. Jutting rectangles and muscular quadrilaterals shift and morph, their sides appearing simultaneously as transmission screens and cages. Ahmed seems to be reigning in the unruliness, as though the trees splaying like arteries or the chaos of the atmosphere needs to be contained and put in its place.

In Untitled 2–the only image where the clouds are released, a red frame awaits to ensnare the smoke and sky like a fly trap. Ahmed restricts his palette to charcoal, reds, and blues reminiscent of Imran Mir. It would be interesting to see him venture into larger-scale work or explore the three-dimensional. In works like Untitled 3, 8, and 9, the quadrilaterals open like a book, giving a sense of knowledge being offered, but we are only receiving a small part.

As I write this in November 2023, people around the world find themselves looking through a keyhole, at a nebulous, brutalized space “undergoing continual transformation as its dimensions expand and contract drastically and change”. ³ While Palestine is battered by Israeli forces, its discourse is shadowy, contested or ‘presented ahistorically, untethered to reality’.⁴ In the past, commentators called Vietnam the only war that ever ‘resisted explanation so obstinately, or became so hopelessly opaque.’ Today, a parallel war of perceptions rages alongside the one on Gaza: ‘Reality has split in two’ in Britain, reads the NY Times headline,⁵ as politicians and the public differ on Palestine. Like looking into a still dark pool, Danish Ahmed’s cuboids gesture to other atmospheres and dimensions, cautioning that as much as we harness, extract and conquer, there are, as Iqbal said, worlds beyond the stars.

II- Ghosts of a Struggling Megalopolis

By Zohreen Murtaza

Haider Ali Naqvi’s meticulously rendered monochromatic drawings of Karachi’s beach “huts” blur more than just the line between reality and illusion. In many of his compositions he adopts a hyper realistic style. It is unclear whether these huts are under construction or if they represent the aftermath of a violent act. They suggest a fragile permanence that is on the cusp of either simmering and exploding with rage or surrendering to nature and dissipating in quiet resignation. This tension in the series is unnerving and not without reason.

Mention of the word “land” in conjunction with Karachi strikes a nerve. It invites a matrix of meanings and histories that are steeped in a murky politics of contested identity and vast class difference.⁶ It is worth noting that many of Naqvi’s beach “huts” featured in these works are actually modernist buildings or ramshackle structures in brick and concrete. Architecture and cityscapes in general, privilege the manmade with their spectacality. In Naqvi’s works however, buildings are sometimes dwarfed by the vast landscape. The disquieting vastness of sandy emptiness makes up a sizable proportion of many of his compositions. Naqvi’s play with space and scale in a natural landscape implies that even the seaside is not free from encroachments. The wealthy mark this land as territory when they start building: the owners have first dibs because they have power.

Despite staking this claim, there is a haunting melancholy in Naqvi’s solemn, grey drawings that transcends the representation of faithful documentation of a landscape. It is unclear whether it is an unsettling atrophy that is unfolding in Naqvi’s construction sites or if it just the slow inertia of a process that is stalled that is occurring. It belies a simple description. Devoid of human presence, some of the spaces evoke a mystery that cloaks the chaos and conflict contained within their stasis.

In compositions such as in Allegory of Land-IV this mystery and conflict is layered with a grandeur that evokes despair for example. The arched windows, pediment heads and fluted pillars of the facade of the beach hut imply care and attention to detail that is highlighted by Naqvi. It is pitted against the enormity of the equally painstakingly rendered destruction that surrounds the structure. The rubble in the foreground resonates with a violence that resembles the aftermath of two tectonic plates colliding and rupturing the earth itself.

Nearly all of Naqvi’s works embody a similar notion of containment and rupture in the physical treatment of the surface itself as well. Most are framed in thick frames that appear to compress the paper so that it folds, crumples, undulates and remains suspended in that imperfect state. The perfection of the drawings bears this strain that enhances their state as being on the cusp of destruction. There is a kind of fatalism and fearlessness embedded in the execution of this iconoclastic act.  The intention of distorting both the surface and image is deliberate and carefully framed. Is it an act of rebellion; one that through choice of medium questions the inadequacy of a canon that historically only privileged mimesis but neglected other ways of representation? Does this subversive act transform into an intervention where the fold or wave of the surface resembles different variants of visual glitches that invoke the failure of broader systems in a postcolonial city that should have contributed to the completion of Naqvi’s architectural structures? Naqvi’s concerns are interwoven with the sobering reality of Karachi’s evolution as an urban metropolis that is at once resilient and struggling to survive. It is stretched to its capacity in much the same way as Naqvi’ surfaces that are marked by creases, fault lines, strain and stress. This context also invites questions about the curious history and origin of the word ” beach hut”.

The history of how beach huts first emerged is associated with the British seaside. Although rather obscure but its early antecedents were first introduced in the 1700s when doctors cited the recuperative effects of visiting the seaside and encouraged their patients to spend time there. As a result, different types of accommodation and entertainment emerged on the beachside.  The earliest antecedent to the beach hut can be traced back to a portable changing room on a boat called a “bathing machine”. By Victorian times these were a rage and by the 1900s when it became socially acceptable to walk along the beach in swimwear they began to appear on land. In the 1970s these grounded “bathing machines” were revamped and appeared as tiny, colourful little sheds, often with gable roofs arranged in rows. These upgraded beach huts still function as changing rooms and are now an integral part of European beachfront architecture.⁷ Meanwhile the function and design of the beach hut  that was in use by European fisherman was also appropriated and  transformed when capitalism recognized the economic potential of  investing in beachfront properties.⁸ Beach resorts that emerged along the coast in the 1900s epitomized the quiet life along the seaside and these imagined associations were transposed onto the architecture of the beach hut.

It is unclear whether the word “beach hut” was appropriated or infiltrated into our vocabulary by virtue of our aspiration for desiring Euro-American modernity but many of the huts dotted along the beachside of Pakistan’s dynamic megalopolis that is Karachi hardly fit this description. Instead of the quaint hut of the primitive man imagined in nature by Marc-Antoine Laugiere in his book Essays on Modernist Architecture it is modest brick structures and sometimes ultra-modernist structures clad in glass, iron and concrete that rise like a mirage from the sands and dominate parts of Karachi’s seaside. Isolated from the noise and energy of the city center these beach huts offer a refuge and weekend getaway for the affluent class.

Discussion about Karachi’s seaside is incomplete without highlighting its importance as a seaport and commercial hub, factors amongst others which have fuelled this acquisition for land and luxury by its elite class under the guise of development. Under colonial rule Karachi’s seaport was developed to compete with Russia as part of “The Great Game.” It emerged as a commercial hub and gateway to Afghanistan, Punjab and western parts of India. ⁹ In the recent past it has served American imperial interests by loading shipments for Americans fighting in Afghanistan. Over the decades it has also gained the unsavoury reputation for smuggling “drugs, weapons, fugitives.” ¹⁰

Over the years, the speed of Karachi’s burgeoning population has outpaced the development of infrastructure. The emergence of illegal but expansive urban slums, unauthorized construction and the development of a corrupt land mafia that has illegally sold off public land imbricates everyone from the highest echelons of power to its most impoverished inhabitants. To add to this “communal schisms, Islamic activism and altered demographics in which Sindhis were fast becoming a minority, set the stage for future conflict in Karachi. ¹¹ In light of a rather piecemeal and tragic evolution of urban development in Karachi since Partition that is plagued with inequity and marginalisation, Naqvi’s beach huts with their promise of leisure time and luxury transform into a euphemism for an opulence and aspiration that is tainted with the politics of land. In some compositions for example, one can merely identify remnants of the construction. Be it a portion of a wall such as in an Allegory of Land-X, a pile of concrete rubble such as in an Allegory of Land IX or mounds of dirt cordoned off by a wall in Allegory of Land – XI, Naqvi’s observations struggle to classify these signifiers of construction and destruction.

This struggle is in fact what concerns Naqvi. The presence of fragments and waste teeters between being a mere representation of the detritus of modernity and the ghostly remains of an ancient civilization that went extinct and faded into obscurity a millennia ago. Naqvi presents us with a puzzling question: are we looking at parts of a necropolis or the foundations of what will emerge as a future metropolis? Could these elements constitute a wasteland or perhaps mark the land denoting territorial rights?  The rendering is tender and soft. The sky, in contrast is dark and brooding. Our temporality and questions about the fate of the past and present are contested here.

In An Allegory to Land-II Naqvi alludes to the failed history of architectural utopias advocated by early modernists that elide with the equally failed ambitions and desires of inhabitants of a postcolonial city in the present. Naqvi’s interpretation of a modernist building or a “beach hut” in this case, located on a beachside is a surrealist dream akin to De Chirico’s anxious visions of abandoned cities.

The uncanniness of this structure is enhanced by virtue of its aesthetic appropriation from its ubiquitous presence in a western metropolitan city center to its relocation in a sparsely inhabited part of Karachi’s beachside. Naqvi’s vision floats nebulously between abandonment, decay and delay. If we accept that it is a ruin then one must acknowledge that “The ruins of 20th‑century modernity, as seen through the contemporary prism, both undercut and stimulate the utopian imagination, constantly shifting and de-territorializing our dreamscape.” ¹² In its incomplete state it transforms into the antithesis of the utopian zeitgeist and pristine appearances of form that had once heralded the birth of modernist architecture.

The ambience is bleak though. Naqvi presents us with a bare, sand strewn landscape that is dominated by the ghostly presence of an empty shell of a modernist facade. One half is covered by a grid of empty window frames. The second half is connected via a porch. Resembling a tower-like form that is dwarfed by a suspended cube the design is minimal and embodies a formalism that is characteristic of this style. Naqvi makes it a point to add the remnants of the scaffolding. Similar scaffolding poles lie in a pile at the foot of the building.

An Allegory to Land-II offers a vision that seem to be in transit or in flux. Boym writes that “ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time.” ¹³

In our general conversation regarding his conceptual concerns Naqvi alluded to the marginalization and displacement that often resulted from the almost institutionalized system of land grabbing, slicing and dicing of public land that is prevalent in Karachi. The disjuncture between the unchecked excess of the rich and the desperation of its lowest classes is jarring.¹⁴ Yet the ambiguity of Naqvi’s buildings is multi-layered and cannot be restricted to one social class. It also invokes and recalls older, grander aspirations for a western modernity through architectural dream projects that inevitably went awry, much like Naqvi’s “An Allegory of Land II.”

One example of such a failed project in Karachi was Tony Tufail’s failed dream to build the Clifton Beach Casino in the mid-1970s. He had planned to commission the architect of the Casino Du Liban which was located outside Beirut to build his dream. Inskeep writes that he was shown a framed artist’s rendering of the casino by Tony Tufail. He describes it in the following words:

“It showed a single building, with a car dropping off customers at the front door. Each of the two planes of the enormous roof were curved upward, as if tracing the ascent of a jetliner. The building would cover approximately one hundred thousand square feet, approaching the size of a modern-day Wal-Mart in the United States.”¹⁵

Inskeep’s reference to a building’s roof resembling a jetliner is reminiscent of an even older and even more romanticized period in the history of modernist architecture, namely the mid1950s or the Jet Age when the American began to boom as this aesthetic began to take shape. Ruins certainly do offer an escape but they contain a remainder of the past.

Modernism had once been celebrated for its edifying qualities that were “considered to embody modern modes of living, thinking and production based on rationality, efficiency, calculation, the obsession with novelty and abstraction, as well as the moral pretension of advancing social and political goals through design practices. Notably, modernism was acclaimed “International” and conceptualized as exemplifying the positive aspect of globalism.” ¹⁶

This definition of Modernism fails to acknowledge that the international definition of modernism can no longer be applied universally, particularly in a postcolonial setting. It would often be characterized by one nation ending up transposing it on other postcolonial nations that were laboratory experiments for exerting their hegemonic influence.

The skeletal frame of Naqvi’s modernist structure evokes memories and spectral traces of lesser-known histories and trajectories that belie the claim that modernity was a universal experience. In fact, in many postcolonial nations like Pakistan it could be envisioned in the realm of desires, or as a means through which one could “catch up with other more advanced nations”.¹⁷

Svetlana writes that “ruinophilia is more of a material and visceral experience of the irreversibility of time that comes together with care for the world.” ¹⁸ Naqvi’s series titled “The House Between Tides” explores this visceral experience of ruinophilia through a time lapse captured in prints. Perhaps it can be interpreted as a sort of cautionary tale about nature and ecology   gradually wresting back its territory from the hubris of man. The series depicts a double storied structure with windows and railing fading successively into ghostly obscurity as if enveloped in the fog of time. Its poetic quality is enhanced by the fact that the paper appears to be washed in sea water collected from different parts of the Arabian Sea.

Whether this gesture should be interpreted as conciliatory and healing or imply an acknowledgment of the isomorphic mapping between nature, architecture and the human body that has existed since antiquity becomes secondary as the act is equally reflective either way. “The House Between Tides” affirms the poignancy of this erasure through a sort of ritual cleansing of the surface that is both literal and metaphorical.

How should one experience these mysterious landscapes that simultaneously evoke fear, melancholy and curiosity? The decay and fragmentation inherent in Naqvi’s works reflects insurgent spaces in a natural landscape where man and nature jostle for space. Naqvi frames these immaculately rendered desolate landscapes as unfinished projects along Karachi’s beachside that become a microcosm of the failures in governance and systemic violence that plagues postcolonial cities today. Naqvi’s practice and immaculate skill also opens up possibilities about how contested spaces in cities can inspire artworks that question the relationship between ecology and architecture.

The Show, Spaces in Retrospection, was displayed at O Art Space Lahore from 27th October 2023 to 6th December 2023

References:

Anwar, Nausheen H. “The Postcolonial City in South Asia.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35, no. 1 (2013): 22–38. doi:10.1111/sjtg.12048.

Heathcote, Edwin. “The British Obsession with Beach Huts.” Apollo Magazine, August 18, 2021. https://www.apollo-magazine.com/brief-history-beach-huts-british-seaside/#:~:text=The%20habit%20emerged%20in%20the,the%20seaside%20affordable%20and%20accessible.

Inskeep, Steve. Introduction. In Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2012.

Jinny. “A Brief History of Beach Huts.” Jin Designs. Jin Designs, August 12, 2022. https://jindesigns.com/blogs/latest-news/a-brief-history-of-beach-huts.

Lu, Duanfang. Essay. In Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, 22. London: Routledge, 2011.

Martin Odehnal, www.mo.cz. “Atlas of Transformation.” Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins | Svetlana Boym, 2011. http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ruinophilia/ruinophilia-appreciation-of-ruins-svetlana-boym.html.

Saigol, Rubina. “Becoming a Modern Nation: Educational Discourse in the Early Years of Ayub Khan (1958-1964).” Council of Social Sciences, Islamabad., 2003, 18.