Statement about art practice

We are living in a world of rapid change under the influence information technology where everything tangible is being transformed into virtual reality, which in its own turn determines the reality we live in. Since we breathe in the time we live in, we at the same time internalize its ways of seeing. While internalizing we know what we do and know why we do what we do but, to rephrase Michel Foucault, what we do not know is what we do does to us. It is consequences of bombarded information we have become alienated consumers who count their lifespan from expiry dates of objects that end up in modern graveyard – junkyard.

When the overall ambience breaths with ethos of consumerism, then social norms and human being cannot remain immune from their influence. When we become use to a commodity, the commodity starts mold into the cast of consumerist teleology that remains cyclical and never reaches its destination. In such a situation, it is therefore imperative to explore the nature of representation in arts on the similar lines when Walter Benjamin examine art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Human beings do not grow organically like a tree. Unlike biological objects his or her cultural ethos, life world situations, scenarios and context shape the personality of human being. This aspect makes me to incline more towards the theory that espouses nurture and rejects nature. Subjectively speaking I am sum of what went into my inner self from the outer world. Basically, I hail from Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan where I spent my childhood in a society imbued in folklore. There my grandparents who used to narrate tales and fables with lesson in a setting of the milky way above, a fresh air to breathe, a serene natural landscape to soothes eyes. I had to help my parents in irrigation, construction, harvesting and most of all I lived in natural environment where everything was organic. My valley Hunza literally sits in the laps of the mightiest mountain massif of the Karakorum.

However, that organic and self-contained universe of our society started to change with the exposure to exogenous lifestyles, ideas and market forces after the opening of famed Karakorum Highway (KKH) in late 1970s. The change was too rapid and drastic that people could not retain what was old on the one hand, and lacked capacity to negotiate modernity. For example: people stopped producing cloth and started buying it from shops. They also started selling organic food to purchase inorganic ones. The sweeping wave of change has not only change material dimension of society, but also radically altered the very social structure, values and ways of seeing. It is this ways of seeing that resulted in indulging in love with oneself in the prevailing vogue of taking ‘selfies’.. People now tend to take selfies of meals rather than being aware of the quality of food and stuff. In other words, the importance of appearances and representation in virtual space has become more important than solid reality.

I still remember there were only a few ‘prominent’ houses painted with white lime in my valley in my childhood. Soon, people followed the suit and painted their homes with white color to look “beautiful”. While doing so they rejected indigenous material like mud, stone and wooden houses, which were drawn from nature. By doing so they opted for inorganic material. It is now that people are realizing its repercussions on the society, thinking, aesthetics and psychology of people. The organic and authentic life is replaced by consumerism. Hence, result in hollowing out of inner self. Now we have a situation where professional actors are more interested in becoming “brand” ambassadors than acting. In fact, our next generation will not know Waseem Akram as a famous cricketer, but a washing powder promoter. Our children have the characteristics of cartoons they watch all time, because we cannot take out time to tell them a story like our grandparents. But human spirit cannot live in inorganic life for long time. When the whole world outside turns into wasteland, it inherently craves for organic life like the fallen spirit that yearn to regain the paradise of organic life it lost. My work is a response to such inorganic situations where appearance, representation and virtual life is eliminating the social, moral norms and responsibilities.