“I want us to confront our own biases and all the ways in which we enact power over others,” explained filmmaker Arafat Mazhar of his cautionary tale of technology and intolerance in Pakistan.
Pakistan
Posted inBooks
Charting a Bold Future For Pakistani Cinema
Love, War & Other Longings offers a thought-provoking analysis of the country’s lesser-known film history, while sketching out aspirations for the industry.
Posted inArt
Searching for a City’s Spirit at the Lahore Biennale
Amid works by international artists and local projects focused on other Pakistani cities, I kept wondering where is Lahore?
Posted inArt
Why an Installation About Police Killings in Pakistan Faced State Censorship
Adeela Suleman’s documentary and installation, The Killing Fields of Karachi, considered the human impact of extrajudicial police killings, focusing on the father of one victim.
Posted inArt
Toxic Environments at the Karachi Biennale
In a city where the municipal government has consistently failed to address issues such as land or air pollution, the latest edition of the biennale considers its environmental crisis through various media.
Posted inArt
Three Queer Pakistani Artists Explore Identity and Disrupt Borders with Their Art
Abdullah Qureshi, Aziz Sohail, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr. are collectively redefining what it means to be queer and Pakistani.
Posted inArt
A Designer’s Game About Arranged Marriages, Inspired by Her Own Journey
In Nashra Balagamwala’s board game, players are teenage girls pursued by an aunty who wants to marry them to any boy she can locate.
Posted inNews
A Pakistani Comic Book Fights Religious Extremism
This week, Pakistani high schools are distributing comic books that authorities hope will dissuade at-risk teenagers from joining militant organizations like the Taliban.
Posted inNews
Giving a Face to the Victims of Drone Killings
A union of hashtag activism, street art, and drones hardly portends an outcome of substance, but a rare exception has surfaced in Pakistan, where a collective has unveiled an athletic-field-sized poster meant to attract the attention of American drones operating in the country’s volatile Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province.
Posted inArt
Divya Mehra’s Tragicomedy of Failure
Divya Mehra and I met briefly, almost in passing at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada a couple years back. In what seemed moments we were arguing about the role artists have in society, and the problems and difficulties of institutional support. This quickly led to a deep respect for Divya and her work.
Posted inNews
College Faces Backlash Against Homoerotic Art
Facing criticism and threats from hardline Islamists, the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, has shut down an academic journal that published a series of homosexually suggestive paintings. The college pulled the issues from bookstores and dissolved the journal’s editorial board, but that board and the head of the school, as well as an art critic who wrote an accompanying essay and the artist, still face a potential lawsuit on charges of blasphemy, the Associated Press reports.
Posted inArt
Dread Scott Is Bringing the Wars Home
I encountered Dread Scott’s curious flag project, “Flags Are Very Popular These Days” (2011), on Facebook and was fascinated by its simplicity. Last month, the artist placed the flags of four nations (Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan) on overpasses in upstate New York. These symbols of pride for four Muslim-majority countries— two of which America is currently (and officially) at war with — must have felt jarring to passersby who may not have been able to recognize their meaning or discerned their origins.