contemporarypakistaniart:
David Alesworth, Elizabeth Dadi, Iftikhar Dadi, and Durriya Kazi with Bacchoo, Shaukat Lala, Mairaj Nicklewala and sons, and Yousuf and family.
Heart Mahal.
Beaten stainless steel, painted MDF, and lightbulbs, installed inside shipping container.
1996-1999.
“One manifestation of this new creative energy is the group’s Heart Mahal, 1996. This collaborative effort between the artists and teams of urban craftsmen is a 20-foot-long container, the innards of which have been transformed into a shrine-like space that evokes decorated trucks and rickshaws, weddings, religious rituals, and Bollywood film sets. On the container’s far wall, hundreds of colored lights pulse to suggest a pumping heart. Their light reflects off beaten stainless steel side walls lined with embossed interpretations of the artists’ drawings and toy figurines nested in mihrab-like niches.
In its collaborative origin, evocative material composition, and dramatic staging, Heart Mahal straddles the gaps between the overused binary oppositions of traditional/modern and local/foreign. Its production reveals the paradox that in an age when capital, media, and technology all move fluidly around the world, people (at least all but a certain rarefied class) don’t. And it is in these non-circulating people’s usage of freely circulating materials (containers, toys) that Heart Mahal fashions a coherent collective expression.
In Heart Mahal the artists’ collaboration moves beyond the gestural through their decision to work with craftsmen, not just on production, but also on fundamental questions of aesthetics, design, intent, and utility. This is not a celebration of utopian democracy, but rather a knowing arbitrage between the artists’ agency in their work’s circulation and the craftsmen’s facility of use, expressed through their painted panels, the beaten steel and the intricately arranged lights.”
(via Karachi Pop: Vernacular Visualities in 1990s Karachi)
