Introduction
My first meeting with Meher Afroz goes back half a century when she had just moved to Karachi from Lucknow. Since then, I have followed her career first as her student and later as a friend and art critic, but always as someone who has been inspired by the intense trajectory of this significant artist of Pakistan. The impenetrable darkness of her early work, while it perplexed many, was for me a space that offered obscure stories of the disenfranchised, the forgotten and of a society losing its moral compass as it clutched on to tools of survival.
Meher is a reflective artist and her oeuvre comes after periods of incubation. Whenever a new body of work appears the audience usually has a visceral response to it, often leaving its conceptual complexity undiscussed. I have always felt the urgency to make visible the deep and dense cultural layers that are sedimented in her oeuvre and map the intersections between her art and history.
My initial dilemma was to decide between authoring the book or inviting others to contribute. I opted for the second, as I have written extensively on Meher’s art practice since the 1990s, which is already available. Besides this, she was also a part of my first book Pioneering Perspectives (1998). Putting together an anthology also held greater appeal as it would give me the opportunity to explore her art through the lens of diverse art thinkers. Texts by art critics, curators, art historians, artists, a filmmaker, an anthropologist and a poet are included in the book. Anoli Perera from Sri Lanka and Savita Apte from India have shared their reading of her oeuvre to reinforce how issues of re-location, identity and social change in post-colonial South Asia transcend political borders. Almost every writer brings into discussion how Lucknow has shaped Meher’s sensibility but also charts the subsequent direction set by a history that became hers after the move to Pakistan. They record how while living in these tumultuous times, Meher became a passionate commentator, using poetry and the poetics of the visual to craft her vernacular.
Meher Afroz with Niilofur Farrukh, 2018, Karachi
Meher’s practice spans two vital periods of Pakistan’s art history. She entered the scene in the early 1970s at the peak of Modernism. After her first show, both Ali Imam and Bashir Mirza welcomed her to the fraternity and the reclusive Zubeida Agha, the grand dame of Modernism, summoned her for a meeting. This was the time when she had begun to win accolades at home and at international printmaking forums. In the 1980s she became a part of the wave of women artists who dominated the art scene. Meher’s trajectory continued to expand with experimental possibilities offered by postmodernism. Always open to new genres, in recent years she has begun to engage with performance art. Her work while relevant to the historical moment she occupies also goes beyond it and despite its cultural specificity, it speaks to a global audience with the gripping power that emanates from all art of substance.
As an art educator, her pedagogic influence spans five decades and she has had a seminal role in consolidating printmaking in the city. Printmaking Departments in Karachi’s two major art schools were set up by her. The Central Institute of Arts and Crafts got its Printmaking Department in the 1970s under Meher Afroz and at that time, was the only art school in the city with this faculty. When the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture was founded, she became instrumental in doing the same. She is widely acknowledged as an influential printmaker of Pakistan.
Parallel to Meher’s art practice has been her art activism. She co-founded ASNA in the late 1990s with Shanaz Siddiq and myself, this platform was conceptualised to find the common ground between traditional artisanal practices and Contemporary Art to enable indigenous inspirations. She took out time from her practice and full-time job to be the driving force behind the four iterations of ASNA International Clay Triennial, an intervention that has helped put Pakistan on the Contemporary Ceramic Art map. Nothing stood in the way of her commitment and she once travelled to Quetta during the armed conflict, to research and bring back craft pottery from Balochistan. Later, she laughingly recalled the threat and difficulties faced when her cargo was repeatedly searched at checkpoints during the road journey.
A fiercely independent spirit, she has never been affiliated to any movement, even when she signed the Women Artists Manifesto in 1983 with fifteen peers, it was more a pledge to uphold women’s rights under threat during the Zia dictatorship, and less as a promise to dedicate her art to feminist ideals. Women issues often surface in the oeuvre of Pakistani women artists who experience entrenched misogyny in the society around them, Meher as a strong woman has challenged stereotypes both in life and art, most of her adult life she has been a major contributor to the family income and her art has never shied away from being a fearless female lens on societal ruptures. She often speaks of complicated subjects like terrorism and violence, conflict and exclusion through the domestic vocabularies of embroidery, dyeing and hand-block printing.
A constant in her art is social critique and resistance that traces its roots to early lessons of a paternal grandmother and father who encouraged the artist and her siblings to speak out against injustice. Reinforcement of social responsibility and sacrifice at the majlis (Shia religious assembly) has also had an enduring influence. Meher confesses to being drawn to the discursive dimension of the legacy of martyrdom articulated by erudite scholars.
She is an avid reader of Ali Shariati, Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz and this love of literary and philosophical traditions underpins Meher’s practice with a synergy between Urdu and Contemporary Art. With the persistent presence of Urdu she has created new cultural signifiers, subverting the dominance of English, especially in Pakistan’s art circle where English is privileged as the lingua franca. With this, she has carried forward the early initiatives of Shakir Ali who tried to introduce Urdu as a language of art discourse. In Meher’s work the audience is forced to decode metaphors, poetry and history that create a consciousness of an epistemology lost to colonial erasure.
The texts in the book have deliberately not been grouped thematically to encourage a nonlinear negotiation of the essays, this lateral methodology opens up the possibility of new connections in the spirit of Decolonisation, that is central to Meher’s art practice.
Only a handful of Pakistani artists have so successfully managed to connect the contemporary with the consciousness of a civilisation and continued to bring into discussion the tensions and transformations of half a century. Dr Akbar Naqvi, Pakistan’s eminent historian, draws a parallel between Meher Afroz and Chughtai, for their commitment to cultural synthesis in his influential art history, Image and Identity, (1998). “How different her approach and design were from Chughtai is an interesting discourse on culture and art under fast changing conditions. She could not have painted a garden favoured by a ghazal which Chughtai painted, when her city was burning. But, in a manner made international by modern art, she showed that flames could become the herald of her art.”
From this urgency and elegance in the art of Meher Afroz has emerged ‘A Beautiful Despair.
Niilofur Farrukh
August 2020
Karachi