The Sacred Square
Nomadic Indigo enters Saidpur – The Sacred Square
Exhibition of Paintings by Noorjehan Bilgrami at the Nomad Gallery
Text: Q. Isa Daudpota
Photography:
For many years I had passed by Saidpur village while driving on the Margalla Road merely paying attention to the opulent houses that line it. Then artist Fauzia Minallah took me and Foqia Sadiq Khan to see the old Mango trees of Saidpur and jointly explore her vision for developing this 600 year-old village for the popularization of national crafts. For a background to the village see the article, “Temple of Lakshmi Devi at Saidpur” by Z.A. Kalhoro
She wanted to have craftsperson from all of over Pakistan to have outlets here, with workshop and production facilities on site where others could be trained in some of the traditional crafts of the country. Some years later, when I visited Delhi, I realized that Fauzia’s vision could be enlarged to include what had been done at Delhi Haat where crafts from all over India are brought over for a limited period by artisans, available for sale, and then replaced by others from different regions. Different restaurants serve authentic regional food.
And this is a vision that Noorjehan Bilgrami (NJB), the promoter of crafts, would have approved, I think. So it was good to see her exhibition held at Nageen Hyat’s newly opened branch of Nomad Gallery at Saidpur. The gallery is one of the better sides of the gentrification of the village initiated by the dynamic but destructive former head of Islamabad’s Capital Development Authority, Kamran Lashari. He was unfortunately asked to inaugurate NJB’s show by the gallery owner. The destroyer of Fauzia’s vision for the village and of the character of much of the capital, he transformed Islamabad in about five years into a concrete jungle, full of wide roads, underpasses, flyovers, with no concern for public transport. In protest, therefore, several persons, including myself, decided not to attend the opening ceremony.
Well before you get to the aforementioned Temple, on the right is the newly inaugurated Nomad. You enter by the right-side door and are immediately in the front room of the gallery. Here’s where NJB’s exhibition begins with larger works in mixed media with acrylic on canvas. As you traverse in an anticlockwise manner, you move to the back room with smaller works of natural indigo paint on paper. Then up the stairs into a display area on the left is where you see handmade fabrics colored with natural dyes hanging attractively from horizontal bamboo sticks. These are products of KOEL, NJB’s boutique in Karachi. As one moves to the exit door, on the left are the gallery’s handicrafts on shelves, which stand opposite a stand selling baked goods, and later perhaps tea and coffee, which you may buy and exit.
As I enter I am not sure what to expect. The emailed invitation brochure shows a large square almost floating on a sea of indigo with penciled hills seemingly in the distance. The top and bottom of the page are bordered with strips of indigo – there is a golden arrow head that point to the lower edge under the wide band of color which I take to be water. The wide horizontal swathes of indigo, reminiscent of Mark Rothko, one of the most influential and high-priced American abstract Expressionists.
The last time I saw NJB’s drawings and paintings for any length of time was forty years ago! That was when we sat in the same art class in a Karachi school. Of that time I can barely recall what scratches I made, let alone that of my fellow students who worked under the caring guidance of Mrs Tahira Rafiq, now in Lahore.
In the early nineties after I had moved to Islamabad I did for a short while explore the local art scene. This led to a visit to the National Council of Arts (NCA) gallery which used to be in a private house off Marvi Road in Sector F-7. The first thing one noticed about that cramped place was the ironic high wall set up near its entrance to segregate it from the low income housing in the slum next door euphemistically named, “French Colony”. [This damning contrast is also starkly evident in what Lashari and his men have done in Saidpur.] So there I am on the first floor of the NCA gallery and I suddenly see the painting of my old school mate. She made it into the national collection, I say to myself proudly. I recall, it too had a geometrical motif. That continuing theme in NJB’s work, perhaps harks back to Euclidean geometry lessons taught by Mr. Zaidi and Mr. K.P. Visvanathan, a Ceylonese, who taught for many years in our school, and both now are sadly with their Maker.
What is one to make of NJB’s minimalist contributions? The straight lined figures dominated by the dark square. It splits – the 16 smaller squares within. Triangles placed in one of four directions. In some of the larger pieces the smaller squares have diagonals drawn – these form a cross, as if a cancellation of the small square by a mathematics teacher. The small square made up four triangles. The penciled geometry of these figures is modulated by the layered indigo with a wavy appearance created by running a nail through the paint.
The crisscrosses, common in NJB’s paintings have an amazing link to the origins of art. Art is a landmark in human evolution; an ability unique to humans. The search for the moment our ancestors became behaviorally just like us is also the hunt for the first evidence of art.
In 1999 Chris Hinshelwood and his team noticed lots of pieces of soft stone called ochre in a cave. If scraped it produces a powder that can be mixed with animal fat and used as paint. Interestingly ochre did not occur naturally in that area and could only have come from several miles away. Then eight thousand pieces of ochre were discovered in the cave. They had been deliberately scraped for a purpose, Hinshelwood believes, to paint on other surfaces.
Then another, rather different, discovery was made. It was yet another piece of ochre but it had been marked with what looked like a crisscross pattern. Was this the world’s oldest piece of art work?
Specialists in prehistoric markings were convinced that the markings were deliberate – not the result of accidental knife marks. Early humans had managed for the first time to store something outside their own heads. They had sent us a message from 70,000 years ago. Is NJB with her crosses unconsciously recreating the pattern that the first artists left for us?
The geometry in much of NJB’s work reminded me of an artist I was familiar with since school, Piet Mondrian, who from my recent reading in art theory is considered one of the greatest pioneers of abstract art. His search for higher, simpler, and more elemental truths led to using rectangles painted in primary colors. Fortunately a 1971 article, “Pursuit of the Square” by Robert Hughes in the Time magazine (www.tinyurl.com/9zplu9) is available and is worth reading to see some of the artist’s concern about art and geometry and to assess its possible relation to NJB’s work. The less geometric work such as his “Still-life with Ginger-pot” of 1912 and “Composition VII” of 1913 in color and treatment is closer to her larger works with acrylic on canvas in the front room. These Mondrian’s are early visual experiments in the Cubist style. Their almost abstract appearance has an element of three-dimensionality – something is being represented. Later he would paint purely abstract images. Note also the inspiration from Paul Klee in NJB’s paintings, such as for example his 1934 work, “The One who Understands” (www.tinyurl.com/8et4af).
On discussing the work of Mondrian with NJB I realized that she was not attracted to his stark abstractions. Her own approach is closer to the contemplative eastern way. Her one year in Japan learning the art of dyeing in Indigo may have reinforced this attitude.
The front room of the Nomad Gallery had seven larger paintings, one with a rubbing of wooden mould – a crisscross pattern that the artist found in Sri Lanka. The back of the mould has a circular pattern and that too is rubbed in on paper and pasted on another picture. Here, and in some other pictures, gold and white paint is dabbed with a finger to create discreet bright blobs placed randomly on the large square grid that covers the canvas. A few little gold arrowheads appear in the small triangles of the mould’s pattern.
Against etiquette, I ask NJB what on earth was being conveyed through this collection! It cannot be only a personal quest, for then an exhibition would be pointless. So while this artist dug deep inside her brain to specially produce this work especially for this show in the capital, she put aside the brutal killings in Mumbai that happened while she painted. Her approach is Apollonian, i.e. orderly and calm, to use Nietzsche’s way of classifying a dualism in ancient art. The other end of the divide is occupied by the Dionysian, such as my old friend A.R. Nagori, who uses intoxicating strong colors and is inspired by the external environment – largely the cruelty and injustice he sees in dictatorships. The remarkable “Scarecrow” by Nagori which shows a crow pecking at the scarecrow clothed in the uniform of the general, is a case in point.
The Apollonian uses her mindscape or generalizes or filters the external events to extract a timeless image – a supreme abstraction. In contrast the Dionysian explores the external world and inspires the viewer by color and movement and displaying strong emotional events that inspire him and through his pictures the viewers.
“The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions…the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point,” said Rothko. (Is this what NJB also wants from her work?) The abstraction he achieved comes out of removing the inessential from his canvasses, a feature that he shares with today’s synthetic biologists. They are busy trying to generate artificial life in the laboratory connecting the minimum possible number of genes to create life as we know it. That is one which shows reproduction and metabolism – two minimum requirements for life.
NJB’s abstract expressionism reflects somewhat Mark Rothko’s Apollonian order – the disciplined laying of color on vast canvases. Rothko’s contemporary, abstract expressionist extraordinaire was Jackson Pollock, the supreme Dionysian, exuding intoxication, chaos, and the ecstatic dissolution of identity in the collective. Sadly both artists chose to end their lives in a violent manner – Pollock in a car accident and Rothko through a bloody suicide.
To understand NJB’s fascination with Rothko, I saw a 7-part video program (www.tinyurl.com/967cex) by historian and art critic Simon Schama’s about the artist, which I highly recommend. The horizontal layering of color is superficially similar to Rothko’s – in both one sees the abstract expressionist’s use of internal exploration to display a more objective reality that the viewer is challenged to search. But since each viewer will come up with his or her own interpretation, and while that is valid, as a reviewer I am always vastly more interested in what the artist is after in each of her abstract explorations.
The surprise discovery of Rothko’s unfinished book, “The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art” and its subsequent editing and publication last November by his son Christopher, gives as deep an insight as possible into his art. The fact that Christopher, a professional psychologist who, along with his sister, had been neglected by their father and left out of his will, edited and completed the work, is remarkable. So is the special show of Rothko’s iconic painting which runs until 1st February at the Tate Modern in London. At its website you can view several curators talk about Rothko’s work and also view all those on display at www.tinyurl.com/24hm6s.
The extensive reference to the artist, who seems to be one of the major inspirations in NJB’s work, is to coax her to write her own philosophy of art, so that the viewers are not left to guess at what she is getting at. It is to convince her to do what Rothko’s newly published work does. This is within her reach as she is an accomplished writer, with more than three books to her credit, starting with a pioneering publication about Sind’s Ajrak –‘Sind jo Ajrak’ and more recently one – ‘The Craft Traditions of Pakistan’.
One would like to understand how Vipassana Meditation (www.tinyurl.com/3pjmx3), which she practices, has a transformational impact on how and what she puts on paper. How does her practice and encouragement of crafts, whether it is through the popularization of natural dyes such as Indigo, or the running of Koel, her boutique, impact her painting? Will Koel, now metamorphosing into a gallery space and a café, and with NJB working in her newly constructed painting studio on top of her house, change the nature of her inner exploration?
The peripatetic Noorjehan has her work cut out for the next few years. It will be interesting to see how her new activities, interacting with each other, transform her art and craft.
The reviewer is a physicist and environmentalist with a long-standing interest in the visual arts. His photography appears at www.tinyurl.com/8rkgzn.
Exhibition of Paintings by Noorjehan Bilgrami at the Nomad Gallery
Text: Q. Isa Daudpota
Photography:
For many years I had passed by Saidpur village while driving on the Margalla Road merely paying attention to the opulent houses that line it. Then artist Fauzia Minallah took me and Foqia Sadiq Khan to see the old Mango trees of Saidpur and jointly explore her vision for developing this 600 year-old village for the popularization of national crafts. For a background to the village see the article, “Temple of Lakshmi Devi at Saidpur” by Z.A. Kalhoro
She wanted to have craftsperson from all of over Pakistan to have outlets here, with workshop and production facilities on site where others could be trained in some of the traditional crafts of the country. Some years later, when I visited Delhi, I realized that Fauzia’s vision could be enlarged to include what had been done at Delhi Haat where crafts from all over India are brought over for a limited period by artisans, available for sale, and then replaced by others from different regions. Different restaurants serve authentic regional food.
And this is a vision that Noorjehan Bilgrami (NJB), the promoter of crafts, would have approved, I think. So it was good to see her exhibition held at Nageen Hyat’s newly opened branch of Nomad Gallery at Saidpur. The gallery is one of the better sides of the gentrification of the village initiated by the dynamic but destructive former head of Islamabad’s Capital Development Authority, Kamran Lashari. He was unfortunately asked to inaugurate NJB’s show by the gallery owner. The destroyer of Fauzia’s vision for the village and of the character of much of the capital, he transformed Islamabad in about five years into a concrete jungle, full of wide roads, underpasses, flyovers, with no concern for public transport. In protest, therefore, several persons, including myself, decided not to attend the opening ceremony.
Well before you get to the aforementioned Temple, on the right is the newly inaugurated Nomad. You enter by the right-side door and are immediately in the front room of the gallery. Here’s where NJB’s exhibition begins with larger works in mixed media with acrylic on canvas. As you traverse in an anticlockwise manner, you move to the back room with smaller works of natural indigo paint on paper. Then up the stairs into a display area on the left is where you see handmade fabrics colored with natural dyes hanging attractively from horizontal bamboo sticks. These are products of KOEL, NJB’s boutique in Karachi. As one moves to the exit door, on the left are the gallery’s handicrafts on shelves, which stand opposite a stand selling baked goods, and later perhaps tea and coffee, which you may buy and exit.
As I enter I am not sure what to expect. The emailed invitation brochure shows a large square almost floating on a sea of indigo with penciled hills seemingly in the distance. The top and bottom of the page are bordered with strips of indigo – there is a golden arrow head that point to the lower edge under the wide band of color which I take to be water. The wide horizontal swathes of indigo, reminiscent of Mark Rothko, one of the most influential and high-priced American abstract Expressionists.
The last time I saw NJB’s drawings and paintings for any length of time was forty years ago! That was when we sat in the same art class in a Karachi school. Of that time I can barely recall what scratches I made, let alone that of my fellow students who worked under the caring guidance of Mrs Tahira Rafiq, now in Lahore.
In the early nineties after I had moved to Islamabad I did for a short while explore the local art scene. This led to a visit to the National Council of Arts (NCA) gallery which used to be in a private house off Marvi Road in Sector F-7. The first thing one noticed about that cramped place was the ironic high wall set up near its entrance to segregate it from the low income housing in the slum next door euphemistically named, “French Colony”. [This damning contrast is also starkly evident in what Lashari and his men have done in Saidpur.] So there I am on the first floor of the NCA gallery and I suddenly see the painting of my old school mate. She made it into the national collection, I say to myself proudly. I recall, it too had a geometrical motif. That continuing theme in NJB’s work, perhaps harks back to Euclidean geometry lessons taught by Mr. Zaidi and Mr. K.P. Visvanathan, a Ceylonese, who taught for many years in our school, and both now are sadly with their Maker.
What is one to make of NJB’s minimalist contributions? The straight lined figures dominated by the dark square. It splits – the 16 smaller squares within. Triangles placed in one of four directions. In some of the larger pieces the smaller squares have diagonals drawn – these form a cross, as if a cancellation of the small square by a mathematics teacher. The small square made up four triangles. The penciled geometry of these figures is modulated by the layered indigo with a wavy appearance created by running a nail through the paint.
The crisscrosses, common in NJB’s paintings have an amazing link to the origins of art. Art is a landmark in human evolution; an ability unique to humans. The search for the moment our ancestors became behaviorally just like us is also the hunt for the first evidence of art.
In 1999 Chris Hinshelwood and his team noticed lots of pieces of soft stone called ochre in a cave. If scraped it produces a powder that can be mixed with animal fat and used as paint. Interestingly ochre did not occur naturally in that area and could only have come from several miles away. Then eight thousand pieces of ochre were discovered in the cave. They had been deliberately scraped for a purpose, Hinshelwood believes, to paint on other surfaces.
Then another, rather different, discovery was made. It was yet another piece of ochre but it had been marked with what looked like a crisscross pattern. Was this the world’s oldest piece of art work?
Specialists in prehistoric markings were convinced that the markings were deliberate – not the result of accidental knife marks. Early humans had managed for the first time to store something outside their own heads. They had sent us a message from 70,000 years ago. Is NJB with her crosses unconsciously recreating the pattern that the first artists left for us?
The geometry in much of NJB’s work reminded me of an artist I was familiar with since school, Piet Mondrian, who from my recent reading in art theory is considered one of the greatest pioneers of abstract art. His search for higher, simpler, and more elemental truths led to using rectangles painted in primary colors. Fortunately a 1971 article, “Pursuit of the Square” by Robert Hughes in the Time magazine (www.tinyurl.com/9zplu9) is available and is worth reading to see some of the artist’s concern about art and geometry and to assess its possible relation to NJB’s work. The less geometric work such as his “Still-life with Ginger-pot” of 1912 and “Composition VII” of 1913 in color and treatment is closer to her larger works with acrylic on canvas in the front room. These Mondrian’s are early visual experiments in the Cubist style. Their almost abstract appearance has an element of three-dimensionality – something is being represented. Later he would paint purely abstract images. Note also the inspiration from Paul Klee in NJB’s paintings, such as for example his 1934 work, “The One who Understands” (www.tinyurl.com/8et4af).
On discussing the work of Mondrian with NJB I realized that she was not attracted to his stark abstractions. Her own approach is closer to the contemplative eastern way. Her one year in Japan learning the art of dyeing in Indigo may have reinforced this attitude.
The front room of the Nomad Gallery had seven larger paintings, one with a rubbing of wooden mould – a crisscross pattern that the artist found in Sri Lanka. The back of the mould has a circular pattern and that too is rubbed in on paper and pasted on another picture. Here, and in some other pictures, gold and white paint is dabbed with a finger to create discreet bright blobs placed randomly on the large square grid that covers the canvas. A few little gold arrowheads appear in the small triangles of the mould’s pattern.
Against etiquette, I ask NJB what on earth was being conveyed through this collection! It cannot be only a personal quest, for then an exhibition would be pointless. So while this artist dug deep inside her brain to specially produce this work especially for this show in the capital, she put aside the brutal killings in Mumbai that happened while she painted. Her approach is Apollonian, i.e. orderly and calm, to use Nietzsche’s way of classifying a dualism in ancient art. The other end of the divide is occupied by the Dionysian, such as my old friend A.R. Nagori, who uses intoxicating strong colors and is inspired by the external environment – largely the cruelty and injustice he sees in dictatorships. The remarkable “Scarecrow” by Nagori which shows a crow pecking at the scarecrow clothed in the uniform of the general, is a case in point.
The Apollonian uses her mindscape or generalizes or filters the external events to extract a timeless image – a supreme abstraction. In contrast the Dionysian explores the external world and inspires the viewer by color and movement and displaying strong emotional events that inspire him and through his pictures the viewers.
“The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions…the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point,” said Rothko. (Is this what NJB also wants from her work?) The abstraction he achieved comes out of removing the inessential from his canvasses, a feature that he shares with today’s synthetic biologists. They are busy trying to generate artificial life in the laboratory connecting the minimum possible number of genes to create life as we know it. That is one which shows reproduction and metabolism – two minimum requirements for life.
NJB’s abstract expressionism reflects somewhat Mark Rothko’s Apollonian order – the disciplined laying of color on vast canvases. Rothko’s contemporary, abstract expressionist extraordinaire was Jackson Pollock, the supreme Dionysian, exuding intoxication, chaos, and the ecstatic dissolution of identity in the collective. Sadly both artists chose to end their lives in a violent manner – Pollock in a car accident and Rothko through a bloody suicide.
To understand NJB’s fascination with Rothko, I saw a 7-part video program (www.tinyurl.com/967cex) by historian and art critic Simon Schama’s about the artist, which I highly recommend. The horizontal layering of color is superficially similar to Rothko’s – in both one sees the abstract expressionist’s use of internal exploration to display a more objective reality that the viewer is challenged to search. But since each viewer will come up with his or her own interpretation, and while that is valid, as a reviewer I am always vastly more interested in what the artist is after in each of her abstract explorations.
The surprise discovery of Rothko’s unfinished book, “The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art” and its subsequent editing and publication last November by his son Christopher, gives as deep an insight as possible into his art. The fact that Christopher, a professional psychologist who, along with his sister, had been neglected by their father and left out of his will, edited and completed the work, is remarkable. So is the special show of Rothko’s iconic painting which runs until 1st February at the Tate Modern in London. At its website you can view several curators talk about Rothko’s work and also view all those on display at www.tinyurl.com/24hm6s.
The extensive reference to the artist, who seems to be one of the major inspirations in NJB’s work, is to coax her to write her own philosophy of art, so that the viewers are not left to guess at what she is getting at. It is to convince her to do what Rothko’s newly published work does. This is within her reach as she is an accomplished writer, with more than three books to her credit, starting with a pioneering publication about Sind’s Ajrak –‘Sind jo Ajrak’ and more recently one – ‘The Craft Traditions of Pakistan’.
One would like to understand how Vipassana Meditation (www.tinyurl.com/3pjmx3), which she practices, has a transformational impact on how and what she puts on paper. How does her practice and encouragement of crafts, whether it is through the popularization of natural dyes such as Indigo, or the running of Koel, her boutique, impact her painting? Will Koel, now metamorphosing into a gallery space and a café, and with NJB working in her newly constructed painting studio on top of her house, change the nature of her inner exploration?
The peripatetic Noorjehan has her work cut out for the next few years. It will be interesting to see how her new activities, interacting with each other, transform her art and craft.
The reviewer is a physicist and environmentalist with a long-standing interest in the visual arts. His photography appears at www.tinyurl.com/8rkgzn.
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