3.
Araeen’s ongoing work reveals the consistency with which he pursues his credo as an artist, and also in his critical writing. Though he chooses extremely different strategies to express his program, there is always the attempt to promote what he calls the IDEA, as the artist’s task, an idea which must remain visible behind the changing faces of the different strategies. But there is a second context that we must take into consideration in order to discover his presence in two worlds. The Pakistan scene is likewise full of problems that result from a delay or total lack of the globalized modernism of art. In a recent unpublished essay he hints at a coincidence between the intervention of modern art, of the American blend, as a short episode in Pakistan and the death of democracy in his home country. The Americanization of Pakistan, which he remembers as a young man, culminated under the military rule established by Ayub Khan in 1958.(40) At that moment, the American artist Elaine Hamilton lived for a while in Karachi and was celebrated in a show at the Arts Council Gallery in 1960. There is a mystery about her presence for which Araeen proposes political explanations. On the whole, the presence of modernist art appeared under premises that were controlled by the government and did not last very long. Since then, there has been no art scene in Pakistan that would allow Araeen to perform a role similar to that which he plays as a third- world artist in London.
When Pakistan celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its independence in 1997, the periodical Arts & the Islamic World, published by the Islamic Arts Foundation, London, dedicated a special volume to the theme “50 Years of Art in Pakistan.”(41) In the same year, the Queen visited the National Council of Arts in Karachi, and a young British Pakistani art consultant and gallerist staged a two-week display of thirty Pakistani painters, sculptors, and graphic artists in a London gallery. It seems that the local, as a concept, did resurrect in a weak synthesis between traditional revival styles and the creation of a nice, national modernism that avoids conflicts of the kind currently characterizing the globalized world. Such activities or publications are political because they pretend to be non-political. It is here that Araeen’s singular importance as a political artist, who thematizes the problems of contemporary art, becomes visible.
Araeen reveals the dilemma of contemporary art in a post-colonial society. Art’s inevitable label as a phenomenon that was originally Western makes any such art, whether pro-West or anti-West, political per se. In the case of Araeen, misunderstandings are unavoidable, as his self is composed of several identities. First, his ethnic self, given the multi-ethnic society of Pakistan, is already a problem. His national identity is equally a problem, since the nation state of Pakistan in his youth was founded as an arbitrary construction. Furthermore, his religious ego is an issue. Though brought up as a Muslim, he was faced with the misuse of the Islamic tradition by the military regime of Ziaul Haq (1977–1988) at home. Finally, there is his identity as an artist living in two worlds. In the Muslim world, he could never come to terms with the restrictions of cultural freedom, foremost in the domain of visual culture and art. But also Britain was not an easy choice. On the one hand, he is free to act as an artist but, on the other hand, he is not accepted on equal terms.
