Home grown potpourri
of folk and primitive art was spotlighted to advantage when
Pakistan participated in the cultural festival of the Melbourne
2006 Commonwealth Games with a vibrant presentatio
n and performance
of art on wheels, from Karachi. The very popular W11, running
from New Karachi to Kemari, is one of Karachi's most elaborately
ornate buses. When its entire decorative trappings were
transferred onto the body of a tram plying the City Circle
route of Melbourne's transit system, a dazzling cultural
cross over came into effect. Ablaze with a riot of colors
and wild imagery common to Pakistani truck / bus art, the
Australian tram became not just an exact replication of
W11 but also an attractive cultural novelty in a formal,
orderly English speaking environment. A collection of photographs
and video films documenting the joyous rides and inaugural
tram event were the subject of an exhibition "W 11:
Karachi to Melbourne." on show at VM Gallery recently.
The videos screened
at VM consisted of "W-11 Karachi to Melbourne"
a 45 minute documentary film by Wajid Ali, "Piyar Zindagi
Hai" - a 12 minute video compiled by Mick Douglas from
digital camera footage taken by hosts and passengers and
"Liminal Tram" a video composition made from mobile
cameras with a 30 second loop by Marsha Berry. A selection
of 40 photographs highlighting the decorative art making
and crafting of the W11 exterior and interior, complemented
the videos.
Wajid Ali,
a graduate of Karachi University Visual Arts Dept, having
already concluded a residency in Australia was pivotal in
the project as production coordinator, photographer and
videographer, while the project itself was coordinated by
Mick Douglas from Australia and Durriya Kazi, Incharge Visual
Arts Dept Karachi University.
Anyone who has
traveled to Asia will be familiar with the way people like
to decorate their vehicles. But in Pakistan, it is elevated
to an art form … The trucks, many of them old Bedford
Rockets, provide a moving canvas for the artists, who compete
to see who can execute the most daring and outrageous designs.
Buses too enjoy the same lavish outpouring of primitive
aesthetic pattern, color and form. Narrowing his search
to excellence in workmanship, Wajid Ali selected, from amongst
the large number of vehicle decorators established in Karachi,
Nusrat Iqbal and his assistants Arshad, Nadeem and Safdar
Ali to craft 2 W11 casings that were co joined to adjust
to the measurements of the large Melbourne tram exterior.
The entire body was prepared in separate panels in Karachi
and later assembled in Melbourne by Nusrat and his team
who were invited expressly for this purpose to the Australian
city.
Truck / Bus
decoration evolved here in the decade of the 70's when ownership
moved away from the elite to the working class. While this
art form traces its immediate origins to the decorative
horse drawn carriages made for the gentry during the Raj,
its basic expressiveness stems from the rural craft / art
ethos of embellishing objects with garish rudimentary designs
to brighten up a drab rustic existence or as a reflection
of their inner exuberance. Noteworthy here is the progression
in this art form with the relocation of these craft artists
to urban city centers. While the thrust is still on crude
primal art, the influence of producing work in urban centers
has brought noticeable change in use of materials, concepts
and imagery. Through the years, the materials used have
developed from wood and paint to metal, tinsel, plastic
and reflective tape in fluorescent and radium colors and
the very fancy incorporation of full lighting displays.
While trucks are mainly decorated with painted images on
wood panels, the steel bodies of buses respond very well
to the sticky plastic "chamak patti" medium. The
highly ornamental pictorial imagery on W11appears to be
a very slick paint job but is in reality a very skilled
manifestation of chamak patti art.
The self adhesive,
multi colored, reflective plastic tape or 'chamak patti',
available in large rolls is the primary art material with
which this bus is decorated. Line drawings of patterns are
stenciled onto the vinyl material and cut as per design
requirement and pasted onto the bus exterior. This expertise
extends to an amazing variety of floral, geometric, all
over, corner as well as border patterns, idyllic landscapes,
attractive female faces, exotic birds, fish, tigers and
lions and also weaponry, rockets and landmark heritage sites.
The W11 implanted in Melbourne also had its fair share of
stylized imagery. Particularly noticeable were the relatively
new art images invented especially for this occasion by
artisan artist Nusrat Iqbal and his team. These included
stylized and ornate mythical bird creatures resembling peacocks,
idealized female portraits as well as flashes of modern
'disco art', all drawn, stenciled, cut and pasted onto the
body of the bus. The cut and paste technique peculiar to
'chamak patti' is an acquired skill entailing years of laborious
training. Nusrat Iqbal discloses that during his initial
training in Lahore, under an 'ustad' he spent a whole year
just perfecting the art of cutting straight 'Pattis' from
the plastic material before progressing to circular forms
and the equally complex art of pasting the cutouts.
Truck art is
denigrated to a lower form of craft art expression here,
mainly because the workers are unlettered artisans with
next to no concept of formal art academics. However, they
are proficient in the technical application of this art
which indicates that it is not dearth of artistic talent
but lack of requisite education which prevents an artisan
from becoming an artist.
For twelve days
the W11 tram in Melbourne, carrying the same title as its
Pakistani counterpart here, "Piyaar Zindagi Hai,"
circled the city almost 120 times carrying as many as 80,000
passengers in the process. Video shots of the bus interior
showed an enthusiastic cosmopolitan crowd rollicking to
the Bhangra beat and raunchy Punjabi songs by Noorjehan
while conductors handed out specially printed Tram tickets
as souvenirs. To recreate the complete W11 experience, conductors
along with the Melbourne City bus stops also called out
the names of the Karachi W11 route stops. It was the gay,
festive appearance created by this art form on the Australian
Tram and an atmosphere of jubilation and camaraderie generated
by the mix blend of Asian and Australian passengers and
attendant staff that defined the Pakistani sentiment of
good will and friendship. The tram proved to be the most
vibrant emissary we have had to date.
While it did
not introduce our more classical finer arts, it did project
the colorful, populist face of Pakistani craft /art which
alone was enough to counter the bogey of 'terrorism' associated
with the image of Pakistan. By showing a lighter side of
the national psyche, it opened the doors for other exhibitions
of indigenous art
