Saba Khan recently held an exhibit on Lahore's consumer culture. Saher Sohail examines how the artist goes about critiquing mainstream notions of urban development
Saba Khan, in a recent exhibit entitled Rosy Dreams with High Walls at the Taseer Art Gallery, critiques the rise of dystopian urban dwellings in the ever-developing, ever-expanding city of Lahore. The work points toward the contemporary condition of a city that boasts abundance in terms of history and culture, showing these layers of the past obliterated by upper- and middle-class consumer culture. The artist draws on advertisements of housing schemes and real estate websites for inspiration. The images themselves are hazy and reminiscent of 8-bit colour graphics, giving the appearance of a retro virtual reality.
Though delightfully lurid and kitschy in terms of colour and medium, the canvases appear to be enervated in terms of the actual subject, at times. In Dream House 1, the viewer can only afford a glimpse of the house in question, while the rest of it is obscured by one of those high walls that Khan mentions in the title of the exhibit. These mansions, secured by insurmountable fortifications, point not only to security concerns raised by housing advertisements, but also highlight the infallible barriers between social classes. Khan’s work also critiques the mode of existence of the three antagonistic social classes that constitute the population of the few developed cities of Pakistan. One man’s rosy dream is another man’s blissful reality, while it continues to still be another man’s object of contempt. The dream is, of course, for those who can only afford to look at this new wave of glamorous housing and development from afar. Such urban development is heavily influenced by the image of affluence projected by cities like Dubai. These dispossessed spectators may be the same people who have been displaced from their own residences in order to make room for new housing schemes (a sacrifice made on the altar of “development”). The residents of these dream homes are of course the new bourgeoisie, who have migrated from cities outside of Lahore with their newly attained wealth: Khan directly addresses them in this body of work. This brings us to the class that frowns upon the nouveau riche: old Lahoris who boast ancestral homes in Gulberg, which are at least three generations old. The disparity between these social classes is hinted at in Khan’s cleverly constructed canvases.
'Pastries' by Saba Khan
The artist scrutinises vicious urban development through images of the domestic
Khan pushes beyond the extrinsic component of these modern dystopias and allows the spectator an internal view of these homes as well. The display was intentionally curated by the artist in a way that at first shows the spectator the exteriors of these homes, complete with hashtags and blessings, and then reveals their private, inner scenes. Cozy Dreamz is a more intimate image that suggests a world where the appropriate choice of mattress and bedding determines an idyllic future. In Drawing Room Dreams, the artist depicts a classic teatime moment inside a sitting room, furnished with sofas and wallpaper that clearly follow the “Punjabi Baroque” style described by Indian architect Gautam Bhatia. The canvas is dominated by an inanimate, looming cake – its stiff pink and blue icing inviting yet inedible, perhaps also unconsciously in tune with the Punjabi Baroque interior.
But other views of food items in Khan’s body of work determine that this cake serves an additional conceptual purpose apart from being just another element of the domestic setting. Punjabi notions of plenitude manifest themselves in Khan’s iridescent confectionery items alongside plated cuts of meat. The seventeenth-century idea of Flemish prosperity, which was celebrated in the “rolling flesh” of Peter-Paul Rubens, is ideologically revived in Khan’s renditions of raw flesh that validate the status and wealth of an upper or middle class person. A typical Punjabi household from this tier of society will serve only varieties of meat cooked in multiple ways at dinner parties, followed by heavily frosted pastries and cakes for dessert. Pastries is a tactile, visually appealing example of such material affirmations of affluence.
'Drawing Room Dreams' by Saba Khan
The artist’s use of text in this work adds another element of popular culture that is quite accessible to the local viewer. Khan translates English into Urdu in several instances, deploying words like “double security” and “happy” which evoke a sense of safety and reassurance. The choice of language here is premeditated: words as such function as a guarantee of welfare in a world where threats of violence are inevitable. These words are easily recognisable to members of the middle and lower classes, owing to the fact that certain English words have seeped into Urdu vernacular, and it is for them that they have been written in Urdu script.
Through this use of text alongside the aforementioned constituents of her work, Khan brings into critique ideas of progress and questions certain material concerns that are commonly seen as contentment. The word “development” itself is under question, what with recent changes in the city of Lahore. Keeping this in view, the artist brings into scrutiny a vicious urban expansion through images of the domestic.
