A decade ago, when I was in art school studying towards an undergraduate degree in fine art, the term ‘biennale’ hardly triggered the rush of excitement that it does now among Pakistani artists and art students. We were not taught about biennial exhibitions and their histories. They were a remote idea, a vague event redolent of the slickness and self-importance of the contemporary art world. One would, at most, stumble across an occasional reference to the Venice Biennale – that progenitor of biennials – conjuring up images of an international art elite converging on an old and aristocratic European city every other year.

All that has changed now. Pakistani artists are rapidly finding footholds in regional and international art markets and discourses. Two of the country’s biggest cities, in quick succession, have also hosted their inaugural biennial exhibitions over the last few months. The biennials, especially those originating in the Global South (loosely, African, Latin American and Asian countries that share histories of colonisation and, in the words of American academic Anne Garland Mahler, have been “negatively impacted by contemporary capitalist globalization”), are now routine, no-nonsense and hugely popular affairs — at least, for the members of the world’s art fraternity.

This is predominantly because, as cultural critics and art historians have pointed out, the biennial model is one that lends itself fairly easily to adaptation and reinvention. Biennials may derive from what is inherently a Eurocentric tradition but they offer a framework for comprehensive artistic displays and exchanges. Thus, cities across the world have taken them up to bolster their own development as well as to contribute to the identity of the region they belong to. This is particularly true of cities that were once under colonial control and are now included in territories that are attempting to repudiate hegemonic influences, hierarchies and definitions.

Oxford-based art historian Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, professor of contemporary art in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, have examined the trend of using biennials to promote new regional identities. In their illuminating essay, Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global, they refer to the premier Biennale de la Méditerranée (the Alexandria biennal for Mediterranean countries) which was held in 1955 as “one of the first regionally orientated biennials”. The event, they note, was held because some of the recently freed European colonies, like Egypt, thought it necessary to work towards their cultural rebirth and integration with other countries undergoing decolonisation.

“Indeed, if the catalogue for the second Biennale de la Méditerranée is anything to go by, with its frequent references to liberation and new nationalisms along the shores of the Mediterranean, it was precisely the cultural development of decolonizing states – of the new evolving regional identities that could challenge old colonial and new Cold War decrees – that was a primary concern,” the two write. “And it was the medium of the large-scale international biennial that was considered one of the best ways to manifest that regional amicability and transcultural potential.”

The Cold War, as the passage suggests, was another early, though indirect, factor in the growth of biennials in the Global South. Certain places took steps to present themselves as “non-aligned”, as Gardner and Green explain by giving the example of the Indonesian city of Bandung. “[It] – again auspiciously in 1955 – held the conference at which Asian and African countries that were not aligned with either the US-led capitalist First World or the Soviet-backed Communist Second World sought an alternative, transversal community of so-called ‘non-aligned’ nations.”

In doing so, these places set out in the search for cultural expressions that were truer to the experiences of their own people and histories rather than those based on the “trepidations and antagonisms” of the invisibly warring superpowers or the expectations of vestigial imperialism. The more recent surge in biennials in South Asia can be traced to similar geopolitical shifts in the post-Cold War era.

But this is one reading of the rise of biennials in the developing South. Another, darker, view posits the non-Western biennial as an ironic reincarnation of the world fairs and large-scale industrial exhibitions of the 19th century that were manifestations of the relentless ambition of the colonial empires. Oliver Marchart, a professor of political theory in the department of political science at the University of Vienna, links “the biennial format” with the world fair, “which provided institutional backing for the internal nation building of the colonial and industrial nations during the nineteenth century”. In an article titled The Globalization of Art and the ‘Biennials of Resistance’: A History of the Biennials from the Periphery, he also points out, “World Fairs were colossal hegemonic machines of a globally dominant Western culture.”

There can be no doubt that, for the West, these extravagant exhibitions showcasing industrial and technological advancements and ‘exotic’ wares and artefacts from distant, subjugated lands symbolised a dazzling era of abundance and superiority, even magnanimity. The colonial sections that were often part of these exhibitions were presented with pride and a desire to civilise the indigenous populations of the colonies.

Revisiting the Paris world fair of 1900, also remembered as the Exposition Universelle, English novelist and poet A S Byatt writes in her 2009 novel The Children’s Book: “The Exhibition could be seen as a series of paradoxes. It was gigantic and exorbitant, covering 1,500 acres and costing 120 million francs. It attracted 48 million paying visitors, took over four years to build … But it had the idiosyncratic metaphysical charm of all meticulous human reconstructions of reality, a charm we associate with miniature, toy theatres, puppet booths, doll houses, oilskin battlefields with miniature lead armies deployed around inch-high forests and hillocks. It had the recessive pleasing infinity of the biscuit tin painted on the biscuit tin.”

This description not only points to the illusion and factitiousness underlying the world fairs of the 19th century, it also reveals how the writer employs the imagery of the miniature to describe their appeal: a world rendered miniscule is a world rendered possessable. In the colonial imagination, such a distortion of scale was perhaps not a distortion at all but a reality.

This skewed outlook is further illuminated by Jeffrey L Spear, a professor at New York University, in A South Kensington Gateway from Gwalior to Nowhere, an essay on the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, held in London. He recounts efforts made by the exhibition’s British organisers to ensure that a decidedly rustic feel permeated the Indian exhibits. The “cultural emphasis” of the Indian galleries, he writes, “was on the production of handicraft against the backdrop of the timeless village”. This was because, even though “the English founded or greatly expanded many Indian cities”, India was “neither Bombay, nor Calcutta, nor Delhi, nor Hyderabad, nor Lahore, nor Madras, but the idea, or ideal, of a village”.

The Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 also featured, in the enthusiastic words of the Illustrated London News (July, 1886) as relayed by Spear, “life-size models of ‘our Hindoo soldiery’, and that ‘colossal masterpiece of taxidermy’, the Indian jungle with scenes of stuffed tigers fighting stuffed elephants and the like”. It also showed “anthropological exhibits of Indian racial types in typical garb, large-scale examples of Indian craftsmanship, architectural fragments, and an ‘exquisitely finished model of a native village’, with life-sized figures of Indian shopkeepers soliciting custom in a section of a native bazaar”.

The use of taxidermy – with its evocation of death and mortuary rituals – in portraying a colonised culture betrays that the exhibitors were so insensitive towards India and Indians that they were unable to perceive them as living, complex and layered entities.

What is of even graver concern is that the ethnocentric approach in putting out these ‘world’ exhibitions did not stop at non-living representations of other cultures — it also included living exhibits. There was, for instance, a ‘Native Artisans Display’ at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. A number of inmates from Agra jail were brought to London to pose as artisans in this display for the British public. These prisoners had learnt traditional Indian craft techniques as part of the British government’s agenda to preserve Indian crafts. (This agenda itself sprung from a desire to stem the growing amalgamation of ‘traditional’ Indian and ‘modern’ British artistry since this amalgamation was complicating clear-cut categories favoured by the coloniser.) In spite of the training given to the prisoners, the display – like other ethnographic exhibits born in the West such as human zoos, artificial villages, freak shows – was inauthentic and exploitative.

The colonial empire’s tendency to classify, compare and judge the colonised through its own paradigm is also manifest in the biennial layout that dedicates different pavilions to different countries. The pavilions, in the words of Jane Chin Davidson, who teaches at California State University, San Benardino, inevitably reinforce a “hierarchy of nations”. In an article, The Global Art Fair and the Dialectical Image, she writes that “the territorial determination of the art fair remains extrinsically a competition among ‘nations’ under the civilised aims for art”. It is precisely to counter the unfriendliness of such a tradition (rooted, as it is, in the original Venice Biennale) that many recent biennials are devised to address specific themes rather than pit nations against each other.

The Karachi Biennale (held in October 2017) and the Lahore Biennale (held in March 2018) have both generated quite a lot of discussion among Pakistani art circles. The former, especially, has evoked opinions that range from positive and supportive to negative and dismissive. It would be apposite, therefore, to review both the biennales in light of the history mentioned above.

Both biennials eschewed the pavilion format in favour of a loose, thematic framework. Both – like many other South Asian biennials – featured several politically subversive works and chose colonial-era buildings as some of their venues.

The repurposing of colonial architecture for exhibitions of politically charged, contemporary art by mostly South Asian practitioners reveals the spirit of rebellion that informed both endeavours. Bani Abidi’s installation, Memorial to Lost Words, pitched the unremembered presence of Indian soldiers in the British army during World War I next to a statue of Queen Victoria in the Lahore Museum. In a similar act of defiance, Sri Lankan artist Pala Pothupitiye refashioned teabags into an academic robe to expose colonial avarice and its corruption of the educational systems of South Asia. His work was installed at the Raj-era Claremont House in Karachi.

Though Fazal Rizvi’s work was not showcased at a British-era building but at the Mughal-built Lahore Fort, he, by using the allegory of a tiger-hunt, did demand an answer from the British Empire for its many transgressions against the Indian subcontinent.

The two biennials did endorse a collective and conscious engagement with our region’s past and with many of its present-day concerns (unchecked urbanisation, political instability, immigration and displacement). Yet they also included aspects that can be deemed problematic, especially in the context of an art market that still capitulates to the demands and intimations of a Eurocentric order. As part of the Lahore Biennale, for example, Imran Qureshi organised the ‘Maktab’ project in collaboration with the Aga Khan Museum, the National College of Arts and the Lahore Walled City Authority. It involved 24 young miniature painters working for several hours every day (for the whole duration of the biennial) in a section of the Lahore Fort that was either reserved for clerks or, as suggested by the Aga Khan Museum’s website, was a Mughal-era school operating within the fort. In the courtyard of this site, which was open to the public, the artists occupied separate alcoves to work on miniature paintings.

Photographs of the project from around the time of the biennial show young artists being observed by curious audiences as they sit hunched over their unfinished works. Some photos show members of the local art elite guiding ostensibly important guests through the site as the visitors look at the artists with delight.

The curator perhaps wanted to supplement a pervasive contemporary fascination with miniature art from South Asia with the excitement of ‘live’ miniature painting in a setting where historical miniature painting was presumably produced. The fact that a museum committed to Islamic art but based in Ontario co-sponsored the exhibit (which was uncomfortably reminiscent of the ‘Native Artisans Display’) is perhaps indicative of the broader contradictions prevalent in our art industry. We may be making deliberate efforts to shake off unwanted, colonial legacies by both lamenting and celebrating our difficult pasts, but we are still catering to an essentially Western world view that continues to assert old divisions and parameters. It is revealing how a majority of Pakistani artists who have achieved international acclaim in recent years have had to provide, sometimes even contrive, links – however oblique – to the ethos or tenets of traditional miniature painting.

Equally significant is the fact that the institution that co-sponsors the leading, international prize for Islamic art is a British museum directly associated with the first world fair — The Great Exhibition (or The Crystal Palace Exhibition) of 1851. The prize is also named after the Queen and Prince Consort who epitomise the empire.

In many ways, we are still caught in the colonial binaries of Eastern, which means traditional and exotic, and Western, which means modern and clear-sighted. What symbolises this enduring irony the most is an exhibit that was originally commissioned by the British for the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883 but was later transported to England in 200 packages for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. A rather apocryphal compilation of mixed Indian motifs, it was a massive sandstone gateway titled The Gwalior Gateway. It was done, as Spear argues, like other screens and gateways in the exhibition, “in the interest, paradoxically, of authenticity”. It played to pre-held notions of what art from India ought to be like — traditional. The Gwalior Gateway was eventually walled off inside the Victoria and Albert Museum where it remained on view till the 1950s, as a fragment of an imperially imagined India absorbed into a modern, British ethos.

The biennials in Lahore and Karachi did present a number of truly democratic works that neither made claims on traditional artistic processes nor employed convoluted ideas and languages to keep step with the current inclinations of the international art market. They functioned autonomously and unrestrictedly as art for the people.

Ali Kazim’s Lover’s Temple Ruins at the Lawrence Gardens, Lahore, was one such work. A faux-ruin crafted lovingly out of clay hearts, it had no agendas; it brokered no stratagems. It was a simple and touching comment on the policing of public expressions of love — an act as ageless as the act of love itself. Another work in the same vein was Ayaz Jokhio’s installation at Karachi’s NJV School. It featured small, uniform-clad puppets in a classroom. Through invisible strings, the puppets were made to rise in unison every time the classroom door was opened, in an eerie parody of official protocol and ceremony.

Yet there were numerous works which, though they dealt with the struggles of local people and presented the problems our region is facing, did so in disconnected, analytical and highly impersonal ways. By doing this, they engendered a formidable distance between the works that, for all intents and purposes, were meant for the public and the public itself, prompting the question: who is this all for?

In planning local biennials or while taking part in them, Pakistani curators and artists do not have it easy. We expect them to navigate not only a labyrinth of logistical red tape but also pick their way through grim, half-built passages of ideology. We want them to accept history and challenge it — simultaneously. We hope that their exhibits are both global and unequivocally local at the same time.

This is a lot to expect. What may help is a perennial rather than seasonal engagement by the art community with the public. There should be a focus on making the biennals inclusive in terms of where the artists come from and what kind of disciplines are showcased. The Karachi Biennale, in these respects, was a more demotic affair than the one in Lahore. It brought together a more colourful variety of oeuvres and presented young and old, nationally and internationally admired, artists.

What is special about a biennial is that, given its recurrence every two years, it always carries the promise of change and adjustment. The next editions of the two biennals cannot but do better than their inaugural performances.

This article was published in the Herald's May 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.