Muhammad Zeeshan's American flag made with Pepsi and Coca Cola cans at the Art Dubai fair in 2008
Brimming with excitement, artist Muhammad Zeeshan happily leafs through his portfolio, pouring over the details of his works and describing his creative experiences. In 2007, he attended a residency programme hosted by Gasworks, a London-based non-profit organisation dedicated to bringing British artists together with their foreign counterparts. Zeeshan was to work alongside four other artists during the duration of the residency.
In his discussions with his fellow residents, he proudly recounted the details of his career: how he had started off by painting cinema billboards in his hometown of Mirpur Khas before getting a graduate degree in fine arts and then going to exhibit his works at many famous gallery spaces both within Pakistan and abroad. He told them that all his works were sold out each time he had exhibited them. His achievements, he says, did not impress the other residents. They shrugged their shoulders, dismissing his career as a “commercial” enterprise.
Perturbed, Zeeshan retorted that his career was no longer commercial as it had grown from commercially-endorsed projects to experimentation with neo-miniatures. The response he got: the residents considered his art commercial because he seemed to be making paintings only to sell them and did not seek to interact with people through his art.
After a lot of discussion with his mentors and coordinators at Gasworks, Zeeshan thought he could explore the concept of commercial art by challenging the opposition between art for money and art for people. He set about creating an installation at a park in Oxfordshire, a structure of shelves transformed into the American flag through strategically placed blue and red Pepsi and Coca Cola cans. He invited passersby to have a free cold drink from the shelves. The cans disappeared one by one and the shelves were almost empty by the end of the day, bearing only a nominal resemblance to the flag. This entire process was recorded as a three-and-a-half-minute video, which was later shown at a Gasworks exhibition.
Learning from and immersing themselves in the economy, society,culture and the arts of a new city or a new country, the residentschallenge themselves with new concepts and methods.
Zeeshan says he would have never attempted or thought of making the flag installation in his own studio space in Pakistan. If it were not for the awkward and confrontational conversation he had with his fellow residents in London, he would not have felt the need to look closely at the term commercial art. “…Everything [in the installation] was based on commercial activity yet my work was not for sale. So why does selling one’s work alone mean consumerist art?”
Working on the installation, he says, also allowed him to understand the importance of an audience for the visual arts. “If no one had picked up the cans, I could not have made my point. Ever since that residency, I have done a lot of work in which my art cannot be complete without the participation of the audience.”
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Having been to more than 12 artist residencies – in countries as different from each other as Norway is from the US – Zeeshan believes these programmes open the artist’s mind and affect their practice, allowing them to make new experiments in unfamiliar environments. Residency programmes, thus, seem to provide perfect avenues for drawing inspiration from new surroundings, new materials and even conversations with other artists.
Residency programmes for artists are quite similar to residency programmes for doctors, writers and architects. Essentially, these require an artist to stay within the premises provided by the organisation hosting it for a pre-decided time period. During the stay, the artists try to create works that benefit from the change in their environment and surroundings. Learning from and immersing themselves in the economy, society, culture and the arts of a new city or a new country, the residents challenge themselves with new concepts and methods.
A handful of residency organisations are operating in Pakistan, too. Vasl, initially known as Vasl Artists’ Collective, hosts one of Pakistan’s earliest residency programmes. It came into being in January 2000, after a two-week long international artists’ workshop held on the shores of Gadani town in Balochistan. The organisation was conceived as a platform committed to creating opportunities for dialogue and exchange through artistic practices. Artist Naiza Khan (who is also a founding member of Vasl) recalls: “We did not realise the extent to which this artists-led initiative would gain support and the immense possibilities that it could create for artists as an alternative platform.”
The Gadani workshop attracted around 600 people to this ship-breaking town to view the work of 22 artists who were part of Vasl’s inaugural residency programme. The event would seem slightly absurd to some Pakistanis: an isolated town suddenly swarming with foreign and local artists who were projecting slide shows and installing artwork, while discussing the importance of residency programmes. Yet the event successfully highlighted the lack of opportunities to freely create art away from the studio-gallery circuit, as art historian Iftikhar Dadi later noted.
As a participating artist, Zeeshan fondly remembers the Gadani workshop. He was then a recent graduate from the miniature department of the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. With only two artists left before he was to display his work as part of a series of multimedia presentations, he began to perspire, conscious of his then inept English. Much to his surprise, the Indonesian artist presenting his work before Zeeshan had an even worse English accent and the French artist after him could barely enunciate a few words in English. “Suddenly, I didn’t feel like an alien anymore. It was a turning point for me; I realised that artists in residency initiatives meet each other on equal footing, no matter which part of the world they are from.”
Residency programmes, thus, seem to provide perfect avenues fordrawing inspiration from new surroundings, new materials and evenconversations with other artists.
It was Dadi who, after returning from a workshop in Delhi in 1997, convinced Naiza Khan about the need for setting up a farmhouse for artists in Pakistan, away from the distractions of big cities. In a remote area such as Gadani, the artists inevitably could spend more time with each other, search for materials together and take daily explorative excursions around the place. “[Dadi] convinced me that it would be easy but, of course, it was a lot more complicated,” Naiza Khan chuckles as she reminisces about the initial days of Vasl’s history. Over the next three years (1998-2000), she doggedly searched for the perfect space until she got hold of a government guest house in Gadani. Since then, Vasl has attracted around 500 international and local artists who have been part of various residencies and have undertaken multiple artistic projects.
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