Between Thinking, Seeing, Saying & Nothing
This year opened for Vasl with the residency program Between Thinking, Seeing, Saying and Nothing, featuring three artists’ who came together at the Vasl Residence for 5 weeks. The resident artists explored Karachi and responded to fragments of the city in various mediums. Intrigued by the city’s ability to absorb conflicts and coalesce communities, Marco, Eric and Shaheen created works that reflected the social complexities of urban life in Karachi.
The residency showcased various artistic expressions such as performance, installations, mixed media and research based art works, emanating from individual perceptions and collective psyche. During their stay at Vasl, the artists and the writer in residence participated in Artshares at universities, ventured out on exploratory trips and commuted at art forums, artists, studios and universities.
Eric Peter from Netherlands was struck by the skills and ethnicities of multitude craftsman and artisans in Karachi. During his residency at Vasl, Eric recorded conversations with artisans and political leaders from the city and commented on the shared experiences of lives across borders and social classes. Eric focused on sociopolitical conflicts through a dialogue with different ethnicities in Karachi, represented through various local crafts in his work.
“Through investigative projects I question the very expectations, assumptions and habits we are accustomed to from a personal and associative point-of-view.”
Shaheen Jaffarani observed the continuous cycle of decay in the city and engaged with the visual possibilities that it presented to an artist. Having grown up in Karachi, Shaheen was familiar with paan stained walls and littered streets – yet as an artist she saw these forms of decay as marks of individuals in an anonymous city. She laid out a sheet of canvas on the street which was eventually trodden over by people and vehicles, accumulating marks of dirt and movement – “small actions that reflect a bigger picture: the urban culture.”
Marco Pezzotta gathered an assortment of objects that vacillated between familiar and unfamiliar and laid them out on a nylon chattai (prayer mat). Looking into the “visual records that produce an intermittent narration and show the craving for an historical truth,” Marco found that his collections of various objects brought together an archaeological display of the ordinary, paying tribute to Karachi. This “playground’ of knick knacks not only reflected the city’s history and it’s visual stories but also showed how connections can develop through art.
Fazal Rizvi, the artist writer in resident, compiled a publication titled “Verba Volant, scripta manent” which is Latin for “spoken words fly away, written words remain.” He reflected on the resident artists’ processes which were permeated with Fazal’s own conversations with his mother. Intermingling abstracts of personal recordings with creative processes created an interesting written dialogue for the residency.
