Hiding in Plain Sight

On Oct. 18, 2007, Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan after eight years in exile, flying into Karachi, where she was greeted by a massive homecoming celebration. "We were so delighted she was back," recalls one of Pakistan's best-known contemporary artists, Rashid Rana, who was in Lahore at the time. "One felt sure good times were ahead." A few hours into the procession, two bombs exploded among the crowd. Bhutto escaped unharmed, but 143 other people were killed. Rana was among the millions who watched the event on television, images of the gnarled metal and flesh thereafter fixed in his mind.

Two months later Bhutto's assassins succeeded, but it was the events of Oct. 18 that prompted Rana to make Red Carpet, a glossy rendition of a traditional Pakistani carpet pieced together using thousands of tiny photographs of torn and dismembered animal flesh. These were taken by Rana, coincidentally, earlier that same day when he went on a research trip to a slaughterhouse, not yet sure how he would use the images. At the time he was struck by how quickly he became desensitized to the corpses and blood. Later that night the photos, all too easily conflated with the human carnage on TV, shocked him anew, and eventually came to represent in his work the brutal violence bubbling just under the surface of refined society. But Rana's decision to use animal flesh as a stand-in for human also reflects the kind of political subtext increasingly common to the work of a new generation of internationally savvy Pakistani artists, a sampling of which are in Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art From Pakistan, the first major exhibition of contemporary Pakistani art in the United States (and currently on display at the Asia Society in New York).

Throughout Pakistan's volatile 62-year history, artists and writers have often had to keep half an eye on a cast of dictators and extremists. Today there is no official censorship in Pakistan, but many of the country's most prominent artists were teenagers in the '80s, when Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq's military regime introduced strict Islamic Sharia—with stringent rules of government oversight. More recently, Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the Taliban in the country's border regions with Afghanistan have provided their own brands of intimidation to free expression.

So it's perhaps not surprising that even the current generation of artists—who travel widely and mix aspects of traditional Pakistani art with the kind of conceptualism that the international art world is fond of—engage political agendas with the sort of discreet touch that Rana uses in his carpets of flesh. Painter Imran Qureshi plays on Pakistani miniature painting, which dates from the Mughal era, by adding unsettling details that remind us of the current war with the Taliban in Pakistan, such as camouflage socks on the feet of a reclining religious man and the use of red, white, and blue to echo the colors of the Stars and Stripes. Bani Abidi's video shows a traditional Pakistani brass-pipe band, but instead of Pakistani music, they are teaching themselves the "Star-Spangled Banner," a reflection of anxieties about Pakistan's political and military alliance with the United States.

To many Americans, Pakistan represents a distant but menacing muddle of threats: an unstable nuclear power and a breeding ground for Islamic fanatics. By contrast, artists like Rana offer some insight into the international mindset of a new generation borne from a sophisticated old culture, however sotto voce they must be in their work. And as Rana says, the need for restraint only makes stronger the desire to deal with politics. "I love art history, and formal art concerns are very important in my work—but I cannot deny the time we are living in."