It was the annoyance of a president that led to the completion of the National Art Gallery in Islamabad. As news records from the time reveal, soon after General Pervez Musharraf moved to his presidential offices, he saw from that high political perch a half-completed carcass of a building. Annoyed at this abandoned protuberance, he asked his staff what it was. He learnt that it was the long-planned and still unrealised National Art Gallery.
It was originally envisioned and approved in 1973 during the tenure of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, only to be abandoned when General Zia took power later that decade. A building was finally commissioned in the 1990s during Benazir Bhutto’s first tenure as prime minister. It was beset with furtive starts and dramatic stops as Pakistani politics trundled along its course of civilian and military rule, with rulers who had differing commitments to the preservation and presentation of art.
A country's creativity
As he told the audience at the gala opening of the gallery in August 2007, once he knew about the project, Musharraf immediately summoned Naeem Pasha, the project’s ever-patient architect, and allotted him the $9 million required for its completion. In this way, the gallery became a reality, at least in a physical sense.
According to reports, when it was inaugurated, the collection at the gallery was carefully and boldly curated. Artists from all genres were represented. Many pieces poked fun at the military but were nevertheless displayed, even as president Musharraf walked through the building.
It was in the estimation of the New York Times (and many others in the foreign press) an impressive and bold representation of Pakistan via its creative depth and diversity. From the design of the building to the curatorial work of the collection, the gallery was declared an emblem of Pakistan’s promise.
Broken promises
But promises in Pakistan are fragile things and what one ruler constructs and inaugurates, another may neglect or refuse to tolerate. Such has been the fate of the National Art Gallery. Touted as a giant step forward for Pakistani art, the building now languishes, with many sections apparently prey to dereliction. In its heyday, not too distant from the pitiable present, the gallery housed a permanent collection, its contents revealing to would-be artists, and to visitors in general, the visual genealogy of a nation. It was also a venue that held regular exhibits featuring the work of contemporary artists.
Not much of that is happening today. In fact, many of the items in the gallery’s permanent collection are no longer on display. No exhibition of contemporary art has taken place for sometime. According to Nageen Hayat, the founder and director of Nomad Gallery in Islamabad, the location of the National Art Gallery is in itself a tremendous challenge in terror-afflicted Pakistan.
Given that the gallery is located in the highly secured red zone, few of the artists who have works in the gallery are able to go there to see them. Given that there is no public transport that will take visitors inside the red zone, as well as the plethora of condescending and invasive security checks if they do manage to get to the zone boundary, it is no surprise that the National Gallery is largely inaccessible to all but the rich, powerful and well-connected.
Forgotten art
If accessibility is one failing of the gallery, accountability is another. Among the works from the permanent collection that have seemingly disappeared are the paintings of eminent abstract artist Anwar Jalal Shemza. A member of the Lahore Circle, Shemza brought a particularly Pakistani flair to abstract expressionism and modernism, revealing how varied strains of inspiration can be woven together in a unique and original symbiosis.
Trained at the Slade School in London and inspired by the works of artists like Kandinsky, Mondrian and Klee, Shemza used motifs from Islamic architecture and calligraphy to produce a calligraphic modernism whose inventiveness continues to be studied, exhibited and lauded around the world. The Tate Modern in London, one of the premier museums of contemporary art in the world, has several of Shemza’s works in its permanent collection.
Not so in his native Pakistan. According to artist and writer Proffesor Salima Hashmi, no one knows the whereabouts of the Anwar Shemza paintings that were a part of the National Art Gallery’s permanent collection at its inauguration. Inquiries in writing and otherwise, made by Mary Shemza, the artist’s widow, appear to have been summarily ignored by the officials in charge, none of whom, it seems, are accountable to anyone regarding the art works in their possession. If such is the situation of Shemza’s paintings, it is possible that many other artworks have also disappeared, with the staff feeling no responsibility at all to locate their whereabouts in their inventory.
In any society – even one that is ailing like Pakistan – art, with its pushing of boundaries, its variety and multi-dimensionality of expression, presents a constructive means to engage the ambiguities and uncertainties of the present. Interactions with the artistic present conversations between the past and present, tradition and innovation – all of them are crucial to cultural progress.
The neglect of art, its severance from those whose stories it tells, is a hacking of the imaginative and the expressive, both necessary for the sustenance of the soul and spirit. In Pakistan’s case, the devaluation of art as manifested in the neglect of the National Art Gallery, exposes the sort of intellectual destitution that leaves the country’s citizens maimed and vulnerable, unable to fend off the parasitic agendas of extremism.
The neglect of the National Gallery hence is not simply another episode in Pakistan’s saga of bureaucratic corruption and official avarice. It is, instead, a deeper denial of the value and worth of creative expression, a passive endorsement of the dogmatism that Pakistani art, if it were not so shamefully neglected, would be best equipped to fight.
This article first appeared on Dawn.