The Drawing Room was appropriately named — the gallery is an extension of Sanam Taseer’s living room. There are no public spaces dedicated to contemporary art in Lahore. When I visited Taseer’s walled, gated, and guarded house, she greeted me warmly, though we hadn’t met before. She had a slight British accent from her years at law school in England and wore Western clothes — stilettos, tailored pants, and a silky blouse. She had moved back to Lahore from New York a few years earlier.

Taseer’s father, Salmaan Taseer, was the governor of Punjab from 2008 to 2011, and he was a vocal critic of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws. On January 4, 2011, he was assassinated by one of his bodyguards. Several people I met in Lahore mentioned “what happened to Salmaan Taseer,” but I rarely heard the word “blasphemy,” as if it were blasphemous to even mention it. In conversation and in the art I saw at Sanam Taseer’s house, direct references to politics were rare.

On her walls were several neo-miniatures and a few larger paintings; most were the work of former N.C.A. graduates. Her living room was full of carefully arranged midcentury modern furniture: a Mies van der Rohe daybed, an Eames lounge chair, an Arco lamp.

“I am obsessed with Danish modern design,” she said.

“It must be hard to get here — did you bring it from New York?” I asked.

“They make them here! At the local shops an Eames chair will set you back six hundred dollars!”

Six hundred dollars — 60,000 rupees — was Taseer’s magic number: most of the art in her gallery was listed for that price. Once the artists she represents gain traction outside Pakistan, they usually find an international gallery to represent them, first in India or Dubai. Taseer is an essential link on this path out.

There is a resulting emptiness at the center of the Lahore art world: the city’s best artists can’t or won’t sell at home. The work has already been spoken for, earmarked for international fairs and shows even before it is made. With a handful of exceptions, rich Lahoris won’t pay what the international market will for art. Instead of $70,000 — which is what you might spend on a piece by Imran Qureshi if you were buying in New York — they want to spend 70,000 rupees. As a consequence, the only work by Qureshi I saw in Lahore was in his house.

Farida Batool created one of the most arresting works I found on my trip. It was a life-size photograph of a little girl in a puff-sleeved white dress standing in a field of yellow flowers. She looks straight out of the picture with a solemn gaze. Over her dress is what looks like a dark gray life jacket. It is, in fact, a suicide bomber’s vest. The nature of the medium, a lenticular print, makes the work shimmer and change, and as you walk by, the girl disappears entirely.

The day after I saw the print, at a collector’s house, I visited Batool in her office at N.C.A., where she is a professor. It was a cold morning and there was no heat. Batool drank chai out of a thermos and wore a chunky sweater that nearly swallowed her. She had the same solemn expression as the girl in the field, and I wondered whether the print might be a self-portrait. She smiled and said yes: she thought of using a model but didn’t feel right making someone else disappear. She had used a childhood photo of herself, from the summer of 1974. She remembered that time as peaceful: “We used to have our main gates opened at all times and the main doors would get locked at night only.”

Much of Batool’s recent work reflects a family tragedy: her first cousin and his son were shot while driving to school — “because they were Shia,” she said. Such targeted killings are assassinations without the celebrity, and they have become widespread in Lahore. Most people I met had just one degree of separation from someone — family, neighbor, friend — who had been killed in this way.

Batool articulated something that I had begun to suspect: that much of the best work by Lahori artists was made in response to the increasing violence in the city. After her cousins’ deaths, Batool exhibited a series of photographs about walking through Lahore called Kahani eik shehr ki (“Story of a City”). “That project helped me,” she said, “because all the anger was directed with protesting in a creative way.” In 2011, following a bombing in his neighborhood, Qureshi created an installation of bloodred foliage at the Sharjah Biennial.

While I was in Lahore, a Taliban commander was killed in a U.S. drone attack, which temporarily derailed the Pakistani government’s peace talks with the group. Batool was critical of the talks and said that negotiating with fundamentalists was impossible. I asked her whether she ever discussed politics in her classroom. She said she did, but carefully: “I say, ‘No, I don’t want to answer your question. I want you to talk about it.’ ”

She reminded me that N.C.A. is a government institution. Classes could have up to 150 students, and there were dozens of teachers and administrators. It was impossible to know who might describe something she said as too radical. And there were scary precedents. A popular teacher of English literature at another university in Punjab had been imprisoned for blasphemy, and the humanrights lawyer who took his case had been murdered.

During the decade before Qureshi and his classmates arrived at N.C.A., Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq was president of Pakistan and censorship was a national policy. But I’m told that even under Zia, who seized power in a military coup, the school was a safe haven, a place where European art books were passed around and ideas and images could be discussed with a freedom unknown in the rest of the country.

Under Pervez Musharraf, the national censorship policy was relaxed, and many artists of Qureshi’s generation who had left to pursue careers abroad returned home to work and teach. Pakistan developed a strong and critical media, which is still active today. Contemporary artists felt freer to address issues of violence, gender, and politics in their work.

Today it is the fundamentalists, not the government, who restrict speech. A few months before I visited N.C.A., Sohbet, the school’s journal, was shut down because of a charge of blasphemy by the jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. The New York Timesreported on the story, but the Pakistani media was eerily silent.

I asked several of the artists I met about Sohbet. No one wanted to speak on the record. Eventually someone told me what had offended the fundamentalists: the journal had reproduced a painting of a Muslim cleric and a naked boy. I was told that it was influential supporters of N.C.A. who had urged the media blackout; the story could have endangered the entire Lahore art scene. N.C.A. issued an apology for the article, shut down Sohbet, and destroyed the remaining copies.

It was unclear how Lashkar-e-Taiba became aware of an art publication that circulated among such a small group of like-minded people. Someone within the school might have leaked it, which made many of the faculty and students uneasy.

On one of my last days in Lahore, I got my hands on a copy of the banned journal. The supposedly blasphemous work does indeed show a cleric and a naked boy. They are in a market, part of a central grouping of three figures loosely based on Manet’sLe déjeuner sur l’herbe. The naked, effeminate boy looks directly at the viewer while the cleric lights the cigarette of the third figure, a clothed boy who sits between them. The article that accompanies the picture is about homoerotic desire in contemporary Pakistani art.

No one I spoke to dwelled on the obvious sadness of the journal’s being shut down. That outcome was taken in stride as politically inevitable. Instead they talked about the details: the placement at the front of the book and the size of the image (“If only it hadn’t been such a big picture”).

The word I heard most frequently about the case was “unwise.” The artist was unwise. The editorial board was also unwise. The opposite of being unwise in Pakistan is playing a careful game of self-censorship and concealed criticism. That’s why so many artists have found the miniature tradition so useful: subversive content is often overlooked when it is presented in a beloved national art form.

Before I left Lahore, Qureshi urged me to join his class on a field trip to Rohtas Fort, which was built in the sixteenth century. The drive from Lahore took four hours, and I fell asleep in the car almost immediately, despite the noise from the rickshaws, motorcycles, and trucks that surrounded us. When I was shaken awake, I looked out the window and realized we were in the country. The sky was wide and blue, and before me were towering stone walls.

Inside the gate the group climbed up to walk the ramparts. From there we could see that the fort’s walls snaked through a landscape of scrub-covered hills. I saw more goats than people. Above all, it was quiet, peaceful.

“I’ve been here maybe fifteen or twenty times,” Qureshi said appreciatively.

“Why not do an installation here?” I asked. I imagined his signature motifs curling over the crenellated walls, even nestling into the hollow stone once used for executions (the heads would drop more than a hundred feet), before running down to the land below.

“It doesn’t need it,” he replied.

Link: 

http://harpers.org/archive/2015/10/pakistan-in-miniatures/