Another auction, another record by Salman Toor - Phillips, London

 

Salman Toor, Liberty Porcelain, 2012.COURTESY PHILLIPS

Headlined by Salman Toor, Phillips $5.1 Million London ‘New Now’ Sale Reaches New High

BY ANGELICA VILLA

December 17, 2020 6:00pm

Source: Artnews

On Tuesday, Phillips’s “New Now” sale in London generated a total of £3.8 million ($5.1 million) across 172 lots, landing at the low end of the pre-sale estimate of £3.7 million–£5.5 million (with premium) and realizing a 76.6 percent sell-through rate. The total was a disappointment when measured against the hopes of the estimates but not against the history of these sales. The £3.8 million marks the house’s highest total achieved for its “New Now” iteration in London.

The “New Now” sales showcase Phillips’s prowess in creating markets for emerging artists. With speculative buying returning to the forefront of collecting (as opposed to a flight to blue-chip quality) the series in London and New York continues to gradually expand. Last year’s equivalent sale brought in a total of £3.7 million, though that 2019 sale’s top lot was a work by an established mid-career artist, William Kentridge; it realized the same total achieved the year before in 2018.

The London sale follows Phillips record-setting $134.6 million contemporary art evening sale total in New York, achieving the highest figure for an evening sale in the house’s history. The sale was led by a $41 million David Hockney landscape Nichols Canyon (1980), sold by Seattle-based real-estate developer Richard Hedreen.

Leading the New Now auction by price was Pakistan-born New-York based market darling Salman Toor’s Liberty Porcelain (2012), which found a new buyer for a £378,000 ($505,688) premium price. That was nine times the estimate of £40,000. Toor’s growing value, bolstered by a current solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York which runs until April, is moving toward the forefront of the market’s attention. The sale comes on the heels of Toor’s auction debut when one part of his triptych Rooftop Ghost Party I from 2015 sold for $822,000. That sale made eight times the estimate of $100,000 during a Christie’s New York contemporary art day sale in early December.

The second-most expensive lot was Banksy’s well-known image Girl with Balloon from 2004, which sold for £189,000 ($252,800), against an estimate of £100,000–150,000. Another staple artist in the Phillips contemporary sales is Eddie Martinez, whose Skullscape 3 (large), from 2012, sold on Tuesday for £163,800 ($219,100), double its estimate of £80,000.

Riz Ahmed on Manto, Qawwali, House Music, South Asia Art and more - NY Times

Riz Ahmed - Source: Gaurdian

 Source: NYT

MY TEN

Riz Ahmed Finds the Beat Between Qawwali and House Music

The actor and rapper, who is shooting the sci-fi thriller “Invasion” with Octavia Spencer, talked about the things that he turned to “at different moments to recalibrate or go back to the well,” he said.

By Kathryn Shattuck

• Published Nov. 10, 2020Updated Nov. 13, 2020

Riz Ahmed, the British actor, rapper and activist, tends to speak in paragraphs filled with vivid details. But in his latest role, as a punk-metal drummer who loses his hearing, he learned a different way to express himself.

“As someone who plays a lot with words — spoken word and poetry and other stuff — it really forced me to step out of my comfort zone,” Ahmed said of “Sound of Metal,” which premieres in theaters Nov. 20 and on Amazon Prime Video Dec. 4. “I think it opened me up physically in subtle but also quite profound ways.”

When they first met to discuss the movie, the director Darius Marder laid out the terms: Nothing would be faked — not the drumming or the American Sign Language central to Ahmed’s character, Ruben. After some initial trepidation, Ahmed decided he was up for the challenge.

“Suddenly these two things that were quite daunting got me excited,” he said. So for seven and a half months he “stopped the rest of my life,” he said, and diligently studied both.

His life now resumed, Ahmed — an Oxford grad whose résumé includes “Rogue One,” “Jason Bourne” and “Venom,” as well as a lead actor Emmy for HBO’s “The Night Of” — spent lockdown in London this spring. In March, his conceptual album, “The Long Goodbye,” addressed his “feeling like your country’s breaking up with you” in the wake of Brexit.

In a Zoom interview from Twentynine Palms, Calif., where he has been shooting “Invasion” with Octavia Spencer, Ahmed elaborated on his cultural essentials — “things that I turn to at different moments to recalibrate or go back to the well,” he said. “Things that speak to my identity.”

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

1. Mathieu Kassovitz’s “La Haine”

It’s a film that I stumbled across when I was a teenager. It was showing late night, a subtitled black-and-white movie. Normally I would have changed the channel. But it was so stylish in how it was shot and edited, and these characters that would jump bursting out of the screen were characters that I felt I recognized. It opened me up to a different kind of cinema.

I feel like it’s a timeless movie, sadly. It’s about riots in the wake of a police-brutality killing in Paris, and it’s something that resonates today. It’s a story of adolescent malaise and marginalization and what that combination can do. But it’s also a hilarious film. It’s a very youthful film. It gives me an indescribable feeling.

2. Short stories by Saadat Hasan Manto

He was a master of the dark satirical short story. He was put on trial for indecency, purely because he chose to portray lives that were not considered worthy of being portrayed. I’ve never been able to sit still for very long, so I’ve always had a tormented relationship with reading. Some of his stories are under a page, but they cut so deep.

He has written about the horrors of partition. He has written about displacement, about how these labels of nationality and identity are fluid. It’s like building a hut on quicksand, and that speaks to my own experience as a child of immigrants and someone who travels a lot. One short story, “Toba Tek Singh,” was particularly an inspiration to me on “The Long Goodbye.” Toba Tek Singh is someone who refuses to pick a side, who decides to build his home in no man’s land. That idea is something that I’m trying to do with my work.

3. Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”

It speaks to a spirituality that I can just get down with — this idea that divinity lives in the shadow of our actions. It resonates with the verse from the Quran about God’s light being described as a lamp in a niche. And it’s a metaphor I’ve returned to on “Can I Live.”

I also loved this line, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” That’s an incredible invitation, and something that brings me back to part of why I choose to act. It’s about a desire to want to experience it all, and to not make everything happen but to let everything happen to you. There’s an element of surrender in there.

4. ’90s Multiculturalism

In the ’90s there was this moment of celebrating multiculturalism in the U.K. Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal created “Goodness Gracious Me,” this groundbreaking sitcom like “Key & Peele” or “Chappelle’s Show.” With hits like “Bend It Like Beckham” or “Bhaji on the Beach,” suddenly we were on the screen. And it wasn’t actors browned up doing Apu accents. This was us. Similarly, in music, Bally Sagoo coming up with these remix cassettes where you’d take hip-hop beats and Bollywood beats, and you’d buy them at a local paan store. I pay homage to this in a short film called “Daytimer.” A big part of this culture was daytime raves, because South Asian girls with strict conservative families weren’t allowed out at night. So we would do all of our parties in the daytime. And you could go and then put back your school uniform, and no one would know any better.

5. Aziz Mian’s “Main Sharabi”

Aziz Mian was a qawwali singer. And qawwali is a genre that I’ve been increasingly taking an interest in as I think about how I can pull from my own cultural heritage and contribute to hip-hop, which I’m so cognizant is a Black art form. Qawwali is an amazing template to create within authentically, in that it’s a mixture of a kind of rap and spoken word and singing. It’s a Sufi tradition of gospel jazz. It’s improvised and quite punk, but it’s also quite devotional.

Aziz Mian was iconoclastic. He was deeply controversial. “Sharabi” means alcoholic, and what he says in the song is, “I’m an alcoholic, I’m an alcoholic.” And what he’s talking about is the intoxication of divine energy. It was mind-blowing for me, because it’s this tightrope of the sacred and the profane that you often have in qawwali, and that Aziz Mian took to its limit.

6. Mos Def’s “Black on Both Sides”

It’s an album that keeps on giving. I revisited the track “Love” the other day. When I first came to this album I was a teenager. When I’ve returned to it now in my mid-30s, I’m recognizing like, oh, wow, he’s referencing bell hooks when he talks about, “Is this the pain of too much tenderness?” You know, when bell hooks talks about how men might run from love because of the pain of making yourself vulnerable. But what he’s talking about is writing and the idea of losing yourself within the ink that spills onto the page.

7. British Rave Music

We have this very proud tradition of sound-system culture that comes from the Jamaican influence in London, which is huge. And from that, we put it through our blender to create these new genres of music every few years. It’s drum and bass, it’s jungle, then it’s garage, then it’s grind, then it’s dubstep, then it’s drill. There’s something just so restlessly creative in London’s concrete. Whenever I finished a film in America, I used to give people USB sticks of a playlist that would educate them on U.K. rave music. U.K. Apache’s “Original Nuttah” is a great primer into what jungle music is. You’ve got a British-Iraqi guy who has named himself Apache Indian, rapping in a mixture of cockney slang and Jamaican patois. I grew up speaking Jamaican slang. I was 20 before I understood they were Jamaican words.

Roy Davis Jr.’s “Gabriel,” sung by Peven Everett, is actually a U.S. garage track, but it takes places in that transition between [U.K.] house and garage. It’s an anthem, really. I think a lot of people in my generation would be like, “Play it at my funeral.”

But the most recent manifestation that’s close to my heart is Jai Paul’s 2013 leaked album, because it blends together all that amazing U.K. music and Black music with Bollywood music and Indian music. He’s created a language that really resonates with me.

8. South Asian Art

A couple of years ago, I decided to start buying small bits of art. The piece that really means a lot to me is a print by Raghu Rai. He took a photo in the late ’70s or early ’80s called “Life Outside Jama Masjid,” which is one of the main mosques in Delhi. It’s a guy who looks a little bit down on his luck — he might be drunk or stoned — and there’s a woman holding him by the cheeks to cheer him up. And there’s a crowd of people who are possibly more on the fringes of society that are gathered outside this mosque to cheer each other up. It struck me as what religion can be about at its best, providing a space of dignity for people who may not feel like they’re afforded dignity elsewhere.

I started buying Mughal miniatures under the tutelage of Navina Haidar, the curator of Islamic art at the Met museum. It’s so crazy that as brown creatives, we don’t know about our heritage. How are we going to move forward unless we know where we’re coming from? I’ve got quite a morbid piece called “Thief in the Night,” from like the 1400s. It’s a miniature of a thief breaking into someone’s house and killing him. But it’s painted so beautifully. I also got to know Salman Toor’s work when I was preparing for “Sound of Metal.” There’s this amazing piece called “East Village Apartment.” It’s this Pakistani guy who’s in his apartment, and he’s got all these books on his table about Indian painting and Pakistani history. He’s trying to do his best to understand where he comes from. But he’s got his head tilted back in exasperation with a glass of wine in his hand, and out the window you see a downtown mosque. And he can’t bear to look at the mosque and he can’t bear to look at the books. I thought it was a beautiful depiction of this busy limbo that so many of us live in.

9. Alocasia Zebrina

So I bought plants during lockdown. Changed my life. I love them — they’re my babies. Alocasia zebrina is a beautiful plant because it’s like the elephant ear, but it’s stripy like a zebra on the stems. And what’s crazy about it is how much they arch toward the sun. They’re so cheeky. They’ll go all the way to try and hit the window. I didn’t know what I was doing for a while and I only had one leaf left. And it snapped, and I was mortified. I thought it was done. But it was so resilient, and I managed to stake the plant and to fertilize it and now it’s sprouting babies. It’s just so satisfying. As someone who has grown up in a city, I never thought the countryside was really for me. It’s connecting me to nature in quite a personal way.

10. His Mum’s Do Pyaaza Recipe

“Do pyaaza” means from two onions. It’s a very simple curry dish that during lockdown my mum taught me, like, “Here’s something you can make and not screw up.” The onions caramelize, so it’s a cheap way of having a sweet curry. Quick to make, very fresh, not too oily, not too much of a sherva to it. My mouth is watering as I’m talking about it. It just tastes like home to me.

 

Salman Toor’s Intimate Paintings Are a Salve for Our Isolated Times

Source: Artsy

By: Alina Cohen 

April 3, 2020

 

View of Salman Toor’s studio with works in progress. Courtesy of the artist.

Portrait of Salman Toor. Courtesy of the artist.

Salman Toor’s small-scale, emerald-tinged paintings of queer bohemian gatherings are particularly poignant in our socially distanced time. Remember get-togethers in friends’ cramped city apartments? Remember their indoor strings of Christmas lights, tilting stacks of books, and lamps with exposed bulbs? Or the abundance of empty wine glasses and impromptu vamping for Instagram-ready shots? Remember going to a bar where people danced under a disco ball, and the bartender had all the right ingredients to make a perfect cocktail? Toor paints these elements of comfort and communal joy with an unsentimental nostalgia that makes me yearn for the time before video-chatting became the predominant way to socialize.

Toor’s lush, intimate works were supposed to get their due this month. The Whitney Museum of American Art planned to open the artist’s first-ever institutional solo show, “How Will I Know,” on March 20th, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition has been indefinitely postponed. After seeing Toor’s work on view at “Xenia: Crossroads in Portrait Painting,” Marianne Boesky’s recent portraiture show in Chelsea, I was really looking forward to the presentation. Instead, I got the next-best thing: speaking with Toor via phone about fashion, South Asian representation, and art history—three of the defining elements of his oeuvre.

Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1983. His community, he said, shared “pretty conservative, moral values.” He was always painting and drawing as a child, finding his friends in the art room of his macho all-boys prep school. Early on, art became a way for him to communicate.

In the early 2000s, Toor moved to the United States to attend college at Ohio Wesleyan University. He experienced major culture shock. “It was insane,” he said of his move to the Midwest. He compared his first year in the States to one of his “silent paintings,” where there’s so much going on, most of it unspoken. The canvas he referred to, Tea (2020), features a man and a woman sitting in a fenced yard, drinking tea. The starry cobalt sky glimmers above them. Toor’s far-off perspective details the potted plants on the patio steps, the white car in the driveway, and the lighted windows of the buildings beyond. Yet the central conversation remains guarded, intimate, and ambiguous in topic and tone.

Salman Toor, The Star, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Toor initially connected with the conservative values in his adoptive city. They reminded him of home. Soon enough, however, he was seeking a more radical, creative milieu. He moved into a hippie commune for the last three years of college, then left for New York. At Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, where he enrolled in an MFA program in 2007, Toor focused on academic painting. “You can really spend your whole life trying to be as good as those white guys,” he said. His early post-graduate paintings used 17th-century styles to represent contemporary South Asian subjects. At the time, he was painting from models and exhibiting work back in Lahore and Karachi; he was making enough money from sales to pay rent.

Yet the artist soon tired of old formulas. He stopped working from life, and instead began generating imaginary characters tinged with elements of illustration and fairy tales. He thought of wooden dolls, Pinocchio, and stories of innocent children. It excited Toor to distort his new figures, which featured a cobbled-together, patchwork essence.

Salman Toor, Bar Boy, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Skinny, brown, hairy men became dominant in Toor’s work—and still prevail today. “I saw myself in that figure. I see myself as an amalgam of different cultures and things I’ve grown to like,” he said. Such characters appear in Toor’s recent canvases of men stopped at customs in airports. The artist portrays these subjects standing behind gray tables laden with their personal belongings, such as shoes or a cell phone.

Toor inserts grace and ambiguity into these fraught scenes. His men are dignified, their clothing (a long brown vest, a shaggy turtleneck) deftly sketched. “Fashion is a tool of empowerment or of describing poverty or humiliation on someone foreign,” Toor said. People of color, when stopped in an airport, often don’t receive much care or positive attention. Toor provides it through his art.

These paintings address the idea of “being anywhere, or being nowhere,” said Whitney curator Christopher Y. Lew. Against “drab bureaucratic backgrounds,” Toor creates figures who are “moving from one country to another, across borders, presented in space that has no grounding,” Lew added.

Toor pays as much attention to clothing in his party scenes as he does in his immigration canvases. He noted how important depictions of fabric were in paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries, when they were markers of luxury and bourgeois comfort. “I want to recreate that historical excitement—that sheen of satin or lightness of linen,” Toor told me. He’s particularly enamored with big waistcoats, layered clothing, intriguing color combinations, and lots of buttons.

The artist updates old art traditions in more humorous ways, as well. In Bedroom Boy (2019), he’s painted a man in the position of a traditional, reclining odalisque, snapping a nude with his phone. The Bar on East 13th Street (2019) riffs on 

Édouard Manet ’s famous A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) by giving the central, gender-bending bartender dark painted nails and pigtail braids.

Lew’s collaborator in organizing the show, curatorial assistant Ambika Trasi, first saw Toor’s work about five years ago at New York’s Aicon Gallery. “Salman talks about entering the brown body into the language of the humanities. It felt really fresh,” Trasi said. She admires Toor’s ability to simultaneously represent reality and reference art history, while “tapping into the experience of living in New York City for people of color,” she said.

Detail of Salman Toor, The Green Room, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Salman Toor, Four Friends, 2019. Courtesy the artist, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Collection of Christie Zhou.

The term “people of color” takes on new meaning in Toor’s paintings, where figures are bathed in emerald light. “I’ve thought of green as glamorous, poisonous, nocturnal, nostalgic, but not sentimental,” he said. The hue, for him, relates less to the absinthe in old Parisian cafés than to the aura of Slytherin (the artist himself, however, identifies as Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff). 

Picasso long ago colonized blue and rose. Toor has made a green period all his own.

Since confinement started in New York, the East Village–based artist hasn’t ventured out to his Bushwick studio. Oil paint is too toxic to use in his apartment, he explained. Toor has made hundreds of little drawings, though, which he thinks of as lists. And he’s been cooking, too. He enumerated the traditional Pakistani Indian dishes he’s made, including vegetable curry, daal with roti, chutneys, and yogurt-based raitas.

Throughout his life, Toor has adapted to a new continent and to imaginative new ways of artmaking. He’s swiftly adapted his own creativity, enjoying the pleasures of time and solitude while waiting for life—and his Whitney show—to carry on where they left off. 

Source: GQIndia

© "The Green Room", (2019); courtesy of Salman Toor

Pakistani-origin, New York-based artist Salman Toor wants to paint a world where the East and West harmonise 

By Nidhi Gupta12 March 2020

 Brooklyn, for Salman Toor, “is a community of conscientious small businesses, flourishing among graffitied industrial spaces, where people dress eccentrically and growing up is optional.” The NYC borough is also home to Toor’s studio: A cramped loft where a wall is studded with his paintings, both finished and in progress; and a makeshift shelf in a corner is piled high with paints and brushes, books and trophies, an opened bottle of champagne and paper. 

This is where Toor, a 30-something, Lahore-born artist who resides in the East Village, spends most of his day working alone – “until I miss my friends. Then I hang out at local dive bars with them, babbling away over drinks about our weekend woes, despairing over Trump’s latest tweet and the effect of living between cultures on our weirdly jeopardised and liberated inner selves.” 

That in-betweener aura bleeds through Toor’s figurative paintings too. From a distance, his paintings – small scale and mostly done in oil on canvas – look like they belong to a long gone era, evoking the air-brushed detailing of Rubens or Vermeer. Look closer and you see his preoccupations are very much of our zeitgeist. 

“In the past, my paintings were more about life in South Asia, the anxiety around class and caste,” says the Pratt Institute alumnus, who left Pakistan in the early 2000s to study art at Ohio Wesleyan. Now, he seeks to offer an intimate view into the lives of queer, brown men living in the US and South Asia.

Lunch, Salman Toor

This painting above, for instance, is called Lunch: A tondo panel featuring three friends, their skin and hair colour as individual as their fashion choices, draped in long snaky limbs and clergyman’s hats, feasting on coffee and pasta, and peering into a smartphone. When Toor put it up on his Instagram, he added hashtags like #feather, #queer and #reverie.

Another painting, called Mehfil/Party depicts a house party that could be a scene out of a Sofar Sounds concert. Young men play the harmonium and sitar in a corner, another in a rapper’s hat appears to be singing a ghazal. Their audience sit, stand, lie scattered all over the room, in twos and threes. It went up on Instagram filed under #safespace, #matinee and #culturevulture. 

In these rooms, bars and streets, against broad brushed-backgrounds, straggly men dance, lounge, kiss, laugh, talk, dress up, eat, stream and exist at peace in their environments. For the most part, there are no victims here. Nor are these tableaux of a gentle urban life staged or modelled for: Toor says he paints from memory and imagination. 

In all of the artist’s work, currency and nostalgia, belonging and alienation coexist: And it’s perhaps that paradoxical quality that’s earned him a growing base of followers everywhere, from NYC to Lahore to Delhi. Toor remembers receiving a “ton of love” for his show at Nature Morte in Delhi, in January, titled I Know A Place. From Instagram stories, he gleaned that “a lot of people who went to see it were going straight from the protests” and found that heartening. This month, as he gets set for his first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, he talks to GQ about his extraordinary life and where he’s finding inspiration these days. 

The artist at his studio in Brooklyn

Two Artists (incl Salman Toor), Two Views of the Human Figure - NYT

 

Two Artists, Two Views of the Human Figure

Salman Toor’s show in New York and Christina Quarles’s in Chicago reveal the enduring — but continually evolving — style of the centuries-old art form known as figuration.

Source: NYT

This article is part of our latest special report on Museums, which focuses on the intersection of art and politics.

Until fairly recently, the world of contemporary art went through a period of turning up its nose on figurative art — works that have a strong resemblance to the real world, especially the human figure.

But two new exhibits by two queer artists on opposite coasts help demonstrate how much that attitude has changed — and how much the change is fueled by fresh perspectives.

The exhibitions — “Salman Toor: How Will I Know” at the Whitney Museum of American Art and “Christina Quarles” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago — present two artists around the same age and at similar career stages with strikingly different styles of figuration.

But Mr. Toor, based in New York, and Ms. Quarles, who lives in Los Angeles, both use a brush to tell previously obscure stories, proving that traditional representational art has the durability to be constantly reinvented, played with and recharged.

“It’s an exciting moment,” said Christopher Y. Lew, the Whitney curator who organized Mr. Toor’s show with Ambika Trasi, a curatorial assistant. “Younger painters are reinvesting energy in figuration.”

Some more on Salima Hashmi's latest book .....

.... and nice to see that our thought leaders are moving away from stereotyping ......

"To think ‘Pakistan’ is to think of its turbulent history and the violence it endures with alarming regularity even today. So, it is a departure from norm when it barely resurfaces in a conversation with Salima Hashmi, Pakistani artist and editor of The Eye Still Seeks."



Source: Mid Day (for all text and images)

Today, in search of Pakistan

By Kareena Gianani |Posted 22-Feb-2015

A new book looks at contemporary art in Pakistan, which reflects the country’s turbulent, provocative relationship with its political and social fabric, writes Kareena Gianani

Even before a reader could run her finger down the contents of the book, The Eye Still Seeks, which looks at Pakistan’s contemporary art scene, she is greeted by an artwork of a cherubic child, barely three, holding a pistol. His glee is unmistakable, as is the background in artist Faiza Butt’s artwork, splattered with scenes of violence.


An artwork by Pakistani contemporary artist Faiza Butt. (Below, L-R) Some eclectic artwork by Hamra Abbas and artist Salman Toor

To think ‘Pakistan’ is to think of its turbulent history and the violence it endures with alarming regularity even today. So, it is a departure from norm when it barely resurfaces in a conversation with Salima Hashmi, Pakistani artist and editor of The Eye Still Seeks.

Pakistan and surprises
To the naked eye, The Eye Still Seeks is about Pakistani contemporary artists’ experiments with a range of media such as digital, video, sculpture, painting and installations. But, look deeper, and these are experiments with naked truth. Religion, gender and politics are as unmistakable as colours mixed together, as if never to be separated from Pakistan’s fabric. Yet, when Hashmi began curating this book, she had her eye on only one idea — what are Indians curious about when it comes to Pakistani art? She decided not to pay much heed to the oft-discussed what-is-common-between-Indian-and-Pakistani-art question. “Indian and Pakistani Modernists had much in common. In fact, Indian artist SH Raza’s younger brother is a Pakistani artist. But this commonality wasn’t of interest to me, because it is Pakistan’s contemporary art which is bold and holds more surprises for the world,” says Hashmi over a telephone call from Lahore.


Artist and writer Salima Hashmi

The Eye Still Seeks takes a refreshing approach — it has Pakistan’s best fiction writers writing about artists they admire, looking into their work and then looking inward to place the art in personal and political context. So, Kamila Shamsie writes on Naiza Hasan’s art, while Mohsin Hamid writes a beautiful meditation on the work of Rashid Rana. Another experiment is one wherein artists and partners Aisha Kahled and Imran Qureshi explore their works in a conversation. “My initial idea was to get Pakistan’s political scientists to write, but none of them were interested in art. That’s when I hit upon this idea, because they are such relevant parallels —crisscrossing Pakistan’s fiction and art. I selected authors who are not only interested in art, but could also articulate why the artists they chose resonate with them,”  says Hashmi.