It was during dark night, when the late Zahoor ul Akhlaq took me along to an unknown location. We reached somewhere near the sea-view, on a huge empty plot, with leftovers of labourers, who must have been busy at the site enclosing a shack type tea joint too. Akhlaq pointed at a large sculpture fabricated in metal, which could be read as the tip of traditional a quill pen, or a human face – or both; but had an immense surrealistic presence in that hour and surroundings.
Akhlaq informed me that it would be the new location of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVSAA), once moved from its initial setting, a big house on the main artery of Karachi. Actually, art schools are not merely about locations, buildings, or space, because the final layer of the newly erected structure of these places comprises their faculty and students. I am fortunate to join IVSAA as a guest faculty from an early stage of its history. It was impressive, stimulating and energetic to work with contemporaries with multiple and diverse practices. Those included names who were my tutors’ friends with my tutors, as well as others who returned after being trained at different schools and universities in the UK and the USA, to participate in a phenomenon that was unmatched since its early years.
Being remotely and occasionally part of it, I witnessed an untiring energy, an unsatiating vision and unexhausting struggle. Due to this, the school, with Zahoor ul Aklaq’s sculpture (now its logo), expanded in an unprecedented way; and carving its own history. A surprise for someone who spent most of his life in Lahore, a city littered with history – particularly in its tangible forms such as Mughal monuments, mausoleums, mosques, etc. For that person, history was fixed not only to time but also to soilfor . Karachi, on the other hand, couldn’t compete with the long legacy of the past, except the brief but beautiful era of Colonial architecture spread in the old parts of town. Especially red stone and sandstone buildings.
The founders of the IVSAA decided to shift the Jamshed Nusserwanjee building from old Kharadar, its original neighbourhood, to the new school. A move to save the historical structure of 1903 from demolition. A new experience – actually the largest in South Asia – of an entire building arriving block by block, each numbered to fit the jigsaw. Once reassembled, as it stands today facing the waves of the Arabian Sea, it is not only a logistic addition to an educational institution, it evokes an essential question, a discourse, a debate that has been occupying the creative individuals from the post-colonial cultures. The matter of how to manage the components of old and modern, of indigenous and imposed, of local and global in our lives and works.
These discussions were spotted in the works of students, and also echoed in the studio seminars, but most significantly in the art that emerged from IVSAA. In fact, the establishment of the school created a centre of art in the port city. From Siddiqua Bigrami, to Bashir Mirza, Rashid Arshed, Meher Afroze, Noorjehan Bigrami, Naiza Khan and many others taught there. It became a hub for bringing visual practitioners from other cities and countries, thus offering a diversity not possible at other venues before the age of the digital revolution.
Another contribution – rather an outcome of IVSAA- is the emergence of a genre now baptised as Karachi Pop (distinct from its contemporary Neo-miniature born in the studios of NCA, Lahore). Partly a product of IVSAA, because two of its members, David Alesworth and Elizabeth Dadi, were teaching in the Department of Fine Art, and the other two, Durriya Kazi and Iftikhar Dadi, were married to them. Not only the first generation, but students from those early years, which included Huma Mulji, Asma Mundrawala, and Adeela Suleman, also experimented in this newly invented language with its syntax rooted in appropriation and assimilation. A process that could be identified with the metropolis itself. In the narrow and congested lanes of Saddar, one encounters how metallic tins, parts of imported machinery, and dysfunctional items are recycled, resurrected, recreated – like the imposing old/new wings/blocks of Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.