Decolonization and Contemporary Art of Pakistan

Abstract

Decolonization as a topic of scholarly investigation and as a conceptual framework is of top priority for focused research and meaningful scholarship in the global-modern world. This study while establishing art as a medium of investigation and a manifestation of socio-political and cultural convictions of a decolonizing Pakistani society aims at exploring the contemporary visual culture and matters of image production to develop an understanding of the processes entangled with issues of sovereignty, self-determination, and territory. The creative legacies, state, and status of art institutions, academic and commercial, as well as the role of artists who helped art maintain its relevant countenance in Pakistan, are also probed. This contextual, theoretical analysis of visual arts finds ‘multiple modernities’ of the ‘global world’ as the most important integer of a ‘decolonizing’ Pakistan. The diversifying effects of global-modern; transformative, differentiated, individualizing, worldwide, and increasingly market-oriented character of Pakistani art is traced through contemporary examples that are well received in the global art market. The main discussion revolves around the often-contested narratives about art in contemporary Pakistan which are illustrative of an ever-evolving society. The periphery of investigation ultimately expands to the subject of decolonization; to claim sovereignty of mind, thoughts, and attitude in order to apprehend the colonial past to make sense of the present, and to explicit the future as per the inclinations of contemporary times.  With an acknowledgment that Pakistan has earned a very respectable place in the global art world and our artists have created a niche in the most powerful and effective industry that administers the world, the paper presents the case of contemporary art in Pakistan as it affects and gets affected by society. Along with established approaches to historiography – collecting, documenting, digitizing, and analyzing the information, research methods are borrowed from sister fields of social sciences only to be tested against the established theoretical frameworks adopted as part of the global discourse on art.