High Noon (III)

Today we publish the third instalment from ‘High Noon’, our visual essay in Granta 112: Pakistan and a collaboration with Green Cardamom. Below are works by Mansur Salim, Mehreen Murtaza and Muhammad Zeeshan. Green Cardamom is an organisation which focuses on international contemporary art viewed from an Indian Ocean perspective. With their help, we selected fourteen prominent figures from the contemporary art scene in Pakistan, and reproduced their work in the magazine. We also used artwork from the organisation to illustrate the written pieces in the issue, in a first for Granta.

See also:
High Noon (I) - Ayesha Jatoi, Bani Abidi and Rashid Rana
High Noon (II) - Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi and Iftikhar Dadi
High Noon (IV) - Naeem Mohaiemen, Ahmed Ali Manganhar and Mohammad Ali Talpur

MANSUR SALIM

Soni Mahiwal, 2003

Oil on canvas, 81 x 122cm. Image courtesy of the artist and ArtChowk. Mansur Salim’s surreal subjects include landscapes on a fictional planet, a space loaded with magical symbolism, layered with nostalgic memories, art-historical references, vernacular mythology and mathematical riddles. Disrupting notions of time and the context of place, this work is named after the ill-fated lovers in the Punjabi tale, while the faces strongly resemble film stars from the 1970s.

See also: Mansur Salim’s Flickr stream

MEHREEN MURTAZA

The Blowjob, from the series An Anthology of Cosmic Snippets, 2007

Archival C-prints, 38.1 x 38.1cm. Courtesy of the artist and Grey Noise. From a series of a dozen digital collages in which Murtaza playfully examines the latent presence of technology in urban visual space, merging globalized modernity with local landscapes. Referencing old war films or sci-fi fantasies, she creates charged images with a lurking sense of the absurd.

See details of an upcoming residency of Mehreen Murtaza’s work at London’s Gasworks

MUHAMMAD ZEESHAN

Cityscapes, 2009

Digital print on canvas, 91.5 x 55.9cm. A found urban image photographed by the artist, part of a series of abstract ‘paintings’ created by splatters of peekh on city streets, which are more visible on the footpaths and alleys in lower-income areas. Peekh is the spat out juice of the paan leaf, commonly chewed with tobacco as a mild relaxant.

See Muhammad Zeeshan’s work on Artnet

Buy our Pakistan issue today by clicking here

See also... our cover for the issue, a special commission made to Karachi-based truck artist Islam Gull. Web exclusives include a new translation of a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, ‘Road to Chitral’ – Azhar Abidi’s travelogue and meditation on Pakistan’s cycle of violence – and ‘Power Failure’, Bina Shah’s essay on the ongoing electricity crisis in Karachi.