The Eye Still Seeks - Kasmir Monitor
THE Eye Still Seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art, edited by Salima Hashmi and published by Penguin Books India, aims to bring together a wide selection of work produced over the course of the last 20 years by contemporary art practitioners from... As is explained in the book’s opening note, this striking volume’s restless title is taken from Dawn of Freedom, a translation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Urdu poem Subh-e-Azadi by Shoaib Hashmi. The line’s connection with Pakistani art can be traced back 14 years to 2001, when it was used as the title of an exhibition co-curated by Salima and Sue Rowley at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney. According to architect and artist Martand Khosla another exhibition, conceived alongside the newly published book, was also planned to take place in New Delhi but — thwarted perhaps by the governmental “sabre-rattling” to which Khosla’s foreword... Faiz’s words might therefore be understood to provide an apt prelude to a work which endeavours both to draw attention to what — to paraphrase Khosla’s comments at the book’s Lahore Literature Festival launch — we might term the peculiar... Source: www.kashmirmonitor.in
