Word: pakistani
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...liberal ways of international visitors. In recent months, however, Swat has changed. Maulana Fazlullah, a fundamentalist preacher known as the "FM Mullah" for his daily radio sermons, has launched a campaign for the establishment of Islamic law, or Shari'a, in the valley. Fazlullah is backed by Pakistani extremists who share an Islamist ideology with the Afghan Taliban next door. These militants have unleashed a wave of violence on Swat that has claimed nearly 300 lives, mostly security personnel, and that has driven nearly half a million residents from their homes. "Swat used to be a paradise," says Zaibi Raziq...
...tricky, of course, to act like an old-fashioned dictator in a globalized world. Musharraf can shut down Pakistan's television stations, but he can't silence the criticism swirling on the Internet. He can spook Pakistani artists, but he can't counter the momentum of the global art market, which has begun to take notice of the wealth of Pakistani talent. A burgeoning interest in South Asian art, coupled with the topical nature of their work, has given Pakistani artists an increasingly high profile overseas. Indeed, there are three new exhibitions in Britain alone devoted to Pakistani...
Most of the artists in these shows grapple with the same topics that capture news headlines - Pakistani nationalism, militarism, the Taliban and state-sponsored terrorism. An eerily well-timed group show at London's Aicon Gallery features the work of Ijaz ul-Hassan, famous as much for his activism as for his art. Imprisoned for his political activities under President Zia ul-Haq, Hassan paints scenes of street violence and government-sanctioned thuggery as stark and bold as tabloid stills. A View Through a Window shows a goon with a gun and blood-spattered clothes looming over a corpse, watched...
Subtler, but just as topical, is the creepily hypnotic work of Sana Arjumand, also in the Aicon show. Her glassy-eyed women play with the props of Pakistani nationalism - founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and the crescent and star of the flag. In I am Flexible. Are You?, a spaced-out woman, dangling like a slack marionette, bends down to pick up a crescent, in a pose of submission, both sexual and political...
Hammad Nasar, co-founder of London gallery Green Cardamom, argues that the NCA's excellence derives from the fact that it remains one of the few Pakistani institutions that's truly meritocratic. "Why would you bother to bribe your way into art college?" he asks. "Until recently, it just wasn't important enough to be corrupted...