Word: pakistans
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...Shenzhen for his young sons. Beaming, he professed his love for America. But he also applauded the Taliban and al-Qaeda and how they "looked after" his Muslim brethren. It's just such a paradoxical pose, at once insular and international, Islamist and secular, that befuddles those outside Pakistan's porous borders, and which is at the crux of Hanging Fire, a survey of contemporary art from a nation known more today for automatic-weapons fire than the arts and humanities...
...volume commemorates a recent exhibition of the same name at the Asia Society in New York City, and includes the work of 15 artists born from 1941 to 1981 - years when the democratic ideals of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's first leader, slowly warped into Islamic nationalism and, later, iron rule by military dictators backed by foreign governments. But Pakistani art also began to mature during this period. Galleries and journals were established, and artists like Chughtai and Sadequain flavored their international modernism with local flair. See the top 10 nonfiction books...
...academies like the Mayo School of Art in Lahore, later revamped as the National College of Arts (NCA). In an essay in Hanging Fire, Pakistani novelist and TIME contributor Mohsin Hamid, who had friends who went to NCA in the 1990s, writes: "The place was a microcosm of Pakistan, but of a creative Pakistan, an alternative to the desiccated Pakistan that General Zia [ul-Haq] had tried to ram down our throats." Many of the artists in the book, most of whom are in their 30s and 40s, have trained or taught (sometimes both) at the school. Among them...
...Some of the works in Hanging Fire, so called because of the desire for readers to suspend popular, negative perceptions of Pakistan, are topical in a sensational way - like Rashid Rana's wall-size matrices, one of which at a distance looks like a handwoven carpet but is in fact composed of hundreds of photographs from slaughterhouses. But the better of the 55 pieces are subtler. Hamra Abbas' Ride 2, a fiberglass sculpture of the legendary Buraq, the Prophet Muhammad's winged steed with a human head, is local in its imagery. But the glinting cherry-red form also recalls...
...senior Jordanian intelligence source tells TIME that al-Balawi was sent to Pakistan at the behest of the CIA, with a plausible cover story: he was to be a medical student pursuing advanced university studies. An official in Amman, who like his colleagues requested anonymity, says that once al-Balawi set himself up in Pakistan's border region and sent out feelers to jihadi militants, "he was very helpful, and the CIA were grateful to him." This source tells TIME that al-Balawi pinpointed several al-Qaeda targets, which were attacked by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and that "al-Balawi...