Many artists have been born out of memory, resilience, resistance, or even a desire to mock the conflict in their outside or inner worlds
Art kicks off a few things, sows some ideas. Such a transformative effect of expression can be triggered by creativity, beauty and the sublime. But there are also the more painful dimensions of human experience, such as loneliness, dread and perhaps terror that create art.
On one hand, aesthetics and creative expression are assigned a high rank on Maslow’s pyramid of needs — let us say as a privilege to be enjoyed by the economically well endowed. On the other hand, far too many artists have been born out of memory, resilience, resistance, or even a desire to mock the conflict that has occurred in their outside or inner worlds.
Social displacement, political repression, violence, war and loss have rocked writers and painters in their bleeding arms. Conflict is a depressing ongoing feature in the world. The year that commemorated the centenary of the beginning of World War I also marked the crisis in Syria, killings in Afghanistan and Iraq, conflicts in Central Africa, animosities in northern Ireland and the Balkans, the Israel and Palestine conflict, and the continuing presence of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram. Also the United States, UK, China, and Saudi Arabia to name a few, continue to spend enormously on military.
It is all too easy to not ask why even in modernity there are so many creators, victims and profiteers of such conflict. Is it our lack of empathyIJ A stunning ability to turn a blind eyeIJ Too many people on the planetIJ Ignorance perhapsIJ
There are also similar uncomfortable questions about art being used as propaganda or for monetisation of conflict. There is often a call for artists to become communicators of the inhumanity of a war. Development agencies chase painters and filmmakers to create works that depict the social conflict they breed in. Social celebrities, who can also write, are wooed by publishing houses to write about an inner conflict that the individual has faced.
Ambiguous, odd, lateral, paradoxical art in all its forms is fascinating. The former, I feel, is the less interesting, preaching, linear and literal type.
Zaha Mohammad Hadid was born on October 31, 1950, in Baghdad, Iraq. Her father, Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid, was the co-founder of the left-liberal al-Ahali group in Iraq, which was a significant political organisation in the 1930s and 1940s. Her mother, Wajiha al-Sabunji, was an artist from the Mosul area of the country. Zaha studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut in lebanon, and then moved to london in 1972 to study architecture. Zaha struggled to win commissions in the UK for her work in the ensuing years. However, in 2004, Zaha became the first woman and the first Muslim to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. later in 2010 and 2011, she received the Stirling Prize as well.
I was first introduced to Zaha’s highly expressive and sweeping geometric architectural style by my lebanese colleague and friend at the World Economic Forum three years ago. The images I saw then stayed with me. The buildings had massive waves of fragmented geometric shapes with multiple perspectives tumbling forward. It seemed to me that Zaha was in a hurry to jump in to the future. There was much conflict and chaos in the world, and her work spoke to me of it. Her acclaimed work, I was later told, consisted of the aquatic centre for the london 2012 Olympics and the Guangzhou China Opera House.
A few days ago, on March 31, in a Miami hospital where she was being treated for bronchitis, the world learnt that Zaha had died of a heart attack. Justin Davidson of The New York Times wrote in his obituary of her that Zaha “designed buildings that inspired awe and derision but never indifference”. She was an anomaly being an Iraqi-born woman in a profession that usually has privileged European men, and an artist in a business that demands consent to too many social and technical parameters.
In developing countries, art is often under-funded, over-instrumentalised and too often neglected, and yet these places have produced some powerful and unique aesthetics. Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil’s work, that now holds a prominent permanent space on the ground floor of the recently renovated National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, is a stunning depiction of the nonchalant passion with which Amrita lived her short life. While contemporary Indian art on canvas is being produced mainly to sell, there are other unique forms of expression that are being created in this country, for instance designer Sanjay Garg’s humble saris blur the line between art and textile.
Elsewhere, too, cultivated from conflict, the mediums of art are diverse. In Kabul, Shamsia Hassani famously sprays graffiti on the city’s walls to each time draw the blue silhouette of the burqa. She creates a ghostly female figure which moves around the city, inhabiting places where women are unwelcome — public spaces, streets, broken buildings — with a sentence of satirical poetry included.
South African stand-up comedian Trevor Noah was born to an illegal union between Mixed Xhosa Jewish and White German parents, for which his mother was jailed. Trevor now hosts The Daily Show — race and ethnicity are the leading themes in his comedy even on the show. Conflict can trigger humour in art, my boyfriend points out. He gives me another example of actor Eddie Murphy, who was born to a telephone operator and raised in a rundown area of New York, and whose early years of comedy was characterised by sketches lampooning white Anglo-saxons, overweight people, and homosexuals.
Art in every form is a personal articulation of one’s unique experience. It is undemocratic in the sense that its creation is irrelevant to the consensus of others. I would say art must be selfish. In fact, its biggest tool is its freedom to be unexpected with which it interrupts the recognised scripts of accepted behaviour. This is what makes art in literature, paint, or architecture so distinct that it is unforgettable. This is also precisely what makes art first to struggle.
The writer is Chief Sustainability Officer for the group of companies, Jindal Steel and Power ltd. She is a Global leadership Alumna of the World Economic Forum. miniya.chatterji@jindalsteel.com