Pakistani Diptychs

INNOCENT PROWLS THROUGH PAKISTAN

“If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked. I don't even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that's the job of dressmakers.”

― Saadat Hasan Manto

This bittersweet series is an utterly subjective journey through Pakistan, a country that remains a riddle despite several extended stays since 2010 and the mix of exasperation and tenderness I feel for it. The construction of these diptychs occurred slowly over the years, as I began to be able to distinguish the layers of reality, walk my way through the veneer of things, identify plots, characters and overtones and to mingle them with the shadows of my own inner theatre. Images started to merge and make sense, new sense born out of apparent clashes or unexpected semblances. It became a play with reality, a kind of collage, an imaginary conversation.

The lost smile of a politician rotting on a wall in Lahore reappears in Peshawar amid the remains of a butcher shop, the tentacles of an octopus in an amusement park of Quetta reach until the railway tracks of Peshawar where a sad child carries his chore of vegetables, an impish Humpty Dumpty teases a mannequin languishing in a showcase in Lahore, the plastic peeling faces of two infants face the promises of “paradise, a man dances in a coal depot in Baluchistan while another, dressed as a woman, shines in the Lahori night. Time somehow stands still, space is saturated with gazes, memories and untold tales, walls stare and people walk by.

These pictures have been taken between 2010 and 2019.