There can be art in anything... even the thin plastic bags that you use to bring home vegetables from the market. Pakistani sculptor Khalil Chishtee uses these to great effect to create life-size, life-like human figures, figures arrested in touchingly dynamic postures — looking upwards beseechingly, hands spread as if seeking something, or bent over, shoulders hunched in despair.
These figures, trailing wisps of white plastic (like dripping blood or melting flesh), propped up on the walls or held up by thick wound plastic ropes from the ceiling of the underground car park at the Madinat Jumeira during the Art Dubai fair in 2008 first brought the 46-year-old Chishtee to notice internationally. Following this, he had a well-received solo in London, at the GreenCardamom gallery at Porchester Place, and another group show at the turn of this year at Aicon Art Gallery with his artist wife Ruby, and other upcoming, contemporary artists from Pakistan such as Faiza Butt, Amna Ilyas, Ali Raza and Masooma Syed.
Later this month, he will show for the first time in India. The exhibition, unimaginatively titled ‘A solo by Khalil Chistee’, will have his installations displayed at two venues in the capital — the main atrium of Select CityWalk mall in Saket, and Seven Art Gallery in Greater Kailash.
There’s an obvious radical subtext to Chishtee’s work — plastic bags are an easy metaphor for the discourse on global warming and the rampant consumerism that characterises society everywhere these days. Somewhere there’s a comment on Pakistan too — the artist, who was born in Lahore and now lives in Sacramento, California, says Pakistan’s “political instability” and the “growing influence of religious fanatics” have affected him deeply. The 1977 coup by the army led by General Zia ul-Haq led to his father, a poet and journalist, losing his job, becoming sick and eventually dying in 1982.
What is remarkable about Chishtee’s works is what Aparajita Jain of Seven Art Gallery calls their “lyrical” simplicity — not for him the deliberate attempts to shock or the overt politics of young Pakistani artists such as Huma Mulji or Bani Abidi who are creating a splash globally.
There’s an almost classical finesse to Chishtee’s forms, a sculptural precision and an attention to detail — his figures look human, their proportions and lineaments taken from life. “I was trained in a very classical manner and worked with all kind of conventional materials, like bronze and other metals, wood, clay, and fibreglass,” says the artist, who taught at the National College of Art in Lahore for 10 years before he left to do a masters in ceramic sculptures at California State University, Sacramento. He admires the edgy, visceral art of a Takashi Murakami or a Damien Hirst, “but I know I would never even want to try to make work like theirs”.
The US, and Chishtee’s experience of the country, have clearly changed his art, giving it an edginess, a contemporary vocabulary that his conventional art training in Pakistan had not equipped him with. Taking a complete break from the rigorous work schedule in Lahore — teaching six days a week while also doing public art commissions all over the country, Chishtee says he spent “the first 18 months [in the US] with ordinary Americans, because I knew America is not Baywatch, as people think in Pakistan.”
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On his first visit to New York city, he found that the city, which was so full of people by day, became after midnight a city full of trash bags filled with garbage. “I wondered at this transition,” Chishtee says, “It seemed as if the humans had been replaced by trash bags.” Hence the plastic, the trash bags...
Many of Chishtee’s sculptures are made on site, the garbage bags, grocery bags, and sometimes shower curtains as well, twisted or tied into knots and melted into shape using a heat gun. “I try not to use another material inside those bags; there is hardly any armature inside them,” says Chishtee. Which is, perhaps, what gives them an airiness, an ephemeralness, that, as the catalogue to his show ‘No Knock’ at GreenCardamom gallery perceptively noted, is “innately evocative of human frailty”.
The show will open at Select CityWalk Mall, Saket, on July 29 and run till August 12. It will also be on view at Gallery Seven Art, M 44/2, M Block Market, GK II, New Delhi
(Monday to Saturday, 11 am to 7 pm)
