Throughout Adeela Suleman’s prolific career, the influence of defining Pakistani contemporary art movements can be deciphered: the women’s movement of the 1980s; Karachipop’s incorporation of urban materiality with artisanal craft; and the painterly concern of the so called ‘neo-miniature’ genre.¹ Suleman, however, remains unconstrained by any of these genres and, as her various bodies of work have evolved, the artist has remained preoccupied with vernacular techniques and found objects, and continued to confront themes of political urgency.

Since 2014, Suleman has produced painted works on found ceramic and enamel plates, along with suites of painted daggers and meat cleavers through which she muses on the subject of violence. The theme originated from living in Karachi during times of terrorist attacks and militancy; however, Suleman has since contemplated humanity’s fascination with the subject more widely:

I’m interested in the way violence can provide human beings with pleasure and joy, much like sex, food. The intensity, excitement and lust involved in all kinds of violence makes me question what actually motivates human beings to do it. So I look for combinations of commonplace delight and try to understand the role it has within the human psyche, and look at how it leaves traces on our memories. The deeper we dig into the past the more politically engaged these narratives become.²

Combining artisanal craft with found objects, these works delve through history to consider violent conflicts and their depictions. They feature techniques of South Asian miniature painting and draw upon different historical events, sites and artistic traditions. These include borrowing from Mughal paintings of courtly figures or lovers implicated in bloodied scenarios, medieval knights and soldiers in savage encounters, and more subtle scenes of idealised landscapes conveying less evident occurrences of conflict.

An alluring balance of beauty and brutality is emphasised in materials; bloody scenes are painted in vivid colours on the porcelain and enamel, sometimes featuring ostentatious carved timber frames. The domestic and delicate nature of the objects, combined with the lavish painterly technique, render the depictions in a fantastical fable-like manner, imbuing the gruesome imagery with a fictitious and unthreatening quality. One example incorporates imagery from the mid-eighteenth-century painting known as The nightmare dream of a king: The fearsome aftermath of the battle of kurukshetra c.1740, by the Indian master painter Manaku (active c.1725–60).³ Illustrated on a large enamel dish is an entanglement of soldiers, horses, chariots and elephants with sprays of flying arrows and spatters of blood. The work depicts the battle between the feuding cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, recorded in the epic Mahabharata, a pre-eminent example of a war that is celebrated and glorified in South Asian culture.

In the series ‘Home Front’ 2021, painted metal cleavers, similarly illustrated in enchanting detail, provide a counterpoint to the blood-stained plates. Each cleaver is entirely illustrated with delicate mountain-scapes drawn from postcards that circulate in Pakistan. They depict views of the Himalayan region around the border between Pakistan and India. The striking natural beauty of these idealised landscapes is foregrounded without any direct reference to violence. However, within them, Suleman recognises the underlying reality of ongoing conflict in the region over several decades, as sites of continued border tension and trauma that pervade the landscapes and their communities. The balance of imagery and object is upturned in comparison to the tableware, and the cleaver itself — and its ability to cut through flesh and bone — becomes suggestive of violence absent in the imagery. As a further counterpoint to the long and disparate histories featured on plates and dishes, Suleman signals much more recent conflicts in these works, which affect a region closer to her home. Across the tableaux of confrontations and deathly innuendo, Suleman references continued brutality across histories and geographies. As Quddus Mirza has described, Suleman confronts contemporary violence as ‘not a new, recent, implausible or intolerable phenomenon, but rather a hangover of history’.⁴

Endnotes

1.  Salima Hashmi, ‘Frames within frames’, in Rosa Maria Falvo (ed.), Adeela Suleman: Not Everyone’s Heaven [exhibition catalogue], Skira, Milan, 2020, pp.8–9.
2. Adeela Suleman, interview with Rosa Maria Falvo, ‘In conversation’, in Falvo, p.39.
3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘The nightmare dream of a king: The fearsome aftermath of the battle of kurukshetra’, Folio from the unfinished ‘Small Guler’ Bhagavata Purana (The Ancient Story of God) c.1740 [catalogue entry], https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/662767, viewed June 2021.
4. Quddus Mirza, ‘Death, migration, and the maiden’, in Falvo, p.24.