Tazeen Qayyum

Tazeen Qayyum (Canada/Pakistan) is a contemporary miniature painter who graduated from the National College of Arts Lahore, Pakistan in 1996. She has three solo exhibitions to her credit and created two collaborative performances titled A Feast in Exile 2009, produced by Vasl Artists' Collective and Double Date 2006& 2007 produced by SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre), Toronto and AKA Gallery, Saskatoon, Canada. Qayyum has participated in numerous International group exhibitions some of which include ‘Urban Myths & Modern Fables’, University of Sydney, Australia, ‘A Thousand and One Days: The Art of Pakistani Women Miniaturists’ at the Academy of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii, ‘JAALA Exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Japan, ‘Negotiating Borders’ Miniature Paintings at Katmandu, Nepal and ‘Homecoming’, at the National Gallery of Pakistan. Her work was included in the 10th Asian Biennale, Dhaka, Bangladesh and 2nd Painting Biennale, Tehran, Iran. Qayyum was also awarded a UNESCO bursary in 2000 to work and exhibit in Vienna. Her works have also been featured at the Sotheby's and the Christies South Asian Modern & Contemporary Art auctions in New York, and reviewed in The New York Times in 2009.

Tazeen Qayyum's work is currently being displayed in the offiicial Vancouver Winter Olympics exhibition "CODELive" which runs from Feb 4- 21, 2010.  Her work is titled  'Dispose with Care' and is one of the four works by four Canadian artists in the exhibition titled  'Its a Disaster' curated by Anthea Foyer for CodeLive.

The works were created specifically to be presented in the unique steel boxes called the PaCuBoxes project, developed by Tom Kuo & Rachel Vulliens. PaCuBoxes is a participatory installation with miniature galleries placed in unexpected outdoor locations within a city. The box is interestingly solar powered and lights up from the inside at night.

Qayyum's piece is installed on the street outside the Vancouver Art Gallery. The work borrows the language of entomology, where a dead cockroach motif is painted and pinned repeatedly at variable depths. Preserved and presented in a steel, Armor-like, display box, the insect images are spread open for inspection and  investigation.

For the Winter Olympic exhibition, the curator Anthea Foyer contacted Qayyum with her curatorial idea.  She had heard of Qayyum and seen her work online before and felt that Qayyum's work would work well with her theme of talking about environmental disasters.  Foyer believed that it would bring a different reading of the theme from the other three artists.  The exhibition is called IT'S A DISASTER! and provides a commentary on environmental disasters - 'Whether immediate - like a tornado, to the long-term eradication of our species and the probable takeover of the cockroach, to the small hope of a more positive future, we are quickly becoming a world where natural disasters are quickly becoming a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. This exhibit serves to highlight this phenomenon by creating tiny moments of awareness about the environment around us.' 

Qayyum's other famous works comment on aggressive global politics and the subsequent suppression of difference. Qayyum’s work was exhibited at the Aicon Gallery in Palo Alto California.  The title for the exhibition was: Human Dicotomy and features 4 other Pakistani artists besides Tazeen: Attiya Shaukat, Aisha Hussain, and Rehana Mangi.   Tazeen Qayyum explores the intricacies of humanity in a body of work which focuses on the repeated image of a cockroach. The insect serves as a symbol of dehumanization, and the diminished value of human life. The methodic and detached treatment of the co1`ckroach communicates an attitude of homogenization which calls into question how political systems regard their multitudes of constituents. From afar the patterned work is attractive; it is only when the viewer inspects each image closely that they are faced with the unpleasant reality. The contrast between beauty and death is inescapable. 

I got a chance to look at her work and to also speak to her.  Below is my interview.

Avoid Extreme Cold

   

Use Only As Directed

                              

AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST TAZEEN QAYYUM BY MEHREEN MAKADA

Q: What are the early influences on your work?

If I can start from the beginning, mainly, I have not been born with the talent so to speak but I have been influenced by my mother. She is a very creative person and wanted me to be an artist. I was encouraged by my parents to peruse art professionally and I worked hard to enter into the National College of Arts. Being accepted into the National College of Arts is an accomplishment in itself. That’s where it all started. While I was there I was introduced to Miniature painting and that really influenced me in many ways. That medium of painting is so unique to our part of the world, Pakistan and Indian subcontinent. While I was there it really intrigued me how my contemporaries were taking it a step further, that art form was being born there and I was part of that movement. This made me believe that maybe I could be part of a movement in the genre and convinced me to specialize in miniature painting.

I really learned the techniques in traditional ways and we were expected to copy masterpieces and understand this art form that way since there are not many books written on this art form. Then after we get to our final year then we are allowed to bring our own expressions into the medium. When you are given certain boundaries and rules that come with the medium and then you are expected to experiment within those boundaries and go beyond them what interests me the most. When I was in college there were probably ten individuals doing contemporary miniature painting and now the popularity has grown a lot and people really understand the importance of this medium and how unique it is. Really even in India there is hardly any contemporary miniature movement. Pakistan is the only place where there are a group of artists doing this medium and really doing well in it. This medium has a role to play in bringing international focus onto Pakistani art and many Pakistani artists have come into the limelight because of this medium. It is interesting in Jaipur you will find thousands of artists doing the same copy paintings. But never even in their universities will you see this medium taken into their curriculum. Painters have used this in their genres but not really taking this medium to the next level critically and not treat it simply as a craft. Pakistan has really brought about huge changes in this art form.’?

Q: Why would you use cockroaches in your art, why not ants, flies or spiders?

So I was not doing cockroaches initially. Over the years my work was very influenced by what was going around me. I lived in Islamabad and worked with some NGO’s on women issues. My initial work was focused on women I knew or stories I had heard about abusive relationships. My art work was definitely influenced by things around me and stories I had heard, it was very spontaneous and in that way. But then in 2002 the war started in Afghanistan, that really triggered the Urdu phrase in my mind reducing people to “keere mokore”. When you lower a human life to that level it really spoke to me. That phrase brought the “keera” in my paintings and painting it dead. I chose the cockroach among all the other insects because it was more recognizable as repulsive than a fly or an ant. Then the idea the symbolism that the cockroach itself carries. I’ve never met a person who hasn’t been grossed out by a cockroach.

There is a type of blindness to who the person is and just the mere sight of the person draws you to it. Also, the different myths that a cockroach can survive a nuclear blast and the irony of the insect. I always paint them dead in a simple way and yet ornament them with floral patterns inside. I would make a pattern out of dead cockroach and just repeat it with other painted elements around it. The idea was that throughout history you will see the same thing happening and for some reason people never learn. I kept going with this theme because I had more to say through it. People ask me when will these cockroaches die and when will you move on. I somehow find new things in them. In a way the war has gone on and we just find new words for it and I find new vocabulary around the same theme.

My own exposure and move has been coming into my work. The recent work is a series that started in 2006 and now I’m using entomology and museum displays as my references. I did a lot of research about how these insects are classified through sizes and colors so viewers can enjoy. Everything is labeled in a very scientific way. The wars and killings are also viewed and presented in a certain way over the years. Through media and propaganda its all about presentation now, what is projected and what is not to be told. How we label things and not the human or insect if you will doesn’t matter anymore. I started reading a lot about cockroaches itself now through the internet. I keep running into these facts about cockroaches and so well coincide with my idea. I read somewhere that they don’t die on their back but because of the insecticide it causes to flip. Which totally goes along with what I’m saying. Also, whatever pesticides that are used to kill cockroaches, the insects eventually get immune to it, which again is what is going on around us.

Q. Do you think in Pakistan art is only for the elite or is it spreading to the middle classes?

I think its changing. There were times in Pakistan it was all about the commercial aspect of it. There is a group that can afford to buy the fine art. Now things are changing, artists are very aware of their surrounding and are focused on their expressions and not just to be sold but just for expression sake. That really has brought change to how the younger artists are thinking. While they are in art school they are encouraged to express openly. Fine art maybe only for the elite but it has grown a lot. We can see evidence in this since the west is very interested in Pakistani art. During Musharaf time even though it was a military dictatorship some media were very open compared to Zia ul Haq’s time. If you had anything to say it was shut down and punished.

Q. Do you think the role of Pakistani artists is changing?

The youth are more politically aware, however, there are always artists who will do art to match your curtains in the drawing room. But a majority of Pakistani artists are more aware of their surroundings and are more exposed to the world.

Q. At first glance your work displays a sense of helplessness, is that what you are trying to convey?

There is a sense of hurt and frustration in it but at the same time I’m being funny and sarcastic about it. The idea of using a cockroach will bring people to see beyond it and become more inquisitive. It has more to with the grim situation but there are things that we can change and I want people to see that. I’m bringing my personal expression in a symbolic way.

Q. Do you compare yourself to any other contemporary artists?

I see myself standing next to many. Going by how I’ve been written about in Pakistan there are always been a group of 5 to 10 who have been mentioned together. And some of our issues coincide, since many artists are interested in politics. But our ways of looking at things are different. Because this medium has some boundaries there are bound to be similarities.

Q. What kind of work can we expect from you in the future?

Some of this work is definitely continuing. I am doing an exhibition in Karachi in December. I have not shown my work in Pakistan for 2-3 years. There is one painting that is shown flat on the table and the cockroaches are in a geometrical grid and labeled with text. That text is from a website that documents Iraqi civilian casualties. Everyday they update it and it is very precise every column is labeled according to victims and casualty. My new work is based on that website and I rewrote it into my work using entomology standards. I’m going to use similar data to show the causalities and bombings in Pakistan in the ‘war against terror’. Thank you for your time. 

Till next time, khuda hafiz.

Mehreen Makada 

Additional artist information:www.tazeenqayyum.com 

Link to the tableau project Tazeen did.  You can also see a video clip.http://www.tazeenqayyum.com/menu/double_date.htm#