Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

was this introduction between the outer and the inner so the chador actually became a symbol of a kind of independence and a kind of freedom . Also it was looking at the fact that because it was being advocated by the State it was a symbol of oppression at the same time . It had a double meaning and a lot of women artists were looking at the chador as a symbol , sometimes overtly, and sometimes in a more understated manner where they are using simple things like the conch shell wh ich has symbolic meanings in many ways - it has been, for instance, used by women of the West as a symbol for the female. And then you have the younger generation . The artist Shahzia Sikander who has work in the current APT - this particular one is called Outrages ofpower - told me that when she was on Rhode Island studying she walked around for a couple of days wearing her chador pulled down, just to look at people's responses, and she said you know I have done that at home when I went to the village and it was very d ifferent from walking around the street in Providence doing the same thing; it was really looking at people's reactions to her as an object. But also she felt very protected because she was observing, without being observed . Sabina Gillani is also a person who has been looking at the chador. It's the enveloping, the protection, as well as the symbol of oppression . I th ink that the point that was being made here now by the younger generation is that to the West the chador, as such , has fairly certain connotations but it may not have the same connotations as where it originated . So again we are dealing with feelings and with symbols. Naiza Khan is a Pakistani artist who was actually brought up in the West: firstly in Lebanon and then in Britain, and came back to Pakistan after her marriage. She worked very much from the female form - the nude - when she was a student in England. Coming back to Pakistan she found it was not so simple. She said 'I looked then at the body in an inward sort of manner. Not the external form, but its inner workings' . I should say here that withi n these last fifteen years or so it has been very d ifficult to exhibit works in wh ich there were male or female nudes and we find that people whose work revolves around that had problems showing their work publicly. With women, say in the West, they would talk about the fact that with using the female nude sometimes there is an exploitative aspect. So again it's a question of context and how we look at this business of the female body. Samina Mansuri is an artist who works out of Karachi and who also had been looking at the female body in a more symbolic way. She works a lot with picking up earth , grinding rocks and mixing them with wax, with soot and with material that she finds, m ixing it all with pigment. The inferences here are through the female body; she has work _ ed in the desert a lot and has picked up things like very large thorny bushes, cacti shapes that she draws. For her it is also a symbolic comment on socio-pol itical conditions in Pakistan. One of the problems that we have had, and I'm sure that is something that we share in art education , is how relevant is it to women's experience? We are very aware that all modern worlds are very patriarchal, but that does not mean that we have to approve it. So one of the challenges has been to work with young women in my classes and try and get them to explore their experience, which is very personal , and it could seem something very ord inary. But in the larger context there has been very strict adherence to certain kinds of genres, wh ich are supposed to be sacrosanct in art education, i .e. the landscape, the portrait, the still l ife. To get the men to tell their own stories as they are learn ing to be artists, is one of the challenges. This is a work by a young artist (Masooma Syed) who in fact came to Australia on a scholarship, but this was much before that when she was just a third year student and given a project in which she had to be autobiograph ical . She came up with this image which was her grandmother's kurta (tunic). I later realised that there was a very poignant story behind the image. Shahzia Sikander, who is l iving in America, is the other end of the spectrum, and goes back and comments on things like marriage, and this installation was called Knock knock. Who 's there? Mithila! Mithila who ? 45