House in a Garden

Soft Concrete

Alongside overtures to produce concrete in South Asia during periods leading to independence for some nations, or throughout a slow burn of resigned civil strife in others, modern architecture established connections to larger scale infrastructural networks at play. It was also a means to counter— or extend—the provocations that these buildings made material. The establishment of a new architecture for South Asia, if not an extension of all independence movements in the world, became as much a closing in (on people, on the production of value) as a fervent attempt to display an openness to iterations of modernism and its latent spirituality of capital largesse. Yet profound fissures remained ever-present at the peripheries of these movements, as with the nations that contained them. For Shezad Dawood, what was one—with the identification of an East that spanned to a West Pakistan, today’s Pakistan, and Bangladesh—became two; a split foregrounding how and why the presence of systems that inform modernist architecture in both countries take on new meanings today.

In this exhibition, two rooms re-situate a body of works by London-based Dawood that confer, in their dispersal and return to India, a historical narrative arc for the artist that begins with a questioning of home and Nation: a politics conceived by and through spaces. Included are series that may be understood as complementary to each other, or as is the case with the diasporic, as talking back. Does the nascent materiality in these works intimate lost hope? A potential yet to come? An attempt at decolonizing the visual and spatial arenas of modern urbanity?

Kantha textiles—often constructed through leftovers—speak to the ways in which cast-off components reconstitute spaces and identities. Considered one of the oldest forms of sewing, kantha is not only an amalgam of running stitches but also an assembly of less useful panels, with multiple layers built atop one another and often remade into blankets. Kantha, as both suggesting a stitch as well as broad naming convention today for the textiles, takes on techniques of recycling that holistically remake as much as rebuild the elements that create them. In Dawood’s works, the running stitch is a continuous line built from smaller lines and these stitches effect dashes, columns, grids—the there, but not there condition of a conventional architectural drawing. The dash, as stitch and structure, represents what may be above or below a given condition. These are the syllabary of (modernist) architecture. While these stitches keep the individual pieces together, they also effect a superimposition, or embodied agency, that unifies the stitch, the subjects that produce them, and their intentionality.

Much like architecture, kantha is a syncretic form of assemblage that addresses the continuous production of things. Transmitted across generational as well as physical divides, kantha are continually being mended and repaired with their use and display. Here, we are privy to an assembly of temporalities whose life cycles as labors have been arrested, if only momentarily. As all buildings degrade over time, those that are visualized among these works are not understood through their misuse, climate, or materiality, but through a reckoning with these conditions. For Dawood, the subsequent disappearance of modern architecture in South Asia alludes to a more generalized entropy of socio-political norms that once attempted to present a future while relegating the past to the edges. For Dawood, kantha is a strategy.

As part of Dawood’s large scale project Encroachments, first shown as part of the Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019) and following at the Lahore Biennial (2020), the use of denim as much as language binds the limits of sovereignty to movements of people and goods. Such material circulates but generally in one direction. Evoking the “illegal” structures established on and around private and State properties, for Dawood, the encroachments are complex spatial forms associated with a shadow architecture that transgresses conventional reception. Accompanied by small graphic paintings that deploy rhetorical gestures concerning US-Pakistan relations during the Cold War, a set of denim paintings invokes both the former US Consulate in Karachi as well as traces of other occupations.

In 1959, Los Angeles-based Austrian architect and émigré Richard Neutra designed Pakistan’s United States Embassy in Karachi which later became a Consulate. But the complex soon became disused once the new capital was moved to the Margalla Hills and what would become Islamabad. Long dormant, the Consulate and adjacent warehouse were recently proposed for sale and assumed to be slated for demolition. The local populace found little application for the low-slung shimmering concrete and brick shells that hold one corner of the Bagh-e-Jinnah in central Karachi. That this building and its significance within the history of global modernisms was considered negligible amplifies it as an arbiter of transnational political relations. While Pakistan had its share of foreign-born architects working to establish and build a new image of the nation, including Louis I Kahn, Edward Durrell Stone and Michel Écochard, a precarious stability provided by initial leaders such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Iskander Mirza was subsequently upended through a coup orchestrated by General Ayub Khan. Dawood’s denim paintings, including Neutral Density (2018) and Defender II (2018), allude to the inchoate fallibilities of a US-borne aesthetic hegemony wrought through alignments established with other nations, rendered as convergent yet incomplete geometries, figures, and surfaces.