Recap | Riaz Mehmood Workshop
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Multidisciplinary artist Riaz Mehmood prepared food and showcased a presentation of his previous work and current research on Thursday, December 12, 2019. This workshop was part of Noor Bhangu’s Has the Community Been Fed? workshop series which sought to intertwine aspects of art, community and food during the month of December.
Riaz Mehmood’s workshop explored the culture and history of his home region in Pakistan, and was centred around a meal of Pakistani food that he prepared himself. Mehmood’s early life took place in a village in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan, a predominantly Pasthun region near the country’s northwestern border with Afghanistan. Mehmood’s earliest memories of his village in Pakistan are almost utopic, and he reminisced about times when no house in the village had a gate and travelling groups of storytellers would capture the village’s attention. However, Mehmood made it clear that times like these have long since disappeared in Pakistan due to growing Western presence, increased political strife and a myriad of conflicts that would plague neighbouring Afghanistan from the 1980’s onward. After studying engineering in Peshawar, Mehmood made his way over to Canada and gravitated towards the arts, soon graduating from OCAD’s Integrated Media program, and earning an MFA at the University of Windsor. As a man straddled between two worlds, Mehmood’s work has grappled with political activism, culture, history and personal experience in the form of sculpture, film, photography and installation.
In his presentation, Mehmood showcased a selection of past work which held a particular focus on the relationship between Pakistan and the West. In one project, Mehmood created a replica of a drone and decorated it in the style of Pakistani truck art. Layered with patterns and painted images reflecting the brutal anonymity of drones, Mehmood’s drone reads as a symbol for the West’s violent shadow, cast on Pakistani life. Mehmood also showcased images from a digital photography project titled Doubletake, in which he collaged photographs of himself at different locations in Pakistan and Canada in an effort to explore cultural homogenization in Pakistan, resulting from Western influence and globalization. One of Mehmood’s most resonating works from this period is a short film titled Amanat, filmed in 2009. Amanat is an Arabic word that means trust or safekeeping. The film is structured around an interview with a rickshaw driver who went out of his way to return a cellphone to a German artist who had left it by mistake in the back seat of the vehicle. In a city of many millions of people and one where cellphone theft is a fairly common practice, fate and the driver’s good intentions mix to form a story that is brimming with optimism.
Riaz Mehmood’s workshop concluded with a presentation of his current research regarding non-violent political activism in Pakistan. Much of Mehmood’s research has been focused on the Khudai Khidmatgar movement in the 1920’s and 1930’s, as well as the Pashtun Taful Movement (PTM), started back in 2014. Tensions between young people and police in Karachi have been boiling over with deadly effect in the past decade. The recent exposé of a Karachian police chief responsible for the deaths of upwards of 400 people ignited the Pashtun Taful Movement, which echoes the Khudai Khidmatgar led by non-violent activist Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Mehmood’s upcoming project will have a strong focus on the PTM, and he plans to compile a documentary project about youth-led activism in Karachi and the whole of Pakistan. Most evident in the presentation was Mehmood’s optimism for groups like these, not focused on previous utopic visions or weighed down by years of political strife and Western influence, but actively shaping the future by reexamining and revising the structures that hold negative impacts on their lives.