Within Karachi’s arid urbanscape with its mishmash of colonial-era residences and an ever-growing number of towering concrete grey structures, there exists a unique and oft-overlooked, language of form and function; of prickly thorns and slick razor wires; of an urban metropolis and its green-thumbed residents. Alongside urban aspirations of security, endures a desire for floral facades to beautify and obscure these reminders of our mortality. If a home is a castle, what does it say if the walls are built unusually high, if razor wire coils overwhelm them, and if grills bar every opening?
These are some of the questions that Jovita Alvares addresses through her investigations into the abundance of Bougainvillea blossoms, she finds dotting the bleak and rigid urban planning on her daily commutes. This once alien plant that unobtrusively commandeers the Karachi backdrop so effortlessly becomes an apt symbol for Alvares to parse the truths of urban existence in an age of constant development. The Bougainvillea is the protagonist through which the artist leads us to question our place within this militarized and brownish landscape that has come to define so many of our cities.
Her artistic practice, borne out of repeated documentation and maintaining a vast visual archive of handheld video footage, leads her to splice and juxtapose moments caught in time. Alvares digitally montages the stills to make holistic printed images that, while being subtly decorative in a veil of superficial beauty, are brimming with poignant subject matter. The process allows for the idiosyncrasies and the transformative nature of the disintegrating non-archival paper, altering the final image which is scanned. This in particular chimes with William Morris’s appreciation of handmade production as he and fellow personalities in the arts and craft movement raged against the Victorian notions of industrialization. Much like the beautifully crafted wallpapers of the Arts & Crafts movement, Alvares’ pieces also contain a touch of romanticism for the past. Repetitive cutouts of Bougainvillea in almost a grillwork pattern obscure the images underneath offering a window into the present. In other instances, the kaleidoscopic quality of the patterns takes centre stage allowing us to envision the barrage of security barriers as the artist wields total control over what she allows us to see or not see.
And perhaps if we were to look we might see in these lived spaces, their respective guardians such as those mentioned in Umberto Eco’s On Beauty, “He cultivates only flowers that are real but seem artificial... in other words, he constructs a life made up of artificial sensations, in an equally artificial environment.” (Eco, 2004)
Text by Haseeb Ullah Zafar
