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One of the marked losses of the COVID19 crisis has been travel abroad. By "travel" I mean not merely heedless tourism and the accruing of smart phone snapshots but the hopeful reaching out towards an understanding-or perhaps only the glimmer of an understanding-of people, places and cultures far distant from our own. Another COVID-era loss was the direct experience of exhibitions of visual art, recently redressed with timed-entry and socially distanced admissions to reopened galleries and museums. How gratifying, then, to walk into Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery on a late summer day to view artworks illuminating aspects of contemporary life in Karachi, Pakistan's most populous and ethnically diverse city and the capital of its financial and economic life. Videos and inkjet prints by the late Karachi-based artist Madiha Aijaz examine, among other things, the complex cultural, political and linguistic legacy of colonialism as revealed in her city's urban spaces. Vancouver-based Althea Thauberger's ambitious video touches on the communal, relational and, in some ways, aspirational meanings associated with Karachi's Capri Cinema. Both artists work in a documentary style: Aijaz's approach is personal, observational and intimate in scale while Thauberger's is collaborative and experimental in its creation and theatrical in its presentation.
"Memorial for the lost pages," co-curated by Kimberly Phillips and Zarmeene Shah, is the first Canadian showing of photographs and videos by Aijaz, who died tragically young of cardiac arrest in February 2019. Her work is characterized in the accompanying exhibition guide as being "as complex and layered as the city in which she lived, addressing issues of language and identity, longing and loss, public space and colonial legacies." Aijaz's small-scale colour photos include the 2016 series "Death sentence in two languages," a study in a sexually charged everydayness: the unexpressed desire embodied in men walking together on a beach, sitting in a coffee house, playing pool. Occasionally, a chador-clad woman walks past, a dark, unfocused blur, but always, always, the men socialize with each other in Karachi's public spaces. (Larger photographs, meditating on the current state of Pakistan's fabled Khyber Mail railway line, wrap the glass-enclosed entrance to Yaletown-Roundhouse SkyTrain station.)
Most engaging here are three short videos, shown on small screens and focused on Karachi's historic and, in this day, little-utilized public libraries....