Conversation @ Pacific Asia Museum: Borderlines
By Perveen Ali
Photos by Yasmin Javed
Keeping true to its mission, the Pakistan Arts Council hosted author Sehba Sarwar on April 8 th for a Conversation@PAM: Borderlines, as part of the USC Pacific Asia Museum’s Free programming every 2 nd Sunday of the Month.
Sehba Sarwar writes and creates art that tackles displacement, migration, and women’s issues; her essays, short stories, and poems have appeared in publications including the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Callaloo, Asia: Magazine of Asian Literature, Dawn Books & Authors and elsewhere; a second edition of her novel Black Wings is forthcoming (Veliz Press, 2019). Her video collages have been screened in Egypt, India, Pakistan, and the US, and she has created a large body of site-specific art installations. In 2016, Sarwar was commissioned by the Menil Collection in Houston to create a multidisciplinary performance, On Belonging, which she launched in February 2018.
Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Sarwar recently moved to Los Angeles via Houston.
In 2000, Sarwar founded Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB), a Houston-based alternative arts organization. VBB emerged out of Sarwar’s simple desire for a public space in Houston in which to read a poem she had written addressing political developments in Pakistan. Spurred by a sense of urgency in the wake of 9/11, the literary collective that Sarwar founded blossomed into a unique Houston-based arts organization that has brought together artists, activists, Houston neighborhoods, and different parts of the world to co-create art and present performances.
Last year, continuing its tradition of celebrating communities from border regions in North America and South Asia, VBB released the third and final installment of its hybrid publication series, Borderlines Volume Three. The publication features photographs, essays, poetry and journalistic narratives by visual and literary artists based in Bangladesh, Canada, India, Mexico, Pakistan, the US-Mexico border, and the USA. At a time of heightened border tensions and rising walls, VBB’s publication “Borderlines” forges connections across borders, exploring shared struggles and joys.
The April Conversation with started with a video presentation of a short poem by Sehba that was recorded at the US-Mexico border and a slide show where she talked about her organization, Voices Breaking Boundaries, Borderlines, and On Belonging. She than read two excerpts from her essays in Borderlines Volumes One and Three.
Sehba Sarwar’s On Belonging explores her life as a transnational citizen alongside her family’s history of migration and displacement from India to Pakistan and around the US. Her live performance incorporated her thought process, her conversations with her mother and family on the day of her father’s death; how distances make us helpless, unable to be with our loved ones at such times. Being a community of transnationals, the audience could relate to not being able to be with their loved ones at such heart wrenching moments. There was not one dry eye in the audience by the time Sehba finished reading from her essays.
Sehba’s performance was followed with a question and answer session moderated by Naila Ahmed, the Vice-President of the Pakistan Arts Council who could very well relate to Sehba and shared the experience of her own loss.
The art installation that accompanied Sarwar's performance was created around a tree, its limbs wrapped with community response cards expressing their responses to the question of belonging, and with ajrak, the traditional block-printed fabric from Sarwar’s home city, Karachi, Sindh where she grew up in Pakistan. Sarwar’s project highlights the global history of migration, and the urgency to resist barriers that divide regions. This fall, Sarwar is completing her memoir that accompanies her On Belonging installation and performance.
As the Museum’s Free Sunday theme was Textiles, the Pakistan Arts Council had put together an exhibition of textiles from all over Pakistan in the Auditorium to accompany Sehba’s art installation.
In the Museum Courtyard the art of printmaking took place to accompany the current exhibition: The Winds from Fusang: Mexico and China in the Twentieth Century. Artists from the Bario Mobile Art Studio helped guide participants through the process of making their own silkscreen printed poster!
Special thanks to the Pakistan Arts Council, its President Samira Saleh and the entire Board for another thought-provoking program.
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