Monday 20 February 2017

Visual Essay (Media: Fine Art, Photography)

The Art piece that i have is by a Pakistani Artist called Sabir Nazar, who is a political cartoonist and his work is mostly on the politics of pakistan. 
Below is this art piece that he did in 2008 as a result of the assasination of the Former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto. The lady in the centre is Benazir Bhutto and around you see people laying dead and some people marching with her. 


Dead bodies of people (possibly the citizens or workers of the political party)
Here we see an image of a man and who looks like to be holding some sort of hammer or something in his hand, and by his hat and clothes, one can clearly assume that he is a worker or from the working class.
In this photo, you can clearly see a group of men, wearing clothes that are significantly different from the rest of the group. Different in terms of colour and the attire.

The hats and the turban tell us that the men are from the province of Sindh (traditional Sindhi hat) and the Balochistan (the white turban).






The flag here looks like the flag of Libya, but its not. It is the flag of the Pakistan's Peoples' Party (Party of Benazir Bhutto).




Here you see the artist writing his signature to tell that this is his work.
Comparison of Sabir Nazar.s Piece with the original piece that has Lady Liberty in it. 

Just like how a woman figure also known as the Goddess of Liberty lead the war during the French Revolution, Benazir Bhutto also lead the Political Movement in Pakistan to impeach a military dictator Pervez Mushraff which later caused her death as a result of a suicide attack. 

A male-dominated society, where women lead are often seen as a bad role model and similarly in PK, the right wing did not like that. So the artist is trying to compare Benazir with the Goddess of Liberty to show how a woman lead from the front in the times of war and can be more powerful and braver than a lot of men.

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2 comments:

  1. Unknown23 February 2017 at 12:15

    This is a interesting variant of the famous painting Liberty Leading the People. The custom of the characters makes it much easier to understand the background of the painting, which is to honor the first female leader of a muslim-majority country, Benazir Bhutto, the 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan. And the date of the painting indicates that it was done soon after her assassination. Most interestingly, although the painter changed the custom of most the characters, the people lying on the ground and begging for mercy remain the same as the original work. Maybe that is because the "people" don't really know what they are fighting against. - Yiyu

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    1. Unknown23 February 2017 at 14:58

      that is a very nice approach. I get what you're trying to say about people not knowing what they are fighting for. In the case of Benazir Bhutto and this piece, the people w traditional hat and turban that you see are the suppressed and belong to a group that have not been given their equal share in govt. which is why I think the artist have depicted them like how farmers are depicted in the original painting.

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