Salima Hashmi – artist, curator, scholar, educator, activist and veritable force of nature – can now add the honour of being COMO Museum’s first guest curator since its inaugural show in Spring 2019 to her list of achievements. “They said they want an exhibition on protest art,” she tells me. “So I said to Seher [Tareen, Founding President], protest is not the kind of word that I can use. Protest is kind of short-lived. So I came back with the title ‘Dharti Dhar Dhar Dharke Gi: Artist as Witness’ and she loved that.”

The title of this group show ‘Dharti Dhar Dhar Dharke Gi’ (‘The Earth Will Shiver, Shake and Beat’*) is of course from Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s revolutionary poem Hum Dhekenge, which the poet - Salima Hashmi’s father - wrote in 1979 as a protest against the oppressive rule of the military dictator Zia-ul-Haq. Faiz is as much a witness in this show as the artists displaying their works, from his contribution to the title, to the curator’s note, to his texts displayed clearly and directly on the Museum’s pristine white walls.

Walking into COMO Museum’s premises, the eye first rests on young artist Hina Tabassum’s sculptural work in the Museum garden – broken teddy bears lying amongst rubble, an image instantly and heartbreakingly associated with the violence unleashed on the children of Gaza. Another young artist’s larger-than-life work unfurls from the roof of the museum down two floors to the verdant ground – Ali Laraib Rizvi depicts bodies in shrouds, packed tightly against each other, in one long mass grave. Again, there is absolutely no doubt in our minds who the artist is referring to. We have seen the images coming out of Gaza for over a year now. The heart mourns before we even enter the museum’s main building.

The curator’s note, written in clear, dark letters directly on the Museum’s white wall, consists of a few, powerful lines, also written by Faiz in the 50s, asking the viewer:

No other explanation or context for the show is provided, or in fact, needed. Death is wrought by the state, by armies, by the military-industrial complex, by colonialism, by nationalists, by religious extremists. Life is asserted by the poet, artist, musician, filmmaker. The artist – life-affirmer – depicts death, wrought by an enemy that is too great and historic for one man or woman to take on. But the artist, like our legendary Mian Ijaz ul Hassan, remembers, depicts, and resists. He protested the Vietnam War in his student days at the University of Cambridge, and then was devastated by the Pakistani army’s actions in the ‘blood-drenched month of March 1971’, which shows in his triptych ‘Bangladesh Saga’ (1973), where pigmented bodies are shown strewn across the ground.

Ijaz ul Hassan’s ‘Bangladesh Saga’ is an anchoring piece in the show. “I knew that I wanted some of Faiz’s texts basically because of his passion for Palestine, but I didn’t want to use his Palestinian texts. I wanted to use his Dhaka text, because the work that Ijaz ul Hassan did is also about Bangladesh,” Hashmi explains. Faiz’s ‘On Returning from Dakha’ (1974) is written on the wall opposite Ijaz ul Hassan’s ‘Bangladesh Saga’. The poet and artist jointly mourn, remember, honour, and send a message to the victims of the Bangladesh war: you are not forgotten. Hashmi explains: “We were looking at our own histories of conflict simultaneously with the massacre, the genocide [in Gaza] that we are witnessing today. In a sense, we were talking about the artist as a witness at all times of torment for humankind.”

This history is apparent in young visual artist Waleed Zafar’s work, ‘The Land is the Color of my Skin’ which shows 27 distinct genocides across the world over the span of the last 524 years. “As we know, on this planet, no one is blameless, but as long as we constantly assert the artist’s voice, we remain in touch with humanity, and that was the idea behind this exhibition, really,” explains Hashmi.

Faiz Ahmad Faiz is not the only legendary resistance poet whose words are proudly displayed on the walls of COMO Museum. Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘House as Casualty’ is clearly visible between two artworks from the Middle East. Iraqi artist Dia Azzawi’s ‘We Are Not Seen, But, Corpses’ was made in response to the Israel-backed massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut in 1982. “It so happened that in the 80s, I had done a series on that also, so [Azzawi’s art work] resonated with me a lot,” Hashmi elaborates on her curatorial process. Iranian artist Ardeshir Mohasses’s ‘Final Confrontation’ speaks to the Iran-Iraq war that claimed half a million casualties in 1980. Both works, in addition to many others, are from the collector Taimur Hassan’s notable collection (he is also the spouse of COMO Museum’s founder, Seher Tareen).

Hashmi doesn’t just show her curatorial prowess with the masterful juxtaposition of imagery and text, but also the placement of the more violent works with the meditative. “Being too overt [when it comes to human violence ] is sometimes self-defeating, because there is only so much that you can take of it,” she says. “[Veteran artist and educator] Naazish [Ata-ullah]’s work, that moment of calm, right under Imran Qureshi’s very violent work, the two of them together are creating that balance which we need; otherwise, we can’t survive.”

This could possibly be her signature move; I remember her exquisite 2016 show in Delhi ‘This Night Bitten Dawn’ where she placed Indian contemporary artist Anita Dube’s work - comprised of human bones covered in velvet and beads and lace - in close confines with Pakistani visual artist Imran Ahmad’s “savage-looking instruments of war” made of stainless steel and surgical instruments. The image is one I still have not forgotten, nine years later.

She also praises her co-curators, Hassan Sheikh and Asad Hayee, as very meticulous and adding finesse to the show - a humility and spirit of collaboration that is unexpected from someone of her stature. When she hears the word icon, she jokes that it makes her think of a Nikon camera. “I am very wary of this label, because the thing is, every time you talk to a young artist who is doing something exceptional and you say my God where did they come from, and you’re so humbled and so happy that such a thing can happen.”

We talk about the upcoming Faiz Festival, and how some of her friends suggest certain people she should invite, and she jokes about the lack of funding: “I think the rich [who are the potential source of the funding] know that innately Faiz inn ki jarhain kaattha hai.” At another point in our conversation, she laughingly shared a story about her parents. “I remember my father and mother would be going out somewhere to dinner, and my mother would very ironically say to my father, ‘So will you be singing for your supper?’ And he said, ‘Probably’.”

Art and capital have always been in a relationship with each other, she says. “This is a reality: creative people have always worked within the constraints of patronage. What is key is what emerges from that patronage. My great eye-opener was Kavita Singh, the wonderful art historian. She taught us to look at the manuscript page, the miniature page, and find the bolshy things that miniature artists did, the little signs that they put in, in spite of the patronage of the king, which talk about ordinary people, which talk about ordinary things.”

She also praises her co-curators, Hassan Sheikh and Asad Hayee, as very meticulous and adding finesse to the show - a humility and spirit of collaboration that is unexpected from someone of her stature. When she hears the word icon, she jokes that it makes her think of a Nikon camera. “I am very wary of this label, because the thing is, every time you talk to a young artist who is doing something exceptional and you say my God where did they come from, and you’re so humbled and so happy that such a thing can happen.”

One of Faiz’s texts is displayed in its original form in Urdu. COMO’s curator Hassan Sheikh asked Mrs Hashmi to explain it to him so that he could explain it to the viewers asking him about it. “It is actually a part of a poem by Faiz called ‘Teen Awazein’. The three voices are those of the oppressed, the oppressor, and the voice of God. The oppressed talks about everything happening to him. The oppressor says this is your fate - everything is for us. The voice of God, addressing the people in power, says you will get your just desserts over here, that the meek shall inherit the earth and the powerful will bite the dust.” The message is similar to ‘sab taaj uchhaale jayenge, sab takht giraaye jayenge’ (when crowns will be tossed in the air, when thrones will be brought down, from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’). Ultimately, she says, “An artist works to create a better world, because they cannot create in conditions of great violence. It’s not humanly possible. What all creative endeavour is, is a way of saying we are alive, and we attempt to stay alive.”

The title of the exhibition is ‘Artist as Witness’. The artists in this show, the young and the veteran alike, are acting as witness to several atrocities of their time, and we, the audience, are joining them. And to witness is no small act. To witness is to resist the erasure of a people. We, the ruled, the governed, may not be able to save those facing their oppressors, but the least we can do is keep their memory alive.