Mahwish Chishty

The lightness of Chishty’s touch and the charm of the works belie the seriousness of her project. Extreme absurdity in the juxtaposition of elements gently introduces the viewer to the horrific realities of drone warfare in Pakistan. The gouache paintings are brightly decorated with flowers, birds and ornate patterns resembling mandalas. An eye features prominently in Reaper (2015); the vehicle gazes out from a gold leaf skyscape—playing with misconceived notion that Pakistani tribal areas where American military drones frequently drop bombs are in a depopulated desert. The incongruous merging of machinery and South Asian mythology draws on the habit of truck drivers in Pakistan to personalize their vehicles with similar motifs; dozens of these vehicles have been destroyed in drone strikes. The brightly decorated trucks are intended to be aspirational, a contrast to the harsh reality in which they operate. In Reaper, the disembodied evil eye—a curse believed to be spawned by a malicious gaze—illustrates the profuse use of military drones by the Central Intelligence Agency in North Pakistan; high-speed data links allow operators to carry out attacks without ever leaving the US. The impact of the drone campaign on tribal life in Pakistan is a direct experience for the artist, whose extended family remains in the country. Though she has been based in the US for the last decade, Chishty made these works in reaction to changes in family life due to the drone campaign, after she learned that her relatives are fearful of stepping outside. By fusing the mechanical forms of drones with the cultural patterns of Mughal miniatures, Chishty presents the ambiguity of her position as a transnational artist creating art from a subjective position informed by her life in the US, a country that is the aggressor, while promoting a local identity based on a formal presentation of the courtly Pakistan miniature tradition. Chishty’s use of miniature painting techniques is an important conceptual link to contemporary artists from Vietnam and Cambodia still dealing with the legacy of US bombings, as well as the status of returnee artists as described by historian Pamela N. Corey in an essay titled “Beyond Yet Toward Representation: Diasporic Artists and Craft as Conceptualism in Contemporary Southeast Asia” in The Journal of Modern Craft. She says, “Of acute importance here are the ways in which the artists deploy craft as a vehicle to create conceptually driven formal iterations, drawing both on semiotic play, such as language, and material subversions, for example [. . .] recombination [. . .] to produce dialectical imagery.”