Salima Hashmi: ‘The worse things are, the better the art becomes’

This is the edited transcript of the keynote conversation that concluded The Politics of Print: elephant in the room, which took place 23–24 January 2026 as part of STPI’s inaugural Print Show & Symposium in Singapore. The title of the talk, “The worse things are, the better the art becomes”, is a quote by Salima Hashmi. It comes from an interview that Hashmi gave in 2011¹ for “Another Pakistan”, a podcast series produced by Asia Society and the Watson Institute at Brown University. In his introduction to that conversation, Christopher Lydon of Radio Open Source described Hashmi as “the vital link between Pakistan’s greatest poet, her father Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and a ‘resilience’ that you’d feel in the air even if Pakistanis weren’t invoking it so urgently and so often.”

Hashmi has been a beacon for practitioners both at home and internationally, with a multifaceted practice that positions her as an artist, art historian, activist, curator, educator and organiser. She is a founding member of the Women’s Action Forum in Pakistan and founding Dean of the Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, which she joined in 2003 after teaching at the National College of Arts for some three decades.

Mirroring Hashmi’s concerns for equality and sustainability, while holding space to celebrate life and art as a civil right, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija moderated this timely and far-reaching discussion.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
Well, I’ve never moderated before, so this is going to be…winging it!

Salima Hashmi
But, as I said earlier, we don’t believe in moderation, so it’s fine.

Rirkrit Tiravanija 
Absolutely not. This is the first time that I’m meeting you, and everyone I know has said amazing things. A close friend, Hans Ulrich Obrist, met Salima in London, so of course I called him and asked what I should say, and he sent me a quote that Salima had written and given to him: “The door opened just a fraction, a shaft of light entered.”

I think we could probably start there.

Salima Hashmi
Well, I confess that I was hoping you would cook something before we start! But, nevertheless...

You know, it’s very disconcerting to have one’s pearls of wisdom confronted. I always tiptoe around quotations. What exactly do those words mean? And are they going to open a door through which you can walk?

Recently, I came across this quotation from James Baldwin, and I thought that, perhaps, it’s describing what happens with the artist in difficult times. These past days have made it obvious to each of us—or perhaps it just seems so—that the world has not been at such a critical juncture before. One of my students asked me, knowing full well that I was 83 years old: “Have things ever been so bad?” I thought a bit, and said “No.”

In that context, I want to share what Baldwin said, and think about it: “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his or her society” – he didn’t say ‘her’, I’ve slipped it in – “is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, to make freedom real.”

I dwelt on that for a very long time, because it’s kind of where we find ourselves today. Or maybe it just seems so, because the battle that we are undertaking is unlike any other, really. The definition of freedom seems very elusive if you think about it. From the river to the sea seems out of reach. So what is the artist to do?

Yesterday, somebody asked a question about poetry in the inaugural session. That’s when one draws or closes ranks with others like oneself—poets, musicians, people who sing—and for that fraction of a moment—of an hour, a day, a week—we sort of feel that sense of freedom that they give us. We evade our time, if you like. When we speak of poetry, we also realise there’s a way of becoming. I feel it’s inevitable that artists, poets, and those of our ilk have to hang together.

When I think of the way that you, Rirkrit, make your performances and step outside the predictable, you’re gathering your forces and you’re taking people with you. That, to me, is not only courageous—it’s also very moving. Because it gives so many people the chance, for that moment, to be other than they are.

That’s why, when we talk about it being a difficult time, we’re really asking: Why art? Why poetry? Or indeed, why love? How do we find love at this moment?

I don’t know. You tell me.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
Partly through the stomach.

Salima Hashmi 
Because if we don’t find love at this moment, then we lose life.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
It’s interesting in the sense that, of course, I would like to think that I approach everything through love, right? Having done a little bit of reading around what you do and what you’ve been doing, I think you give so much, even when you’re not doing anything. Maybe that’s the kind of energy that we need to harvest together; to try and find a place for all of us to be together.

Salima Hashmi 
I think a lot of the images I was putting together for this talk, not really to comment on one by one but just to provide context, because I feel very strongly about where I originate, which is South Asia. That’s my new description, because of, what can I say, the adolescence of the establishment in South Asian countries, where the people are denied being able to come together to work, and for artists to meet.

I find it incongruous when artists from India and Pakistan can’t meet in one another’s countries, yet they go off to places like Dubai. Can you think of a fate worse than death? I mean, really. So we struggle on, for decades, to try and evade these borders. Therefore, I now say I’m a South Asian, and then I’m a woman, and then a Pakistani.

But I’m very cognizant of the fact that we’re in Singapore. I’d like to remind you that you’ve been here before.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
I’ve been here a lot, and it’s interesting, because I’m thinking about the title of this talk, “The worse things get, the better the art becomes”. At least as a person who’s visiting, everything here seems to be in place, and I do wonder about the struggle of being in a place where everything is well-kept.

Salima Hashmi
How well you put it. Because we know that we rest on the shoulders of other people’s struggles, and I feel that because I came to Singapore a long time ago when making art was considered very close to sedition. The fact that you now have Singapore Art Week, private collections, and artist studios—which we don’t have in Pakistan, artists have to find their own space—tells me something.

But I wonder if art-making will be better as a result. What do you think?

Rirkrit Tiravanija
I suppose we could just struggle with ourselves, within ourselves. That would probably be the first struggle: to find ourselves, to understand ourselves better and, in that way, to then relate to things around us. I think art-making is always a struggle, even without all the problems around.

Salima Hashmi 
My teacher, an early modernist in Pakistan, Shakir Ali, said, and I’m translating from the Urdu: “On the day you begin your work, you are utterly alone. You have no companions and no turning back, and before you there’s the abyss. Those who are very fortunate can walk the walk and reach the other side.”

I am often reminded of that when I look at work, which is deeply thoughtful. It speaks of something other than the maker. And you can sense that they have drawn into themselves much more than we have thought of or even dreamed of. That then becomes a mark of the time.

When people say that art is not political, or need not be political, I have a quiet smile to myself. All art is political. The fact that it attempts not to be political tells you something about the politics of where it’s happening. Therefore, when we say that in bad times you produce good art, you’re really not just talking about the imagination, but the essence of human beings and their ability to defy, remake, rethink, reconfigure, and find a way. That, sometimes, can end a life while it provides life for others.

When walking the streets, do you think of that and wonder: why is this given to certain people?

[Addressing Jitish Kallat in the audience] When I was at your talk yesterday, and you were talking about planets beyond this, I really travelled with you. I thought how amazing a gift this is, for an artist to find there’s a possibility of those frontiers that we would rather be in, rather than the ones we are confronting today. I say this especially because, as you were sitting down, my friend Rosa said this is a very apt subject for today’s conversation, because things are looking really bad, and you said: “In that case, we’ve hit the spot.”

But I would really like you, Rirkrit, to comment, because you spend time in the USA and you teach.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
I teach in New York, which is not like the rest of the US of A in a way. But it is becoming quite difficult. I mean, just to wake up to the news, or to just see the memes or whatever. A friend of mine said: “It literally takes up all your brain, because it’s bombarded by all these terrible thoughts. So, it is difficult to remain.” It’s good for us that we have some space to go away to.

Salima Hashmi 
And thus, the artist, and thus the poet; and going on from that question in the inaugural session yesterday about whether poetry and art cohabit the same space; and looking at the work of artists currently in South Asia, who use poetry or employ poetry to add a layer to their work.

I’m thinking of people like Shilpa Gupta, who uses Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry, like “Hum Dekhenge ”—“We shall see”, or Nalini Malani and her work on violence against women, In Search of Vanished Blood, which is named after Faiz’s poem “Lahu Ka Suragh”.

You know, Faiz’s poem was written decades ago, when the General usurped the will and the mandate of the people, and blood was spilt—and then, decades later, an Indian artist, a woman, uses the same words to add a layer to her work, which has to do with violence against women. One thinks about how the poet, the artist, witnesses a particular time and leaves their mark. And that mark is like a mark that comes round again and blossoms in a very different way decades later, and who knows, it will become something else, somewhere.

That, then, is the promise when we say: “The worse things are, the better the art becomes”. Perhaps you need that horror to push the poet or the artist into a corner where they have to go beyond themselves. Is that, do you think, the mechanism that occurs?

Rirkrit Tiravanija
I guess in a way, since, at least for me as an artist, I’m always weighing the problems of the world around me. I think I always see problems everywhere. I have to ask myself: How can we have come all this way and still have the same kinds of trouble?

Salima Hashmi 
Why do we refuse to evolve as a species? It is something that bothers me a great deal. The Pakistani artist who now lives in the US, Shahzia Sikander, made a work which again used one of Faiz’s lines: “Tum kyun us din ka zikr karo”—“Why speak of the day when the heart is shattered?”

The last lines of that poem, “Tum apni karni kar guzro”, actually go: “Tum apni karni kar guzro / jo hoga dekha jayega”, which translates to, “Do what you’re destined to do / and care not for what follows.”

So perhaps there is that moment when you make a decision about what you have to do, and at that moment, all doubt falls away, and that door opens, and the shaft of light enters. That’s the moment of creation, I suppose. I don’t know whether that sounds too pompous.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
I think it’s about right. You curated a show in 2009 that was centred around the idea of delaying. Could you speak about that idea?

Salima Hashmi
Hanging Fire. Yes, it was a show for the Asia Society in New York, and it was about art from Pakistan. Pakistan is kind of this filling in the sandwich between Iran—and when you say the word “Iran” there’s a certain image that comes up—and India. Pakistan is this inexplicable slice in between, which changes and mutates when it becomes the frontline in the war against the Soviet Union, and the Americans are pouring their goodies in—the same high-quality goodies, by the way, that the Taliban are using—causing devastation in Pakistan.

Suddenly, Pakistan became this wonderful state helping the free world. And then, of course, everything backfired and we became the front of extremism and the birthplace of something that happened on 9/11. Nobody ever said that Pakistan had anything to do with it. But we certainly paid for it, as did people in the streets of Kabul, when in fact the supposed engineers were the Saudis. But you don’t fight with the Saudis.

So, Hanging Fire was really intended to combat the narrative and look into what was actually happening in Pakistan. I think it was a kind of defining exhibition because I strove to look at the sheer diversity of the country. Among the leaders in the art world were women who were very often single parents; women who had made it on their own, who had lived great struggles. The same with men. The artists who had learned to combat so many different opposing influences with a sheer will of creative energy. This was startling for audiences in New York, because they never connected the kind of vocabulary that they came across with contemporary art in this part of the world.

I say with a certain amount of confidence but also a tinge of surprise, still today, that the exhibition was so diverse. They were all artists who lived in Pakistan, except for one who comes and goes. That was even more surprising, because there’s a feeling that artists make good once they go to the West, but the artists in the show all live, work, and very often teach in Pakistan. That is why there is a crop of young artists every year who are educated with great vibrancy in the teaching studios, and so they keep coming.

When I think of 2009 and the artists who participated and their subsequent careers, it’s amazing where they have gone. They are known not only in Pakistan but elsewhere. The majority of them are fairly secure economically, and they continue to be fertile and do not repeat themselves, which is, of course, the huge problem. We know that once there’s an appearance in the West in a high-profile venue, artists become a commodity and therefore of no great wealth where they came from, in real terms. The new artists have flats in Dubai, but they’re not contributing very much.

Just last week I saw two or three shows in Lahore, and looked at the work of an artist who came from Skardu, which is high up in the mountains. There was an earthquake there recently, and roads are blocked. This young man’s work is something that moves me because he was trained as a miniature artist but gave that up to work with old fabrics in new ways that speak to his will. Where did this come from? It comes from someplace that is very difficult to describe.

I asked him: “Are you going back to Skardu?” He says: “I have to. I can’t survive in Lahore.” I ask: “How will you make work?” and he says: “One of my friends has a motor workshop, and he’s giving me a little space in the back. He says as long as we can chat every evening and I can tell him some new jokes, I can have the space for free, and that’s where I’ll make my work.”

I’m astounded by his courage and his capacity to believe in what he’s doing. To me, that more than fulfils what this evening’s talk is about. Don’t give up on human beings. They are immensely resourceful. They may have very little, but there is that desire to leave the world a better place, to do something that somebody has not done before, and to talk to us. You have to go find them.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
You know that idea, that there are people who still want to be artists? How do we explain that in a place where there isn’t anything? That desire must be coming from some place.

Salima Hashmi
I think the desire comes from having very little, but having a lot, and having dreams that are so immense that they can’t be contained. I also find that, because the content is there, it has to find its way. I don’t know whether I should be really horrible right now and say that some of the recent art fairs I’ve seen in Europe are banal. I mean, they’re very slick, but there’s nothing that will add to my joy of being alive.

I think that is something we need to talk about. For my generation and generations after me, in order to learn about art, you turned your face West. That was where you had to go. You had to go to London or Paris or New York or whatever. And I think it’s time we turned our faces the other way and looked here. Because we have what it takes in terms of form.

If I can tell a little anecdote. Many years ago, in the ’70s, my father, the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, met Jean-Paul Sartre at a writers’ conference in what was then Leningrad, now back to St. Petersburg. Sartre said to my father: “You know, Faiz, there’s nothing going on in literature in the West after the Second World War because what we had to say is done. We’ve still got the form, but the content is all in the Third World.” It was called the Third World then. “Once they’ve found the form, because they haven’t found the form, they will take over.”

I think that’s already happened in countries which have a lot to say; they have found the form, and they surprise us. You are one of the most surprising artists, I think. You have a way of speaking about things that have not been done in the way that we were familiar with. But you also bring something that goes very deep into your own world, and that world is one of the layers we can uncover together. To me, that is really what it means to have a great deal to say in a world that wants to stifle us and our voices.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
I’m mesmerised.

Salima Hashmi
I just want to put in a word for what I saw this morning, which was the exhibition Fear No Power at the National Gallery Singapore. I found it so moving but was also deeply shocked that I did not know that parallel to our movement in Pakistan, there were almost the same struggles, issues, pains, joys, and triumphs elsewhere.

I recognised each one of those artists in the show, because in them, I saw artists in our part of the world going through parallel journeys, at exactly the same time. That, to me, was such a revelation. I have been transformed by this exhibition, and I want to thank the National Gallery for bringing this exhibition to Singapore and drawing the threads with the women’s movements in this region and educating me.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
Should we open to questions?

Salima Hashmi 
Or comments.

Li Li Chung
Thank you. To milk that question on poetry that I asked yesterday, which wasn’t about poetry going with art side by side but about poetry inside art. You come from a tradition where miniatures and manuscripts are text and visual heavy, they go together in the same frame… Could you talk about that in the context of contemporary art?

Salima Hashmi
The miniature tradition is still very much alive, but in a different way. Because, of course, it was a court-based tradition. There was tremendous patronage at one time in Akbar the Great’s court with an atelier of 4,000 painters. Now, the story goes, the Persian tradition came into North India but surely they didn’t bring 4,000 painters from Persia. They were local artists who were there and simply changed their practices so that they could be included and trained in the ateliers. Then there were masters in the ateliers—some were masters of just borders; some were masters of the underpainting.

And then there were, of course, the calligraphers. To a great extent it was the story that was being—and I hesitate to say the word—illustrated, because you find there is so much more in the visual that is not there in the writing. I have been privileged to listen to this wonderful art historian who’s left us now, Dr Kavita Singh, in which she talked about the political content in the paintings that is nowhere in the script. The text is saying something which has a framework, and it is about giving information or letting us know about the intricacies of governorship or whatever the king has conquered, but the artist is having his own way and getting away with so much more.

Of course, being an artist, that would happen—there’s no way that the artists would be completely restricted by the text. They would go into their own realm and give that—if I may call it—value to the manuscript. When the manuscripts were divided, which, of course, has been done—they were taken away by the British or whatever—they become divorced from the text, so they have to stand on their own. And do they stand on their own? Yes. The historian will find so much more that was not in the text.

Today, it’s very different, because the contemporary miniature painter has to find a reason to work in a particular form, and they have to justify it to themselves. It’s no longer possible to say, “oh, but this is the way it was done.” That’s not what you have to talk about today. The modern miniature subverts the tradition and finds ways of doing things. Still, in this love affair between poetry, the word and the image, the image has a certain freedom that is not bound by language in the way that the text is. But also, they are parallel. The poet can feed off the image, and there are plenty of poets who write painterly poems. They speak of colour.

In one of my father’s poems called “Sham”, which means “evening”, he talks about a tree, which, as he says, reminds him of a temple that is disintegrating, and he goes on to describe it. Once, I said to him, “you know, this is a painter’s poem.” And he acknowledged the fact that, yes, it was a painter’s poem. So there is this leaning on one another, and that is not surprising: you need your allies in times of trouble.

Therefore, when you know that a poem came to you and the young poet has already been annihilated by a bomb, that poem becomes more than a poem. It marks something that we would rather not know and that we know. Because in that annihilation, that poem is more than a poem. It becomes all of us. It becomes the suffering of a people. It becomes the savagery of a people, and it becomes the pain that all of us suffer. The same thing happens when you look at a painting, which becomes more than a painting.

Yesterday, we were standing in front of a work by this Korean master who is no longer here, and we were thinking: “How could such a calm work happen after what this artist has been through?” Maybe he’s bringing us to that moment of calmness and taking us out of ourselves and making a promise that, yes, you too will redeem the insanity of the world, and you will make that promise of being a human being through that very calm work, which must have come about after the most difficult times that the artist lived through.

I think of all of that—whether it’s a poem or whether it’s a work that we make. It’s an invitation to everybody: Come. Be with us. Suffer with us. Dream with us. And eventually, we will perhaps add something to you, and you will add something to us. That is, after all, what the Greeks tell us: theatre was all about making us more than ourselves.

Srinivas Aditya Mopivedi
This is a very special moment, watching you both, two of my mentors, sitting and talking. I want to ask about hosting and generosity, which you both have very seamlessly embodied all your life. Salimaji, you hosting art, hosting people, hosting imaginations, in a space where there was no space to host. And Rirkrit, hosting people, a lot of people, through your art.

I remember Rirkrit saying many times that if you do something with generosity, people always come, people always respond. Could you talk about hosting as a process?

Salima Hashmi
Oh, dear. I’ve just published my memoirs, and no, I’m not going to make a plug for my book, but it took me back to when I was a little girl when I always flunked mathematics. I used to make little drawings in my maths book, and my mother, who was very good at mathematics, used to get pretty infuriated with this, because it meant I was not paying attention. So, she said: “I suppose when you grow up, you want to be an artist,” and I said: “No, I’m going to be a teacher.” I was pretty certain, because teachers were the boss.

But I think it’s a misunderstanding to think that one is giving away anything. I know that if I have gained anything in all these years of teaching—I think it’s almost like half a century of being a teacher—it is that you’re actually walking away with a slice of somebody’s life, and that is the most amazing thing, because it makes you more whole.

I know that I have benefitted enormously from learning from people I was supposed to be teaching. That has been the most enriching experience, far more than working at my own work, which is what I have very often neglected, at the expense of giving time, which is the most precious thing one has, one’s life, this time on Earth, and it has been made wonderful by people like yourself. So don’t feel that we have given you anything; we’re taking it, I tell you.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
I think that’s really true. I saw you talking about that in an interview, and I was thinking about that. You know, in Thai culture, the teacher is the highest and most important person after your mother, and I think maybe the way you’re teaching is also a kind of hosting. I think you said you are not there to tell students what to do, but you’re there for them to find themselves, right? I think that’s a way of hosting which is to hold a space where people can think for themselves. There’s a certain kind of energy and attention; a certain kind of empathy. I’m learning all the time from everyone that I’ve encountered through the teaching that I do.

Salima Hashmi
I remember when I was teaching five-year-olds in England. My husband was studying at the London School of Economics, and that was the only job I could get, and I was forever grateful, because teaching five-year-olds taught me how to teach young adults.

There was a particular child who was very troublesome, and the headmistress warned me that he’s a troublemaker. But I found that he was very good at putting things in order, so I would come in the morning, give the mat separators to him, and he used to put all the round things together, until he discovered the art corner. As soon as he discovered that, he would walk in, take a brush, dip it in black paint, and make these strokes. And I, of course, being the helpful teacher said, “Oh, David”—I still remember his name after 50 years—“how nice. What have you made?” “It’s my apple tree.” “Okay, so, are there any apples?” “No.”

He started doing this week after week. I spoke to the headmistress, and she told me his was a single mother, the father’s mother was alcoholic, the father left ages ago, and the elder brothers were in trouble with the police. This went on, and I found that he used to come in, and he enjoyed doing that, making those black branches. Then one day he walks in. I’m just watching him, as usual. He hesitates after doing two black lines. Then he dips the brush in red paint and makes two red apples. He looked up at me and said: “My papa came home.” It taught me everything about him, his life, and what art was capable of. I always held onto that as the possibility that resides in this activity.

Jiaying Gian
Thank you for your generous sharing. I’m fascinated by your talking about this inviting of the other... But if I think about the state of the world today, there seems to be this kind of retreat to having a stronger sense of self. Being a Singaporean, I think we’ve always been very open. We’re taught to absorb everything around us… So, I’m wondering: Do you think artists need to have a strong sense of self, to be generous in the first place or to create? It’s a bit of an existential question.

Salima Hashmi
I would hesitate to give a prescription, because I think each of us responds to our particular circumstances, and we probe and search and question within our context. The context invites us or insists on our search.

I came to Singapore a long time ago, and soon after that, as the principal of the National College of Arts in Lahore, we invited a number of artists from elsewhere to come into a workshop with the students, and among them were Lee Wen and Suzann Victor, who came from Singapore. I remember Lee Wen coloured himself yellow, and I was interested in knowing what he thought the response would be when he went into the bazaars of Lahore, which is a conservative city, one would think.

When he came back in the evening, I happened to meet him, and I said: “how was your day?” And he just looked at me and said “I learned a lot,” and I thought immediately, I wonder what the people in the bazaar learned, because they must have learnt a lot also. I think it has to be this conversation between where you are and how you probe it and how you disturb it, because if you are not making things awkward, then perhaps you are not moving.

Some awkwardness is required for something to be a movement of any kind, if, as an artist, one wants to somehow disturb the status quo, which is one’s job. Otherwise you’d be just repetitious. Then you have to be very thoughtful about how that status quo has to be disrupted and what you have to do.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
I would just maybe say that we all move at different speeds, and maybe the thing is to realise which speed you’re moving at and understand that.

Roopa Dewan
You come from a place of great experience, and you’ve gone through wonderful and varied journeys. How do you see the new generation being affected by social media and generative AI?

Salima Hashmi
I am always on the side of innovation. Take the pencil, which is only about 250 years old. For me, innovation is the essence of living. But as an artist, one’s work is to combat the power that is.

I worry that AI is going to make someone a hell of a lot of money. The fact that it makes a handful of people very rich and powerful bothers me, because that means power, and it means control. It also takes up resources that cannot be renewed, which is worrisome. Also, people who were very critical in the development of AI are saying it’s time to stop all of these things, and I want to spread the worry a little bit.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
You have to shout.

Salima Hashmi
No, I’ll wait for you to do it!

Rirkrit Tiravanija
I mean, it is about how we are evolving, in a way, and I do hope that at least artists are critical of the tools that are available. Generally, artists take the tool and take it apart and make a kind of criticality out of it. So, I do hope that does create some resistance towards the way we use it.

I mean, it’s a tool, so it’s just about how we use it, and if we don’t use it critically, we’ll have problems. It’s like the pencil: you could use the pencil to do many things, but if you’re not critical of what you do with it, then you make terrible things. Hopefully they find a way to deal with it in a good way, which is to make something better.

Salima Hashmi
I don’t give up on the ingenuity of the new generation. I think there’s a great deal that we have yet to understand, and I think they are grappling with it.

Jittish Kallat
Thanks for this really fascinating fireside chat: we feel like we’ve been privy to something that’s going on in a living room or in a studio. The title of this talk comes from a quote, right? “The worse things get, the better the art becomes”. Is there a sort of homeostatic place where art actually becomes possible, beyond which art becomes impossible in either direction?

This is a thought that kept coming back to me as you were speaking, where sometimes, like you said, making art can be seditious. But what happens when it gets dangerous? I don’t know if either of you had any thoughts of that gradient within which art becomes possible, urgent, or—using your word—better?

Salima Hashmi
I think one is very aware of the fact that we’re living in a time where art may not be possible. I think we are kind of poised at a moment in which those that would make art or life impossible are in opposition to those who would like art and the planet to be safe in whatever manner we are equal to, which is what right now is being tested. Are we equal to what we are being faced with? That is a big question. And therefore, the making of a poem, the making of art, singing a song, all of these things are our only defense if the world is to continue.

The fact that we are concerned that there may be no breath to sing that song is right now what is concerning us, and yes, there may be a moment in which breath is no longer there. We have seen it happening on our screens. We have let it be so there are times when it cannot happen. But that does not mean that an artist elsewhere does not speak up and does not mark that moment. This is something that I’ve done before, and so I’m very hesitant, but I do want to read this quote from Faiz, which asks about the role of an artist:

My answer is and would be, we are the offspring in the direct line of descent of the magicians, the sorcerers and the music makers of old, in times gone by, these ancient ancestors of ours could make the rain come down with their incantations and with their songs, they could make the deserts bloom. And they not only implicitly believed that they held these powers, their community believed it also. For this is because they found for the hopes and fears of their people, for their dreams and longings, words and music that the people could not find for themselves, and by bending their collective will to a desired end, they could sometimes make the dreams come true.

So that is who we are, the inheritors of that magic and the power of that magic in big ways and small, depending on the intensity of the love our hearts possess or the anguish we share to defy what is evil and to uphold what is good. And thus, as a writer, I run no state and command no power. I am entitled to believe that I am my brother’s keeper and my brother is the whole of mankind. And this is the relevance to me, of art, of peace, and elimination of the nuclear menace, and to Palestinians, of freedom.

All images courtesy of Salima Hashmi.

—

World View distils conversations with leading artists from around the globe, to explore how they see the world through the prism of their life and art.