Farhat Ali

Born in 1988, Farhat Ali is a contemporary artist from Badin, Sindh. He started his career as a billboard painter followed by a formal education at the Centre of Excellence in Art and Design at Jamshoro, and subsequently the National College of Arts in Lahore, where he graduated in 2015. 

Like many artists before him, Ali was interested in contemporizing the Mughal miniature early in his career. Many of his 2015 works mimic traditional forms, displaying exacting attention to detail and capturing humans and animals in domestic and outdoor spaces. However, unlike his predecessors, Ali adds an important, refreshing dimension to his work: the element of play. In his contemporary miniatures, he replaces royal and divine figures with pop culture characters, for instance from Cinderella, Looney Tunes and the Simpsons, all the while maintaining recognizable conventions. Ali's depictions of amusing encounters between cartoons and Mughal figures reveal a deeper truth. Rather than illustrating an intersection of Western and Eastern elements, Ali shows that they become a new entity altogether.

This present work deepens Ali's ingenious approach to the East-West duality and communicates his message with South Asian pop culture references. In Untitled, the artist uses the famous shot of Raj Kapoor and Nargis in the rain from the celebrated 1955 Hindi comedy drama, Shree 420. The monochromatic scene is beautifully executed in Indian ink, and reimagines the film still in photorealistic detail. Kapoor and the empty, rain-washed surroundings, directly mirror the film scene's composition. Meanwhile, Nargis has been replaced by an undressed female figure, whose pose references the central nude in The Return of Spring (1886) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

In Shree 420, in one of the most famous songs in Bollywood history, Kapoor engages with the onset of globalization in the 50s, singing in Hindi: "My shoes are Japanese / These pants are English / On my head is a red Russian hat / But still, my heart is Hindustani." This cinematic reference accompanies the theoretical approach to the world that Ali explores in his miniature work. He departs from obvious cultural intersections and instead embeds a global narrative within familiar, South Asian images.

Farhat Ali, through his artistry and methodology, elicits an exciting, contemporary take on society, pop culture and the act of image-making.