Stories We Tell
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STORIES WE TELL A Project by Beaconhouse National University (BNU), School of Visual Art and Design (SVAD) Center for Culture and Development (CKU) Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF) Edited by Rabeya Jalil and Bilal Sami Published by the Beaconhouse National University School of Visual Art and Design, SVAD ISBN 978-969-7716-00-5 STORIES WE TELL Printed in Lahore, Pakistan Topical Printers, Street no.2, Attari Industrial Estate, 18-KM Ferozepur Road, Lahore-54670, Pakistan Cover photograph by Ahsan Asghar A Project by Beaconhouse National University (BNU), School of Visual Art and Design (SVAD) Center for Culture and Development (CKU) Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF) Designer: Ali Murtaza Editors: Rabeya Jalil, Bilal Sami Edited by Illustration Designer: Komal Naz Rabeya Jalil and Bilal Sami Editor, Talking Stories: Mina Arham Contributor, Talking Stories: Nour Aslam Video Content Specialist: Waleed Zafar Video Content Specialist: Jawad Hussain Photography: Ahsan Asghar, Zeeshan Khalid TABLE OF CONTENTS Rashid Rana: Foreword Storying The City page 7 page 27 About 100 Multi-Colored Stories page 9 page 81 Rabeya Jalil: Educators as Storytellers Talking Stories page 11 page 107 Bilal Sami: Today I Had to Talk About Freedom Of Fables, Rhymes & Songs page 13 page 133 Quddus Mirza: Stories We Store & Restore Project Team page 14 page 150 Adnan Madani: A Choir of Fictional Voices: Contributors The Allegory of the Public page 156 page 17 Acknowledgements H.M. Naqvi: Podna Podni and Other Stories: page 158 Thoughts on the Moral Mode of Storytelling page 20 Durriya Qazi: The Truth About Stories Is That’s All We Are page 23 FOREWORD The School of Visual Arts and Design (SVAD) at BNU Stories We Tell is an integral part of a four-day was established in 2003. In the past decade, the school Symposium in December 2016. The project will has ushered in a new era in the way art and design are culminate in an Exhibition and a finale artSPEAK practiced and understood. Beyond the several degree seminar that will feature discussions with eminent programs offered at SVAD and which are designed to writers (including our publication contributors), encourage a progressive approach, it has been our aim educators and artists to reflect on the audio-visual to engage in activities that explore alternate means of stories collected during the course of the project. knowledge dissemination and thus seek to expand the very notion of education. Stories We Tell is a project in Rashid Rana the same direction that takes the SVAD vision beyond Project Director, its walls. It is a project that sees the entire city as a Dean, SVAD classroom and turns all its participants into teachers and students simultaneously. The case for supporting artistic endeavors in Pakistan The Vice Chancellor, BNU, Mr. Shahid Hafiz Kardar, is not an obvious one, particularly at a time when has been extremely supportive in facilitating this the country is ravaged by poverty, disease, natural project. Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF) happened disasters and conflict. Yet one could also argue that to be a natural partner. Its involvement added supporting the Arts has never been more important tremendous value to the project’s smooth progression than in turbulent times. Investing in the arts and and audience interaction. The team’s expertise of humanities helps build tolerant and humane societies, public programming and social media outreach an aspect we ignore only to our peril. made the project visible and accessible to a wider community. The Lahore Biennale Foundation is grateful to our partners, the Centre of Culture and Development Bilal Sami, with his background as a filmmaker, (CKU), a self governing institute under the Danish storywriter and producer, proved to be the perfect Government and Beaconhouse National University, team lead. The project, for him, began with a School of Visual Art and Design (SVAD) for coming commemoration of the idea of listening to Cassette together to create a dialogue between various Kahanis back in the day, and has taken it to a communities around Lahore with “Stories We Tell dimension that explores and expands the definition (Aao Sunnayein Kahani)”. A special thanks to Rashid of storytelling in a broader sense, providing the public Rana, Dean of SVAD, for his hard work in creating with means to voice their concerns, views and ideas. He a space for the arts in our public narrative, and to saw the project through, assured and assertive, form its Qudsia Rahim, Executive Director of LBF, for her conception to its planning and execution. efforts to create a sustained conversation between the Public and the Arts in line with the Foundation’s The initiative was designed to give it a life beyond its vision. end. An enhanced website for the project, housing the recorded conversations, will operate for the next two Osman Waheed years. This publication is an attempt to develop an Chairman, LBF academic resource with meaningful outcomes, rather than serving as a mere archive of activities. It features notable writers and critics who have interpreted a selection of stories and have deliberated on various aspects of storytelling. Our project team has earnestly reflected on the project process, analyzed its outcomes and has created a section of this book as a resource of public testimonies and narratives. 7 ABOUT Stories We Tell: Aao Sunaiyein Kahaani Stories We Tell ‘Aao Sunayein Kahani’ is an audio/ As part of this initiative, educators and visual storytelling project of The School of Visual undergraduate students from the discipline of Visual Art and Design (SVAD) at Beaconhouse National Communication Design at SVAD, BNU, collaborated University and the Lahore Biennale Foundation with the Mirasi community (the gatekeepers of the (LBF), made possible with the support of the Centre musical storytelling tradition in Punjab) on short for Culture and Development (CKU). narrative videos/animations that aimed to give a voice to the community’s take on storytelling as well as their The art of conversation and storytelling has played profession’s interaction with it. an important part in suturing together the cultural fabric of South Asia. This was how, for the longest The project culminated in a symposium that consisted time, histories were transferred between generations, of panel discussions and presentations by various survival narratives were created, exchanged and thinkers, practitioners and academics, along with a passed down generations, and instructional anecdotes final exhibition of audio-visual stories and a musical to sustain everyday life were passed on. The act of performance titled Loki Kehnday - a collaborative listening and hearing created collective wisdom and performance between musicians from the Mirasi a sense of commonality between classes and across community and the renowned vocalist Ali Sethi. social divides, thereby sustaining intercultural and interclass dialogue. With public spaces becoming more and more stratified and co-opted by specific classes, the interaction between classes has become minimal - most of it happening in a space where the power and class dynamics dictate how stories will be shared, as well as who will tell and who will listen to them. Ao Sunnayein Kahaani aims to bring conversational storytelling and sharing back to common public spaces in the hopes of making the act of storytelling and experience-sharing a democratic one. For several months twelve storytelling booths (shaped like rickshaws) were placed around the city, with the purpose of recording and disseminating stories and conversations. A defining monthly theme that encapsulates a particular aspect of Lahore’s quintessential everyday life dictated not only the locations at which our storytelling booths were placed, but also the narrative theme of the stories being played and recorded. These themes were also used as trigger narratives for discussion and conversation sessions. The sessions titled artSPEAK, were focused on themes that emerged from the project and invited academics, thinkers and practitioners to contribute to a discussion. 9 EDUCATORS AS STORYTELLERS Rabeya Jalil Tales and oral histories become the carriers of cultural of storytelling (qissa-khwani) as a method for exchange codes, morals and values. A story told, therefore, is of ideas. We, a group of art and design educators, a representation of a community - or an image of it. wanted to connect stratified and insular communities Baudrillard’s (1988, 170), interpretation of an image is of Lahore with each other by facilitating an engaged, that “it is the reflection of a basic reality, it masks and innovative process of dialogue and eventually examine perverts a basic reality, it masks the absence of a basic the art of storytelling in public spaces. During this reality, it bears no relation to any reality whatever: eight-month project, twelve storytelling booths were it is its own pure simulacrum”. Thus, a story as an placed around the city to record and broadcast stories image becomes an interpretation of an experience. and casual conversations. In the earlier part of the This story then becomes fiction; one account as one project, a particular theme representing a stereotypical perspective. Over time, many such narratives tend image of Lahore, guided the locations of the booths. to store information, contextualize knowledge and As the project evolved, the process of storytelling flatten, or simplify, reality. Local, indigenous wisdom became a play of free association; people listened to and survival guides are created and carried across a story or monologue on the interactive recording generations through informal ways of sharing. screen in a storytelling booth and recorded a story in response to it. They picked any aspect of the recorded Formal schooling tries to do the same. talk and used it as a stimulant to share an anecdote, incident or news that connected with its context. School of Visual Art and Design (SVAD) at the We recorded about 8000 narratives from twelve Beaconhouse National University (BNU) in storytelling booths placed across a range of socio- collaboration with the Lahore Biennale Foundation economic settlements in Lahore every month.