Tiffany (in the bright pink shirt) and other TAG members discuss The Roof Garden Commission: Imran Qureshi with Museum Educator Sehr Karim-Jaffer.
«Sudden violence in the United States, especially when unpredictable, triggers an immediate and mass reaction. This is hardly so in the case of Pakistan, however, a country where violence is the norm and not the exception. At the Museum's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden this summer, contemporary Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi challenges American viewers to immerse themselves in the bloodbath of civilians killed in sectarian conflicts far away from our own shores.»
A repugnant sight awaits when one first steps onto the Cantor Roof Garden—the splatter of diluted red acrylic on the floor looks like a murder scene, or the carnage of fish scales and bird feathers. At first, I was reminded of The Money Tree by Kilgore Trout (a character from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five), the story of an imaginary tree that feeds on human blood in order to bear its fruit—in this case, dollar bills. Yet when I looked closely at Qureshi's work, I found myself in awe: the work has the deliberate spontaneity of Monet, the natural rhythm of Pollock, and the traditionally florid designs typical of miniature portraiture.
By inviting us to step inside his work and forget the distance that would normally prevent viewers from seeing themselves as a part of the world imagined by the artist, we become part of the red. As our group continued to move across the expanse of the great floor, Museum Educator Sehr Karim-Jaffer brought our attention to the invisible line marking the end of the red floral designs. This line—created with the aid of masking tape—is inspired by the artist's interpretation of the Boston Marathon bombings.
Although similar to the divergent fates of those close to the race's finishing line, Americans find our lives entirely different from the Pakistanis. Yet through his work, Qureshi shows us that our fate is truly linked together, tied by a common thread—a thread that cannot be severed by apathy towards news of violence in developing countries, because this violence is no different from the terrorism found in our own country.