by Jon Lackman | 7 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary
When every inch of every building is covered in posters, and the posters change daily, how do you find your way home? In a recent issue of South Asian Popular Culture (5:1), Iftikhar Dadi writes on “Political Posters in Karachi: 1988-1999.” During this time, “Pakistan attempted to ‘return’ to parliamentary democracy.” Consequently,
the existence of multiple and competing forces, and the amplification of visual production before each election and during the various crises of the 1990s meant that the struggle for representation acquired a fluid and dynamic visual character … what this theatre enabled was visual and performative participation by interested sections of the public in an arena of competing images in the popular realm. The democracy decade lifted the stifling and boring atmosphere of the Zia years and allowed activities of diverse non-state actors to gather significant momentum in the popular realm.
Tropes of domination and resistance do not capture the polysemy of this popular theater of images. The structural weakness and short-lived duration of the elected governments, each lasting only about two years, meant that the central government was unable to extend its hegemony over the public space of the nation-state … creating unanticipated and dynamic sites for new forms of text and image-based popular politics
Dadi analyzes numerous posters as well as the varying methods of visual intervention in use at this time, for example:
defacement by religious groups of revealing female flesh in billboard advertisements, the covering-over of film hoardings during the month of Ramadan, and the invasive pasting of political posters over formal and informal signage.
Dadi notes also that the explosion of visual stimulus changed the very nature of walking about the city, creating a situation analagous to the one observed by satirist Ahmad Shah Bukhari Patras in 1927:
Announcements of latest inventions, opportunities, and portents of impending revolution that assault the eyes, are pasted on virtually every immovable object, creating such constant variation in the appearance of buildings that it becomes very difficult for even the city residents to situate themselves.
Let alone sort out their politics.
