PRISMATIC STORYTELLER: THE DISJUNCTIVE NARRATIVE IN AFSHAR MALIK'S ARTWORK

Abstract

The concept of disjunctive narrative in art has its origin in the first half of the 20th century and can be connected to art movements like Dada and Surrealism. Artists of these movements intentionally disrupted the tradition of representation and combined unlikely elements in order to explore the world of subconscious and defy reason. This trend did not just stay within European boundaries but travelled across continents and made its way to South Asia. Since then, disjunctive narrative has been an interesting and ever pertinent way of storytelling in Pakistani art, which enables artists to portray more complicated realities that are not always linearly explicable. Considering that Pakistan is a country with layered history, multicultural influences, and socio-political complexity, such narrative schemes prove to be a powerful means of expression. This paper explores the disjunctive narrative existent in the artworks of a famous contemporary artist of Pakistan Afshar Malik, as it helps him build complex and multiple levels of visual narration. The artworks fashioned by Malik are a perfect example of a prismatic style which is broken, surreal, and disjointed. This paper will address how Malik re-conceptualizes surrealism, mixing media, and disjunctive story-telling, moreover what it means within the emerging spheres of global art. The paper analyzes few of his works to explore the disjunctive narrative techniques used by Malik to express the themes of memory, recall, absence and presence, which interlace and generate a relationship between the past, present and future. These links illustrate an insightful account in the modern Pakistani art.