Visiting Pakistan

Arrival

As we drove past the site of the cricket shootings and I asked if this was where 6 Pakistani police and a traffic warden lost their lives, the driver laughingly replies "Yes, we are brave men who live in Pakistan with terrorist attacks, bombings, shootings all around us.  Pakistan is full of brave men.  But it is America who prepares terrorists not Pakistan".  I guess the preperation of terrorists goes on at all levels and in all manner of spaces.

Later, sat round a kitchen table I am talking to renowned international artist Salima Hashmi.  Our talk turns to the role of art within society and how the growth of extremism in Pakistan is affecting artists - but also how it is affecting education and most worringly, how women, already largely invisible in certain regions, are being pulled away from any opportunity to access education.

We talked also of how much contemporary arts work in the UK has become dislocated from the social context, with commentary tendentious at best and at worst superficially out to shock - childish responses to complex social and environmental problems.