Rumi inevitably comes to mind when I look back at my years of knowing Mansoora Hassan. Her passion for Sufi poetry and music were intertwined with the visual during our long years of friendship, caring, laughter and rapport. The first connection was that of student and teacher at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan.

The year was late 1970, my first year of an uninterrupted academic career which eventually spanned three decades. I never actually taught Mansoora's class, but her enthusiasm was unmistakably present in the corridors, in the cafeteria, under the banyan tree and while passing through the studios.

She soon remedied this very casual interaction. Insistent on getting an input on her works-in-progress, she nudged me into offering encouragement and guidance on moving forward. It was the commencement of a multi-faceted bond which embraced our working and personal lives until she exited, far too soon.

An Iranian ‘hammam’

I vividly recall her first major work — a thesis painting titled “Hammam” depicting naked women in an Iranian bathhouse. Thereby hangs a tale. Mansoora was among a group of students on an NCA study tour to Iran and Afghanistan in 1971. I was the official chaperone of the female students. After crossing the Pakistan/Iran border at Zahedan, we piled into a bus and began our tour, stopping frequently along the way to take in historical sites like Neyshabur.

Tired and dusty from the long journey we arrived at our destination. The serai we stayed at was the cheapest place for art students and teachers albeit without the luxury of showers. Following local custom, we took off for the nearest hammam for much-needed ablutions.

On arrival we discovered it cost much more to rent private showers than to indulge in the communal bathing experience. This was more of a social gathering than the discreet bathing scenario we were expecting. We paid our rentals and headed for our cubicle. Not Mansoora! It was grist for her artistic mill. Photographs were not allowed so she stored the data of naked bodies in her mental image bank. This is what she recreated as her thesis painting.

In a certain way, this project established her approach to the artistic process. In deference to the customary diffidence towards showing the female nude, Mansoora resorted to Cubist vocabulary which abridged the more graphic details of the female anatomy into the famous Cézanne dictum of “cone, cube, cylinder, sphere” being the geometric shapes that are the building blocks of form. There could thus not be any objection to Mansoora’s depiction of the ladies in the hammam. It was the epitome of decorum.

Mansoora’s penchant for performance led to her inclusion in our weekly TV satire ‘Such Gup’ and her regular cameo appearances cemented our relationship. The performative element, initiated in this very early phase in her art practice, reappeared decades later in a far more sombre context with a political intent. To a certain extent, this was an intrinsic component of her psyche which was evident in her mark making alongside her ability to assemble contradictory elements in her aesthetic vocabulary.

The opportunity to go to New York for an art programme was not a privilege gained easily. There were extended domestic battles with her authoritative father and her protective mother until she wore them down with her persistence. A female going abroad for higher education was still a novelty in 1974, more so for the purpose of studying art.

As a 22-year-old graduate student at the Pratt Institute, she chose to specialise in printmaking, not offered as part of the curriculum at NCA. It was a bold choice because such a highly meticulous and technically demanding branch of art making might have been seen as diametrically opposed to her intuitive modus operandi as an artist up to that point.

Joining the printmaking studios at Pratt might have been a conscious choice, but getting the opportunity to be the teaching assistant to Michael Ponce de Leon was fortuitous.

In 1963 in Karachi, Ponce de Leon had been instrumental in introducing contemporary techniques of printmaking to a select number of Pakistani artists including Ahmed Khan, Shahid Sajjad and Saeed Akhtar. For him to now have a young Pakistani female artist assisting him in the studio must have brought back memories and connections formed earlier.

By then, Mansoora was experimenting with the formalist techniques of etching in the printmaking studios but, the consummate rebel, she questioned age-old hallowed etching techniques, adding her own interventions.

After completing her MFA, she was back in Lahore to embark on the personal covenant of marriage. Not for her the conventional arranged affair but a union with a soulmate/friend who studied at Yale during her years in New York. This at least met with no opposition from either side. Her husband was a Pathan, in tune with Mansoora’s own ties to the region (she was born in Peshawar), and she knew the language.

Mahmoud was now working for the World Bank so their return to the U.S. was already on the cards. This ensured the feasibility of continuing as a printmaker with access to resources which were much harder to come by in Pakistan. She quickly buckled down to her practice alongside the social obligations required in the bureaucratic environment of the U.S. Capital.

Innovative printmaker

Her first major exhibition in Pakistan was in 1982 at the Indus Gallery in Karachi. It marked her introduction as an innovative printmaker to the Pakistani audience. Each of her monoprints was a unique print and not part of an edition. The thematic content was the newly excavated Tiwanaku civilization of Bolivia, her husband’s first posting out of the U.S. and an entirely new experience for Mansoora.

Her excitement at the opportunity to share this and her passion for the medium was palpable. The ancient images from Tiwanaku in her photo etching monoprints were as new for their native Bolivia as they were for her audience in Pakistan. Mansoora was elated by these explorations which grounded her in her new surroundings and were an attempt to identify with her location through her art making.

She not only studied the archaeological remains but also researched what they revealed of the civilization that produced such startling images. The decision to move beyond the engraved surface of the print and to add a layer of paint became her emblematic signature; a recurring manifestation of her romance with the layered surface.

South America was fascinating virgin territory for the artist — curious, alien, and novel, it instigated a host of artistic and professional pursuits. This new context supported her passion for travel, adventure and visual magnetism. It led to her sharing her work with out-of-the way audiences unaccustomed to encountering a Pakistani artist, and a woman at that.

She also travelled around Peru, Argentina and other parts of South America exhibiting her work as she absorbed the social and political realities across the continent. Her work was discussed and bought by collectors and included in the National Museum of Art in Bolivia.

Mansoora’s interest in the historical traces of human habitat became more pronounced as she travelled with her husband across many parts of the globe. Returning to Washington D.C. was a time of consolidation of her art practice as well as the fulfilment of her role as a wife and mother in her home. The restlessness that was distinctive to her persona was put on hold as she established her atelier and her career as a teacher and organiser of the artist community there.

Curiously, the mundanity of these surroundings never appeared in her work, nor did the corresponding accoutrements connected to motherhood or domestic trappings. Instead there were references to historical memory connected to actual and spiritual journeys interwoven with enquiries into belief and identity. These yearnings were intense and fruitful but presented a challenge in terms of convening the many visual components jostling for her attention.

Mansoora’s affinity for music came from her mother’s deep passion for both classical and Sufi music, instilled in her and her elder sister through sitar lessons and classical dance. These creative expressions at home were in harmony with each other and established a framework for Mansoora’s interest in art.

She persuaded visuals that originated in various civilisations and multiple locations to cohabit a visual space when required.Mansoora knitted together visual relationships to form tapestries of textures, flamboyant gestures and intuitive mark making to energise the surface.

Her dexterity as an itinerant photographer was a critical part of the narrative. In his book Understanding a Photograph, John Berger states: "Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does."

The techniques Mansoora experimented with grew steadily more individualistic and distinctive over time. She added collage and chine collé to her repertoire, describing her work as mixed media painting.

Muslim women’s movements

This ran parallel to her interest in women’s movements in the Muslim world and in her home country. Her friendship with the Moroccan scholar and sociologist Fatema Mernissi became a collaboration of the artist’s hand and the scholar’s text, reinforcing their mutual serendipities. It produced the celebrated travelling exhibition “Fear of Difference”, its title confirming the fearlessness of both pioneering women.

The interaction with Mernissi and her writing led to a residency in Fez, Morocco, where the Festival of Sacred Music brought Sufi performers from all over the world, including Abida Parveen from Pakistan.

Abida Parveen’s passion and abandon while singing poetry, frowned upon during Zia ul Haq’s oppressive regime, made her one of Mansoora’s favourite voices. With regular visits to Pakistan, she claimed its tumultuous political and social upheavals as her own.

The great human rights activist Asma Jahangir was among her closest friends. Her engagement with the feminist poetry of Kishwar Naheed was an invocation to her own sentiments and concerns. The conversations with the kalaam or lyrics of the poet and her passion for the poetry of Maulana Rumi found their way into both imagery and surface sensitivities. The discourse with Rumi was not only possible but credible, as the great Ustaad or Teacher would say:

This poetry, I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

Like her muse, the artist often gave the impression of letting “things happen”, but in reality there existed a great awareness in the trajectory of her work and artistic output. She experimented with new printmaking techniques while simultaneously moving into video.

Solar plate etching eliminated the use of chemicals in her printmaking. Her photographic installation/video “The Bound Project” won a mention at the Cairo Biennial in 2004. A known Egyptian actor was depicted in large-scale photos entrapped in a Sindhi ajrak shroud with only his head visible. A video also showed him wrapping himself tightly in the ajrak. The underlying concept of this work was the constraints of history and culture on creativity.

Begging for peace

Mansoora’s time in Cairo (2000–2005) and Turkey (2006–2009) brought concerns of identity and belonging to the forefront of her life and art practice. Always an energetic and adept organiser, she worked hard in Cairo to build networks of artists and was also the co-founder of “Friends of the Opera” in Egypt.

Connected across continents, she organised the group exhibition “Take me to the River” which travelled to South Africa, Turkey, France, Lithuania, and Uruguay and finally the United States. In a curious way, it echoed an early exhibit at the Touchstone Gallery in Washington D.C., “Eight Paths to a Journey”, which led to media attention.

She curated a Pakistani women artists’ exhibition which toured Japan during Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s visit to that country.

Mansoora’s ability to motivate and disseminate her infectious enthusiasm amongst colleagues and strangers alike melted barriers across race, ethnicity and class, regardless of location or circumstances.

When many worlds fell apart on September 11, 2001, Mansoora Hassan the artist embraced the pain and ensuing horror across the globe. Like a penitent for all, she donned a burqa (itself a valiant and conspicuous act) and stood in front of emblematic American monuments like the White House, the Lincoln Memorial and Ground Zero, her hand outstretched - as though begging for alms.

She was instead begging for peace — a commodity in short supply. The fact that she did not meet with the hostility pervasive at the time was no small miracle but, as her friends would always say, “Well, that’s Mansoora!”

CAPTION: Mansoora Hassan: Afghan Burqa Project- ‘Begging for Peace in New York

She trusted her spirit and was unfazed by the thought of consequences. The Peace series saw many avatars of mixed media works and video. It drew her closer to video as a viable medium of expression in a world undergoing turmoil and conflict.

Her questions were journeys into herself. The time she lived in Turkey with her husband reinforced spiritual undercurrents in her work. Sufi music and poetry, always embedded in her life and work, were effortlessly recalled in these years. In a lifetime of travel, the notion of “home” remained a nagging persistent question with Mansoora, who never embraced the idea of being an artist of the diaspora. She preferred the predicaments of the nomad who inhabited all the spaces she encountered with love and manifold yearnings. These dwellings found their way into her imagery alongside the homage she paid to universal human endeavour.

The beauty and sacrifice of Karbala reverberated in the submission to the Sufi messages. The work became austere with the loss of her son; the evocation of loss was simple, subtle and pure -- tragedy brought acceptance.

The acceptance of her exit in 2023 in itself seemed contradictory to the vivid flame of Mansoora Hassan’s life but she had prepared us years before by her constant fidelity to Rumi’s message:

Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

(The author is an artist and art educator based in Lahore. She is a founder member of the Southasia Peace Action Network, or Sapan, and a board member of the South Asia Foundation. This article is adapted from her essay 'A Wished-for Song – Mansoora Hassan in Memoriam', produced for Mansoora Hasan's posthumous exhibition in Washington DC, November 2024. By special arrangement with Sapan)