THE FABRIC OF OUR LIVES?
Does This Drone Art Normalize The New War Machines?
MOTHER JONES INTERVIEWS Pakistani artist Mahwish Chishty about her series of paintings transforming the most modern machine of warfare — drones — into beautiful works of art mimicking Pakistan’s “truck art” genre.
“It’s kind of a folk art,” she tells the magazine. “It’s a tradition, a culture. People who drive these trucks basically live on those trucks, sleep on those trucks. They kind of make that into their mobile home and they decorate it into something that’s eye pleasing. They’re extremely beautiful paintings. They spend so much time on it and they don’t get any funding. This is something that they do, just a personal interest. It has no reason whatsoever other than just an aesthetic sense. I always thought that it was not given any importance in the art world back home, and I wanted people to think maybe what would happen if these drones were friendlier looking, instead of such hard-edged, metallic war machines.”
Chisty says she doesn’t aim to “glorify” drones so much as provoke “people to talk about it. At the same time, it has some kind of beauty to it. I am also looking at them as objects, and not as much as war machines.”
Discuss.
