Awais Shaukat

A clip loops across TikTok: a piece of duct tape, a yellow banana, a white gallery wall. Someone has typed "money laundering" in bold pink letters over the image. The comments pile up in seconds. "Explain to me how this isn't a scam." "Rich people washing dirty money lol." "Nobody actually likes this, it's just a tax write-off." Thousands of likes. No sources cited. The banana in question belongs to Maurizio Cattelan.

There was a specific kind of silence that fell over Pakistani households on certain evenings in the 1990s, right when a wobbly title card announced a bespectacled genie was about to arrive. Kids abandoned homework. Parents stopped mid-sentence. For fifteen minutes, a state broadcaster with no competition owned the room. That memory is now being reanimated by a computer, and not everyone is comfortable watching it happen.

As you know, some informal art communities built around social media across South Asia have begun to evolve into fleshed-out editorial platforms in recent years. Pakistan has just secured its own place. PakistaniArt, the country’s independent English-language art and pop culture publication, launched a dedicated website this week. The platform launched in October 2020 as a modest Instagram page featuring the work of Pakistani digital artists.