Curator Hammad Nasar: ‘What if all Turner’s best paintings were in Lahore?’

“It’s not about building institutions, it’s about building infrastructure.” Curator Hammad Nasar is analysing his craft. “It’s not enough to pull in visitors. You have to connect with communities, create legacy.”

Nasar reaches for one of the off-piste metaphors he loves. “If you were a mountain climber, the question would be not ‘Can you reach the summit as an individual hero?’, but ‘Have you pushed the base camp higher?’”

Thanks to Nasar, the cultural camps of several British cities have been elevated. We are talking at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, where his exhibition Divided Selves: Legacies, Memories, Belonging, co-curated with Rosie Addenbrooke and Alice Swatton, is due to open next week.

Nasar is at home in the West Midlands city. In 2021-22, he acted as lead curator at the Herbert, helping it leverage opportunities arising from Coventry’s year as UK City of Culture. In the same period, he not only curated the Turner Prize, won by the Array Collective, in the Herbert’s galleries but also set up shows in Aberdeen, Wolverhampton, Manchester and Plymouth, in his role as co-curator of British Art Show 9.

Those projects crystallised Nasar’s gift for revealing an alternative landscape within British contemporary art. Far from the glitzy, profit-dazzled world of the YBAs, Nasar’s constellation is grounded in notions of care, collectivity and inclusiveness yet unafraid to confront past and present political wounds. His shows expose the faultlines in our national psyche yet offer paths to healing, too.

Divided Selves is no exception. Showcasing 26 artists who explore how we “make peace with difficult histories and traumatic pasts without being paralysed by them . . . to shape a common future”, it couldn’t have a more fitting home than Coventry, which was devastated during the wartime Blitz.

Nasar has drawn several of his participants from the Herbert’s own “Peace and Reconciliation” collection. But he has also chosen art from the British Council Collection, which, along with the Arts Council Collection, is due to transfer in its entirety to Coventry when it becomes home to the new National Collections Centre in 2024.

This is part of a revaluing of culture in Britain’s regions that is long overdue. Yet last year’s decision by Arts Council England to divert £32mn of arts funding away from London triggered fury in the capital. Surely Nasar is grateful to see the redistribution?

“No! It shouldn’t be an either/or thing,” he exclaims. “What the British government spends on culture is pitiful compared with other European countries.” (Last year, France earmarked £3.86bn for culture, compared with £446mn for England.) Nasar also believes the department for culture should be grouped not with media and sport, as it is at present, but with education. “Neither are investments. They are rights. And that requires a very different conversation.”

Imaginative dialogues are Nasar’s forte. At the Herbert, our chat unfolds in the company of “Moonstomp”, a skinhead-style mannequin by Rene Matić; “Lost Pavilions”, two photographs of abandoned cemeteries by Said Adrus; and “Bloodlines” by Iftikhar Dadi and Nalini Malani, a pair of maps threaded with a line of blood-red sequins.

Such works prise open Britain’s less-told stories. Matić reclaims the origins of skinhead culture — tainted by its neo-fascist associations — in working-class Caribbean and white British communities. Adrus alludes to the desecration of the graves of Muslim soldiers who gave their lives for Britain in the first world war. The cartographies of Dadi and Malani, the former born in Pakistan, the latter in India, commemorate the millions displaced and killed as a result of the line of partition drawn through India in 1947 by British law lord Cyril Radcliffe and the resulting trauma that fuelled south Asian migration to Britain. “He became chancellor of Warwick university” is Nasar’s dry comment.

For Nasar, such works help remedy Britain’s affliction as an “insufficiently imagined country”. Certainly, at a moment when its government is tightening both geographical and discursive borders, the complex, global weave of Divided Selves operates as a welcome corrective.

Nasar’s unconventional beginnings — he trained as a chartered accountant — may have nourished his gift for thinking beyond traditional frontiers. After growing up between Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan — “I’d never heard the term curator — I didn’t grow up going to museums” — he moved to London in the late 1980s.

“You could get seats for a fiver in the Barbican. I went to a lot of films, a lot of art galleries,” he remembers. He enrolled at Birkbeck College for evening classes in art history. Later, he took a postgraduate diploma at Goldsmiths.

Art, he discovered, had “this amazing capacity to be multiple things at once. It can be a hyper-luxury good, a site of political urgency and a pocket utopia simultaneously.”

Returning to Pakistan in the mid-1990s, working as a banker, he started to write film reviews for a newspaper. Soon, he was writing about art too. When Lahore-based artist Usman Saeed asked for advice on the London arts scene, Nasar helped him exhibit at the Royal Society of Arts.

Since then, Nasar has fostered a panoply of cross-cultural exchange. From 2004 to 2013, with his partner Anita Dawood, he ran Green Cardamom in London. A hybrid arts organisation for both commercial and non-profit projects, it focused on artists from south and west Asia, and collaborated with institutions including the British Museum and Cornell University. A roster of senior roles and fellowships include stints at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, Yale’s Paul Mellon Centre, the Stuart Hall Foundation and the Decolonising Arts Institute at the University of the Arts London.

Decolonisation is a buzzword in the art world. But Nasar points out that superficial efforts at inclusion merely mask the underlying problem. “There’s no point in just showing this or that artist. We have to change the art-historical narrative,” he says.

He has long championed an older generation of non-white, UK-based artists neglected by the establishment. One such, the Chinese-Taiwanese conceptualist Li Yuan-chia, who created an arts hub in Cumbria, will be the subject of a show co-curated by Nasar at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge later this year. Meanwhile, the brilliant painters Gulammohammed Sheikh and Zahoor ul Akhlaq, from India and Pakistan respectively, who studied at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, will feature in an upcoming exhibition that Nasar is co-curating at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. Focusing on south Asian miniature art, it includes both contemporary responses and historic loans from public collections in the UK.

Nasar points out that Sheikh and Akhlaq’s engagement with south Asian miniatures first-hand occurred in British museums. “What would it mean if all Turner’s best paintings were in Lahore?” he asks with a quixotic smile.

He is unafraid to change position or make mistakes. “Pushback is what tells you that you are doing something right. If you get it wrong, apologise and try something different. For me it’s crucial to be open to the possibility of being wrong, of being pushed — of learning, and trying again.”

Nasar believes both artists and curators need to stop being “over-cautious” and give themselves “permission to act”. As an example of this courage, he cites the decision of queer, black sound art collective B.O.S.S (Black Obsidian Sound System) to accept their Turner Prize nomination from Tate in 2021 and critiquing the institution for exploitative practices in an open letter. B.O.S.S convinced Tate to double the artists’ prize money, then themselves funded a mobile sound system to leave behind in Coventry. “It was a masterclass in using the exhibition as infrastructure,” recalls Nasar.

His preference for dialogue over silence saw him accept an MBE this year (Member of the Order of the British Empire). “I’m thinking of it as Member of the Order of British Excellence,” he chuckles, enlisting another favourite metaphor: that of “pushing hands” in t’ai chi.

“You have one point of physical contact — usually around the forearm and hands, and you move while trying to ‘listen’ and locate your partner’s centre, then knock them off it. The object is to meet incoming aggression not with strength or resistance, but with softness; moving with the force to either redirect it or allow it to exhaust itself.”

I’d love to be a fly on the wall when he meets the King.

‘Divided Selves’, February 18-September 24, theherbert.org

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