Why an artist with a national audience has no right to emotion

A red paint tube, a store room, and the beginning of art

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Abdal Mufti as a storyteller, artist and policy consultant who has had to travel in from Lahore for the conversation. Muzamil flags what he finds most interesting about Abdal’s work — the still images paired with nostalgic music — and asks the obvious starting question: how did you end up here.

Abdal answers by refusing the premise that he was always an artist. “I wasn’t someone who, as people say, was born and already drawing as a child,” he says. He went through Saint Helen School in Rawalpindi, then Sadiq Public, then Army Public College in Westridge. He failed enough that he and his friends would bet on it. His father, not him, drew the biology and physics diagrams in his school practical notebooks.

Art arrives, in his telling, as an accident in a storeroom. A photograph of a child, an old paintbrush belonging to his late aunt — the only person in the family who painted — and a single tube of red paint. “I didn’t even know there was such a thing as oil paints,” he tells Muzamil. He painted that summer in a windowless storeroom with no fan, and his family assumed he was hiding from the heat. Three months later he had a small body of work and what he describes as a feeling of liberation he had not experienced anywhere else.

Muzamil pushes on the contradiction: a self-described bad student who ended up at NUST. Abdal corrects him carefully. “I was never a bad student, but I was made to feel I was a bad student,” he says, and traces it back to growing up the youngest in a household of high-achieving brothers where relative ranking was the only ranking that registered. He went to NUST for business management, not engineering, and graduated in 2014. By then he was already painting daily, on boxboard rather than canvas, because canvas was too expensive, and increasingly on the walls of his own room because the scale forced his proportions to develop on their own.

Van Gogh as teacher, and the warning against being institutionalised

When Muzamil asks whether he learned from YouTube or online tutorials, Abdal says no — he does not have the patience to watch other people paint when he could be painting himself. He copied benchmarks instead. The first artist he set out to emulate was Vincent van Gogh, and the first painting was Starry Night.

He explains the choice in spiritual rather than technical terms. Van Gogh was, in his reading, “incredibly talented, but then again incredibly demented” — a man whose society could never quite accept him. What Abdal saw in Starry Night was the capture of movement. “He painted a star as something that is moving,” he says, not as the dot the rest of us would draw. He still redraws Starry Night once a week, eight years on, and once spent time at an office sticking small versions of it onto his colleagues’ computers because, he laughs, everybody should own a Starry Night.

The thread that pulls the rest of the conversation along starts here. When Abdal eventually showed his work to an established artist in 2014, he was told he had “murdered every rule in the art world” and ordered to go and learn them. A different mentor, Zarar — the one person whose opinion he sought out — told him the opposite: don’t get institutionalised, keep doing what you are doing. Abdal eventually reconciles the two positions. Rules matter, he says, because they give you a structure. But they only matter if you can climb out of them. “If you don’t go inside the box, how will you figure out how to come out of it? What is your own stamp?” Without that, everything reduces to what Andy Warhol was warning about — mass production, all of it looking alike.

A student who was raped and hanged, and the end of self-centred art

Muzamil asks, with some care, whether Abdal had an ordinary Pakistani childhood. The answer he expects from his parents would be yes; his own answer is no. Then, more difficult ground: depression, and the low point at which art arrived.

Abdal is unusually direct about it. His grades collapsed in his final years of academia. He reached a point where he considered ending his life. He talks about it openly, he says, because too many young Pakistanis are at the same point and do not know it. “Either you go through with it, or you find somebody or something to hold on to.” For him, that something was art. That is also why he refuses to monetise it the way people keep telling him to. “If I have been given something, it’s only fair, it’s my duty, that through this maybe someone else finds it too. Make what you cannot.”

After NUST, almost on instinct, he refused to take a corporate seat. He cleared the Procter and Gamble aptitude test, made it to the final shortlist, sat on the waiting list and lost the spot — and ended up applying to Teach for Pakistan instead. He was placed in an under-resourced public-private partnership school in Green Town, Lahore, behind Model Town, where rooms held thirty children each and the families did not pay fees. He moved into the community itself toward the end of his time there.

In late 2015, on a public holiday, one of his Grade 1 students was raped and hanged. The body was discovered two days later. The boy’s grandfather had a heart attack when the body was brought home. The case made national news. “It’s still, when I talk about it, it just moves me,” Abdal says. The incident, he tells Muzamil, ended the self-centred phase of his art. “For the first time, I realised it is not about me anymore. Who am I to complain?” If he could paint, he should paint about the people around the incident, not himself. From that point on his work shifts visibly — more people, fewer self-portraits, more colour, a deliberate move toward what he calls the small incidents the mass media will not pick up because they hold no commercial value.

He moved back to Islamabad to ground himself, spent eight months as a creative head at an agency, then moved to Sindh and Balochistan to work on out-of-school children enrolment at grassroots level. Twenty million children, he notes, are out of school in Pakistan. The slums of Lahore had seemed crushing until he saw the cities of Sindh. That trip changed the art again. “Now I tell stories,” he says, “because if God has given me this, then someone in Sindh whose story will never be told — let me tell it. Whoever wants to listen can listen.”

The private room and the choice to go digital

Muzamil asks two related questions: when did art move from private to public, and when did it move from physical to digital.

The first one is harder than it sounds, because Abdal still treats the process of painting as something he cannot share. “I can share the art, I make it and share it, but I don’t share the process,” he tells Muzamil. The instinct goes back to the original storeroom. For years he painted alone, and for years he burned the paintings afterwards. “I made them out of nothing,” he explains. “They should return to nothing.”

The 2015 incident broke that loop too. He opened an Instagram account in 2016, started doing murals people could literally pick up and take away, and began drawing portraits of the people he met at shrines while travelling through Sindh. The early digital work was made on his phone, on top of physical paintings he was still producing in parallel.

He now works almost entirely digitally, and is open about why. White-cube galleries, he tells Muzamil, exclude almost everyone he wants to reach. “How many people walk into a gallery? Who here has ever been to one?” Art, in his view, has to be democratised, not because the physical form has no beauty — it does, and he misses it — but because digital lets a single story reach a hundred and fifty thousand people instead of twenty.

April sixteenth, 2020 — when a still image became an experience

Muzamil asks for the explosion point. Abdal remembers the date exactly: 16 April 2020. COVID had locked Pakistan down a month earlier. He had 32,000 followers. He had been painting to music for years — Ali Sethi was on, he says, the day he made the piece — and he had begun to notice that music was the rhythm for his own process the way other artists might use cigarettes or alcohol. He decided to bring the music into the post itself, with one tiny hand-drawn element animating on top of the still image.

The reasoning he gives Muzamil is precise. A still picture triggers one human sense. Add music and you trigger two. Add movement and the human body begins to interact with the image in a different way altogether. He uploaded the piece, put his phone down, went downstairs to eat — a habit he keeps to this day, because if he stays on Instagram while a post lands he knows he will start to read the feed and adjust the work to it — and came back to a feed that had detonated. In the first few hours he gained seven to eight thousand followers and the piece was reshared seven or eight thousand times. By the end of the month he was at 80,000. “It wasn’t just a picture,” Muzamil offers. “It became an experience.” Abdal agrees.

The underdog effect, and the moment of going national

The conversation turns to the 2021 incident that has shadowed it the whole time. Abdal painted a piece in response to a high-profile murder in Islamabad. For the first twenty-four hours, he says, the response was warm. By forty-eight hours he was, in Muzamil’s phrasing, “the source of all evil.”

Abdal admits the inversion still baffles him and says he would genuinely like to learn from Muzamil how social media produces it. Muzamil, who went through something structurally similar a year earlier, offers a framework. People who go viral by design know what is happening to them. People who do not — people whose caravan just grew while they kept working — do not see the shift until it has already happened. And society, he says, runs on the underdog effect. “We love to build people up when we can say nobody cares about him. I care about him. I’m going to support him. And then the moment a lot of people support him, suddenly: oh my god, look at this artist, so many people support him, what a commercial piece of shit.” Underdog to influencer to enemy is, he argues, a standard evolution.

Abdal absorbs the frame and turns it back on himself. His mistake, he says, was that he had not internalised the fact that he had become national. “In my head I was still the storyteller, still this artist making things for himself.” Once the audience had broadened past art’s natural followers — through music, through written stories — it included people who did not read art the way artists do. “Art is not definitive,” he says. “It is perception based. If I’m saying something from my perspective, it’s not necessary that you understand it. But I do want to say that the solution is to try to understand my perspective.” When that bridge fails, he accepts, it is the artist’s failure, not the audience’s.

Should an artist think about the society before they speak?

Muzamil pushes him to a harder question. As an artist, do you have a responsibility to think about how a viewer will receive your work? Or does that responsibility belong to the activist and the policy expert, who can build in the nuance an image cannot carry?

Abdal’s answer is layered. No, he says, because the moment an artist starts second-guessing every piece against every value set in society, discourse dies. And discourse, even with a wrong premise, is the point. “Even if I am ridiculously wrong — and I will accept I am ridiculously wrong — the fact that my perspective differs from yours starts a conversation between us.” But yes, he says, because sentiment matters too, and someone with a national following has to read the society’s sentiment honestly before they speak into it.

The two of them then arrive at what they both seem to think is the more important diagnosis. The Pakistani public sphere has developed what Abdal calls social amnesia. An incident happens. There is outrage. There are protests. A committee is announced. Two months later something else happens and the cycle resets. Nobody asks the why. Muzamil presses the point: name one policy initiative that has come out of this particular murder. Hearings continue, the Prime Minister is involved, the media is covering every angle, and the same redundant loop closes again. Abdal connects it to the moments when the loop does break — the December 16 attack on Army Public School is the one he names — where society gets jolted into saying no, this is the line, you do not go past this. He had hoped this would be one of those moments. It was not.

Reactionary culture, witch hunts, and the absence of a metric

Muzamil widens the lens. The most educated layer of Pakistani society, he argues, is now leading an online culture that looks closer to fifteenth-century witch hunts than to anything rehabilitative. There is no metric for how big a person’s mistake is and what degree of consequence fits it. Everyone gets thrown into the same dock. Abdal corrects him gently — both sides are educated, he says, just into different ideologies — but agrees on the shape of the problem. Reactionary culture replaces the question what was the mistake with the verdict you were wrong. He compares it to mob mentality. The cars get smashed; whose cars they are stops mattering.

Muzamil offers what is, in some ways, the kindest read of the people who hunt. The people who outrage most, he suggests, are the people carrying the most unprocessed weight. They are not necessarily right; they are full. “Their life sucked, and now this is, for them, a grand form of justice.” He does not think that is good enough. Punishment, he argues, should be nuanced and rehabilitation should be possible. Both of those things require a discourse the platform actively suppresses.

Abdal connects the suppression to a structural feature of social media. Word counts cap what you can say. The platform makes it almost free to comment on someone’s idea and almost expensive to first understand where the idea came from. The asymmetry produces the reactionary default. “You don’t know what your words have done to the person on the other side,” he says. He then offers the line that ends up framing the rest of the conversation. “Critique me a hundred percent. That is completely your right. But you do not have the right to threaten to kill someone.”

What the pile-on cost him

Abdal is unusually specific about the cost. For the first two weeks after the piece was attacked he stopped answering unknown calls. He went into what he describes as absolute seclusion. He lost friends — close ones, friends who had reached out to him in their own crises and whom he could not respond to because he could not respond to anyone. Old contacts surfaced, and he could not face them. He took two months away to understand what had happened, and he came back still afraid.

Muzamil mirrors the experience back to him. After his own incident a year earlier, he was paranoid for months — convinced strangers in a grocery store were about to hit or stab him. “It’s not normal,” he says, and points out the thing the underdog framing hides. A sixteen-year-old with a million TikTok followers does not have the emotional infrastructure to absorb that level of attack, no matter how often she is told she signed up for it. “She didn’t sign up for it. She signed up for discourse.” Inviting someone to dinner, he adds, does not give them the right to start bashing you under the abstract banner of freedom of expression.

Abdal accepts the framing and extends it. Words, he tells Muzamil, are not erased when their author moves on. They stay with the person they were aimed at, and they keep developing — into paranoia, into shame, into the inability to trust an open inbox. He has not gone back and read most of the messages. “To this day, when I am on social media, I am afraid. Still.”

No right to emotion, and the case for staying in the conversation

By the end of the conversation Muzamil offers what reads like a slow, hard-earned conclusion. “As a public figure, you do not have the right to emotion.” It is, he admits, a sad thing to have to say. But every emotional reaction is multiplied; every flash of anger is the moment the people waiting for it have been waiting for. Abdal agrees. The only sane move is to step back, refuse to feed the loop, and keep making the work.

He is careful not to let that collapse into despair. He says, more than once, that he loves the people who follow his work and would not trade them. His one request is that anyone who likes a piece extend the same effort to a piece they do not. That is the door, he says, through which discourse re-enters the room. It will not start with the audience. It will have to start with the people making the work — people, he tells Muzamil, who built their studios in their own homes and are paid in attention rather than commission. If that means the paranoia stays, he is willing to live with it. “It should stay,” he says. “It will keep you from doing certain things. But don’t let it change the way you think.”

Muzamil closes the conversation at the one hour thirty-eight minute mark, asks the audience to disagree with him in the comments — politely — and signs off.