From Steel to Symbol: Cultural Re-Authoring and Visual Hierarchy of Pakistani Truck Art

Abstract

Pakistani truck art has been described as one of the most complex and socially integrated types of vernacular visual culture in modern South Asia. The practice started in carriage transport communities and not in institutional art spaces, and alters standardized industrial vehicles into highly ornamented, mobile cultural spaces. Working together in the workshop production of painting, calligraphy, mirror inlay, carved wood, embossed metal, illumination, poetic inscription, and devotional imagery trucks are re-written out of the utilitarian machines into stratified symbolic infrastructures. Based on the material culture theory, the paper discusses truck art as a vibrant socio-visual system between 1990 and 2023 affected by regional craft traditions, religious symbols and vernacular aesthetics. According to the multi-sited ethnographic research, the visual hierarchy analysis, the motifs categorization, and the regional comparison have been included into the present study. The research reveals the manner in which decorated trucks act as concurrent devotional technologies, work spaces, autobiography surfaces, and mobile artworks. Their visual hierarchy is structured to create sacred, narrative and communicative spaces so that they can be legible in motion and turn highways into a space of symbolic exchange. Finally, the adorned trucks also show how mobility is made culturally productive, steel is turned into symbolic, labour is turned into aesthetic expression, and infrastructure makes meaning in motion.