One Piece by …
One piece by … is an interview column on Kajal Magazine. In each interview I talk to a South Asian artist about one work of art they have created. The aim of the column is to present readers with an in-depth understanding of an artwork and a broader understanding of the art making process by shedding light on the myriad of decisions an artist makes for a singular work. In doing so I hope to avoid the pitfalls of trying to summarize an artists’ entire practice in a single interview (impossible) and keep the conversation focused, brief, and accessible.
The War Rug, by Hazara artist Khadim Ali, is overwhelming. The title references a distinctly Afghan art form: rugs populated with war imagery. Ali’s artwork however is a digital animation projected on a plain rug. It is full of war, specifically American forces in Afghanistan, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha by the Taliban, the battle of Rustom and Esfandiyār from the Shahnameh, and the recent botched American evacuation from Afghanistan – all against a backdrop of a map of Afghanistan and its surrounding countries and in the incongruous medium of retro video game graphics. Rockets, drones, anti-aircraft guns, fighter jets, a GBU-43 bomb, tanks, a warship, Chinook helicopters, coronavirus cells and all manner of military vehicles swarm the screen. There are countless explosions and fireballs, accompanied by the comical arcade hall pew-pew sound effects. As the Buddha crumbles we hear shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” and “Subhanallah”. People are lowered into position via helicopters, running to a commercial airplane, manning guns atop military vehicles, and once it has taken off, falling out of the airplane – their individual screams piercing through the hellish soundscape of a screaming crowd, airplane engines, and helicopter blades.
This bombardment of visual and auditory stimuli triggers both the happy nostalgia of childhood games and the trauma of a very contemporary war: simultaneously playful and horrifying. It’s a multilayered meditation on the complicated history and cultural heritage of Afghanistan; presenting us with neither a linear narrative or a didactic point of view. Yet, embedded within the violence and destruction are moments of hilarity, fantasy, and beauty. In the first half of the animation a line of bullets and shells dance at the bottom of the screen and a herd of goats hops across the map, oblivious and immune to the ongoing battle. In the second half of the animation otherworldly birdlike creatures, robot-esque figures and brightly patterned helicopter and tanklike shapes dot the space. The most powerful however is the music, a man singing in Pahlavi, his clear haunting voice, full of yearning and sorrow, soaring above the cacophonous chiptune symphony of war.
Kajal connected with the Australian based artist to learn more about the making of this powerful work, beginning with a discussion on the textile genre it evokes in both title and aesthetic: war rugs. Read more.
One Piece by Hiba Schahbaz, Burning Venus
Contemporary artist Hiba Schahbaz has been meditating on love. Love beyond romance. Love as a state of being. Her most recent solo exhibition, at Almine Rech gallery, Paris, was titled Love Songs and featured her painting Burning Venus. An ode to the goddess of love herself, this work references Italian art history, gilded Mughal miniature painting, and Schahbaz’s unique pictorial lexicon. Created in 2016, with watercolor, tea, gouache, and gold leaf on paper, Burning Venus was nestled amongst brand new dreamy pink and red oil paintings on canvas.
Kajal connected with the artist to discuss this bewitching piece — a chronological, physical, and aesthetic outlier in the exhibition that revealed both how long Schahbaz has been contemplating love and the evolution of her inquiry and larger art practice.
One Piece by Sharmistha Ray, The Night is Dark and Full of Rainbows
The Night is Dark and Full of Rainbows, by contemporary artist Sharmistha Ray, is a seductive image: A marigold crescent rests at the bottom of an indigo square. The square is inside a vertical rectangle and framed by a diagonal rainbow, such as one thrown by a prism. Rays of color seep through the blue but yield to the yellow crescent and the faint outline of a circle extending from its edges. The clean celestial geometry and jewel-tone inflected ROYGBIV color palette is unabashedly appealing.
The artwork’s description complicates the viewing experience: “60 hours of automatic writing with colored pens on vellum.” Yet it is hard to find writing in The Night is Dark and Full of Rainbows, there are no legible words floating in the shapes or any script that could be recognized as text. In reality, text is everywhere. The tight, idiosyncratic cross-hatching that fills each block of color is actually Ray’s handwriting but they have layered their script so densely that it has become illegible. The concealment is no accident; the words are not meant to be read. Ray is using writing not as a communication medium but as a mark making process.
Kajal connected with Ray to discuss The Night is Dark and Full of Rainbows, beginning with how the artist incorporated automatic writing into their visual art practice. Read more.
One Piece by Abdolreza Aminlari, Untitled (22.001)
For the last year contemporary artist Abdolreza Aminlari has been making his own paper. Working with master collaborators at Dieu Donné, Aminlari has been producing velvety, vibrantly pigmented sheets of cotton paper – prussian blue, neon pink, and deep mauves.
The adoption of papermaking is unsurprising; Aminlari is best known for another labor intensive craft process: embroidery – specifically with gold thread on paper. His latest body of work, Location of Home, combines these two processes to stunning effect. Kajal connected with Aminlari to discuss Untitled (22.001), his largest work on paper to date. Read more.
One Piece by Golnar Adili, Baabaa Aab Daad (Father Gave Water)
Contemporary artist Golnar Adili is playing with language. Specifically the shape of Persian. For the past 15 years she has been making art that revels in the physicality of her mother tongue. She has extracted individual letters from her father’s writing and recreated them in print and sculpture, designed her own Persian pixel typography, created a pattern out of verb pairings from Hafez’s poetry, rewritten a letter between her parents on the edge of 352 folds, used paper strips to fabricate a sculpture of Rumi’s words and made landscapes from her father’s handwriting. These works are memorials to a childhood ruptured by geopolitics. They are also joyful, wondrous constructions informed by Adili’s background in architecture.
Kajal connected with Adili to talk about her artist book Baabaa Aab Daad (Father Gave Water), the significance of language, and straddling the duality of joy and sorrow. Read more.
One Piece by Randhir Singh, Sector 5 Saket
Randhir Singh’s photograph Sector 5 Saket captures a ubiquitous scene in South Asia: the neighborhood cricket match. A stack of bricks stand in for wickets, field boundaries are demarcated by random objects, and the players’ attire is a mismatched cacophony of color. However, the protagonist of Singh’s photograph is one of the match’s onlookers: the local water tower.
It’s an otherworldly structure – monumental and grimy; a bizarre hybrid of a hovering spaceship and a fluted temple column. Emerging from behind a dilapidated wall, the tower is flanked by lush green trees and soars into a clear, almost white, sky. The people, the wall, and the trees are all rendered diminutive in the presence of the looming industrial structure.
Sector 5 Saket is the first of 27 water tower portraits Singh has created to date. The ongoing series is an ode to large format photography, shooting with film, and one of Delhi’s oft overlooked and soon to be redundant monuments of urban planning. Kajal spoke with Singh about the impetus behind this architectural portrait and the series that it spawned. Read more.
One Piece by Suchitra Mattai, A Poet’s Quarrel
A Poet’s Quarrel, by Denver based Indo-Caribbean artist Suchitra Mattai, is an artwork made out of another artwork. Like many of Mattai’s recent pieces it is a textile intervention on a found artwork – embroidery on a landscape painting. Using bright yellow and red thread Mattai has embroidered large lightning bolts onto an otherwise idyllic scene of a cottage nestled in a mountain valley. It’s an offbeat pairing in so many ways: new and old, abstract and real, primary colors and earth tones, craft and high art, serene and disaster. It is quintessentially Mattai. Kajal connected with the artist to discuss the finding, making, and naming of this work. Read more.
One Piece by Najmun Nahar Keya, The Spell Song
A wall of soft words. Bangla script as sculpture, with pillow-like volume and skin of shimmering sari fabric. The formal beauty of written Bangla catches the eye of the uninitiated. The title, The Spell Song, heightens the mystery of the text. For Bangla speakers the softness will transcend the physical to the linguistic. The phrases on the wall are Bangla folk proverbs – familiar and, for many, familial. The title, kindling reflections on the magic of language; the mysterious immortality of folklore.
Bangladeshi artist Najmun Nahar Keya debuted this installation at the 2020 Dhaka Arts Summit (DAS), a biennale exhibition based in Dhaka, Bangladesh that has very quickly become a critically significant event on the international art calendar. A text-based artwork that is indecipherable to foreigners is a bold choice for the exhibition that routinely draws the largest foreign crowd to Bangladesh. Keya’s decision however, was well rewarded. The Spell Song was roundly lauded by DAS attendees and the art industry press. Kajal connected with the artist to learn about the origin, creation and reception of this work. Read more.
One Piece by Hangama Amiri: Arayeshgah-e Bahar
Hangama Amiri is memorializing the everyday lives of contemporary Afghan urbanites. Combining a fashion designer’s toolkit with the history and language of painting, Amiri is creating rich images that place Afghan women at the center. We see a colorful bazaar, banners for Khatool Mohammadzai, the first and most senior female general in the Afghan National Army, young men and women relaxing in a public park, a group of girls posing for a photo, ads for eyelash extensions, and more. Her 2019 textile installation Arayeshgah-e Bahar (Bahar, Beauty Parlor) depicts the crowded interior of a beauty salon, an all-female space. Yet there is an armed man standing outside.
Kajal sat down with Amiri to discuss the creation of this piece, the hierarchy of art materials, and the lives of Afghan women. Read more.
One Piece by Umber Majeed: Hypersurface of the Present
Green is a loaded color for some of us. Green is Islam. Green is Pakistan. It is the dominant color on the Pakistani flag and consequently inextricably linked to national identity – saturating government seals, corporate logos, athletic uniforms, and more. It appears prominently in Pakistani-American artist Umber Majeed’s work. Majeed’s choice of green, however, is less flag and more highlighter, and its symbolism encompasses Pakistan, the Internet, the concept of time, radioactivity, and more.
Kajal connected with Majeed to discuss this particular hue and her idiosyncratic – and very green – installation: Hypersurface of the Present. Read more.
One piece by Mequitta Ahuja: Xpect
Mequitta Ahuja’s 2019 painting Xpect depicts a woman in a red dress reclining on two chairs that have been draped with bright blue fabric. The large painting directly behind her, the smaller painting on the floor in the background, and the lack of furniture around the woman imply that we are in an art gallery. The model meets our gaze – she is clearly posing.
Xpect is a self-portrait. The model is Ahuja. Her classic pose is made decidedly contemporary by her pregnant belly, the sonogram she is holding, and her slight smile. It’s a birth announcement! An Instagram trope inside a painting that is loaded with rebuttals to art history.
Kajal connected with Ahuja to learn about the making of this work. Read more.
One piece by Zinnia Naqvi: The Wanderers Niagara Falls, 1998
Pakistani-Canadian artist Zinnia Naqvi mines her family album for inspiration and source material. In her photograph The Wanderers – Niagara’s Falls,1988, she has built a complex and colorful tableau around a photograph of her mother and sisters visiting Niagara Falls. This personal image, like all travel photos, is especially poignant today. As the global pandemic wanes and peaks around the world it is unclear when, if ever, we will return to the days of unfettered tourism. Furthermore, by presenting the brown body as an explorer, consumer, and conqueror of the great outdoors Naqvi is subverting one of the most problematic tropes of Western art history.
Kajal sat down with the artist to discuss her inspirations, influences, and creative process in making this photograph. Read more.
One piece by Himali Singh Soin: The Particle and the Wave
The world, as we knew it, is on pause. As governments scramble to get ahead of the coronavirus pandemic and the privileged amongst us work from home, the situation for many artists is growing precarious – long awaited exhibitions are being cancelled or postponed indefinitely, part-time teaching jobs are on hold, residencies and fellowships are closing, and absolutely no one is buying art. Understandably. It seems fitting to revisit Himali Singh Soin’s animation The Particle and the Wave right now. In this hypnotic and strangely beautiful animation, Singh Soin focuses on the almost universal symbol of a pronounced pause: the semicolon – specifically, Virginia Woolf’s use of the semicolon in her novel The Waves.
In a little under 13 minutes Singh Soin scrolls through Woolf’s entire novel. Her aesthetic is stripped down almost bare; each page of simple black text appears centered on the screen, the white of the “page” is identical to the white background but the text is not floating in space – a faint outline of the page grounds the words and telegraphs the text’s origins – a physical book. A small blinking yellow rectangle highlights each semicolon. The minimalist video is accompanied by an ethereal soundtrack: delicate chimes running the gamut from high pitched and light, to mellow and sonorous, and to deep basslike tones. This “music” is in fact… Read more