Writings

Ahmed Nazir, a well-known printmaker, extends his digital acumen to a series capturing the uncapturable – the unfolding trauma in the on-going massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza. The series of digitally developed images based on what one is forced to interpret as the colonial capitalism’s Black Hole where children are being regularly targeted to ensure the erasure of a race seems more like a conceptual/emotional take on ‘trauma’ and ‘spectatorship’ as opposed to the ‘depiction’ of the Ground Zero of thanatopolitics.*

Gaza, which has often been dubbed as ‘an open-air prison’ is now being levelled to the ground through incessant bombing in the pretext of fighting Hamas, an armed group the Western media categorically refers to as terrorist outfit while the rest of the world has the all the reasons to cast doubt on the nomenclature and the narrative attended to it. Through the same framework organized around sovereignty, Israeli occupation forces, with the support from its Western guardians, continue to dehumanize the Palestinian people. Thus, the narrative, tainted as it is by the ideology or race and religious supremacy, feeds the processes of the production of the Palestinians as ‘corpse’.

Ahmed Nazir started out as a printmaker in the early 1990s. He is among the few artists who played a crucial role in making printmaking a mainstream praxis. As one of the founding members of the Dhaka Printmakers that was operational in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he produced etchings, lithographs and monotypes of extraordinary quality. Aside from his early purist practice, on which an excavation is imperative, he has become known for breaking the taboo by incorporating digital technology into the fold of the medium that is often subject to misinterpretation in this clime. In this 14th solo exhibition, the digital prints are brought closer to his earlier lithographic production by the virtue of their aesthetic constitution.

Ahmed Nazir’s new prints are an extension of his preoccupation with the digital media. Photoshop is his chosen programme, which he first employed in 1997. It is a time-consuming process since he has developed a habit of putting layers upon layers of incorporated images and digitally developed textured planes to determine his response to a chosen subject matter, always working emotively and non-deterministically. They, for him, are like ‘performative devices’ that help to enact the realities he chooses to address.

From the aesthetic point of view the images deals with the ‘horror’ of genocide employing its own logic, one that helps the artist ‘enact the realities’ as he manipulates images in Photoshop, creating layers with fragments while accumulating ‘noises’ that adds an abstract quality to each image. The process helps to cut down on the ‘in the face’ attitude that many an artwork based on catastrophic events otherwise brings into view.

Nazir’s works escape the usual gambits of representation, as has been mentioned at the beginning. Susan Sontag once feared that any ‘catastrophe’ that is experienced from distance via news media ‘will often seem eerily like its representation.’ The works in this exhibition overturns that fear as the series that comes under the title ‘Bioscope’ lands on a ground of its own, distant from the deaths and devastations yet leading us back to them through its own devices. The artist’s unique line of imaging is linked to his earlier works since the abstract qualities of the early lithographic and monotype series are carried over to the current oeuvre. Nazir picks up the images (his references to war-torn Gaza) and breaks them down into fragments to achieve the kind of intensity only possible through ‘digitally mediated pyromania’. Everything is burnt and destroyed to emulate the condition in Gaza. Mimesis, thus, is the last thing in the artist’s mind. As for ‘bio-art’, Boris Groys’s term to indicate art that makes ‘documentation live,’ Nazir would rather hark back to his ‘eye’ series to allude to the lived and suffered realities rather than repurpose images in a way so that they together feign an installation of document on Gaza.

However, there is a conceptual dimension to the series – the device that is the bioscope, which the artist once used in the early 1990s in an installation, first of its kind in Dhaka, helps to frame the retelling of the inhuman saga by questioning the strange ‘spectatorship’ we have entered in the mediatized world. ‘The forced passivity is what I felt should be brought to the fore. We have no other option but to witness it from a distance,’ Nazir explains and he wanted to capture the mixture of rage and helplessness the daily deaths instigated. The bioscope seems like an efficacious memory-tool, a box-like device with small round windows to peer into the images that slowly unspooled inside as the bioscopewallah, usually a man, turned the lever. It came handy as a metaphor as the aim for the artist was to lay bare the ‘necropolitics’ (Achille Mbembé’s term), which is, in essence, the power of the colonizer over the life and death of the colonised and the passivity of spectatorship in the mediatised world.

By overlapping the experience of traumatic destruction of Palestine and the memory of bioscopic fantasy, Nazir seeks to attend to the ‘pain of others’. This series has been made to frame a transcendental exposition of ‘globalized trauma’. Here the autobiographical (via artistic memory of his past works and the contextual element of the bioscope) and the global (war zone of the colonial capital order) is fused and channeled into an approximate individual aesthetic expression. The works defy the temporal logic of modernity on two counts, one by remembering the imaging process of the bioscope and the other by dodging the languages of global traction.

Nazir’s practice has been focused on the ‘dematerialization’ of his language, not to become ultra-conceptual, which the phrase originally implied, but to let emotion dictate the final outcome. The digital medium is thus deployed against itself, ensuring that the ‘medium’ does not become the ‘message’. Therefore, his works reside between the recognizable fragments of photographs (be that found images or his own) and abstract qualities expressed in textures, lines and other forms of aesthetic artifice. The end results, in the current series, seem to bring the trauma of the Gazans out in the open, forcing the viewers to rethink the ‘world order’ that has created this zone of occupation and bloodshed.