Apt for a museum show, Suspended in Time is extremely overwhelming as it confronts the viewer with multiple facets of South Asian history simultaneously. Ali Kazim was invited to Oxford University in 2019 as the first ever South Asian artist-in-resident; and as part of the Gandhara Connections Research program, he was given access to the Ashmolean Museum’s extensive collection of Southeast Asian art and artefacts. After spending time and absorbing fragments of history and culture at the Museum, Kazim returned to Lahore to work on a body of work that would culminate in a show at the Ashmolean Museum in 2022, the year of Pakistan’s 75th anniversary.
The artist’s works are a response to select historic pieces, most of which are on display alongside Kazim’s contemporary works. In complete contrast to the onslaught of historic context are Kazim’s visuals— serene and stark, subtle and poetic in their representation. Narrowing down to a few pieces of work for the purposes of this article was an impossible task, hence this review will focus on a single motif that has been repeated in various images and different media in this exhibition— birds.
The five-panel piece titled Birds is based on Farid-ud-Din Attar’s poem Mantiq al-tar, better known as Conference of Birds. The text addresses human nature and desire where the journey and destination of the birds are used as an analogy for human behavior. In the poem, life consumes most of the birds, save for thirty birds, who manage to accomplish their purpose and find their King. Despite there being only thirty victors in the story, the stress is on teamwork. Had those that did not make it to the end, not been there to start with, the final thirty birds would not have attained their target. With Sufi undertones, Kazim entwines life and poetry representing these birds in a medium and technique of his own making.
Owing to his previous struggle in archiving ink drawings, Kazim experimented with pigments and manifested a genre of water-based works that are akin to A.R Chughtai and Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings from the Bengal school. To achieve the tonal gradation in the birds, Kazim regularly lifted and removed paint so as to stretch the limitation of the paper to absorb color. The resulting visual is subtle and powerful simultaneously. This monochrome piece depicts various life-sized species of birds soaring in a diagonal composition, executed in a labor-intensive technique that from afar may look like pencil on paper, is an absolute visual treat.
Like many artists, Kazim iterates that each subject dictates its own medium. Arguably, there is a stark contrast between his struggle to archive the five-panel painting, as opposed to his installation of three thousand unfired clay birds, placed under an open sky in a derelict factory in Lahore, also titled Conference of Birds. Where the painting is meant to hold its vigor and shade without fading, these unfired birds were intended to return to dust, post rainfall. This work was meant to be temporal and transient, and once the unfired clay birds melted, the piece was complete. This installation is an ode to all the unsung birds of the poem who lost their way and did not complete their mission.
Kazim came across similar Mesopotamian terracotta bird figurines, such as the Hudhud in the Ashmolean collection, and though the installation in Lahore was not a conscious response to the bird figurines, they subconsciously stayed with the artist and manifested in the Lahore Biennale installation of the unfired birds. Unintentionally, the wasted birds of the installation are also a reference to lost history. To explicate, where the Museum’s collection may be available to visitors from across the globe, it is lost to the residents of the land where it originated from. The chances of locals of this place ever seeing and experiencing these artefacts are next to negligible. Hence, Kazim’s melted clay birds are also a reminder of the subcontinent’s lost history and culture.
Another series of work that tie into the bird trajectory are the paintings titled The Hunters. In this series, Kazim masterfully represents bird hunters who hunt migratory birds for their livelihood as they rest at the Indus Delta before continuing their journey. A trick these hunters use to catch their prey is to conceal themselves by adorning bird-like headgear to dupe the real-life birds. The paintings with masked figures, painted in a stealthy posture with one eye peeking out, against a stark background make for a curious and intense visual. The minimal compositions allude to the nature of the job and its cultural status. These paintings are cleverly juxtaposed with a Company School painting of a Raja posing with birds and other animals. This installation makes it is impossible to not compare the reverence owed to the birds in the historic company school painting and their implication of wealth and power to the birds in The Hunters series, that are chased and caught. It is fair to say that the birds’ status has evolved drastically.
Having focused on a single visual element should not discount the other works in the show that respond to the Gandhara period. Kazim has explored portraits, sculpture, archeological sherds from ruins, and the Buddhist stupas, showing a total of twenty-three works, most of them made between 2019 and 2022, to relay a sense of history and contemporaneity together.
Although a necessary lesson for people of Pakistani origin to see and learn from, it is equally interesting and enlightening for a cosmopolitan audience, not least because of the mastery of craft present in Kazim’s oeuvre. The words of Tim Hitchens, President Wolfson College, Oxford University, resonate in this context, “These works, as I say, should change our perception of contemporary Pakistan and Pakistanis. But they should also change our perceptions of Britain and Britishness.”
Ali Kazim’s solo exhibition ‘Suspended in Time’ is on exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK from 07th February to 26 June 2022.
Title image: Conference of Birds, Installation, Lahore Biennale 2020, © Ali Kazim
Samar F Zia
Samar F. Zia is an artist and art writer based in London. She regularly exhibits in Pakistan and UK; her work is currently part of the Affordable Art Fair, London. She is a volunteer at Alumni of Colour Association of UAL. Alongside making art she writes for various publications in Pakistan. Zia graduated with distinction in BFA from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins, London.
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