Dimension of each 18 x 22 x 28 cm
Experimenter presents Muqaddimah, Aziz Hazara’s second solo at the gallery and his first solo at Experimenter – Colaba, Mumbai. The title of the exhibition is derived from the Persian/Arabic word ‘muqaddimah’ which means a prologue to an expansive milieu. The exhibition presents video installation, photography, sound sculptures and underscores what it is to constantly coexist with violence and the multiple shifts of power regimes in the context of the socio-political rubric of Afghanistan today. Through constant experimentation with his visual language, Hazara traces the evolving connotation of waste, surveillance, soundscapes and the notion of ‘everyday’, rife with the dichotomies of tragedy and normalcy.
The preoccupation with objects in Hazara’s practice emerges as a result of the political, economic and social impact of the war detritus left behind by a series of foreign interventions, proxy wars and civil conflicts. He looks upon these objects as camouflaged entities, whose ever-changing functionalities are a testament to how one’s relationship to their surroundings is constantly re-coded in response to larger political dynamics. Hazara’s works also draw attention to the afterlife of these objects which sustain a global market with a gigantic supply chain circulating within Central Asia, South Asia, West Asia, North Africa and Eastern Europe that feed into the economy of war.
Surveillance tools such as drones, tethered aerostat radar systems and night vision goggles, introduced by Soviet troops, NATO and US forces to keep the people of Afghanistan under watch, found their way into these markets and became accessible to the locals after every regime change in Kabul. Hazara uses these technologies in his practice to reverse the gaze by manipulating and reverse engineering them as his subjects of observation as well as means of representation. He brings attention to the wartime surveillance practices and how these tools serve a sinister purpose of collecting an archive of biometric data and panoptic images by military oppressors.
Sound becomes an important tool in Hazara’s documentation of the ruptures and ambiguities concealed within the everyday in geopolitically embattled regions. It manifests in his practice as a cartography of war through its sonic fields which has become integrated into the popular culture and collective consciousness. He threads together contrasting sonic experiences such as pop music, muezzin calls, whirring sounds of drones, military weaponry, bombings as well as Naat songs – which, popularised by the resistance, reappropriates the traditional songs of old Islamic culture to glorify martyrs and suicide bombers as courageous figures. In his practice, these sounds are brought together as the polyphonous residues of decades-long military interventions, regime changes, colour revolutions as well as shifting and often overlapping propagandist ideologies.
In Hazara’s practice, the politics of sound and images find an incisive meeting ground in the pursuit of truth-telling as he subverts the trope of representing people in conflict zones through a dehumanised and passive lens by the corporate western media. He often employs the language of abstraction or as he calls it ‘non-image’ which questions the assumed fixed meaning and coherence of visuals while tapping into the memories and stories of landscapes of leftovers. Hazara offers a lens into the tension that materialises as a result of making absence an ubiquitous presence. He also attempts to break away from the notion that images and sounds stand as embodiments of objective evidence and unwavering truth by focusing on their inherent instability. Through the conflation of the visual and the aural in his works, Hazara emphasises on the normalisation of violence and how one adapts to the everyday through gestures of defiance, resilience and remembrance, manifesting at times through acts of play.
