Hazara often employs sound as a medium to signify both conflict and the collective. In Takbir (2022), silence and sound, darkness and light, operate as metaphorical devices in a transfixing nexus. The camera shifts into a steady, almost nauseating circular motion, causing city lights to dissolve into a trail of light calling out to infinity as resounding cries of Takbir (which describes the call Allāhu Akbar/God is great) emerge from all directions in unison. The call of Takbir resonated the night sky of Kabul, whose landscape the film follows, in the backdrop of the announcement of evacuation of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021, making way for the Taliban to once again take over the lives of citizens, symbolising a call to action for some, or a call in anguish for others. The sound echoes across the vast expanses of the starry night sky as a gesture of protest and mourning, juxtaposing both the individual and the collective engulfed in a perpetual war. All this, while tracing blind spots of night raids, newfound complicities, media ‘fog’, and the blur of overnight displacement, Hazara poignantly meditates on how darkness can also offer a refuge.

In Takbir (2021), Hazara uses the sonic dimension to juxtapose rituals of daily life against the carnage of an ongoing conflict. The young man at the centre of the screen looks straight at the camera — almost compelling the audience to engage in a direct, eye-to-eye dialogue with him that does not allow any escape. The rhythmic movement and the bold gaze engulfs the viewer in a trance-like vortex. The self-flagellating, mutilated, violated body posits itself as a counternarrative of war – a palimpsest of scars and trauma; a testimony of endurance, resistance and survival

In another part of the gallery is Hazara’s haunting video Eyes in the Sky (2020) presenting a drone’s-eye view of a barren landscape where the camera pans across rugged and dusty hills and we see a young man blowing the smoke of espand (wild rue) against the sky. As the camera zooms in on this landscape, children wielding guns begin to appear trailing past terrains of abandoned tanks and detritus of war. At a halfway point, a child stares directly into the lens as the soundscape turns polyphonous blending in the sound of drones, helicopters, and calls for prayer, and the innocent surveilled child at once seems to reclaim their space and freedom.