 |
 |
Version True - Uma Nair
Lessons Of Darkness:Zakkir Husain
For a beginning ,walking in to Vadehras and seeing art's greats like SumedhRajendran,Gigi Scaria and the likes mulling over Zakkir's show was enough to reaffirm the interest and intrigue this Kerala artist had brought to the city of Delhi. From a title that rankled in one's curiosity to an arresting detailed large work that spoke of his own commitment to the politicsim of a nationalist fervour, among other works, give an old-fashioned humanism the burning presence of an insightful and revenant look at the order of chaos in today's world.. Zakkir's art discounts considerations of style to insist on realities of life and (chiefly) death/instability/vicissitudes, as does a bolted-together and propped (and perhaps large) reconstruction of the deathly instinct of humanism in today's world.
Other works on both floors of the magnificent space at Vadehras pile on rare and uncommonly seen translations of raw-nerved provocations: with a surreal striking photographic distortion of maverick and maw-like chaotic cosmos in arid ground, some with a naked man who seems to contemplate a parasitical plunge. This show was about the lessons of darkness in the recurrent events that happen in the milieu of urban madness.
Most unlike the common run of contemporary art today in India, which often risks triviality in the pursuit of cheap seduction, this is a new kind of sensibility that incurs hysteria as an aftermath of an earnest intensity of understanding the whys and wheres of the context of urban paradigms and shifts that cater to the instability of the world of riots wars, and sensational systematic apocalyptic times. Zakkir combines an motional reach and his own intellectual skill by weaving both together to give us stances that exceed and go beyond the formal grasp of day to day happenings. Throughout the show, and certain melodramatic lurches and lunges of man's asystematic nature of functioning there is an unwritten signature of the failure of society entirely.
But the insightful ability of successful artistic technique in the face of world conditions may constitute a subject for art as substantial as any other, and rather more compelling than today's stacked-deck models of success there is a seriousness of intent that Zakkir probes and ponders about. Submerged and downed in his grafitti of multiple symbols is the idea of the grain of angst that mirrors in a gruesome death's-head neatly—that is to say, messily—critiques death in the manner of the everyday occurrence. Works like Zakkir's tacitly cancels the credit of artists who allude to terror and horror without personal investment. It is indeed true that existentialist standards of authenticity may/may not be back in force, however fleetingly. How much can we bear of art that, like the famous poet Sebald's writing, glories in bottomless malaise? Zakkir invites the viewer to find out after spending considerable time mulling over his idea of mundane and morbid chaos. This isn't art as engineered sensation, it is the experiential thrust of an issue related intensity, it is the sadness of the observer remaining just the observer and failing o be the participant in a world taken over by the threshold of madness and mayhem.
It's the works on the top floor that express and pinhole you into delving deep into the psyche of satirical stances. It is as if Zakkir expresses his own anguish directly: and unconsciously recalls the lines of Sebald: "Oh, / you are men of stones. . . . Water? Fire? Good? / Evil? Life? Death?" But Sebald's signature tone is dead calm. His conjuring of historical and personal loss, which in his novels and memoirs are usually keyed to the calamities of the Second World War, happen to you slowly, as you read, like the onset of a cold. When a young artist reflects that he wants to get mixed up with such connoisseurship and contemplates in his workings of such sordid and remote sorrows-you know he is vital and imperative in the market.
In many ways Zakkir also reflects in his artistic angst a rising sensibility haunted by "the destabilizing sensation of having come upon the remains of our own civilization after its extinction," transfixed by "offended sceneries and scorched earth," and hankering for qualities of the "pure, distant, and extreme" in "a sphere that is, if not religious, at least sacred or obscure, like a mystery cult." Remarkably, the visual works on display endorse today's rhetoric.
