AUTOMATED SUBJECTIVITY (mustafa zaman and rafiqul shuvo)
AUTOMATED SUBJECTIVITY mustafa zaman and rafiqul shuvo
Bengal Art Lounge 22 Aug - 2 Sep 2013
Published by Bengal Art Lounge 60 Gulshan Avenue . Ground Floor Gulshan 1 . Dhaka 1212 . Bangladesh Contact +88 (02) 9895135 . E-mail: art.lounge@bengalfoundation.org Web: www.bengalfoundation.org
Cover Front Unmaking of the Makers - 16 Digital print . 40 x 30 cm 2013 Cover Back Gift for John - 3 Pencil drawing, printed image . 30 x 30 cm . 2013
Photograph Mustafa Zaman, Rafiqul Shuvo and 2L Photography Design Emon - Bengal Foundation Printing Graphosman Reproduction and Printing Dhaka, Bangladesh
Half image : Living Best Artist in Dhaka City C - Print . 2013
Katerina Don Bengal Art Lounge
The automation of creativity is contingent on long, intrepid intervals of subjugation to the tidal demands of natural rhythms linked to the phases of the sun, resulting in an irresolute dichotomy. This condition is akin to schizophrenia, rooted in compulsive consumerism born out of the need to possess the evasive and unattainable. And thus, the text remains in the juxtaposed, disjointed state between beginning and ending.
Half image : Candlelight Vigil Life-size sculpture styrofoam and wax . 2013
Curatorial Note 1 Living in the terminal stage of the Capital Order – one which easily gives rise to the schizophrenic subjectivity, as is evident in the bipolar forms of politics, rabid profiteering, and the web of information networks clogged with hyper (mis)communication -- is like living like an automata, about which Descartes felt at ease, and that was way back in the fifteenth century. The Cartesian Automaton, one which sought to represent the real – the human and the processes that help creates his/her self(s), or the subjective world(s) – was apparently a false representation, as the 'subject' is present even before 'thinking' began. The cogito principle, thus, led only to dead-ends. Yet the concept of Automaton still presides over the organism that seeks to call him/herself human as well as the social organizations constructed to serve him/her. Thus, subjecthood, from the very beginning of modernism, was understood through (mis)representation. Automated Subjectivity seeks to address this misrepresentation alongside all the social/psychological ills that inflect the thinking/feeling body in its everyday existence. In the terminal stage of modernity its pathologies speak through us: the bodies that are subjected to not only thoughts but trauma of not being able to align thoughts with deeds – plunge into futile actions. Bodies lose their vitality struggling to survive… 2 To ensure that the body remains docile and subservient to the existing social design congenial to the capital circulation, secular modernism produces its own mythos. The production of such mythos framed around the concept of freedom, individualism and social justice, enforces, or should one say, sparks the production of the docile body. Such a myth- or text-informed body, once closely examined, seems to produce more than what it has been programmed or designed for. Thus, what is issued forth from the locus of the body unveils unexpected layers of truth against the context of the politics of production and reproduction and representation. Aside from the unilinear culture of democracy, development and progress, to which the body must conform, bodies that party to such hyperactivities generate their own pathologies that often appear to us 'social ills', to use a common parley. What these deformities show is the failure of the capital regime to alienate the subjects from the social processes, which it attempts to accomplish by unleashing several layers of myths. The myths or the metascripts, with which the ruling cartel inscribes the social space, thus, in the end, fall flat on the face. The exhibition Automated Subjectivity addresses the subjects or bodies that conform and also those that develops behavioural patterns antithetical to the chimerical and coercive regime of the capital. Yet when the fast-paced communication and a drive towards a fabricated destiny makes us all achieve a velocity which, in turn, subjects the body to a certain condition where it becomes naturalised, or even denatured, metaphysically speaking, we see bodies acting like agitated robots – as self-destructive automatas. Mustafa Zaman Artist and writer Editor of Depart (an English language art quarterly)
Candlelight Vigil At first glance one sees a crudely done pen drawing of human figures on a tracing paper; but a closer look lets the viewer discover that the playful figures on the semi-transparent paper are scribbled on a close-up photo of a fashion model's seductive and luscious lips. One realizes soon that this drawing with the image of lips underneath the tracing paper, has been made into a photographic image. In such a work, part of the Full-blown Entities series, Mustafa Zaman raises issues of female identity, feminine stereotypes, the female body and fetishism. Zaman takes photos from magazines, places tracing papers on them, and dribbles sketches on the sheet. The photomontage is then photographed and enlarged. The magazine images underneath the tracing paper are not always recognizable; indeed, they are blurry. These are parody advertisements, designed to critique relations between commercial design and the way popular culture moulds people's lives. In Full-blown Entities-16 we see scribbles of a nude male figure, rushing towards something and then see the visage of a young woman appearing through the tracing paper. Zaman shows how images of women are constructed by the male-dominated media, which shape the way women see themselves. The work is intended to expose stereotypes that reflect the prevailing power relationships affecting women and men. The image also points to the Freudianinspired notions of women as somehow lacking the phallus and connotes the essential unimportance of the female sexual response. The Full-blown Entities series has been presented as a personal photo album. It disrupts narrative, calls into question the divide between high and low art and makes one wonder if art is at all a vehicle of elevation and improvement. A black and white image of a burka-clad woman becomes subject of the tracing sketch Full-blown Entities-6. The line drawing of a nude in an inviting pose imposed on the burka image implies that the malegaze dominates our collective psyche and that no burka can actually prevent us from fantasizing the female body even when fully covered. Zaman mines fashion and pornographic magazines, his own discarded or unfinished watercolour paintings, photography, digital prints, video clips, found objects, and extruded polystyrene foam. It is out of this rich interbreeding of method and materials that his absorbing works for the current exhibition 'Automated Subjectivities' arises. He scribbles directly on a female nude image of a sprinter preparing to start off in The Mourning After-1. The sprinter’s head has been replaced with what can be discerned as a fragment of a face and her apparent fitness is supported by fragile anamorphic line drawings. He makes fun of the conventional sporting image and subverts the aura associated with sporting icons and conveys to us that in contemporary life the pervasive influence of images from film, TV, advertising has led to a loss of the distinction between real and the imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth. At the loss of the real we are only left with the virtual. The result is a society of ‘simulacra’ as described by the French theorist Jean Baudrillard where all distinctions between the real and the virtual are eroded For Zaman's next series Caught in the Shadows between the Eyes he photographs his own shadows on the wall and then scribbled sketches on the shadowy and playful images. In the fifth work of the series a weightless dismembered torso hangs from a head. The disproportioned head is seen gobbling a cylindrical body parts slashed away from the female figure. The scene is grotesque and disturbing. In most of Zaman's drawings the figures are headless, dismembered and devoid of any personality. There seems to be no way of apprehending their psyche. Here he is critiquing the
| Ziaul Karim repressive image of reason. With the loss of the real there has been a loss of the standard individual, person or self that could be the object of study. Following the French theorists Deleuze and Guattari he gives primacy to parts over the composite psyche. He sifts his focus from fixed norms that order life to life as an open and creative whole of proliferating connections. For him, self is not governed by any fixed norm or image, a self in flux and becoming, rather than one subservient to Law. The End-game and Ecstasy series interrogates the way the repetition is inherent in cultural imagery and has the particular ideological function of presenting and positioning 'feminine' subjectivity as stable and fixed. The pictures of the series are blurry and hazy photographs of magazine or newspaper images of women in different postures. Zaman puts blobs of play dough on the images and then makes them subject of his photography by quick backward and forward movement of the camera to achieve a hazy effect. He focuses on the ‘maleness’ of the representing camera eye. The male heterosexual viewer prefers women receptive to touch and as easy to shape as is play-dough. Zaman never leaves the viewer in a comfortable viewing position as his works interrogate, question and upset received notions of the relations between text/image, non-art/art, theory/practice by installing the conventions of both and then by undermining the borders along which each can be opened and altered by the other in new ways. Tacky, risqué and gyrating dance clips from popular Bengali cinema projected on three unplugged irons placed on a table constitute the content of the video installation Caught between the Untouchables. The ultimate aim of sexually explicit dance moves of Bengali cinema is to provide pleasure to the male audience. The audience identifies with the hero of the movie. Today's commodity culture is dedicated to enjoyment. The enjoyment dictated by our pleasure principle, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, induces in consumers the desire to look good, healthy, young, and to be slim. The imperative is that you should be consuming, shopping, eating, and indulging in your basic instincts. The pressure to do more, see more, enjoy more actually makes people deeply unhappy. If Mustafa Zaman focuses on the politics of representation, calling our attention to the politics of how we represent ourselves to ourselves, his co-artist in this duet exhibition Rafiqul Shuvo contests the essentialist notion of meaning. For Shuvo meaning is not inherent in signs, nor in what they refer to, but results purely from the relationships between them. Any meaning or identity is provisional and relative and constantly shifting with the medium of expression. In the video installation Liquid, a gravity-defying headless human figure is seen floating upside down with green slimy substance gushing out from the headless torso. The found image (from the net) of the three-dimensional figure wrapped in tape was edited and made into video. The video pits a three dimensional picture against a two dimensional video projection. Shuvo's video installations and sculptures are self reflective in the sense they look at the process of language itself. For him medium is the ultimate message. The sculpture Candlelight Vigil by Mustafa Zaman done in wax and extruded polystyrene foam is a white human figure with two hands raised towards the sky. The two hands are actually candle stands. The flame of the candle is to flicker throughout the 12-day exhibition. The French theorist Jean-François Lyotard once wrote that the job of the artist is to question the role of the grand narratives that subsume individual lives. The human candle of Mustafa Zaman with its flickering flames seems doing his job of keeping a vigil at apparent apolitical innocence of our visual images and verbal stories, asserting that these construct rather than reflect our experience of the world.
Mustafa Zaman
Caught in the Shadow Between the Eyes . Digital print series on paper . 30 x 35 cm (each) . 20013
Look who is Looking at the Site of Conflict (part of an installation entitled 'Awakening of Souls around an Umbrella') Digital print on synthetic medium . Variable . 2013
Meditating the Being in Lightning Speed Digital print on synthetic medium, Center piece 80 x 65 cm . Lateral pieces 80 x 65 cm (each) . 2013
Full-Blown Entities - 2 . Digital print on paper . 30 x 40 cm . 2013
Mourning After - 6 . Digital print on synthetic medium . 62 x 47 cm . 2013
Unmaking of the Makers - 3 . Digital print on paper . 40 x 30 cm . 2013
Full-Blown Entities - 1 . Digital print on paper . 40 x 30 cm . 2013
I Can Face My Self (part of an installation entitled 'An Awakening of Souls around an Umbralla') Digital print on synthetic medium, left piece . 39 x 30 cm , right piece 24 x 20 cm . 2013.
Mustafa Zaman b. 1968, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Education 1988 : BFA, Department of Print Making, Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka Solo Exhibitions 2002 : 1st solo exhibition of conceptual works that combined medical profession related images with fictive texts was entitled The Body of Evidence, Zainul Gallery, Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka 2009 : 2nd solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures under the title Mind Out of Time, Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, Dhaka 2009 : 3rd solo exhibition of conceptual sculptural pieces as well as digital and other forms of arts were presented under the title Regaining Unconsciousness, La Galerie, Alliance Francaise, Dhaka Group Exhibitions 1990-91 : Two consecutive contemporary young artists exhibition organized by the artists 1992 : Participated in Small Form Graphics show, Lodz, Poland 1992-94 : All exhibitions organised by the Dhaka Print Makers including the 1993 show at the 2nd Asian Theatre Festival, Hong Kong. : 9th and 10th Nationl Art Exhibition and 5th Asian Biennale organized by Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka 1995 : Exhibition X3, a three-man show at Zainul Gallery, Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka 1998 : A group exhibition of Bangladeshi artists at Art Today, Delhi, India 1999 : Three-Man Show, a group exhibition at Zainul Gallery, Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka 2000 : 9 Soloists, a group exhibition at Zainul Gallery, Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka 2003 : A three-man show at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, following completion of a month-long residency programme at Britto, an artist run non-profit. 2004 : Figure of Five, a group exhibition at La Galerie, Alliance Francaise, Dhaka Workshop 1992 : 1st painting workshop organized by Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka, conducted under the aegis of artist Mutaja Baseer. Residency 2004 : A month-long residency programme organized by Britto, an artist-run organization based in Dhaka Other Work Experiences 2011-12 : Worked as the curator of Grameen Headquarters (telecom giant) in 2011 who now has a major collection of Bangladeshi installations, sculptures and paintings; : Cocurated Crossover, an India -Bangladesh art workshop and exhibition completed in two legs, one at ICI Gallery, New Delhi, India, and the other at Dhaka Art Center, Bangladesh, with Sushma K Bahl and Archana B Sapra 2001- 4 : Editor of the vernacular art journal 'Noi' At present working as the editor of Depart, an English language art quarterly Publications A conceptual diary titled, Regaining Unconsciouness, on the occasion of the exhibition of the same title in 2009; A Bangla fiction titled 'The Beach the Beach' published in 2004; Four books of Bangla poems published between 1997 and 2008
Rafiqul Shuvo
Living Best Artist in Dhaka City . C - Print . 2013
Gift for John - 2 . Hair on printed image . 29 x 21 cm . 2013 . (each)
Alone, we are never alone, will never be alone . Acyclic, paper, plastic on canvas . 312 x 167 cm . 2013
Manufacture . Wood, steel, various threads . Dimensions variable . 2013
Gift for John - 1 Pencil drawing, printed image 28 x 21 cm . 2013 (each drawing)
Gift for John - 14 Acrylic, photo, printed image 28 x 21 cm . 2013 (each image)
Xciting things are happening . Video . 4.09 min (Loop) . 2013
Rafiqul Shuvo b.1982, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Education 2012 : MFA ,Department of Sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh 2009 : BFA- honors, Department of Sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh 2007-08 : Scholarship South Asian Foundation Curated group show 2012 : Only God can judge me”OGCJM” ,Tejgaon Industrial Area, Dhaka. 2011 : Young Dhaka Art Show-11, Zainul Gallery-2, Faculty of Fine Art, Dhaka University 2011 : (1000) Group Bad Art or Good Art Show. Café Ajo, Dhaka 2011
: “Mourn” a process based art show, Dhaka Art Center's exhibition, titled Senses: 7
Selected Group Exhibition 2013 : Automated Subjectivity. Bengal Art Lounge, Dhaka; Chobi Mela VII, International Festival of Photography, Bangladesh 2012 : OGCJM- Only God Can Judge Me, Tejgaon Industrial Area, Dhaka; Mourn, a process based art show curated by Rafiqul Shuvo, part of an effort by Dhaka Art Center entitled Senses: 7; How Are You? at Community Space Litmus Gallery, South Korea; Crossover, an India -Bangladesh art exhibition, ICI Gallery, New Delhi, India, Jointly curated by Sushma K Bahl, Archana B Sapra and Mustafa Zaman; Dhaka Art Summit, organized by Samdani Foundation, Dhaka 2011 : The Country Of Rising Sadness, conceived and curated by Ebadur Rahman, Dhaka Art Center : Footnotes And Unorthodox (a Group Art Show), Dhaka Art Center 2010 : Sguadi Sonori-2010, Infinite Spaces, video art, organized by Faticart Association of Contemporary Art, Rome, Italy : 14th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka. 2009 : 12 artists Group exhibition. Hun Gallery, New York, USA; New York Art Expo, New York, USA; 2009 [Human Emotion Project, video art screened at Festivals in Italy organized by Faticart Association of Contemporary Art, Rome, Italy; 18th National Art Exhibition Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy; Vova, Mini Art Biennale, Hungary 2008 : 13th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy; Polyptych, a group art exhibition, Alhambra Art Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan; Young art exhibition, Alhambra Art Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan : 16th Young Artists Art Exhibition, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka 2007 : 17th National Art Exhibition. Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka 2006 : 12th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh, Bangladesh shilpakala academy, Dhaka 2004 : 15th Young Artists Art Exhibition, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka 2003 : Latitude Longitude, Informal Art exhibition, Dhaka Award 2010 : Best Experimental Award In Sculpture, annual exhibition, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka 2010 : (praise) Balaton Szalon 2010, Vonyarcvashegy, Hungary 2009 : (praise) "VoVa"-Mini Artbiennale, Hungary Published Samdani Art Book-1: An Art Book+Show Catalog to launch a new breed of contemporary artists from Dhaka with the glimpse of an emerging local discourse, edited and curated by Ebadur Rahman Depart, an English language art quarterly published from Dhaka. Vol. 1 Issue 4, October 2010 Present position Freelance Visual Artists