Aziz Hazara‘s large-scale video installation Bow Echo, 2019, was premiered at the Biennale of Sydney NIRIN in 2020, on the cusp of the COVID-19 global pandemic. It takes its title from a devastating weather storm that clusters numbers of powerful thunderstorms in a fast-moving straight line. A bow echo can be hundreds of kilometres across, with destructive cyclonic force winds that cause severe devastation in a short period of time.
Growing up in war-torn Afghanistan, whose capital Kabul is often rocked by devastating terrorist attacks – many of them horrific suicide bombings – Hazara has created a compelling work that speaks with a searing simplicity of this ongoing horror. Afghanistan’s population continues to endure terrorist atrocities, even under Taliban rule, that in 2021 replaced the previous decades of international armed conflict. In the artists own words: “The work has been inspired by my own experience of the recurring horrors of suicide bomb attacks that have unsettled the city of Kabul. They are a sort of ‘horror game’ and since 2001 have taken place in different parts of the city, becoming an integral part of its recent history… The question of how best to represent this history and its effect on the lives of individuals has been one of the most persistent questions during the making of this work. Very often, the idea of representation becomes a dilemma.”
Bow Echo, 2019 is presented as an enveloping arrangement of five large video screens hanging from the ceiling in a darkened room that confront the viewer with five images of young boys, all desperately struggling to stand still and be heard playing toy bugles, atop a dramatically windswept mountain overlooking Kabul. This same mountaintop was once the stronghold of local Warlords that controlled the city of Kabul from the same vantage point. The plaintive calls of the toy bugles, which each child is desperately struggling to blow amidst the swirling sand storm, herald the urgency of their community’s plight against continuing repression and acts of unspeakable violence, amidst the cultural desolation of war-ravaged Afghanistan. The intense high-pitched sound of the bugles is overtaken by the sound of the bow echo itself and the growling rumble of drones that along with low flying helicopters have become an almost constant aural backdrop to the city of Kabul. To the artist’s despair, the plight of the people of Afghanistan has worsened in recent years since the Taliban takeover when many nations suspended humanitarian aid and armed conflict persists in some parts of the country between the Taliban and sectors of Islamic State.
Hazara works lives and works between Kabul, Afghanistan and Berlin, Germany.