Notations on Time at Ishara Art Foundation
Lately I’ve been thinking about how history is documented/recorded, remembered, erased, retold. After I visited Notations on Time, the latest exhibition at Ishara Art Foundation, I left thinking about how personal and social history is passed on from one generation to the next, and how artists act as informal historians by making works that won’t be found in official history books.
Curated by Sandhini Poddar and Sabih Ahmed, it features works by 20 artists from South Asia and its diaspora, “…a dialogue between artistic generations to highlight entanglements between the past, present and future”.
Where and how do we ‘read’ time? On bodies, skins, machines, rivers, landscapes, and stars. Within wormholes in cosmic space and underground, in unseen root systems, within site-readings from archaeological and evidentiary fieldwork, within ancestry and oral traditions, within myths, folklore, and storytelling, within science fiction and mixed realities, within long-dead stars in the cosmos viewed through powerful telescopes, and so much more.
The exhibition poses questions such as, ‘what happens when residues from the past are reincarnated into the future? Where does the jurisdiction of the present end? What is the future of the past? What possibilities can the space of an exhibition offer to think through these questions?’
Notations on Time includes works by the following artists, and includes text Raqs Media Collective’s book ‘Seepage’. You can read all the artists bios here.
Soumya Sankar Bose
Sheba Chhachhi
Shezad Dawood
Ladhki Devi
Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad
Aziz Hazara
Amar Kanwar
Ali Kazim
Mariah Lookman
Haroon Mirza
Anoli Perera
Lala Rukh
Jangarh Singh Shyam
Dayanita Singh
Ayesha Sultana
Jagdish Swaminathan
Chandraguptha Thenuwara
Zarina
Here are some of the works that stood out for me:
Where the Birds Never Sing (2017- 2020) by Soumya Sankar Bose is a photo series about collective memories or violence, death and forced eviction. Bose asks survivors to re-renact their memories of the Marichjhapi massacre, “the forcible eviction in 1979 of Bengali lower caste refugees from Marichjhapi Island in Sundarban, West Bengal, India and the subsequent death of thousands by police gunfire, starvation, and disease”.
You can read the rest on Bose’s website.
Soumya Sankar Bose, Where the Birds Never Sing (2017-2020). Inkjet print on archival paper, set of 45, dimensions variable for each print. © Soumya Sankar Bose. From the Ishara Art Foundation and the Prabhakar Collection.
Silver Sap (2007) by Sheba Chhachhi is a series of 8 black and white photos about the “ongoing recuperation of the female body from dominant market and mediatic representations”.
The passage of time and physical toll is marked on a human body, and in a world where we’re still bombarded by what beauty is supposed to look like and aiding several industries that keep perpetuating this image - photos like this remind us to challenge that kind of representation.
Sheba Chhachhi, Silver Sap (2007) Archival pigment prints, set of 8, 76.2 x 60.96 cm each. Image courtesy of the artist and Volte Art Projects. From the Ishara Art Foundation and the Prabhakar Collection.
Aziz Hazara, Monument (2019) is another work about collective memory, this one is at a graveyard in Afghanistan which is also a site for collective grief.
"My interest in the issues of memory, archive, surveillance, the panopticon and the politics of representation, is deeply entrenched in the geopolitics and the never-ending conflict that afflicts my native Afghanistan. The relevance of such issues, however, overcome geographical specificities and appeal to a contemporary condition that is globally shared." Aziz Hazara
Aziz Hazara, Still from Monument (2019). Double channel UHD digital video, colour, sound 5:20 minutes. © Aziz Hazara. Image courtesy of the artist and Experimenter gallery.
Zarina, The Ten Thousand Things III (2016) by Zarina (1937-2020) are beautiful to look at. They look like handmade postcards carrying with them messages and symbols from another dimension.
Zarina, The Ten Thousand Things III (2016). A set of 100 collages mounted on Somerset white paper, Image size: Variable, Sheet size: 22.9 x 15.2 cm. © Zarina; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Farzad Owrang.
Tucked upstairs is Light Work xlix (2022) by Haroon Mirza. My photo doesn't do it any justice, but if you visit, make sure you don’t miss it. Made with LED tape, wire, aluminium, copper tape, and one local stone, - this too feels like it landed from another dimension.
The exhibition is on until May 20. If you’re in Dubai, don’t miss it.