The Black chevron is a symbolic title given to a series of works that primarily critique the customs of assigned values to things, to understand the No Thingness. To recalibrate from relative nothingness, and to keep aside holy isms that betray the depressed constantly more than ever. Thus this series of works explores what this No Thingness as the outcome of structural error, systematic oppression in terms of our differences, that one has to afford in every corner of life. How its plasticity creates converging points of recognizing the absurdity of the world at the same time while stimulating empathy towards planetary life. Challenging the problematic value system which is based on market-oriented, righteous morals; the oligarchic invasions and their intentional exclusions based on a variety of differences are reasons to seek possibilities to live otherwise. These manifestations are symbols of or for a utopia at the same time it’s a conversation derived from and within my everyday poetics.
A symbol is a rendering movement, “it transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing” - Albert Camus. Symbols also could be difficult to understand like the problem itself. Yet like the tip of an arrow or of a compass, the chevron symbol breaks through linear time and moves multi-directionally in time. A rubric that sets away interiorizing notions of common value, values related to commodity, emptiness/nothingness.
Finding the chevron symbol in different periods of human civilization, and the activities associated with rediscovering, and resurrecting, it into contemporary life is like excavating, negating, and propagating memory of each of our times. The relation I found with it symbolically represents planetary unconsciousness which holds us together in generating human myth, its mystery to believable. This means, that our sheer nostalgia for species stands alone as an indication of a phenomenal cyclic movement which surely says our human's inability to remember things after a period. Or as if our human insecurities abled us to invent our own history as a human species, to tell our story? Anthropocentrism and its myths through which we see and experience the world is a narrow road that takes us back to memories spread a(across) different flesh accumulated bodies and mysterious minds. It foresees things one could not see or not explain in between while in the process of creating, interweaving, destructing, re-looking, and so on. It’s an action activated meant to never end.
The series includes mainly object-based sculptures but also a group of photographs that intersect the associated ideas of elements found in the very poetics of daily life.
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After the revolution, 2022; banana fiber, PVC, Iron, Clay jar, plaster
Extracted banana fiber produces a captivating odour, it reinstigates what is un visibled in the presents of the absent lived life. The scent evokes an otherworldly presence or life after obsolation / death. In one setting it is arranged like an exploding stream of intelligence of some sort and in another as if a guard holding his weapon in his armpit. Unfilled spaces in the pipe and jar gives a suspending moment of danger/nostalgia. The unclear archetypes value the loss of life in unprecedented struggles insurrected for protecting the right to live for all species, and those becoming possibilities. Using both synthetic and earthly materials insisting on the contemporaneity of ours is otherwise not possible.
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A Divine Conspiracy, 2022, Digital Photographs
A divine conspiracy is a photographic survey that looks at how designs of material culture living matters, and systems enable things to live or operate symbiotically narrating the divergence that almost mirrors nature. The fictionalized planetary experience submerges human and more than human visible paradigms, the divinity in this no more (natural) shift is deeply collapsing in effect on the pitfalls of worries on disinformation, fake news, and AI interventions in data manipulation which increasingly disturbing politicians and governments and their agencies whether they are bad or good or young or old left or right. The experience is almost going to be auto-destruct of the system. This imitation of several distinct things each other breaking the mirror. The level of transparency it reached questions the very idea of disorder, this un(visible) effort says the world is no more one family but whole conflicting organisms of military power. The related morality that erased and regenerated this lights up on dehumanizing, racializing, and animalization of our human species, which is a de facto element dominating the planet into an extremely poisoned to breathe. Beyond species shaming this process of breaking the mirror/auto-destructing system is a pure imitation between things. This means the predatory and innocence colliding with each other innumerably at the same time like in the old days what Augusto Boal might call the cop in the head. In our all head. In the heads or minds and bodies of we all. Human and more than human mind and body. Ah… forgive, the benevolence of every single existence both visible and non-visible things are under suspicion and are under greater absurd surveilling cultures.
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Fall and Whispers, 2022, Plaster, coconut fiber, plastic, plants, fungi, bettle, cotton threads, Iron, Glass magnifier
The model exemplifies the pathological stance of the nation-state on promises over people’s lives, and conservations of more than [human] nature. Not depicted as sorrow on someone’s forever loss or policing over someone’s action but yet as mimesis of a distant witness, whose agency is never enough to talk about anything because his proximity is wider than the ocean's horizon, of a person’s rights are weaker because he seek relations beyond nation borders. This an architectural utopia in a dream, but scrambled within its awakened premises.
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Workers Lullaby, 2022; Hacksaw Frame with Wooden handle, Harmonica
The work is a love song for the proletarian struggle. Untoned mouth organs in higher pitches produce a siren-like noise. Obsoleted hand saws carry the fragile and precarious life they live. But yet their strength to be optimistic and the beauty, of their empathy towards the world are un-parallax from any ideological or comradeship point of view.
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Grassroots, 2022, Walking Stick, Coconut Shell, Charcoal, Dried Areca Palm leaf base, Dried Yam Stem, Plastic Measuring Cup, Ash, Gold Leaf, Iron, Battery cell, Cloth, Screw Pine Mat
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Do they ever let us heal?, 2022; Clay Sand Brick, Spirit Level, Thermocol Shoe Lifter, Animal Mask, Plastic, Acrylic color
The arresting gaze of an injured mask is a self-critique; protesters in third-world countries spent millions of money for publicities for protest demonstrations and for the planning of it, none of them ever make avail of any sort of basic protective measures. As if like visible wound is essential to the forefront of any movement. Who is authoring this mass psychology of freedom fight and resistance, not letting us stop dividing further and losing each other?
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North-East-South-West Bodies, 2022; EPE foam bag, Thermocol Mould, Mud dauber, Talpatar Sepai
A mud dauber quietly nested on a toy made out of palm leaves and bamboo sticks, it was in an open container in my room. In the first place primordially it reminds us that we are not alone, even in all advancements for intruding on privacy we could be aliens to each other. The simple gesture of mud dauber leaving the carefully designed nest also tells the peculiarly inherent nomadic nature of life. Depiction of humans as toys, their indignity, the reliability and trust it contains / projects and mud dauber remains on it also led to the body politics within South Asia insulated by various institutional deliberations.
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At the edge of capital governance, 2022; Found Used Book, Sickle, Iron, Adjustable Spanner, Mixer Grinder blade, Storage net mesh Bag, LED Bulb, PVC, Acrylic Color
Growing up in a communist regime first a belief then a frustrating realization about communist mythmaking its false promises to demolish capitalism. Its gender, and masculinity, forcefully taught irrecoverably imprinted patriarchy concerns me very personal level. Unlearning has its limitations. The proletarian struggle is ever higher in the world. Ideology continues to burden them. There is no emancipation from slavery and low wages. The work is this ideological incapacity bending over these ideological incapacities and its brutal denial of it. The leakages, lacking plasticity, and its current politics over color are unpleasant and unreliable for a proletariat uncaging.
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Impositions, 2022; Aluminum Sheet, Found Used Book, Hammer, Plaster, Parts of circuit board, and plug
The work is not necessarily about a particular person’s proposition but breaks the notion of personal ideological bondage as a necessity to overcoming the debilitating state of living, amplifying the error itself with a proletarian tool. And considering damage/state in human error not as a defect but as an effect to ornament the decay, obstipation, or something in a state not workable in its imposed notion of purpose.
Special Courtesy Ashkal Alwan, HWP, Virtual, 2022.