visible roots left in the ground > < follow up for the tree
tabla tabla strings and vocals >
a call to recent studies >
video description: set to another Lollywood classic, this short clip splits the screen into two separate panels. Each one follows the camera movement from dead roots laid in the grass upward to a living tree and then up again to the blue sky – the movement is from grey decay to lush green and blue life. As the intro to the song finishes and the first vocal is about to drop in, the image pauses for a brief moment…two tabla-like images appear side to side. Both are rotating circles with an inner circle of a blackened wood texture, made to appear like the syahi, the central point of the tabla skin. Both rotating circles give the sense of vinyl records being played, with the outer ring on both circles featuring two distinct family images. One is of my two grandfathers sternly sizing each other up. The other is of my grandmother and her best friend sizing up the camera. As the song continues and fades out, the images are taken away by a burning line across the screen.
A British conceptual and installation artist born in Ilford.
Landy is best known for Break Down, a performance piece where he categorically destroyed all of his possessions in a disused C&A on Oxford St. It has been widely read as a critique of consumerism, following on from early work of his that overtly criticises a growing consumerist ethic. I think the work contains an inner dimension that allows for a deep denial of materiality (not just material), making it spiritual and ascetic. The work was visceral and emotional for Landy.
After ‘Break Down’ he took a hiatus from making art before returning with Semi-detached. The latter is a lesser known work of his but I find it conceptually important that after destroying all of his possessions that he felt the need to recreate his home. This house is such a ubiquitous image in Ilford and witnessing it in the gallery space gives me mixed feelings. In some ways, the work seems to be a direct discussion about the area, home and Landy’s personal history. Mobilising the aesthetic feels representative. The work engages in a kind of elevation of normality. An edification of all of the processes of house-building: window fitting, door framing, coving, roofing etc. While obviously not unique to Ilford, this building is a complete replica that brings Ilford into the gallery space and it makes the address in Ilford another site of the work.
In other ways, the work misses an opportunity to have a discussion about how dynamic Ilford is as an area. The focus is on a frozen moment in the artists history and does not engage more widely in the creation of place. The neighbours, the local supermarket, the high street, the bus stop, the local park. These aspects of home-place-making are all conspicuously absent from the work.
Anyway, the work is actually all about Landy’s dad who was confined to the house after a mining accident in 1976. It’s about his father’s incapacitation and a reflection of working class conditions in 1970s Britain. So of course, it isn’t about Ilford at all neither elevating its normality nor missing its dynamism but keeping a focus on the father-figure. In some ways, Landy’s work is about ancestry and those who have come before. The excerpt from a Guardian interview with the artist below strings together the relationship between Break Down and Semi-detatchced.
“One object that Landy didn’t destroy until right at the end, which went round and round the conveyor like an unclaimed suitcase, was a big old sheepskin jacket – his dad’s. “My mother had bought it on credit just before he had his industrial accident. After that, it became too heavy for him to wear any more. She still had to pay it off. In a sense, this sheepskin coat became him, travelling around on this yellow tray…Landy later made a significant work about his dad, Semi-detached, in which a precise replica of his parents’ Ilford semi was erected in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2004. It was the sort of emotionally loaded artwork he couldn’t have imagined making before Break Down. “I was interested in my dad’s value as a human being. What’s rubbish? What’s a weed? Why is my dad a total wreck case? That’s what preoccupies me.””
Most recently Landy has been making work about Essex, the county of his and my own birth. Reviled as the capital of countries nouveau-riche, Landy documents the nations view of Essex in his 2021 exhibition Welcome to Essex at the Firstsite Gallery in Colchester. His archive Essexism turns the mirror on a liberal-metropolitan elite who have written about the rise of Essex as a kind of phenomenon. It shows them as frightened of the emergence of a new kind of middle class who do not seek the sanctified sophistication of upper-crust England but use their wealth to adorn themselves while otherwise staying authentic in speech, action and style. While the classism is a clear issue tackled in the work so is the accompanying misogyny.
The construction of the ‘Essex girl’ has been used as a way to demonise young women and label them ‘stupid’ for seeking different kinds of mobility. In the accompanying documentary, Landy meets superstar businesswoman, Amy Childs, who it turns out is his first cousin once removed. He makes a point about their similarity and even uses products of hers in his exhibition as part of the archive.
The work feels authentic, political and as described by Landy himself iconoclastic. I appreciate that he includes his mother in the documentary work, that he explores spaces he knew as a child and that he admits how ignorant he was about Essex throughout most of his life. I feel inspired by how genuine he seems and through reading about his life and work I take away the following lesson:
bringing the family into the frame, forgoing the material, seeking something of home,
I am currently researching into artists from Ilford. (Ilford is one answer to where I’m from)
Gillian Wise was a British visual artist born in Ilford. She was part of the English Constructivist movement of the 1950s before becoming a key member of the Systems group.
“Her work follows the principles of experimentation and reduction to elemental units (line, colour, and plane). Her structures play on the effects of the geometry of light and industrial materials, as well as contrasts between transparency and the primary colours.” – aware
Gillian Wise was born in Ilford in 1936. She grew up in Ilford until leaving the area to study at 18 in Wimbledon. She exhibited as part of the British constructivists and became their youngest member in 1961. She challenged the predominance of American modernism at the time and then continuously throughout her career. She clearly understood art and artistic production to be an overtly political matter and spoke often about the CIA intervention in Cold War cultural production.
“There artists of all stripes and their nascent agents had to be American to get the full treatment of nurture and sponsorship since that is what policy demanded. Policy from Washington. Out of this was born the Abstract Expressionist group… the two names which have been retained as most representing that moment are Pollock and Rothko, although the latter was trying for a stylistic variant. While Pollock reflects some early Alexander Rodchenko (one of the original and prolific members of the Russian Constructivist movement) experiments, Rothko’s attempt at mysticism, à la Malevich, is a very thin affair.”
Her work was overtly political and she herself was an avowed Leftist who won a British Council scholarship to research Russian constructivism in 1969. She travelled to Leningrad, exhibited in Helsinki and joined the Systems group, a collection of Marxist artists who successfully produced and showed work throughout the 70s.
Gillian Wise was the only British artist to create work for the opening of the Barbican centre in 1982. Her work, the Alice Walls, inspired by the Russian avant-garde, remained entirely uncredited until 2014. She referenced it as, “a dark episode in the annals of support for national artists and, of course, women.”
The history of this Ilford-born artist gives so much rich context to the sidelining of genuinely Leftist and Marxist positions throughout the Cold War. It also references the definite and unacceptable misogyny of the mainstream British art establishment who have since begun to rewrite their silence around Gillian Wise with her inclusion in a variety of shows.
While on the surface it seems that Ilford plays a limited or invisible role in the artists history, one striking historical coincidence keeps me wondering.
Gants Hill Underground Station in Ilford
In 1937, one year after Gillian Wise was born, construction on the Gants Hill underground station in Ilford began. The station was designed by Charles Holden and was inspired by stations on the Moscow Metro.
Before it was eventually opened to the public in 1947, the ‘under construction’ station was used as an air-raid shelter. After consultation between Moscow and London about the building of the Moscow Metro in the 1930s, British architects returned to London with some new ideas. Gants Hill is designed with a central vaulted concourse separating two platforms in order to maximise the amount of space for the flow of people.
Getting to the platform level of the station is a striking experience. As you travel down the deeply-set downward steps the square floor tiles slowly come into view before the marvel of the ceiling is revealed. The station has barrel-vaulted ceilings and is tiled in a geometric pattern that is reminiscent of the Krasnye Vorota Metro station in Moscow which opened in 1935.
Krasnye Vorota Metro Station
Ivan Fomin was the designer of the Krasnye Vorota Metro Station. Fomin worked in a variety of styles throughout his lifetime, including Art Nouveau, Neoclassicism and an intermediary style of architecture known as Postconstructivism.
By the early 1930s, Constructivist art and architecture had fallen out of favour and was soon to be replaced. Stalinist architecture would become the dominant form of expression for the next decades. Wedged in between these two larger forms is a brief architectural style known as Postconstructivism (sometimes referred to as early Stalinism).
Constructivist work had been wildly imaginative and avant-garde in its use of shapes, materials and technology. It was avowedly political, aiming to incite a social purpose for all people in public spaces. The demise of Constructivism comes alongside the rise of Stalin and the impact of centralised state power. The Stalinist architecture that followed utilized classical forms representing a return to traditional notions of power. Dmitry Khmelnitsky writing about this period suggested that Constructivism was ended by the force of Stalinist power. Khmelnitsky suggests that “traces of the Constructivist style in the Postconstructivism of the 1930s are a sign of indecision, not tradition.” There was a vacuum that state-sponsored artists were filling with a combination of what came before (Constructvisim) and even further back (Classicicism). This combination of ideas was the starting point for Stalinist architecture. Postconstructivism is truly then a misnomer for the return of classicist forms and styles with accidental traces of Constructivism.
Ivan Fomin himself had a deep love for classicism and had spent a long time attempting to develop his own form of proletarian classcisim. In the 1930s he partook in key competitions to design the Moscow Metro. He won just one and designed the station Krasnye Vorota with vaulted ceilings and a central concourse. A model of the station was at the 1938 World’s Fair in Paris where it won the Grand Prix. Fomin designed the station in what would become called Postconstructivism.
Ivan Formin competition entry for a Moscow Metro
Gants Hill station in Ilford, designed by Charles Holden adapted from a design by Ivan Fomin, bares the scars of the Constructivist movement being clamped down on by the Stalinist regime.
Gillian Wise, born in Ilford, developed a career as an artist inspired by Russian constructivist art. She would even travel on a British government grant to research Russian constructivism in the country itself.
Only after this trip to Russia does Wise give up being a Constructivist artist and move on to join the Systems group.
I’m not saying that architectural ghosts haunted Gillian Wise as a child until she was able to exorcise them in the country from which they originated but…I am saying that.
the footage is taken from one mountain spring in the Harz >
suddenly any place where the water flows is a place I can imbibe with a sense of home/belonging >
bodies of water as liminal spots of belonging >
this work draws its title from lyrics in Mark of my Departure >
it is meant tobe funny >
video description: set to a classic Lollywood tune this video juxtaposes different images of flowing water in different shaped frames. The frames are sometimes overlapping, sometimes slowly elongating and are synchronised to reflect moments in the musical journey. The water is flowing from a small stream across grey-brown rocks flanked by some greenery and soft moss. The water is clear and the flow is strong.
As the beat drops and the tabla comes into full swing, two circular images are seen rotating on the screen. The two images are in the same style and both created in the same way. On the left is an image of my grandfather, reading a newspaper, looking away from the camera. His image is framed by a circular photograph of a chopped tree trunk. Using the same method, the image on the right has the chopped tree trunk frame with an image of my father and his brothers in it, all sporting the wild 1970s style of facial and head hair. The two images rotate continuously in the style of old vinyl before slowly fading out.
these are my two grandfathers surveying each other
my grandmother and her best friend
MADE THE SYAHI
Using the image of the chopped down tree stumps, I fashioned the syahi for these tabla’d images, making the symbol of dislocation the central point of attention. Reversing the process from the previous studies, trying to be more direct in the tabla reference and combing through the family pictures. This process has reminded me that so much of this work is about building an archive for/of the family that reconnects the ancestral lineage severed by dislocation.
Noor Jehan is an icon > singer of over 10,000 recorded songs > first female Pakistani film director in 1951 > affectionately known as the Queen of Melody >
Below you can hear Noor Jehan singing ‘Lal meri pat’ >
Lal meri Pat is the original version of the song that venerates the saint Lal Shahbaz Qalander > it brings the research out from the mystic 12th century reaches > out also from the Afro-South Asian connections > straight to Lollywood >
Pakistan’s film industry set up in Lahore has its own heroes and history > if interested > this podcast has been a joy to listen to >
I’ve been blaring these songs in my room and in my headphones on the go >
I’ve been paying attention to the way these videos are shot and edited >
I’ve enjoyed the sharp, deliberate, on-beat chopping >
these studies are produced by pushing family photos into images of chopped trees < these trees are located in the Harz Mountains in Germany where the bark beetle has destroyed local forests < amongst the decay and disease wild flowers and grasses < growback >
< the bark beetle is a kind of predatory invader to the forest < “nature” has its own forms of violent destruction < reoccupation of habitat < re-inscription of its role < colonialism >
< normally a tree would be able to ward off the beetle by producing its own resin < but increased heat and drought have weakened this defense < many trees are dying < many trees are being chopped down < chopping >
< roots in the ground remain as the wood is chopped and moved elsewhere> < chopping >
< the stump is a sign of this dislocation < a mark of my departure >
< the stump becomes the image of the tabla face < except it misses the syahi < the syahi is the blackened tuning paste in the center of the drum < the syahi is the pupil of the eye > < in the iris >
< in the iris < my father and his brothers < my grandfather alone < the generational split that I never knew < their relationship with the looking lens < the brothers facing the eye of the camera < the father lost in his work < neither looking at each other < both brothers and father >
< in my eyes >
< in my eyes < as I walk>
< at the rhythm and pace of a tabla>
< through the dying forest < and mystifying growback >
All work on my profile is orbiting this piece right here
These are the opening liner notes for MOMD. There are two images. They both share the same style; a black roti-textured background with bright pink text. On the first image, the text cascades down and reads ‘mark of my departure’ with each word in a different font. In the middle, across the cascade are the letters MOMD emblazoned large.
The second image has the same large MOMD across the middle. Above it is the track list. Which reads as follows:
mark one: water mark two: melanogenesis mark three: in the bazaar mark four: ilford lane mark five: be you
Underneath is a body of text that reads as follows:
MOMD produced, arranged and entirely composed by Allah SWT
features include Nusrat and company, the Chapparrals, whoever recorded that tabla loop, some random heads, Mufti Menk and that hilarious kid, Hamza Mohammed Beg and everyone who has ever interacted with us.
In the name of Allah the gracious and the merciful
I am greeted at the archway of my own work, stepping into it for the first time, hearing my voice drowned in the divine. All voices are dripping with it.
MOMD is a parting letter but I do not know to whom nor do I know where I am leaving to.
Those whom you guide none can misguide and those whom you misguide none can guide.
All of my research, writing and creative work for this program is trying to understand and expand on this that tumbled out of me >>>>>
Another Shahbaz, this time a veneration for the famous and beloved Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalander.
Fascinated (as an outsider), proud (as an insider) of how this/my culture can infuse prayer, dance and music into ritual. I use this visual in Mark of my Departure to bring up a sense of collective ecstatic spirituality and straightforward party vibes.
The visual alone is full of such absurdity and humour; I love the ageing baba having money thrown at him, the dancing kids doing some ubiquitous skanking < maybe the key here is how intergenerational the celebration is?
The people they party to venerate the saint, Lal Shahbaz Qalander.
So much of my own practice is informed by techniques used and made popular by hip hop > sampling, chopping, rapping > somehow this video feels like it has every aspect of a classic early 2000s hip hop video and therein lies the appeal of the visual > it’s a kind of indirect nostalgia > I can access this image of my collective ancestral culture through my individual nostalgia for early 2000s hip hop < displacement is strange
South Asian culture (and cultural artifacts) have a relationship with hip hop that is everywhere to see but not many places to fully understand. My own work tries to explore that relationship. Famous hip-hop producers have lent on South Asian culture to give their music some flair, some essentialised but deliciously addictive vocal chops and catchy melodies < that’s only one aspect of this cultural exchange >
SIDEBAR
Here is the briefest non-chronological history of South Asian samples in mainstream hip-hop production from the early 2000s.that I can remember
I’m writing as I research and have just come across the work of Professor Elliot Powell. Phew. Elliot Powell is doing the work!
“His first book Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), brings together critical race, feminist, and queer theories to consider the political implications of African American and South Asian collaborative music-making practices in US-based Black Popular Music since the 1960s. In particular, the project investigates these cross-cultural exchanges in relation to larger global and domestic sociohistorical junctures that linked African American and South Asian diasporic communities, and argues that these Afro-South Asian cultural productions constitute dynamic, complex, and at times contradictory sites of comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and anti-imperial political alliances.”
Powell charts the link between the lamenting lines of Asha Bhosle (sampled by Just Blaze) and the flippant response from rapper Erik Sermon. The sampling of South Asian music seems to fall into what Powell describes as an early 2000s Indo-chic. The ‘Indian’ aesthetic is utilitzed widely and carelessly to point to a sense of the exotic or oriental. This seems nowhere more evident than in the translation of the sample for the club-ready party hit ‘React’.
“The verse, sung by Asha Bhosle, can be loosely translated as, “If someone has a fondness for suicide, what can one do?,” to which Sermon responds, “Whateva’ she said, then I’m that.”” < Elliot Powell
While Powell suggests that the White orientalist gaze has to be decoupled from the African-American orientalist gaze he still substantiates these critiques. Powell recognises some of the problems.
Of course it has problems.
Using the female-presenting body and voice as an essentialising tool while also minimizing/invisibilizing the labour of the South Asian body < exoticising, homogenising etc etc > Marking South Asian culture as an empty form > a type of commodity that has to have its meaning by-passed because of its illegibility “whateva she said, then I’m that, if this here rocks to y’all then react!”
Powell does not deny these critiques but does complicate them.
He does so by recounting the fact that a year before the release of React, Erick Sermon himself had an alleged suicide attempt.
Powell notes how difficult it was for him to admit it and how he had dissociated from the events that left him in the hospital recovering from various wounds.
One year later, Erick Sermon and Redman are hanging out at the studio and Redman plays a CD of Just Blaze beats. Erick Sermon feels that he doesn’t have a big single on his upcoming album.
There was no conversation between producer and emcee, Erick Sermon just heard the beat and decided that it was the one.
He was immediately struck by it and the next time producer Just Blaze heard the song, it was already a smash hit on the radio.
Powell invokes queer theory and cites this as an example of ‘queer temporalities’, conversations caught between time, unwittingly had, unknowingly needed.
“In the field of rap, I’m superb, I’m fly I should be in the sky with birds” Erick Sermon, React
MAIN THREAD RETRIEVED!
Phew.
Long time-ways from the 12th century sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalander.
But perhaps not > Lal was also known to be ‘fly, in the sky with birds’.
Here is a closing anthem from Qawwali singer Faiz Ali Faiz in homage to the legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who is being readied for further research. The image below shows a flying Laal Shahbaz Qalander who is often likened to a red falcon.
The story of 12th century saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar is on pause but set to continue > it’s an incredible story of syncretic religious traditions, long-lasting spiritual practices and it is our link to Amir Khusro < famous South Asian poet and inventor of the tabla > it is our link also to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and straight through to the heart of the South Asia diaspora.
…the first musical instrument I remember touching was
[ the tabla in my uncle’s home ]
this pair of beating eyes, bringing life
the touch of taut skin
flitting
flatting
frequencies
skimming
skipping
sentences of sound
there is no more desperate path out
(of dislocation out)
than my divine desire to crop my fingers
fold them into pegs
to fling and to follow
to play play play
Un-tabla’d as I am, I dedicate my sound to learning about the music in me that already knows the rhythm of the tabla. This is the first section of Mark of My Departure. Speaking over the tabla loop here felt liberating. The image of the tabla is currently in my mind and everywhere around me all the time.
if you got the rhythm I can go with precision i can flow with the feeling of the water i can drop unexpected, drop like the t’s in the native speech it’s sorta sorta slick with these thick lips flip syllables to spit am from L D N but you can find me in the kiez by canal in the sun, in the rain, in the hail my friend all praise due all praise due all praise due Allah if i wanna manifest a blessing, my head be pressing the musallah
this language I hate it the colonisers tongue – not very fun this language I love it, it’s the only one – well I guess that’s done
i can flow with the feeling of the water cut through the border what you gonna do with this bricks and mortar when the sea-levels rise hoarder that’s me though too much stuff who come rough round the edges and bluffs i can float in the cushioning clouds, pushing them bounds kush and a crown
The tabla remains an image, a motif of dislocation for me. When I experience others playing it with such verve and knowledge I am transported. I find the rhythms intoxicating and the sounds to be full and complete in their expression.
As a vocalist, I hear a quiet challenge. Can I speak over these rhythms? Would it be an act of magical place-making? Magical relocating of the unrooted postcolonial body? Am I returning forward? Am I just traveling the planes of my Western privilege and taking without knowing?
These are specific folk rhythms with their own long histories of which I am coolly unaware. These sounds are not mine.
The tabla is the first musical instrument I have any memory of. Sitting in the corner of my aunties house. These sounds are also mine.
Should I simply let it sit in my ears and enjoy it as I do. That for now is the only certainty.
Hey, I’m Hamza welcome to my studio. I’m a self-taught multimedia artist and researcher. I’m an able-bodied male-conditioned, postcolonial person. My work is informed by continuous conversations with the people I love as much as any reading, listening and observing.
I’m using this residency to resume an investigation I started some time ago (before getting distracted by another project). Mark of My Departure (MOMD) is preoccupied with the South Asian diasporic experience. The centerpiece of the work is a 7 minute visual collage set to an original composition.
I will use the time afforded to me in the residency to continue the collection and tessellation of related postcolonial images and ideas. I am aiming to produce a supporting body of work so that the video is held within an expanded context.
When you step into my studio, you should smell my aunties homemade garam masala slowly infusing into fried onions on the stovetop. Poke around the work you find and if you have any questions or comments do not hesitate to leave them in the comments section.
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