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Artifice of Time: Atiqul’s ordering of the archaic
We’ll find our world in some heaven of space-time; it will be our love and our
reason. -Emmanuelle Arsan
Md. Atiqul Islam… is he a narodnic martyr type, a Luddite? One wonders after scrutinizing his slightly derivative, semi-interesting sculptures of muffled protest and perfectly calibrated proportion.
Atiqul’s gentle rage against the machine, often, found its moment of greatest efficacy in sensuous offerings of an aesthetic experience that takes us beyond academic lyricism into the maelstrom of history– time-making and marking– and the politics of experience-making.
Also, in a complex intertextual occurrence of deja vu, Atiqul’s work seems to have a strong conceptual affinity with Richard Long’s Land and Nature sculptures– Long is a brilliant British artist and sculptor who is, ironically, most famous for turning down Turner in 1984.
At this point, while still attending– visually, tactually, tactically– Atiqul’s exhibition at the Asiatic Gallery of Fine Arts at Nimtoli– one of the most architecturally heterogeneous and polymorphic arts space in Dhaka– we are confronted by Atiqul’s sculptural appropriation of traditional systems of reckoning which revolve around his theme of the (re)arrangement of space-time that has to be seen as a refraction/representation of the desire to subdue and master the capitalistic staging of the ideological parameters that brutally curtails the nature or the disposition of “other’s” reality and, more often than not, I felt, I got beamed up to Lascaux, or to a more innocent pre-colonial temporal space,as it were.
Antiqul’s sculptures, under the erroneously translated rubric Water and Life, are not about nature or natural forms . To put it almost simplistically, they are about the human articulation in nature; perhaps, more importantly, these sculptures, are an account and appraisal of and confrontation with Modernism’s relationship with natural time and Being. However, the question remains: does the circuitous journey out of the trauma of Modernism have to pass through complacently and comfortably nationalistic “rural” archaism and abashedly espoused pre-civilizational values?
It shouldn’t be too distractive to mention here that aforementioned Long predominantly occupies himself with space, he deconstructs false boundaries and opens up the vastness of the experience of landscapes, embedded in sculptures and, indeed, in all social constructions. Atiqul, in contrast, ironically reifies capitalistic monuments to global time– occidental efforts to standardise, control, mark and close off ‘Time’– by focusing on a range of fragile and interlocking realities rarely represented for the homogenized global gaze.
Atiqul, in his attempt to claim an interstitial status– in a borrowed Far Eastern vocabulary– one that shatters the easy distinction between aesthetic and political, personal and universal, global and local, acceptance and resistance. He sequences his exhibition in two segments, Tower and Statue and, Atiqul portmanteaus the segments within the larger conceptual framework of ‘Water & Life’.
Indian cosmology, since millennia, describes time and measures life as flowing water. Ancient Aryan text, Atharva Veda, on the other hand, conveys the story of an overflowing vessel or an ocean placed outside time but, which is the source of time. Also according the Veda, body, or life-time issues from vulva which got the taste of ocean while the womb is tidal in its web and flow. In the historic sense, Western colonization of time and water bodies are linked; the great breakthrough of timekeeping– making clockwork sufficiently efficient to discover longitude– was achieved to colonize and control the wilderness of ocean-time; it was Britain’s maritime supremacy that established Greenwich worldwide as the zero meridian; ruling the sea was equal to controlling the standard of world times.
Modernist attitude to time, principally, signifies the ideology of occidental, imperialist, Christian time which had been standardized permanently, authoritatively and officially and this standardization was monumentalized– for global transaction, business, travel etc.– by a tower: the Eiffel Tower in Paris, in1913, on the first day of July, sent out world wide time signal for the first time.
Atiqul’s biomorphic, vaguely erotic forms– Morning Drops, Statue-4– or the ironic, organic tower sculptures that employ the signifiers of household objects, stove, pots ,pan and pitcher etc.– while leading to a introverted sensibility and an economy of material and gesture– shyly challenge the hegemony of the imperialist occupation of global time .
Let us formulate his statement: {Water and Life+ (organic Tower and Statue)} vs. Imperialistic Tower and Statue!
Modernist sculpture, the label with which Atiqul dialogically and mildly engages, asserts an inherent rootlessness in the hands of Brancusi, to name just one early pioneer, made claims to being self-referential and culture non-specific. But, Atiqul, not unlike many of his Western counterparts, refuses to experience the more recent phenomenon of self referentiality of form and rootlessness as pure negativity and reverts to regressive antidotes of folksy simplicity and “rural archaism” in the safe camouflage of traditional posturing.
The matrix of trauma, aggression, violation and false representation through which we come to ‘experience’ and situate ourselves in history– incessantly superseding its own protocol of containment– impacted irreversible incursions into the nature of art/reality construction and Atiqul’s anti-modernist, primitivist discourse and employment of retroactive and reactionary tactics of recontextualization and recycling of traditional, mediating subjects, in a system of ambivalently useful purposes, in the end, cull little sympathy from the audience...