The well-known diasporic artist, Bani Abidi, recently posted to her social media page, her son’s wonderment about whether the sky gets ‘cut’ when one travels between countries — an innocent musing that acquires profundity in today’s ‘globalised’ yet exceedingly divided world. I found this to be specifically pertinent to the ideas explored in a recent show by Fazal Rizvi who, too, grapples with the absurdity of demarcating imagined borders on something just as expansive, shared and fluid — the ocean.

The Fleet, curated by Aziz Sohail, looks at the ocean as a point of confluence and exchange that becomes subject to delineation. The subsequent political imp­li­cations, imp­osed restrictions and questionable free­doms of those that are bound to it, through geography or commerce, become a point of interest for the artist. This is explored through interactions with local fishermen, which the artist interprets into his practice that is stretched between disciplines, presenting his writings in the form of art.

This leads to a yet more fundamental discussion on captivity and the nature of freedom as perhaps a social construct and a futile aspiration. What ties this train of thought to the rest of the show — and subsequently the entire show — is the site-specific audio tour ‘Tairtay Kamre’ (Rooms Afloat) which explores the various levels of captivity that we live in. This is encapsulated in narrations of writings by the artist interspersed with loose translations of an account by former African slave, Olaudah Equiano, with heart-wrenching details about life in captivity; descriptions of the anatomy of fishing vessels with closed iced rooms (gaale) down below for storing tons of caught fish; and poetic, evocative musings that turn these elements into metaphors and analogies to our bodies, to the idea of nationhood, and to elusive, imagined bonds of our own fabrication. One questions the existence of ‘freedom’ in a world constructed with boundaries; even our own being is confined within the limits of our own skin.

An exhibition looks at the absurdity of demarcating imagined borders in the ocean

Experiencing this piece within a floating boat becomes transcendent, not merely relating ideas passively, but immersing the audience into them. One is overwhelmed with a sense of isolation and is able to enter the work with the gentle rocking and the sounds of the sea that blur the distinctions between the environment and the art. One is also met with a very concrete sense of borders and their implications, as the group is subjected to security checks at the coastguard post, which also restricts the movement of foreigners, providing a subtle form of irony to the piece.

The experience of the sound piece, in a way, sheds new light on the rest of the works, and our understanding of them becomes more nuanced. The artwork ‘(Floor) Plans To Occupy And Capture (Upon) The Sea’, as the title suggests, reads like an architectural blueprint of a room with a (fishing?) vessel contained within, again drawing analogies between the catching and storing of fish and the militarised capturing and occupying of territory and those who reside therein.

In ‘The Blue Drawings’ series, Rizvi expands upon his previous works which give text a binary purpose: to poetically convey his thoughts and to act as an image through its formal construct. Here, the artist plays around with the bracket, repeating it in various arrangements and essentially drawing with it to depict — in minimalist referential form — the sea, borders and obstructions, and ships. The use of the bracket here is apt, as it brings in the idea of borders as an instrument of containment, rendering the ocean with it.

What is made painfully clear in these works is the inevitabile demarcations, no matter how absurd they may seem. The human race is inherently territorial and for various reasons chooses to confine itself to closed rooms of varying sizes, natures and degrees. What the work then, accomplishes is to invoke a sense of empathy in the viewer, an awareness of those who regularly flirt with these man-made boundaries, these open-air prisons, and in many ways, unknowingly live within them.

“The Fleet” was on display at the AAN-Gandhara Art-Space, Karachi, from January 18 till February 15, 2018

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 4th, 2018