The Fleet (2016)
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