Visions of Colombo flash on the screen – buildings old and new, railway stations, parking lots, beaches, rain puddles, places of worship – all taken on Abdul Halik Azeez’s smartphone. It is a visual diary of the artist’s life from the period of February to July 2016. Embedded in the visuals of this stop-motion ‘stream of consciousness’ video is the story of Sri Lanka’s urban transformation after the end of the country’s civil war in 2009.
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What does begin to emerge is a contemplation on architecture and infrastructure, and how a person navigates these spaces on a daily basis. What do such structures say about history, representation, and our shared hopes? This question is present throughout the Ishara Art Foundation’s current exhibition Body Building, which features Azeez along with 15 other artists who work with photography1.
“I have really been thinking about what this city [Dubai] means to us; what our attachments to it are; how, even when we go to what everybody calls ‘back home’, we carry this urban experience with us in some way, and also when we arrive here, we carry those cities with us. It’s about that exchange,” she explains.
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- 1. The title is a play on words – body and building – meant to highlight man’s relationship to his built environment, specifically in the context of South Asia, which is the focus of the foundation, and its links to the Gulf. For curator Nada Raza, formerly at the Tate in London, it is vital to investigate these ties and see how bridges can be drawn between the two regions, and potentially other parts of the world.