Prime: Art's Next Generation
Text by Omar Kholeif
The burnished metal chains travel in slow motion. But in this factory setting, the cogs have gone to sleep. The hushed sounds that embody the moving images in Munem Wasif’s Machine Matter (2017) echo in the dimly lit heritage house that was one of the settings for the 14th Sharjah Biennial in 2019. A slow pan becomes a painterly image, an archaeological relic of a past time. The tranquil soundtrack unexpectedly begins to take force: a wind chime, over the sound of a human breath ascending, a synth? Wrinkled crevices appear before us, resembling a mutating landscape. The sound of a heartbeat enters the sonic frame. The specks of hair within this torrid landscape reveal this image to be that of a metamorphosing human body, captured somewhere between life and death.
Machine Matter propels the viewer one inch into the future, while holding a steady mirror to the past. Filmed in sumptuous black and white, the artist creates an interplay between the physical apparatus of industry—the machine—and the disembodied membrane of the mortal form. He conjures the interdependent relationship of human and machine, the cyborg, and philosopher Arthur Koestler’s concept of the “ghost in the machine,” from his foundational 1967 text that purports that we are all hurtling toward a form of self-destruction.
The setting in Munem’s work relates to the vanishing history and trade of jute, known as “the golden fiber,” which forms a major production and export business in his native Bangladesh. Before the birth of artificial materials, it was common for coffee and sugar to be transported and distributed across the globe in bags made of the material. Here, the artist’s expressionistic portrait captures the lives of exploited laborers, whose disembodied figures occupy the screen and whose materials and image accompany the work in installation form.
Much of Munem’s artwork is motivated by an impetus to showcase the social inequities in contested geographies, in many cases the social, economic, and political tensions between Bangladesh and India—the scars of a colonial era, which saw Bangladesh become a battleground state, claiming its independence in the Liberation War of 1971. In the ongoing project Seeds Shall Set Us Free, begun in 2016, Wasif resuscitates the age-old photographic cyanotype technique, a low-cost process that produces cyan-blue copies. In this work, dripping seeds in diverse sizes form animate constellations resembling celestial spheres. These kernels, which are often used in various ceremonial celebrations, including weddings in Bangladesh, are presented here as artifacts, as their production has become increasingly genetically engineered—a metaphor for a bygone era.
The burnished metal chains travel in slow motion. But in this factory setting, the cogs have gone to sleep. The hushed sounds that embody the moving images in Munem Wasif’s Machine Matter (2017) echo in the dimly lit heritage house that was one of the settings for the 14th Sharjah Biennial in 2019. A slow pan becomes a painterly image, an archaeological relic of a past time. The tranquil soundtrack unexpectedly begins to take force: a wind chime, over the sound of a human breath ascending, a synth? Wrinkled crevices appear before us, resembling a mutating landscape. The sound of a heartbeat enters the sonic frame. The specks of hair within this torrid landscape reveal this image to be that of a metamorphosing human body, captured somewhere between life and death.
Machine Matter propels the viewer one inch into the future, while holding a steady mirror to the past. Filmed in sumptuous black and white, the artist creates an interplay between the physical apparatus of industry—the machine—and the disembodied membrane of the mortal form. He conjures the interdependent relationship of human and machine, the cyborg, and philosopher Arthur Koestler’s concept of the “ghost in the machine,” from his foundational 1967 text that purports that we are all hurtling toward a form of self-destruction.
The setting in Munem’s work relates to the vanishing history and trade of jute, known as “the golden fiber,” which forms a major production and export business in his native Bangladesh. Before the birth of artificial materials, it was common for coffee and sugar to be transported and distributed across the globe in bags made of the material. Here, the artist’s expressionistic portrait captures the lives of exploited laborers, whose disembodied figures occupy the screen and whose materials and image accompany the work in installation form.
Much of Munem’s artwork is motivated by an impetus to showcase the social inequities in contested geographies, in many cases the social, economic, and political tensions between Bangladesh and India—the scars of a colonial era, which saw Bangladesh become a battleground state, claiming its independence in the Liberation War of 1971. In the ongoing project Seeds Shall Set Us Free, begun in 2016, Wasif resuscitates the age-old photographic cyanotype technique, a low-cost process that produces cyan-blue copies. In this work, dripping seeds in diverse sizes form animate constellations resembling celestial spheres. These kernels, which are often used in various ceremonial celebrations, including weddings in Bangladesh, are presented here as artifacts, as their production has become increasingly genetically engineered—a metaphor for a bygone era.
