KATERINA DON
He is known to be reserved. To be meticulous and somewhat enigmatic. Wakilur Rahman stands out in the crowd – the shaven head, the philosopher’s spectacles, the sharp beard – his appearance is just as chiseled as his ideas. There is a harmony between the man and the product of his labor.

Identity is a recurrent subject here in Bangladesh, but Wakil is one of the few people who has escaped the crisis. His travels in South Asia and long sojourn in Germany have not made him distant from his land and its character, on the contrary, from a distance he has discovered and defined his sense of self as an artist, as a Bangladeshi. Text, he says, is the best visual representation of national identity. It is not a statement of nationalism and not a reference to the Language Movement, but a declaration of self. He has worked extensively in developing fonts and has completed a 7 x 21 meter aluminum wall installation in the Grameen Centre in Bashundhara which comprises of more than 9000 names of thanas, cities, towns, and wards  – a record of old place names mixed with the new.

The spectator is a reader in front of Wakil’s works – a disoriented reader at that. The Bengali script is at once recognizable and illegible, the lines overlapping one another, letters or parts of sentences are blotted out or drowned in ink, the meaning barely shining through. And then there are the works with independent letters abstracted from meaning or place, standing alone, attesting their individuality.  It is a fusion of semiotics and esthetics – seeing is understanding.

Wakil’s fascination with calligraphy goes back to his student days in China and is a recurrent theme in his career. His second point of reference is architecture, many of his works in the past have been space/site specific – works that are not designed to be showcased in parlors and living rooms but to exist in a short period of time, leaving behind just a photo record and a memory. This is a huge leap from the market demands and tendencies of Bangladesh. But Wakil, is an artist who can be seen laughing about such things. He lives by the Bible of the vagabond – indifferent and detached.

It is Wakil’s objects that are the most playful. For instance his recent

‘archival’ works – glass cases filled with shreds of drawings and watercolour landscapes. The whole notion of archiving is turned on its head as you

look at these absurd capsules of the artist’s works from 1997 – 2003.

Then there are the living books, books which have ceased to serve their original purpose and have become symbols. They are no longer meant to be read, but to be watched as they change with time, some growing ferns, others cracking. The idea of these strange objects is like a seed which is planted in the mind of the spectator to germinate, creating new meaning, new ideas.

In Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Quran, a short novel written by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, the flowers are perceived as a metaphor for the beauty of the words of the scripture. But the real beauty is the moment when the Monsieur Ibrahim’s Quran is opened, and inside are dried flowers. This physical manifestation of the metaphor is at once simple and incredibly touching. Something similar happens with Wakil’s living books.

On the opening day of his solo exhibition at the Bengal Art Lounge, Wakil unsealed three of the transparent boxes in which lay open books in different “environments”. One book was obscured by dry grass and soil, the lid covered in weighty droplets of moisture. One book had grown salad leaves from the pages. Another soaked in white oxide, water and gum. These works, titled Song of Tide, were not meant to last forever, they were meant to inspire, to represent the evolution and flow of concepts, from book to person, from person to book. The little leaves were meant to die and dry, perhaps one day under the right conditions to sprout again.

JAVED JALIL

Gallery….studio-scape and manipulated naturalism

In art – temperament, time and space are in a constant open-ended struggle with reality. We humans are constantly striving for communication. The reason and objective of communication has multiple interfaces and can link various thought processes and realities to its humanistic journey with the world of solid, liquid and air. To commit oneself to a discussion and to relate with the other is a journey of understanding and contradiction. What are the possibilities of interaction and how one can possibly relate and intervene into the realms of a balanced association of words and objects, is like a process of spirit coinciding with matter.

Conversation in its spontaneous act is an impulse and association of information, ones’ premeditated beliefs, a search for identity and correlation with his/her innermost thoughts, strife and finding an identical harmony in a character who can relive another life into a preset present form. So there’s a merger of self with ideology or emotional link with humans from the past that somehow glorifies the recent characteristics of human form and its versatility.  We are at times a surrogate or a replacement and also an extension of ourselves. There is a continuous effect of change and the ghost of becoming someone else. This self-losing game that slowly emerges as a specific character tends to rule not only with our personalities but our creative mediums or the enhancers of this spirit as well.

I, as an art writer and an artist, have engaged with another person of different creative interface, primarily motivated to do this writing. Whenever we are reading texts we have a premeditated notion that whenever an author has written something we should try to read to understand. The reader may become a distant part or a viewer whose primary preconceived function is to understand. The urge of understanding can actually at times take the viewer away on a ride into conceived understanding, where he may simply fail to communicate. It is like knowing the name of a bird in different languages, but forgetting to simply see the bird, to know how it is. When he reads the text as well he speaks of it with himself, a threesome act starts and through the simple process of talking to himself and the text, one may get closer to a certain level of relating that can slowly make sense. He is anticipating the thoughts and becoming the space, text and the auditor. Storytelling, whether it has fiction or informative element or relates to a more ethereal essence, are all working to be communicative. What if we lose the consciousness while reading and become the thought being, in a hybrid state, of a trance would that be possible to become the act of it and attain it as a conversation, rather than not being wary of understanding, and just let it take place naturally, like when we talk, not having the act of preparation leading us. This writing is a conversation of three characters playing in the interfaces of the text, thought and the physical elements. The artist, the writer and the spirit, a threesome conscious journey to convey a work and temperament of an artist. The artist is Wakilur Rahman. So to make the writing interactive, like a cyber-hangout space, we are creating visually oriented textural and phonetic aspects, keeping the LED screen within our imaginary visual world, so we can change our understanding as our thought lends to other frontiers without taking any disk space in our brain as a stagnant disposition.

ACT I

Old testament and present innovation

The conversation starts with the artist speaking of his intro syllables of thoughts, as he says in this exhibition ‘I wanted to create a relationship with my previous work as well as coming to the present state of execution. Normally an exhibition is a set of work which relates to that certain domain. I wanted to keep a timeless essence and a link that derives spontaneously.’ In the exhibition he is portraying no retrospective work, he says. It is more of transition clips of work from various times and accumulations of it. He also puts this exhibition as where he wants to come out from his placement of his work and space to realize the content with alternative motifs.

On the other hand, me, the composer of this conversation interface said, yes an exhibition where a singular theme is conceived, we as an artist are trying to fuse the experiences beforehand into new platforms. So work is actually a thread that cannot be set aside into one focused direction but as a realized whole. So here the artist wants to reinvent his communication as a viewer and a visitor who dwells into a collective perception, at least having the openness of it. So the creator and observer both is the artist, he is the capitalist, the creator, the architect and the economist of the material.

ACT II

Change as nature’s flow = animating life, work and thought

Wakil talks about change as a means of urge, need and limitation. He feels he had to change conceptually, on to the surface level, elements and also the context of art.

But why this change? Is it that artist Wakil is seeking for various personalities… to be different characters of change? Is it his restlessness or boredom? We all know an artist is the vehicle of his psychological and physical nature. We cannot take away his genetic aspirations and physical presence and the need for alteration. Some artists keep themselves in one finding and slowly mold themselves according to the persevered flow of time, and there are artists who are simply confident and play around with their abilities. There are artists who have less crafty facilities but create laughter with an intellectual smile. We need all different characters …as all makes it interesting and curious; like our need has various parameters, our desire to transcend has no bound.

Some artist fulfills his journey of change and stillness through his/her innate ability to connect with their interfaces and some are just wanderers.

Wakil is somehow the restless breed who is more like a space of an architectural structure who wants to build different spaces and convert it into various other spaces, as the need for changing space is a need for transcending the environment.

ACTIII

Relationship with personality = conceptual perplexity = physical act of creating aesthetic materialism

We see in the previous doctrines of art, artists like Albert Durer created the structured visuality of distinction with his powerful engraved lines, which convey a direct identity. We have in our time artists who deal with environment, its space and elements as a creative process. The difference is not being a modernist, ideologist of environmentalist, it is actually the surge of expression that personality needs that renders to manifest distinctions. Man as creative species are always associating and reinventing the course of their material to fill up the empty spaces of their uncertainty.

So concepts can live into domains of various ideas and moves into spaces of environment and elements limitlessly, then again, be strongly identified with simplicities of mediums.

Wakil feels astonishment for ideas and that fuels his mental acts; he may perhaps live more into the enthusiastic domain of thought. But he also models different elements to show the gestures of his curious ideas. He travels with anything that takes his fancy and he manifests that into some composition of elements and space.

ACT IV

Rendered graphic works = and the obscurity diverged

As Wakil lives more into ideas and the mutation of it he uses various sources of expression; his graphic works carries out, at the same time, contradictory states. It seems like he is a man who creates convex and also concave processes of anticipation. In his prints he uses scratches forms of tearing sensations with sudden definite lines, with clustered particles and textural etchings and its impulses. But slowly, it feels he wants to cover everything with lots of ideas coming down to a minimal attitude. Wakil feels it is not possible to be just simple – for the sake of being there, but slowly marking, remarking the chaos and overridden energies overlapping with each other and becoming the change of the process himself. It is the layer of identity, experiences trapped on top of the other and finally the space of serenity, or to say, creating the space.

ACT V

Obsession with space = minimalistic realization at various stages

Wakil defines space as a verbal and physical conversation. Then again, in our contemporary scene, the certainty and acknowledgement of space are almost a conflict of an artistic canon and religious sentiment. Is it about the overpopulated situation of certain countries comparing with less dense parts of the world, or is it about finding an identical home for existing, or is it the aesthetic determination of real space and picture space, colliding with the gallery or environmental space. So is space a form of our personal thought identity to exist? The answers could be in multi-textual processes woven into a very holistic existence. Maybe different times and generations think of elements singularly to give an overall expression of establishments relating to one element. Maybe we have this obsession to relate the holistic whole to individual elements in a singularity as a signature of genre and time. Could it be that we are subconsciously thinking of the cosmos and our approach to live in other cosmic spaces? If we look at a picture or composed plane we can see the cosmic state is inevitable, regardless of its figurative or abstract attitudes.

ACT VI

Spirit = abstraction = trends of spirituality = confusion

Wakil speaks about H2O. Yes, it keeps us alive. But how do we realize it? Can we see it? Maybe not in terms of graphical description, but we can realize it by not simply breathing it but also by watching it, as tree moves when the wind blows, and its strong presence of it. It is the air and is H2O of the element, a chemical need for existing. We can put it this way – spirit exists because of the physical disposition of matter and our structured form makes us realize it. So spirit, which is the airy presence, is the other self our being and together we realize the functionality of us or the union.

So these factors which can be realized and be seen in its formless constitution, possessing the other-earthly form, is the doorway and our hypothetical gateway of belief and unexplained factors. Or our salvation from life’s uncertainty which become the religious doctrines with sociological and physical character – the plot of spiritualism. Wakil speaks about atheism – belief system; we all are believers and at the same time we lack it in degrees of distinction. Some are like academicians who are into the school of institutional religion and some has their own mediums and forms. So believe can be classified into various aspects of individual, institutional and the vagabond – it is like various mediums of expressive attitudes. I guess it dwells into space as a religious attitude.

Something that cannot be seen is a trigger point of spiritual existence and also representatives who deal with various mediums of forms. The trendy takes spiritualism as abstraction where the form is unrealized, as the air which moves the leaves of the tree. On the other hand, it is figurative and represents spirituality, which represents the tree. So the spirit contained and the spirit free makes the difference. Wakil speaks of the spiritual aspects of Lalon, Buddha and many other forms of mystic establishments that influence his state of mind. The aesthetic of the religious frontiers are more directly published in institutional schools of literary intentions and there are other formats which delve with more unearthly enterprises of thought. So conflict of the trendy and the superficial is actually the difference we make for our identical crises or sociological status. Belief is a residing artistic venture, the fuel of our form which moves us and creates our cause of existence. The confusion of belief is not only a humanistic distraction but the aesthetic, art, or extension of expressions of those who suffer from it. As in life, an art contradiction is eagerness and elementary voice movement in our physical space.

Wakil glorifies his state of spirit with change, space, recitation and progression. He anticipates the environment, his presence and the solidarity of hand felt creations. To him, the spiritual essence is felt through certain symbols as his inner characters like the circles overlapping with each other, in his wood cuts, as two communicative forms unifying as gender combine-ment of union. His singular plates of engravings used spontaneously over time have the impression of creating various surfaces of experience and felt moments. It is like in life, where each and every day event is compressed by the other, as information on top of the other, when finally the starting of progression is lost into the layers of living. The clutterED place slowly becomes obscured and the minimalism is born. Wakil enjoys this space as the minimal which derives from time.

Wakil in his exhibition wants to confront himself and also expose he contradiction of his self, as he tends to follow his shadow and find himself another entity. It is an urge to become someone else, to know where he is. He is an organizer of elements but comes out from chaotic pressure of the environment, and may be contradicts his restlessness with clinical executions of space arrangement. His graphics of confusion and emotional turmoil find a place in an environment of consciously aware casual appearances.

ACT VII

Studio existence and character = relating to gallery space = clinical disposition = self-exposure

Studio for an artist is his place of salvation. Each artist creates this space according to their self-anticipation of nature, habits and impacts. He tries to possess that certain space as a lover and when he works he makes love with his thoughts, hands and the surface necessary to his working process. But in contemporary times, the idea of artist’s studio and alignment of his work has been comparatively realized within other contexts. Artists who deal with nature as a direct art media finds their studio space outside, as his/her personal link or there are artists who are not self-aware to have a space to find the certain solitude. It all depends on individual characters. But at the end, everybody seeks a home that is his studio. Wakil in  this journey of uncertainty seeks for a clinical finding of a reflected identity of his studio space into an intervention of gallery space as a studio sentiment.

The relationship of personal space and the gallery space does not always convey the intimacy, as in the discussion earlier with the artist, we ventured into a understanding where he said, ‘when you bring the studio atmosphere into the gallery …where the economic tendencies are related, the attitude and application of your work may have a purpose oriented separation.’ That is to say the intentions can become absurd. On the other side, in a lot of installation-based work the personal elements are brought into the gallery to convey a semi-personal information or messages into a public space. Wakil finally bought into this idea of creating a reflector space of his studio into a gallery space. As the contemporary gallery space, our national environment, our attitude of aesthetic and the personal life has stages of matrix confusing, overlapping and trying to synchronize.

Even in the realm of architectural disposition there are architects who play an application and physical role of generalized living standard, and then again, some create an interior and exterior simplicity and set up orientation of the decorative. The artists are going through this series of metamorphic changes trying to find our home as our nationality seeks for the peaceful permanence of existence, inwardly and outwardly.

This space minimalism affects Wakil’s art-ship of creation more into the physical effect of it, but his expressive works has more imperfection and intuition. He produces the setup of his work and studio space with a keen understanding of clinical and decorative balanced pattern but his restless emotions finds home, as like the searching pirate, within his graphic and painterly works. His past works as a student are also on display with his interior room elements in the gallery but somehow the space melts in with the gallery space as it totally does not probe his chaotic or restless resemblance. The pseudo and the mundane, or the highly aesthetic and also the conservative space struggle is realized specially in our race – a confusion, paradox and also the serene intensity confronting our morals, concepts, desires, idealism and our suppressed dogmas. Altogether it is a dilemma and Wakil as an artist unconsciously expresses, attains the communication with the self from outside as shadows, also tracing it with ambition. The books that he has organized his graphic works in convey his passion for space arrangement and the tactility of being carelessly defined, while the exhibition has taken a synchronized clip of reality of an artist rather than be an organized compositional studio-scape of Wakil’s concepts in installation of clinical distinction, of manipulated naturalism with voices of the racing free.