One of the many captivating highlights of Ali Kazim’s exhibition Suspended in Time at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is The Conference of Birds, a five-panel watercolour painting based on the 12th century allegorical Sufi poem by Farid al-Din ‘Attar. In the poem, ‘Attar describes the journey of a flock of birds in search of their king. In Kazim’s visual rendering of this Persian classic, various species of birds soar towards the sky, each bird delicately painted in contrasting shades of blacks and greys reminiscent of East Asian ink wash painting.
Kazim’s The Conference of Birds was inspired by the ancient terracotta birds in the South Asian collection of the Ashmolean Museum. In 2019, he was appointed the first South Asian Artist-in-Residence at the museum at the invitation of Oxford University’s Classical Art Research Centre. While the object of the residency was to specifically work with the Gandharan collection, he was also provided access to the South Asian collection.
The Ashmolean’s collections from Gandhara are rich and include sculptures of the Buddha and narrative scenes of his life apart from devotional objects used in Buddhist worship. While Kazim would have encountered Gandharan art before, the residency at the Ashmolean allowed him to engage with it further. It is that engagement that eventually culminated in Suspended in Time.
Professor Mallica Kumbera Landrus, exhibition curator and Head of the Department of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum, said about Suspended in Time in an accompanying note, “[Kazim’s work] offers a profound engagement with the Museum’s collections and the art and history of the subcontinent. Ali has a unique ability to make images that are simultaneously timeless and like nothing you’ve seen before.”
Kazim was born in 1979 in a small town in the Punjab province of Pakistan and began his artistic career painting cinema hoardings. The work seeded in him a passion and curiosity for fine art. He enrolled into the prestigious National College of Arts in Lahore, where, working with students from diverse backgrounds, he thrived. From there, he went on to complete a master’s at the Slade School of Art in London, participated in prestigious exhibitions and is now Assistant Professor at the National College of Arts.
Suspended in Time addresses the decolonisation debate shaping conversations and practices in Western institutions with the central question: how should historical objects be presented to contemporary audiences? Many of the objects in Ashmolean’s South Asian collection came from the old Indian Institute at Oxford, where they had originally been used to showcase the British empire and train colonial officials.
In the accompanying exhibition catalogue, Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History at Oxford University, writes of the artist: Kazim’s “work there did not seek to address the history of colonial collections just by contextualizing artefacts and marking their links with empire (as if in retribution). Instead, it made the Museum’s collections into a site and source of new artistic production. Kazim does not relabel the past but uses the Ashmolean to inspire the creation of a truly post-colonial culture in the present.”
The artist took inspiration from ancient Indian artefacts at the museum to produce some of the works exhibited. The painting series Ruins was set off by photographs he took of Indus sherds in the museum collections. Following his return to Pakistan after the residency, he visited unexcavated mounds at Harrapan sites, where he discovered numerous clay sherds. Based on those, he created the Ruins series in monochrome – the result of piecing together hundreds of images of sherds and landscapes.
His wash techniques were derived from studying the surface of a collection of Bengal School Paintings at the Lahore Museum. At the Ashmolean, he continued his engagement with Mughal, Rajput as well as Company School painting in his Man of Faith series. Almost floating and saturated with thin layers of watercolour wash, the subjects have a monumental dignity, suspended in space and time.
In the conversation in June 2021, which has been reproduced in the exhibition catalogue, Landrus asks Kazim about his view on Western misconceptions about art in Pakistan and the subcontinent? He replies:
“Currently, the West does not think of art and culture when it thinks about Pakistan. People often associate the country with bearded men and the Taliban. The media is responsible for this representation; in movies, Pakistanis are often villains. I think that until the discipline of the study of art history includes equal reference to the East, Pakistan will remain on the artistic periphery. Also, European and North American museums focus mainly on Western art, and museum galleries dedicated to the East are often at the back or side of the building. More recently, some South Asian artists have been offered gallery space and exhibitions, but overall, I do not think there is proportional representation in museums, despite large diaspora. If we artists on the subcontinent focus more on the development and distribution of our work at a global level, it will help change such issues with representation.”
Ali Kazim: Suspended in Time is on view at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, until June 26, 2022.
Farida Ali is a London-based art historian.