Tracing the Distance

Solo exhibition of Sanjid Mahmud

All artistic creations are in the end co-production. Artistic language of an individual artist cannot be brought into being without simultaneous negotiation of previous languages — art thus carries traces of many other forms of art. Even non-art objects and images are embraced by some as when languages are often made to veer towards uncharted terrains, developing a strong sense of the here and now to bathe in the glory of everyday life. However, Sanjid Mahmud, in his project titled ‘Tracing the Distance’ has taken the idea of co-production to a level where negotiation takes place not in terms of linguistic borrowing but in an attempt overlap his own artistic expression with those of others, that too in real time.

In his exhibition doing was prioritised over viewing.  As visitors entered the space of Shunno Studio they confronted small, empty canvases. The first thing every visitor was asked to do was to make an attempt to work on a canvas. Those complied left sketchy images or painterly gestures they could muster since the process inspired an spontaneous act of painting from each who picked up the brush while artistic talent could easily be put on hold. Consequently, what the participants deposited had little to do with normative practices and the subsequent intervention by the artist, though informed by art historical development in painting, made no bones about achieving a specific linguistic goal. In this sense what began as mostly a freewheeling act of putting paint to canvases seemed to have dodged a definitive closure, thereby remaining free of commitment to the modernist outlook shaped by the idea of chronological time and linear progress.

‘Tracing the Distance’, the title of this process-oriented exhibition, hints at the intentful distance the above project sought to maintain from the logic of modernity that places an individual artist on a historical context and downplays his/her ‘territorial’ as well as ‘extraterritorial’ consciousness. By staging a seemingly unrelated artistic actions to arrive at certain results that defy mainstream concept of art as a ‘significant form’, or an enviable praxis, the artist opens up the white cube to expose a procesual gambit through which a pause is created so that both through participation and appreciation the relationship between art and artist, between artist and the art world can be rethought.

Mustafa Zaman

Artist and critic based in Dhaka