Fazal Rizvi
A mirror in my pocket
May 7 - July 20, 2024
In the summer of 2020, I trekked through the Karakoram mountains in Pakistan hoping to collect sounds of glaciers and the surrounding territory. Hearing the audio files for the first time upon my arrival in Maastricht, I realized they had captured nothing of what my ears had witnessed. I deemed this exercise a failure.
As the first part of a long-term and open-ended research project, I have been working and thinking through this predicament of failure: the failure to record, the failure to listen, the failure even to realize that documenting an unruly landscape aurally could be as difficult as trying to walk it. Reflecting on these meditations and navigations through this perceived failure, the notion of desire begins to surface: the desire to seek refuge in these mountains, to seek their images and their sounds. These contemplations brought me to the crux of my inquiry: What does this desire represent? And where does it rest in regard to the history of the gaze on such places and such terrains?
This body of work while centering itself on the present and the past; the colonial, the historical and the mythical; the molecular and the geological; the metaphorical and the material, attempts to confront several images and their accompanying veils. It seeks to think through moments in various journeys across time and place, where a terrain resists being read and recorded, where images turn their backs towards you, where a magical herb disguises itself to not be seen, and where a blur is all that is left for you to witness and perceive.
Fazal Rizvi
22nd March 2024
About the Artist
Fazal Rizvi (b. 1987, Karachi, Pakistan / Lives and works in Pakistan) is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Karachi. His inquiry rests somewhere between the personal, the social and the political. Having spent a few years thinking about the materiality and immateriality of the sea and its borders, Rizvi also keeps returning to the personal and familial as a place of trigger and has been contemplating on the ideas of memory, forgetting and monument making. Rizvi has also been working on his long term engagement and research in reference to the glacial and mountainous terrain in the north of Pakistan since 2020, where he lives partly through the year.
Rizvi graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2010. He has been an artist in residence at the Arcus Studios, Japan in 2011, and was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust award for Gasworks Studios Residency, London in 2014, Pro Helvetia New Delhi studio residency in Zurich, 2020. He was a resident artist at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands for the year 2020-21, and at Cite des Arts Paris, with Institute Francaise in 2023.