The language of war

First we have the beautiful objects: a lady’s elegant wristwatch, the portable clock in a case, etc. Next are the objects of nostalgia: a photo album barely recognisable, a book burnt to ashes. Then there are the objects of war, stealth and decoys for purposes of deception: the used gas mask and the goggles.

Placed in a highly formalised arrangement within vitrines affixed to a sombre coloured wall, do these ossified objects nudge us to go back in time? Working as markers of nostalgia, do the exhibited objects inculcate sadness or historical reverence in us? If so, then what are we to make of the weathered drawings of a creature half-beast-half-man that accompany each display? What are we to make of these tea-wash incident reports that talk to us of transgression?

Perhaps the objects stunted in time and charred beyond easy recognition point us to a past that is no longer accessible - to you or to me, to a Kashmiri, to an Indian or to a Pakistani. But thats not the only thing that Srinagar-born artist Moonis Ahmad is getting at. In a way the artist is talking of something new and something in the here-and-now – a currency of the present and of the future: information. The power to engineer information, the language of information and misinformation, and its tricky modes of dissemination are to be understood as the new arsenal of war. Literal states of war perhaps involve the most heightened calibration of such power relations.

Ahmad's solo exhibition hinges on this very theme - the creation and circulation of "information"

Ahmad’s solo exhibition hinges on this very theme – the creation and circulation of “information” - that in other contexts can also be understood as the making of a “hoax”, a“fiction” or a “hysterical document” (this term is used by contemporary Lebanese artist, Walid Raad who has worked on the fictionalised Atlas Group documents since 1989). Hysterical documents are not pieced out of individual memory but are created “out of the material of a collective fantasy”- a collective fantasy that has already been made susceptible to panic and ungovernable excessive emotion.

Not only does Moonis Ahmad’s guspethiya “breach” the borders of the Seven Seas, as an intruder he is also not governable by the laws of the Seven Seas – due to this problem he must be “declared a security threat.” While thinkers such as Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden may debate a “breach” in the context of electronic surveillance in the First World, at its root the“breach” is highly connected to the terminology of manual warfare. A breach is not only the act of “failing to observe a code of conduct”, it is also“a gap in a wall made by an attacking army”. And the attacking army is always the Other.

Thus we have the guspethiya: sometimes captured as grotesque and in a moment of action, sometimes depicted with an aquiline nose or seen with a void for a mouth, depicted with a particular thatching of the hair. In most cases the facial features of this creature are highly evocative yet the spectral archive in which his likeness is recorded remains indeterminate. For the condition of panic to take fully take root and create an atmosphere akin to civil war, the spectral archive must remain incomplete.

In the 2009 Bollywood film Delhi-6 , Delhi locals are routinely terrorised by a mysterious “kala bandar” a Big-Foot type black monkey that reportedly possesses killing and thieving powers – people succumb to death just by listening to accounts of the monkey’s exploits. Very simply the monkey is not real but an empty simulacrum or a rumour that has the capacity to make people act out and succumb to acts of violence. However, over the course of the film panic is generated daily over primetime news – and even though the film concludes after various levels of havoc are wreaked, the “kala bandar” is never caught.

Moonis Ahmad, who came from Kashmir to study at the School of Visual Arts and Design at Lahore’s Beaconhouse National University under the UMISSA scholarship program, does not take on the long-contentious issue of Kashmir head on – but does so rather intelligently by bringing to light the mechanisms that underlie various conditions of conflict and war. These conditions may exist within South Asia or may be found in the context of rising tension that the contemporary wave of Muslim immigrants into Europe have to contend with. The question always remains: who is to say which is the intruder, and which is the one intruded upon?