We, in conflict

Neha Kirpal

Microscopic flowers, a geographer sleeping and an engineer sewing his jacket… These are some of the images that greet you at Melbourne-based interdisciplinary artist Moonis Ahmad Shah’s latest exhibition, Atlas Holding the Heavens, at New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery. The exhibition, presented by the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art in collaboration with Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, is part of FICA’s Emerging Artist Award that Shah received in 2017. As part of the award, Shah undertook a residency at Switzerland. During his time there, he researched the relationship between cultural and military instrumentalisation of the landscape in Switzerland and Kashmir.

Moonis says the exhibition addresses diverse questions concerning everyday life, the landscape, the body and how they reorient, adapt and react to territorial conflicts. He says that the works in Atlas Holding the Heavens are in a dialogue with one other and they question, subvert and, at times, overflow into each other.

Talking about the inspiration behind the artwork in the exhibition, he explains that there were many points of departures that conceptually laid its foundation. During the process, new possibilities and fields of inquiries opened up as well.

“Some of the points of departures were how the idea of landscape is constructed in a state of conflict; how do I as an artist respond to the spectacular constructs about landscape, conflict and hysteria; and more importantly, how do I laugh back at them through my interventions in ideas, forms or contents and data arising out of such turmoil and conflict,” he elaborates.

Born in Srinagar, Shah works with hybrid practices involving mediums like video, photography, painting, programming and installation. Currently, a doctoral candidate and sessional lecturer at the University of Melbourne, he is a recipient of the Australian Graduate Research and Training Programme scholarship, which fully funds his studies and living in Australia. Shah has shown his work at various exhibitions nationally and internationally.

He has attended residential programmes such as The Shifting Place: Understanding Territorialities: Identity, Place & Possession at the UNIDEE, Cittadelarte, Italy in 2016. Currently, he is working on an unsupervised machine learning project which aims to investigate the nature of the photographic enframing of criminals, freedom fighters and local populations in history textbooks.