Mumbai
Asim Waqif
OVERKILL
Asim Waqif’s newest works are provocative intersections in which narratives about materiality, structure, and form—conventional terms employed in architecture—are transformed into a visual poetics. His term for the basis of some works: ‘excavators,’ suggests a reformation of ground and grounding, the ways we seek, cut, extract, follow meaning. How is knowledge recast as an urgency for moving forward? Extending the ways in which certain excavators are also political tools that dismantle also points to how such instruments of power may engage aspects of justice as well as destruction. Their use, if not operation, as part of ongoing tests of division also inform aspects of displacement. Each of the works in OVERKILL thus operate at the hinge of excess and dereliction. With materials that have been manipulated using techniques of force, bending, tying, drilling and more, viewers are thus located in-between knowing and erasure.
Cohesive yet also defiant, these human-centered operations suggest ways of building and seeing in the world. Waqif’s works offer an improbable materiality that deploys aluminum composite panels and cyanotype gel to shape the countenance of spaces, of our reciprocities with and because of form. OVERKILL provokes us to consider the potential in un-building. Entropy is thus not only a physical process but one in which the individual and collective are both subject and object. Such an actioning, a dynamic embedded within the ways surfaces slip and fold, structures hang or descend, Waqif presents unique, sometimes furtive, conditions that catch each of us in and of time.
Artworks
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