റ ('Ra')
In his debut exhibition, Amjum Rizve invites the viewer to some key sites in and around Kannur in northern Kerala, places that the artist grew up around and have left a mark on him. These include the precincts of local mosques, dargahs, sacred groves, kabristans, and paddy fields. Each of these frames has been subjected to a treatment that elevates its otherwise ordinary setting into something epiphanic. What results are highly ornamental tableaus straight out of a surreal dream.
Ornamentation, as one might imagine, is not merely a romantic take on the orthodox landscapes inhabited by the artist. In Rizve’s hands, ornamentation
becomes a meditative technique through which the mundane is revealed in scintillating detail.
In order to fully appreciate the role played by the ornamental in the artist’s practice, one has to turn to his past. As a teenager, Rizve was required to take classes in khatati (calligraphy) and kathaprasangam (storytelling), among other things, as part of his religious education at the madrasa. As sanctioned modes of representation within Islam, these arts enabled the artist to imaginatively render otherwise unillustrated Quranic accounts with fantastical vividness. The formal structures of kathaprasangam allow considerable room for ludic interpretation, inventiveness, and virtuosity. It taught him how to draw out detail from reticent reality at large. These staging and narratorial tropes acquired during childhood can be glimpsed in the vignettes presented by this exhibition.
Aside from the formal training in khatati and kathaprasangam, the artist had at least two informal points of entry into the ornamental. The first was through family members who frequented Iran in search of work and brought back bits of Persian culture in the form of fabrics, keepsakes, stories and eatables. Their refined craftsmanship, stated glamour, and inviting smells launched the artist into a full-blown exploration of Persian aesthetics, a presence that’s largely missing in Malabar’s Islamic cultures. Before long, Seljuk carpet patterns as well as motifs from Indian and Persian miniatures started inveigling themselves into the artist’s imagination, offering a way to relieve his austere surroundings. The second ingress into the ornamental was by virtue of growing up in a family where multiple members were in the line of embellishing, embroidering, and designing apparel. In fact, a two-year long stint with an aunt bedizening wedding dresses led directly to an amalgamation of beadwork into his paintings and sculptures. To this burgeoning array of adorning techniques were added 3D liners, embroidery, and drip painting. All these baroque overlays pack reality to the point of bursting, priming Rizve’s surfaces for magic-realist extrapolations.
Over time as religious studies and family craft melded with the formal training in arts, the ornamental in Rizve’s practice came to take on the sheen of religious routines, breathing exercises, and meditation techniques that the artist was exposed to from an early age. This queer blending of the sacred and the secular, the transcendental and the material, can be discerned in the focussed repetitions of forms and patterns in his artworks. The almost religious rigour, precision, and discipline that Rizve pours into his beading and embellishing allows him to parse reality in unexpected ways.
Islam has early roots in Kerala compared to the rest of the subcontinent, arriving in the wake of Arab merchants with whom the region enjoyed a long trading history. According to popular accounts, the last Chera king, Cheraman Perumal, is said to have witnessed the splitting of the moon, a supernatural event which prompted him to travel to Mecca to commune with Muhammad. Perumal subsequently converted to Islam and was bestowed the title of Tajauddin by the prophet himself. Before his demise in Oman, the former king issued instructions to his trustees back in Kerala to allow missionary work and the construction of mosques. Some of the oldest mosques in India and possibly the world are attributed to this mission carried out by Perumal’s emissaries, such as Malik Dinar.
A shadow of Malbar’s historical cosmopolitanism and cordiality can be discerned in the syncretic architecture and rituals practiced by the Mappila Muslims of north Kerala. For instance, the Cheraman Juma Masjid in Kodungallur, a mosque attributed to the aforementioned Malik Dinar, bears a closer resemblance to a regional temple with its sloping tiled roof, anomalous east-facing entrance and the absence of any minarets. There’s a long tradition of people from all faiths donating oil to the nilavilakku (lamp) installed near its pulpit. This, together with the Vidyarambham (a Hindu ceremony marking initiation into letters) that the mosque holds, has cemented its secular credentials over centuries. The history of Malabar is rife with such stories of inter-faith patronage, cooperation, and exchange, the patronage of regional mosques by Hindu Zamorins of Calicut being a case in point.
In his choice of sites for depiction, Rizve underscores these syncretic skeins constituting the socio-cultural fabric of Malabar. Far from being a stray reference, the recurring figure of a Sufi sitting in meditation offers a quiet nod to the saintly company cultivated over the years. As a young child, the artist used to accompany his mother to the shrine of Rahman Shah in the nearby town of Vengad. Portraits of a Storyteller pays homage to Rizve’s many insightful conversations with his murid Abdulla Shah, whose khankah was attached to the Kannur City Juma Masjid, where the artist received his religious education. The dystopian backdrop of the triptych, inspired perhaps by the neighbouring cemetery, represents the turmoil ripping through the artist at the time when he first came in contact with the Sufi. The caged vanitas in the middle panel symbolises ignorance and limitations of the human mind beyond its usual conveyance of transience. Whereas the moth depicted in the final panel recapitulates an epiphany the artist had at the dargah where a moth briefly brushed against his garments, as if in silent communication, before settling meaningfully on a wall across from him. The encounter happened soon after the passing of his murid and somehow conveyed his lingering presence to the artist. A previous iteration of the work attempted to capture the specific pattern of a bird’s flight, always describing the same arc, through the cloistered verandah of the dargah. By anchoring what would seem like non-events to an initiated eye in his paintings, Rizve alerts us to the poetic possibilities that reside in the tiniest grain, the astonishing ways in which the world opens to us when we sit still.
The exercise of holding stillness with a view to gaining a nuanced perspective on reality, is sustained throughout the current body of work. An ongoing series, Flowered Doom, holds the silence of a kabristan, releasing its arcadian afterlife in gleeful spurts. In another series of landscapes, Rizve depicts in watery facture a sodden paddy field that has special significance for the artist. The site holds a memory which found the artist lost in contemplation of the moonrise reflected in the water-logged field. A carelessly tossed stone by a friend marred the perfect beauty of the moment, bringing tears to his eyes. The misplaced cypresses, impressionistically rendered, convey this barrage of emotions ready to burst.
Occasionally, Rizve’s poetics of the mundane and mysticism of the non-event give way to more truculent agencies and affects. These insurgent feelings are lodged subtly through a cast of carefully selected characters, ranging from subaltern deities to defiant mythological figures like Iblis, demonic archetypes and grenade lobbing monkeys. Rizve’s invoking of subaltern deities like Pottan Daivam and Muthappan, not to mention the choice of kaavu (sacred groves) as a setting for his subjects, gestures to the long histories of resistance that echo through these spaces and find expression as the theyyams (rites) associated with them. Primarily a preserve of Kerala’s marginalised communities, these theyyams, often satirical in nature, pay homage to ancestors who lost their lives for a social cause. For instance, Pottan Theyyam is remembered for his anti-caste dialogue with Adi Shankaracharya, the founder of Advaita Vedanta. Interestingly, there are also theyyams performed by Mappila Muslims, which vocalise their struggles. Viewed in this light, the upside-down beaded sculpture of a Sufi embracing Muthappan is a direct call for subaltern unity against the rising tide of communal discord. Indeed, embracing figures recur throughout Amjum’s oeuvre, sending a message of harmony.
The phonetic and pictorial exhibition title ‘?’, denoting the Malyali alphabet ‘ra’, carries special significance for the artist. Its pendulant curve can variously connote a cove, a burial mound, or a sickle moon floating on a pond. It marks the juncture where the twist of wrist rehearsed during khatati met the Fauves’ unruly lines that count among the artist’s early inspirations. Lastly, it marks the bridge between his quiet musings of the mundane and wild interpretations of reality.
In his debut exhibition, Amjum Rizve invites the viewer to some key sites in and around Kannur in northern Kerala, places that the artist grew up around and have left a mark on him. These include the precincts of local mosques, dargahs, sacred groves, kabristans, and paddy fields. Each of these frames has been subjected to a treatment that elevates its otherwise ordinary setting into something epiphanic. What results are highly ornamental tableaus straight out of a surreal dream.
Ornamentation, as one might imagine, is not merely a romantic take on the orthodox landscapes inhabited by the artist. In Rizve’s hands, ornamentation
becomes a meditative technique through which the mundane is revealed in scintillating detail.
In order to fully appreciate the role played by the ornamental in the artist’s practice, one has to turn to his past. As a teenager, Rizve was required to take classes in khatati (calligraphy) and kathaprasangam (storytelling), among other things, as part of his religious education at the madrasa. As sanctioned modes of representation within Islam, these arts enabled the artist to imaginatively render otherwise unillustrated Quranic accounts with fantastical vividness. The formal structures of kathaprasangam allow considerable room for ludic interpretation, inventiveness, and virtuosity. It taught him how to draw out detail from reticent reality at large. These staging and narratorial tropes acquired during childhood can be glimpsed in the vignettes presented by this exhibition.
Aside from the formal training in khatati and kathaprasangam, the artist had at least two informal points of entry into the ornamental. The first was through family members who frequented Iran in search of work and brought back bits of Persian culture in the form of fabrics, keepsakes, stories and eatables. Their refined craftsmanship, stated glamour, and inviting smells launched the artist into a full-blown exploration of Persian aesthetics, a presence that’s largely missing in Malabar’s Islamic cultures. Before long, Seljuk carpet patterns as well as motifs from Indian and Persian miniatures started inveigling themselves into the artist’s imagination, offering a way to relieve his austere surroundings. The second ingress into the ornamental was by virtue of growing up in a family where multiple members were in the line of embellishing, embroidering, and designing apparel. In fact, a two-year long stint with an aunt bedizening wedding dresses led directly to an amalgamation of beadwork into his paintings and sculptures. To this burgeoning array of adorning techniques were added 3D liners, embroidery, and drip painting. All these baroque overlays pack reality to the point of bursting, priming Rizve’s surfaces for magic-realist extrapolations.
Over time as religious studies and family craft melded with the formal training in arts, the ornamental in Rizve’s practice came to take on the sheen of religious routines, breathing exercises, and meditation techniques that the artist was exposed to from an early age. This queer blending of the sacred and the secular, the transcendental and the material, can be discerned in the focussed repetitions of forms and patterns in his artworks. The almost religious rigour, precision, and discipline that Rizve pours into his beading and embellishing allows him to parse reality in unexpected ways.
Islam has early roots in Kerala compared to the rest of the subcontinent, arriving in the wake of Arab merchants with whom the region enjoyed a long trading history. According to popular accounts, the last Chera king, Cheraman Perumal, is said to have witnessed the splitting of the moon, a supernatural event which prompted him to travel to Mecca to commune with Muhammad. Perumal subsequently converted to Islam and was bestowed the title of Tajauddin by the prophet himself. Before his demise in Oman, the former king issued instructions to his trustees back in Kerala to allow missionary work and the construction of mosques. Some of the oldest mosques in India and possibly the world are attributed to this mission carried out by Perumal’s emissaries, such as Malik Dinar.
A shadow of Malbar’s historical cosmopolitanism and cordiality can be discerned in the syncretic architecture and rituals practiced by the Mappila Muslims of north Kerala. For instance, the Cheraman Juma Masjid in Kodungallur, a mosque attributed to the aforementioned Malik Dinar, bears a closer resemblance to a regional temple with its sloping tiled roof, anomalous east-facing entrance and the absence of any minarets. There’s a long tradition of people from all faiths donating oil to the nilavilakku (lamp) installed near its pulpit. This, together with the Vidyarambham (a Hindu ceremony marking initiation into letters) that the mosque holds, has cemented its secular credentials over centuries. The history of Malabar is rife with such stories of inter-faith patronage, cooperation, and exchange, the patronage of regional mosques by Hindu Zamorins of Calicut being a case in point.
In his choice of sites for depiction, Rizve underscores these syncretic skeins constituting the socio-cultural fabric of Malabar. Far from being a stray reference, the recurring figure of a Sufi sitting in meditation offers a quiet nod to the saintly company cultivated over the years. As a young child, the artist used to accompany his mother to the shrine of Rahman Shah in the nearby town of Vengad. Portraits of a Storyteller pays homage to Rizve’s many insightful conversations with his murid Abdulla Shah, whose khankah was attached to the Kannur City Juma Masjid, where the artist received his religious education. The dystopian backdrop of the triptych, inspired perhaps by the neighbouring cemetery, represents the turmoil ripping through the artist at the time when he first came in contact with the Sufi. The caged vanitas in the middle panel symbolises ignorance and limitations of the human mind beyond its usual conveyance of transience. Whereas the moth depicted in the final panel recapitulates an epiphany the artist had at the dargah where a moth briefly brushed against his garments, as if in silent communication, before settling meaningfully on a wall across from him. The encounter happened soon after the passing of his murid and somehow conveyed his lingering presence to the artist. A previous iteration of the work attempted to capture the specific pattern of a bird’s flight, always describing the same arc, through the cloistered verandah of the dargah. By anchoring what would seem like non-events to an initiated eye in his paintings, Rizve alerts us to the poetic possibilities that reside in the tiniest grain, the astonishing ways in which the world opens to us when we sit still.
The exercise of holding stillness with a view to gaining a nuanced perspective on reality, is sustained throughout the current body of work. An ongoing series, Flowered Doom, holds the silence of a kabristan, releasing its arcadian afterlife in gleeful spurts. In another series of landscapes, Rizve depicts in watery facture a sodden paddy field that has special significance for the artist. The site holds a memory which found the artist lost in contemplation of the moonrise reflected in the water-logged field. A carelessly tossed stone by a friend marred the perfect beauty of the moment, bringing tears to his eyes. The misplaced cypresses, impressionistically rendered, convey this barrage of emotions ready to burst.
Occasionally, Rizve’s poetics of the mundane and mysticism of the non-event give way to more truculent agencies and affects. These insurgent feelings are lodged subtly through a cast of carefully selected characters, ranging from subaltern deities to defiant mythological figures like Iblis, demonic archetypes and grenade lobbing monkeys. Rizve’s invoking of subaltern deities like Pottan Daivam and Muthappan, not to mention the choice of kaavu (sacred groves) as a setting for his subjects, gestures to the long histories of resistance that echo through these spaces and find expression as the theyyams (rites) associated with them. Primarily a preserve of Kerala’s marginalised communities, these theyyams, often satirical in nature, pay homage to ancestors who lost their lives for a social cause. For instance, Pottan Theyyam is remembered for his anti-caste dialogue with Adi Shankaracharya, the founder of Advaita Vedanta. Interestingly, there are also theyyams performed by Mappila Muslims, which vocalise their struggles. Viewed in this light, the upside-down beaded sculpture of a Sufi embracing Muthappan is a direct call for subaltern unity against the rising tide of communal discord. Indeed, embracing figures recur throughout Amjum’s oeuvre, sending a message of harmony.
The phonetic and pictorial exhibition title ‘?’, denoting the Malyali alphabet ‘ra’, carries special significance for the artist. Its pendulant curve can variously connote a cove, a burial mound, or a sickle moon floating on a pond. It marks the juncture where the twist of wrist rehearsed during khatati met the Fauves’ unruly lines that count among the artist’s early inspirations. Lastly, it marks the bridge between his quiet musings of the mundane and wild interpretations of reality.
In his debut exhibition, Amjum Rizve invites the viewer to some key sites in and around Kannur in northern Kerala, places that the artist grew up around and have left a mark on him. These include the precincts of local mosques, dargahs, sacred groves, kabristans, and paddy fields. Each of these frames has been subjected to a treatment that elevates its otherwise ordinary setting into something epiphanic. What results are highly ornamental tableaus straight out of a surreal dream.
Ornamentation, as one might imagine, is not merely a romantic take on the orthodox landscapes inhabited by the artist. In Rizve’s hands, ornamentation
becomes a meditative technique through which the mundane is revealed in scintillating detail.
In order to fully appreciate the role played by the ornamental in the artist’s practice, one has to turn to his past. As a teenager, Rizve was required to take classes in khatati (calligraphy) and kathaprasangam (storytelling), among other things, as part of his religious education at the madrasa. As sanctioned modes of representation within Islam, these arts enabled the artist to imaginatively render otherwise unillustrated Quranic accounts with fantastical vividness. The formal structures of kathaprasangam allow considerable room for ludic interpretation, inventiveness, and virtuosity. It taught him how to draw out detail from reticent reality at large. These staging and narratorial tropes acquired during childhood can be glimpsed in the vignettes presented by this exhibition.
Aside from the formal training in khatati and kathaprasangam, the artist had at least two informal points of entry into the ornamental. The first was through family members who frequented Iran in search of work and brought back bits of Persian culture in the form of fabrics, keepsakes, stories and eatables. Their refined craftsmanship, stated glamour, and inviting smells launched the artist into a full-blown exploration of Persian aesthetics, a presence that’s largely missing in Malabar’s Islamic cultures. Before long, Seljuk carpet patterns as well as motifs from Indian and Persian miniatures started inveigling themselves into the artist’s imagination, offering a way to relieve his austere surroundings. The second ingress into the ornamental was by virtue of growing up in a family where multiple members were in the line of embellishing, embroidering, and designing apparel. In fact, a two-year long stint with an aunt bedizening wedding dresses led directly to an amalgamation of beadwork into his paintings and sculptures. To this burgeoning array of adorning techniques were added 3D liners, embroidery, and drip painting. All these baroque overlays pack reality to the point of bursting, priming Rizve’s surfaces for magic-realist extrapolations.
Over time as religious studies and family craft melded with the formal training in arts, the ornamental in Rizve’s practice came to take on the sheen of religious routines, breathing exercises, and meditation techniques that the artist was exposed to from an early age. This queer blending of the sacred and the secular, the transcendental and the material, can be discerned in the focussed repetitions of forms and patterns in his artworks. The almost religious rigour, precision, and discipline that Rizve pours into his beading and embellishing allows him to parse reality in unexpected ways.
Islam has early roots in Kerala compared to the rest of the subcontinent, arriving in the wake of Arab merchants with whom the region enjoyed a long trading history. According to popular accounts, the last Chera king, Cheraman Perumal, is said to have witnessed the splitting of the moon, a supernatural event which prompted him to travel to Mecca to commune with Muhammad. Perumal subsequently converted to Islam and was bestowed the title of Tajauddin by the prophet himself. Before his demise in Oman, the former king issued instructions to his trustees back in Kerala to allow missionary work and the construction of mosques. Some of the oldest mosques in India and possibly the world are attributed to this mission carried out by Perumal’s emissaries, such as Malik Dinar.
A shadow of Malbar’s historical cosmopolitanism and cordiality can be discerned in the syncretic architecture and rituals practiced by the Mappila Muslims of north Kerala. For instance, the Cheraman Juma Masjid in Kodungallur, a mosque attributed to the aforementioned Malik Dinar, bears a closer resemblance to a regional temple with its sloping tiled roof, anomalous east-facing entrance and the absence of any minarets. There’s a long tradition of people from all faiths donating oil to the nilavilakku (lamp) installed near its pulpit. This, together with the Vidyarambham (a Hindu ceremony marking initiation into letters) that the mosque holds, has cemented its secular credentials over centuries. The history of Malabar is rife with such stories of inter-faith patronage, cooperation, and exchange, the patronage of regional mosques by Hindu Zamorins of Calicut being a case in point.
In his choice of sites for depiction, Rizve underscores these syncretic skeins constituting the socio-cultural fabric of Malabar. Far from being a stray reference, the recurring figure of a Sufi sitting in meditation offers a quiet nod to the saintly company cultivated over the years. As a young child, the artist used to accompany his mother to the shrine of Rahman Shah in the nearby town of Vengad. Portraits of a Storyteller pays homage to Rizve’s many insightful conversations with his murid Abdulla Shah, whose khankah was attached to the Kannur City Juma Masjid, where the artist received his religious education. The dystopian backdrop of the triptych, inspired perhaps by the neighbouring cemetery, represents the turmoil ripping through the artist at the time when he first came in contact with the Sufi. The caged vanitas in the middle panel symbolises ignorance and limitations of the human mind beyond its usual conveyance of transience. Whereas the moth depicted in the final panel recapitulates an epiphany the artist had at the dargah where a moth briefly brushed against his garments, as if in silent communication, before settling meaningfully on a wall across from him. The encounter happened soon after the passing of his murid and somehow conveyed his lingering presence to the artist. A previous iteration of the work attempted to capture the specific pattern of a bird’s flight, always describing the same arc, through the cloistered verandah of the dargah. By anchoring what would seem like non-events to an initiated eye in his paintings, Rizve alerts us to the poetic possibilities that reside in the tiniest grain, the astonishing ways in which the world opens to us when we sit still.
The exercise of holding stillness with a view to gaining a nuanced perspective on reality, is sustained throughout the current body of work. An ongoing series, Flowered Doom, holds the silence of a kabristan, releasing its arcadian afterlife in gleeful spurts. In another series of landscapes, Rizve depicts in watery facture a sodden paddy field that has special significance for the artist. The site holds a memory which found the artist lost in contemplation of the moonrise reflected in the water-logged field. A carelessly tossed stone by a friend marred the perfect beauty of the moment, bringing tears to his eyes. The misplaced cypresses, impressionistically rendered, convey this barrage of emotions ready to burst.
Occasionally, Rizve’s poetics of the mundane and mysticism of the non-event give way to more truculent agencies and affects. These insurgent feelings are lodged subtly through a cast of carefully selected characters, ranging from subaltern deities to defiant mythological figures like Iblis, demonic archetypes and grenade lobbing monkeys. Rizve’s invoking of subaltern deities like Pottan Daivam and Muthappan, not to mention the choice of kaavu (sacred groves) as a setting for his subjects, gestures to the long histories of resistance that echo through these spaces and find expression as the theyyams (rites) associated with them. Primarily a preserve of Kerala’s marginalised communities, these theyyams, often satirical in nature, pay homage to ancestors who lost their lives for a social cause. For instance, Pottan Theyyam is remembered for his anti-caste dialogue with Adi Shankaracharya, the founder of Advaita Vedanta. Interestingly, there are also theyyams performed by Mappila Muslims, which vocalise their struggles. Viewed in this light, the upside-down beaded sculpture of a Sufi embracing Muthappan is a direct call for subaltern unity against the rising tide of communal discord. Indeed, embracing figures recur throughout Amjum’s oeuvre, sending a message of harmony.
The phonetic and pictorial exhibition title ‘?’, denoting the Malyali alphabet ‘ra’, carries special significance for the artist. Its pendulant curve can variously connote a cove, a burial mound, or a sickle moon floating on a pond. It marks the juncture where the twist of wrist rehearsed during khatati met the Fauves’ unruly lines that count among the artist’s early inspirations. Lastly, it marks the bridge between his quiet musings of the mundane and wild interpretations of reality.
