Soliloquy.

A solo show by Ahmed Faizan Naveed.

Full Circle Gallery, Karachi - Friday 23rd August 2019.
Full Circle Gallery is a hub of cultural and artistic expression and engagement. Full Circle
proudly presents works produced by masters, as well as emerging artists.

Exhibition review by Paul-Mehdi Rizvi.

Looking through Ahmed Faizan Naveed's portfolio immediately makes one thing obvious: he
makes Difficult Art. Fortunately, the artist has no difficulty being articulate and receptive - his
statements, though requiring a higher degree of attentiveness to his intentions, are entirely
legible, but to complete the process of reading, interpreting and understanding his oeuvre
requires familiarity with the genre he is so deeply immersed in.

Obviously, Naveed's exhibitions are powered by a conceptual methodology by way of an

experimental approach and a meticulously reflexive relationship with his chosen materials. For
this writer, whose relationship to celluloid is life-historical, ranging from Super-8 and 16mm in his
childhood, and then later, 35mm, medium, large and specialised formats both for print and
cinema, there is a high risk of a blase response, but fortunately traces of the allegorical aspect
of photography remain, the scopophilic instinct triggered by the chemistry of light and silver salts
hovers in close vicinity just beneath the intellectual activity that Naveed demands and
magnetically must pull forth from the viewer.

The term 'contemporary' within Art turns out to be a generally misappropriated term in our times.
Considering that it was first used nearly a century ago in relation to the problematics of
authorship and the possibilities of language within literature, given definition by Bakhtin and
Benjamin amongst others, shortly after the first great European war and then worked on, up to
the nineteen-seventies, the categorization becomes inutile in most situations now because most
artists are not aware of it's origins at all.

In a discussion regarding what was then defined as a mark of the Contemporary, primarily in
writing and drama, and the critique of the synchronic act in aesthetics, Beasley-Murray writes in
Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Experience and Form: 'As in Bakhtin, these moments of
stasis that interrupt the flow of events reveal to the contemplator the alternative possibilities in
the present.The dragging of the artwork from the cultic and ritual past to the present liberates it
for new purposes in the future. Similarly, in Benjamin's analysis of Brecht's epic theater,
interruption, through Verfremdungseffecte, creates an expanded present in the which the
distracted audience can reflect on how events might be different, in which the claims of
competing viewpoints can coexist and be evaluated. As in Baktin's polyphonic novel, reality
reveals itself here as 'one of many possible realities', 'not arbitrary', and as bearing within itself
'many possibilities'.' Naveed's declared interest in simultaneous points of view as well as the
subterranean presence of polyphonia (admittedly a hard-to-get-at axiology) is precisely what
makes his oeuvre bona fide Contemporary.
So, one must also learn to access, in Naveed's methodology, a strategic deployment, a
demonstration in the formation of a linguistic turn and, as yet another one of the hallmarks of a
work being contemporary according to Bakhtin, Voloshinov et al, of an intuitional cognisance of
the importance, perhaps even the supercesion, of language in aesthetics. Naveed's oeuvre
operates mainly in the conversion, if not the extension, of the visual to and towards a particular
form of language that does not function solely for the sake of manipulation - the exhibition at Full
Circle could well be titled Light Box Photopositive, and to repeat, his stated interest in the 'what
if' of multiple points of view represented simultaneously (in other works apart from this particular
set) is a sign of linguistic montage-making as opposed to a simple predilection for creating
visual assemblages.

With Naveed, one profits by syncing with his keen attention to the environments in which he
exhibits, and his decidedly authorial concern with beginnings, middles and endings. The
voluntary effort goes some distance to help resolve his difficult textualism. In this particular
exhibition, the artist presents in-between states, drawing attention to landscapes with structures
built in preparation for eventual habitation. En route to the exhibition space proper, like a
well-considered word chosen for it's ambiguity, a lone Photopositive (titled Twigs) was placed
amongst the bushes in the courtyard of the gallery - a 'farewell' lightbox, as dubbed by the artist
himself. To the last, it offered the visitor an encounter that might be written out as Hello
Threshold Goodbye.