Safdarnama
Monday, December 23, 2013
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
My first weird shit zine!
Here are three illustrations from
my first zine (titled 'Safdar's weird shit') that I will sell at the This Is
Not Art zine fair in Newcastle this Sunday. The zine places a series of
unconnected reminiscences, whimsies and stray thoughts alongside a few of my
stranger drawings. It's a vanity zine to be sure, but isn't that half the joy
of zines? I think it's the rare freedom to dive headlong into something that is
uninhibited, subjective and perhaps utterly ridiculous. So long as it's true to
a particular vision or path, something wonderful or awful could come of it and
therein lies the excitement!
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Refugee Survivor
This poster was
inspired by an overwhelming sense of despair at Ausrtalia’s treatment of asylum
seekers and refugees.
Like most
refugee supporters, I was crestfallen when an appointed panel advised our
Labour government to return to offshore processing in April 2012, ostensibly
under the pretext of ‘stopping the boats’ that arrive at our shores from
Indonesia and thus reducing the chances that asylum seekers will die at sea
when those boats fail to make a successful journey. The recommendation was put
through parliament almost immediately, making the small tropical islands of
Nauru and Manus Island our new detention outposts.
Those who arrive
under the new legislation are subjected to a ‘no advantage’ principle, which is
as punitive and small-minded as it sounds. It is a law which effectively means
their application process will be no quicker than that of an offshore
applicant’s (the designated time is about 5 years), and which also makes the
process of gaining family reunion—should they eventually gain refugee
visas—longer and more difficult than would normally be the case.
The true
intention of offshore processing (despite pious rhetoric about ‘saving lives
at sea’) is to prevent asylum seekers from gaining access to our courts. It is
to make the capacity for judicial review on decisions made against them, and
last minute appeals on things like deportation, less possible. It means the government
can confront these people with the bleak option of spending years on a tropical
island in cramped, uncomfortable, insalubrious tents, in 40 degree hear, or be peremptorily
sent back to where they came from.
Then in October
our government successfully excised the mainland of Australia from the
migration zone, meaning that even those asylum seekers who make it onshore will
be denied the fair processing of their claims. Instead they will be treated as
if they were still in a foreign country and had never made it to a place that recognizes
the protections granted by the UN Refugee Convention.
It is clear that
the desire of both major political parties to be tough to the point of
inhumanity on refugees is politically motivated, and panders to the worst
feelings in Australian society. To my thinking, the national temper on this
issue is no less detached from reality than reality television itself. Because
this is an election issue in our country, and has been ever since the Liberal
party exploited race politics to a tea in the 2001 ‘Tampa affair’, the policy
of detention plays out like a macabre survivor show, in which craven
politicians test just how hard they can be on some of the world’s most
vulnerable and defenseless people. Instead of bringing out the best in us, it
plays upon our meanest instincts. The island setting and punitive conditions
forced upon refugees will no doubt satisfy the ignorance of those who rail
against ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘illegals’. Alas, they are likely to never be
confronted with the immense psychological damage that mandatory detention
inflicts on people.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Stop Islamofacist zombie-ization!
Here's the pencil sketch for my 'Stop Islamofacist zombie-ization!' poster and below is the final product!
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Supernatural Trees
Below is
my drawing of the mythical Waq Waq tree of medieval Islamic
geographical, zoological and imaginative literature. I’ve tried to emphasise
its eeriness but there is a lot more to this, and other magical or supernatural
trees, within Islamic theology and tradition.
For
pre-modern Muslim geographers, Waq Waq referred to a far-off, unknown country.
One of the strangest place names in the geographical literature (ranking in
weirdness alongside Yajuj and Majuj, which are transpositions of the Biblical
lands of Gog and Magog), it has been interpreted by various medieval Arab and
later European scholars to refer either to a part of Eastern or Southern Africa,
an island perhaps in the Indian or Pacific oceans, or a place in South East
Asia, China or Japan. Looking at a circular copy of Idrisi’s world map, one
sees the land of Waq Waq near the end of the world, at the southern tip of
Africa, on the Eastern coast, facing the Indian Ocean, opposite China. It was clearly a place about which traders may have heard odd and
fantastical tales but to which few had ever travelled.
The
country is renowned for its strange inhabitants and by the existence of a supernatural
tree. One source describes a dark-skinned population who speak an unfamiliar
tongue, leading some scholars to speculate that the word may be of
onomatopoetic origin – showing the reaction of Arab traders to the so-called
‘click languages’ of southern and eastern Africa. Whatever the case, this race is
associated with a mysterious tree that grows fruit that ripens into human forms.
Different versions of the story record the tree blooming human heads, animals, children,
or a race of small people, who are capable of speech. Some would praise God,
whilst others would ripen, fall to the ground and cry out ‘Waq! Waq!’, before
dying. The tree sometimes has an oracular function, as in the mythology that
surrounds Alexander the Great in Arab and Persian sources. These commonly describe an
incident in which the world-conqueror visited and spoke with the tree. It predicted
his future and forewarned him of his impending death. This Il-Khanid miniature painting dates from about 1340.
The
great Arab polymath and belletrist, al-Jahiz, described the tree as a cross between
plant and creature and there are accounts of its offspring that combine both
human and animal forms within a bizarre, inter-species mélange. The 12th century physician and zoologist, al-Marwazi, described the people of Waq Waq as:
“a tribe whose nature is like that of men in all their limbs, except the hands,
instead of which they have something like wings, which are webbed like the
wings of a bat. They, both males and females, eat and drink while kneeling. They
follow the ships asking for food. When a man makes for them, they open these
wings and their flight becomes like that of birds, and no one can overtake them.”
Such creatures are an uncanny mix. One can imagine their eyes
widening in alarm as they rush to the air, amidst inhuman caws and the flapping
of batty wings. The human/bird mixture appears in other contexts, such as the harpy
(female-headed birds) of Arab and Persian art. This luster-painted ceramic from
12-13th century Iran is a good example.
There is
also a sense in which Waq Waq represents not simply a far off land, but a place that can exist only in the imagination. Responding to
Hasan al-Basri’s decision to travel there in search of his missing wife, Sheikh
Abdul Quddus of the Thousand and One
Nights explains it thus: ‘My son, relinquish this most vexatious affair;
you could not gain access to the Islands of Waq Waq even if the Flying Jinn and
the wandering stars assisted you, since between you and those islands are seven
valleys, seven seas and seven mountains of vast magnitude.’ We are not talking,
then, about a terrestrial place that you or I can visit. It perhaps existed in what mystical philosophers and theologians,
such as Ibn Arabi, called the ‘imaginal world’ (‘alam al-mithal).
The
fantastical mixing of plant and animal forms is a notable feature of Islamic
art. Here
is an early wooden panel that shows birds conceived almost as abstract shapes.
Historians of Islamic art refer to this as the ‘beveled style’, which began in Iraq in the ninth century. It is less concerned with representation and leans more towards ambiguous, biomorphic shapes. Here is another panel that dates from Egypt in the 11th century. It is clearer in its depiction and shows horses reined within a complex vegetal/plant design.
Historians of Islamic art refer to this as the ‘beveled style’, which began in Iraq in the ninth century. It is less concerned with representation and leans more towards ambiguous, biomorphic shapes. Here is another panel that dates from Egypt in the 11th century. It is clearer in its depiction and shows horses reined within a complex vegetal/plant design.
It is
difficult to ascribe a literal or symbolic meaning to these examples because
there are no recorded theories of visual aesthetics—or the nature of symbolism—in
the history of pre-modern Islamic art. With the exception of calligraphy, no
pre-modern scholars to our knowledge ever sat down and wrote a treatise
explaining what the visual arts actually mean. Thus the types of representation
shown above may have carried a specific symbolic importance for the intellectual
culture of the time (which seems likely), or it may simply have been about
following styles, images and forms that were then fashionable (which seems
equally as likely). Or it was, probably, a mixture of the two. This ambiguity
or ambivalence of meaning is one of the great mysteries of Islamic art, and the
thing that makes it fascinating to this day.
Nonetheless,
supernatural trees have a firm place in the religious imagery of the Quran. In
a passage loaded with allegorical figures, the sacred text refers to the tree
of ‘Zaqqum’, which it describes as ‘issuing from the heart of hellfire’, and
from which grows fruit that are as repulsive as ‘the heads of devils’. The
oppressors (zalimun) of this world
(whose greed is often associated with gluttony) will fill their stomachs of
this foul fruit, which they’ll wash down with a beverage of scalding despair (37:62-67).
In
another verse, the Quran describes a lote tree which stands near the boundary
between earth and paradise, and which the Prophet witnessed on his journey to
heaven: ‘By the lote tree of the farthest limit, near unto the garden of
promise, with the lote tree veiled in a veil of nameless splendour’ (53:13-18).
According to Muhammad Asad (who draws from the commentary of the medieval rationalist
Zamakshari) the reference to a tree ‘veiled in a veil of nameless splendour’ is
deliberately vague (mubham). For how else
could one associate something as ineffable and majestic as
paradise with the symbol of tree? The tree then must be described for what it is: as
something that cannot be properly visualized or named.
Trees
are an elemental symbol of life, fecundity and divine favour. Indeed there are
numerous prophetic traditions that refer to the blessings of planting trees,
whose fruit represents an act of charity for every person or animal
that eats from it. From the standpoint of Islamic theology, everything in creation
submits to God’s will and is a reflection of God’s mercy. Thus it is in the tree’s
nature – as of every created thing – to acknowledge and praise its creator, which
it does with every sprout and branch, every leaf and bloom that shoots out from
its trunk. Here lies the spiritual foundation for a theology
of environmental protection.
Human
lives are intimately associated with trees. The Prophet used to preach to his
companions every Friday by the side of a palm tree. One day a woman from amongst
the people of Medina asked if he would like for them to build him a pulpit. The
Prophet responded: ‘as you wish’, so they made him a new structure. As he
ascended the platform, the tree started to weep and cry like a small child.
Responding to this, the Prophet came down and embraced the tree until its
sobbing subsided and it had calmed down. According to one of the companions,
the tree had sorely missed hearing the Prophet’s recollection (dhikr) of God (Bukhari). Likewise, there
is a report about Aisha,
the Prophet’s youngest and favorite wife, who in the later stages of her life
was said to have wished she were a leaf or a tree uttering the praises of God (Ibn
Sa‘d).
And here’s another one of my sketches.
Lovecraftian drawings
These drawings are a small homage to the work of H P Lovecraft (1890-1937), whose weird horror stories have fascinated me since I was a
teenager. I say ‘small’ because there is a long tradition of illustration inspired
by Lovecraft’s themes—from the 1920s to the present—that I make no grand claim
to have appropriated.
The fascination of Lovecraft is his pessimistic quest for the unfathomable and the unseen. His writings convey the overwhelming sense that human life—indeed human consciousness—is merely a cruel accident of evolution, and that the world around us not only has no overarching purpose or meaning but would easily destroy us. The ancient ones: the giant, rotting, squidlike forms that dreamed our cosmos into existence, are so incomprehensible in their monstrosity that to merely contemplate them would drive a normal person to madness. Though the world appears stable and predictable, it is a mere clod at the threshold of a much darker, murkier realm that hovers mercifully beyond the reach of our perception and understanding. It is this sense of standing at the precipice (and not yet crossing – for how could you?) which charges Lovecraft’s stories with a special, eerie quality. So with all of this at the front of my mind, I drew these monsters, which are an exercise in sheer self-indulgence.
The fascination of Lovecraft is his pessimistic quest for the unfathomable and the unseen. His writings convey the overwhelming sense that human life—indeed human consciousness—is merely a cruel accident of evolution, and that the world around us not only has no overarching purpose or meaning but would easily destroy us. The ancient ones: the giant, rotting, squidlike forms that dreamed our cosmos into existence, are so incomprehensible in their monstrosity that to merely contemplate them would drive a normal person to madness. Though the world appears stable and predictable, it is a mere clod at the threshold of a much darker, murkier realm that hovers mercifully beyond the reach of our perception and understanding. It is this sense of standing at the precipice (and not yet crossing – for how could you?) which charges Lovecraft’s stories with a special, eerie quality. So with all of this at the front of my mind, I drew these monsters, which are an exercise in sheer self-indulgence.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
The 'Night Journey'
This is my interpretation of the miraj,
which refers to the ‘night journey’ in which the Prophet Muhammad was
transported from Mecca to Jerusalem and then upwards, towards heaven. It is a copper plate etching that features plenty of aquatint, to give it the starry sky effect.
According to legend, the Prophet was
transported on the back of a winged horse-like creature with the head of a
woman, called al-Buraq. The creature bears comparison with the winged monsters of ancient Babylonian and Persian mythology, which often served as guardian figures. Indeed, Muslim historians made this connection. When Ibn Balkhi visited Persepolis in the 12th century, he associated the bearded bull monsters at the gateway of Xerxes palace with al-Buraq. For this depiction, I have followed the convention, observed by most
medieval Persian and Ottoman miniature painters, of veiling the Prophet’s head,
which is encircled by a fiery nimbus.
The image that I worked from was this
wonderful 17th century Safavid painting, in which the Prophet is
seen raised above a flurry of clouds into the angelic realm, with Gabriel as
his guide, against a starry moonlit sky, and surrounded by a sacred flame. The
ornately curved cloud shapes and delicate flames licking around the Prophet’s
form shows the stylistic influence of Eastern-Chinese painting on Persian art.
However, the tradition of Persian miniature painting developed into something
very unique. It is a flat, largely abstract way of panting which balances luminous
colour, shape and decoration, to
create a type of dream world. As Oleg Grabar, a scholar of Islamic art
points out, human figures do not enjoy the centrality that is given to them in
Western art but appear as one amongst many pictorial elements within an
overall design. I was also thinking of Tiepolo’s ceiling frescos, and his
amazing underside views of flying horses.
Included as well is a more stylized
interpretation of this theme, which I made for an unfinished comic book.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)