Bad Zombie Santa

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! 

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. 

Stop Islamofacist zombie-ization!

Here's the pencil sketch for my 'Stop Islamofacist zombie-ization!' poster and below is the final product!

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. 

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).

This is a leaf inscribed with calligraphy from Turkey (20^th century).

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 '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. 

More zombies...

Here are some images of a zombie work in progress, which also mark the stages in my attempts to learn photoshop. I still have a long way to go but at least I'm now getting to the stage of being comfortable with the program’s basics and can experiment with things as I go along. I also include a zombie wallpaper-type layout that I’ve been tinkering with.

Portraits from Villawood

Here are some portraits that I drew on trips to the Villawood detention centre with the Refugee Art Project. The group was founded in late 2010 to provide art classes for asylum seekers in detention and to display their work in public exhibitions. The idea is to allow detainees to express themselves through the medium of art, and to convey something of their experiences to the Australian community. Amongst our participants are a large number of people from Iran, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, who are some the largest groups in our detention centres. Their works vary across diverse genres of art, including drawing, painting, sculpture, and artworks made from found objects, including food!

The Marvels of Things Created and the Miraculous Aspects of Existing Things

Here is another work from 2011, titled 'The Marvels of Things Created and the Miraculous Aspects of Existing Things'. It is inspired by a 13th century manuscript of the same name which was written by a Muslim cosmographer, and which contains descriptions of the celestial spheres, geological forms, types of animals and uncanny creatures, including weird humanoids and animal-human mixtures. Pictorially, I wanted to mix the conventions of Persian and Indian miniature painting, with its often strange and fantastical, luminescent, coral-like landscapes and composite creatures, with my interest in comic book illustration (though it certainly leans more towards the latter). It was exhibited as a light box.

Stop Creeping Sharia!

I exhibited this zombie poster in Sydney's At the Vanishing Point gallery in the 'Contested Territories' exhibition last year. I had also forgotten that I even had this blog so it's time to update it and catch up on missed time! Here is the image and below is my artist's statement.

Artist’s Statement: “Stop Creeping Sharia!”

As channel Seven’s Today Tonight program recently reported: ‘Sharia law is being practiced across Australia. In every capital city sheikhs are dispensing Islamic justice!’ In conversation with the owner of a Muslim bookshop in Lakemba, Today Tonight’s reporter intoned that: ‘Australia already is an Islamic state!’ What the reporter failed to mention was that most Muslims understand sharia law according to the common obligations of prayer, fasting, and good moral sense. Instead, audiences were left wondering when these potential fifth columnists will overthrow ‘Australian laws’ and impose such oppressive punishments as stoning and amputation.

Thanks in part to the ‘war against terror’, Muslims are bombarded with distorted accusations and conspiracy theories that put a question mark under their civic morality. This is promoted by the political right, sections of the corporate media, and concerned citizen’s associations (such as ‘Q Society of Australia’ who describe Islam not as a religion but as a ‘totalitarian ideology’, comparable to fascism or Nazism). Such groups warn that Islamic values are a threat to Australia’s secular democracy. They refer to “creeping sharia” or “sharia by stealth”, as the Fairfax journalist Miranda Devine put it.

The Zombie genre in film and comics has often dramatised and provided social commentary on a range of political and cultural anxieties. In particular, the figure of the undead (as neither alive nor dead, yet driven forward by a primordial desire for human flesh) raises interesting questions about the conceptual limits and nature of the ‘civilisation’ under threat. Muslim zombies are my response to the ludicrous myths and conspiracy theories that frequently enter into discussions about Western Muslims and secular democracy.'

This is an ongoing project that I will update regularly, and a written zombie manifesto is in the works!

RIP Wilberforce

Recently, my dog Wilber was put down because he attempted to attack a child. It was a hard decision to make but the danger was such that there seemed to be no other choice. Perhaps he'd been abused by kids as a pup, or maybe he'd been trained to hunt pigs for a time (as Irish wolfhounds often are) and therefore associated small children with pigs. Whatever the case, he didn't seem to trust children and couldn't be trusted around them. He was sweet, cuddly, loyal and affectionate. But the attack was too sudden and unexpected. I'll miss him. RIP Wilby. You're a good boy. If there's a doggy heaven then you're certainly up there, chewing kangaroo tails and chasing birds.

Etchings

These are some etchings that were made during my time at the National Art School in Sydney. I really loved etching. It's like an extension of drawing insofar as the copper plate, and the acid one bathes it in, work on the image long after one's original marks have been made. The image is also determined by how much the plate is wiped before going into the press. In places you can wipe it hard for a strong light, or leave sections a little inky for extra atmosphere and depth of shadow. This tactile process, and room for serendipity, gives to etching an originality and richness that is impossible to replicate. There's really no medium quite like it.

Drawings and Paintings

Grandmother Portraits