Berlin-based artist Aziz Hazara’s practice is deeply engaged with the geopolitics and enduring destabilization of Afghanistan. In the artist’s film-installation Bow Echo (2019), five boys are seen braving harsh winds to climb atop a large rock from which they ceremonially sound a kazoo—a small gesture that hopes to carry an urgent message in their community’s plight against repression and violence.

Situated on the high hills of Kabul Province, in a landscape that bears the marks and mirrors the trauma of its people, the echoing sound of the kazoo becomes both an eerie overlay and a resounding pronouncement of life. Hazara’s work has long interrogated the mechanics of internal borders and territories that are negotiated under military occupation. Against these unlivable conditions of colonial violence, the artist’s work offers a close study of collective and intimate expression. His practice opens broader conversations around grief, documentation, and memorialization as elements that bind a collective experience, stretched out across landscapes. 

For Hazara, the life of an individual or a community cannot be justly treated by common methods of representation. His practice has looked at the technologies of power that form through surveillance, and those that become manifest in the weaponization of representation. This is a central point of interest in curator Nasrin Himada’s framing of the exhibition, which speaks to the tensions between the forms of artistic interrogation and representational convention. Bow Echo takes up the difficult task of assembling expressions of mourning and empathy, of survival and steadfastness, to draw parallels between a collective life force, and the collective love expressed for home, land, and the people.

• Aziz Hazara