October 15, 2013
October 18, 2013
March 26, 2013
October 26, 2011
October 24, 2011
March 10, 2011
December 3, 2010
January 18, 2010
January 05, 2010
May 11, 2009
March 01, 2009
Febuary 14, 2009
December 30, 2008
December 26, 2008
September 29, 2008
June 25, 2008
March 01, 2008
january 05, 2008
JULY 11, 2007
JULY 11, 2007
June 18, 2007
June 18, 2007
Febuary 16, 2007
Febuary 08, 2007
December 08, 2006
October 18, 2006
June 28, 2006
June 27, 2006
November 27, 2005
|
|
SEPTEMBER 29, 2008
Nasir Mazhar - spring/summer 2009
By Michele Occelli
There are events, and there are moments when time stands still and the features of the present implode relieving us of the undesired boundaries of our everyday existence. Nasir Mazhar's Spring/Summer show was nothing less than the revitalization of that line of creativity and magic, which the east of London has encased since time immemorial. A line that many of us had believed severed and long abandoned. It was revelation, it was catharsis, visual and aural, sensorial and sensual, psychic and historical.
Entering a space all too familiar to any of the east end captive children, Nasir, with the aid and collaboration of OTHON and Ernesto Tomasini, produced what cannot but be termed a ritualistic coup de foudre, the whiplashing of the audience into a perceptive embodied state of visual and aural intoxication. Nasir's headpieces were sparsely distributed around the floor and the stage, spotlighted. The models body had been rendered marmoreal, inanimate, by the application of an intense white coating, as such somehow erased and yet, within this erasure, detailed and impossible to escape, as the bounding of their silent bodies and those architecturally untimely head designs was a spectacle gleaming with the intensity and rarity of the prophetic.
It seems almost impossible to describe Nasir's creations, as indeed a factual portrait of their appearance would not carry any of the intensity and excess which is the experience of seeing them worn. As such the only way to do justice to the complexity and novelty and uniqueness of his designs is not to portray the pieces as individual sculptural interventions, but rather to attempt at making sense of them as design, as collective. His headpieces reveal how our corporeal space is the embodiment of the body's potential for otherness, the body's capacity to move beyond itself. Nasir's work seeks morphing, mutation. By altering the space which surrounds the body, through a process which comes intensively close to the fundamental principles of oriental art (vase being the outside, not the inside of the shape) - the desire to create a chimera of body/form/space becomes a way of thrusting ourselves towards a new, a novel, an unseen, an unthought, which strikingly lays before and beyond the contemporary, before and beyond the actual, before and beyond the culturally ascertained.
Headpieces turn into tarots; they become surfaces onto which symbols are cast within designs that seek not to be read and understood, but to stimulate the mind to tread upon its own uncharted territories. His pieces propel forward collisions of meaning that dispel our culturally tamed bodies and their trite styling choreographies. His work is a search for the rawness of those forces that cannot be stilled and contained within a box; it is the hat box that turns itself into Pandorašs own, and once opened unleashes desires that do not speak, desires that can only swear. Shadows trickling over the body, the face, covering and confusing features, returning the badlands of personality and form to their own luscious heart of darkness.
By morphing the body's relation to space, the identity, the fixation, and the stabilization that comes with it breaks at the seams. Nasir turns alchemist, and we turned other than ourselves. In the moment in which his designs are worn, the body enters the realm of the shape-shifter, cast back into a ritual older than itself. Under the moon the drum beats, and you, through your body, are rewritten, pulverised, made molecular. Models are spotlighted into the ghosts of a garden of earthly delights, glimmering under a moonlight ray, they stand as mementos to the fact that design should never ask for a pacified smile from its viewers, rather it should strike the heart and the mind like a dagger; a dagger whose blade is still incandescent with the creative thrust it has generated its form.
And the music of composer and pianist OTHON could not but deepen the atmosphere of this first collection show, turning the air into the fumes of a hellish cavern where the very act of creativity as the purest challenge to the laws of reality as we know it had been consigned and locked by some envious ruler. The room of Hoxton bar and grill became the cave of a visual and aural rebellion, the cave where titanic desires are unleashed. The virtuoso excessiveness of OTHON's piano playing, constantly oscillating between the delicateness of a young Glenn Gould and the martial virility of a late Yukio Mishima, moving beyond any avant-garde reformulation of an entire tradition of contemporary classical music was combined with the baroque Manichean many voices of artiste extraordinaire Ernesto Tomasini. The sound resulting intensified the beating and pulsing of the designs to the point where it was difficult to discern whether this was a fashion show or some arcane rite of passage held in a temple conjured out of mythology itself. And indeed a rite of passage it was, as this event confirms the revolutionary designing talent of Nasir Mazhar and the fact that London has not yet lost the tethers of its creative chariot.
Michele Occelli.
Links
MICHELE OCCELLI
PHOTOGRAPHY
RAFAEL PEREZ EVANS
SHOW PICTURES
|
|
|
|
|
