Bow Echo presents five images of young boys, all struggling to stand still, playing toy bugles atop a dramatically windswept mountain overlooking Kabul.
The plaintive calls of the toy bugles, which each child is desperately struggling to blow amidst the swirling sand storm, herald the urgency of their community’s plight against continuing repression and acts of unspeakable violence, amidst the cultural desolation of war-ravaged Afghanistan.
In the artists own words: “The work has been inspired by my own experience of the recurring horrors of suicide bomb attacks that have unsettled the city of Kabul. They are a sort of ‘horror game’ and since 2001 have taken place in different parts of the city, becoming an integral part of its recent history… The question of how best to represent this history and its effect on the lives of individuals has been one of the most persistent questions during the making of this work. Very often, the idea of representation becomes a dilemma.”
Growing up in Afghanistan, whose capital Kabul continues to be rocked by devastating suicide bombings, Aziz Hazara created a powerful work that speaks with searing simplicity of this ongoing horror that Afghanistan’s population continues to endure, even under the Taliban rule established in 2021 that followed decades of international armed conflict. Bow Echo takes its title from a devastating weather storm that clusters powerful thunderstorms in a fast-moving straight line that can be hundreds of kilometres across, creating destructive cyclonic force winds that cause severe devastation.
Exhibition: 10 February – 16 April 2023
Supported By: A Perth Festival event supported by Visual Arts Program Partner Wesfarmers Arts, and Lotterywest
Presented as part of Perth Festival 2023, a celebration of the John Curtin Gallery’s 25-year partnership with Perth Festival, However vast the darkness… brings together a vivid and compelling season of three interconnected projects offering deep reflection and forceful protest of the inequities suffered by peoples across the globe. It features two major installations by Afghani artist Aziz Hazara, Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana and Meanjin/Brisbane Aboriginal art collective proppaNOW. Together these artists champion truth-telling as the way to illuminate a path through the darkness of profound geopolitical tension and enduring oppression.
Header Image: Aziz Hazara. Bow Echo. 2019. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata, India.
