Majuma, the artwork in the image above, is the focus of another essay by Ferreira da Silva titled 'In the Raw' (2018). In her thinking and writing through the work, Ferreira da Silva demonstrates the way it helps her to expose the workings of racial logic in formalism.
Madiha Sikander, Majmua, 2017-18. Clove, monofilament, glass and metal beads. Courtesy of the artist.
Thought Experiment
Try to think without what Ferreira da Silva calls the "pillars" of modern thought: separability, determinacy, and sequentiality. For example:
Separability creates the separation between 'object' and 'viewer' in the encounter with art. The viewer judges if the art is good, interesting or beautiful.
Determinacy makes the art into an object that is determined by the artist: if we just understand the artist's intent, we know the meaning of the artwork.
Sequentiality makes the art into the end product of the matter that composes it.
It approaches reflection as a kind of study, or as the play of the imagination without the constraints of the understanding.
With this idea in mind that you are not trying to understand Majuma, but rather it is inspiring the play of imagination and study between your body and its body, what is your immediate response to it?
The practice would not providing answers but, instead, would involve raising questions that both expose and undermine (...) decision, judgement or determination.
What kind of questions does it raise that encourage thinking about it beyond its immediate appearance?
Release the imagination from the grips of the subject and its forms. (...) What’s so compelling about forgetting, about surrendering the artist’s intentions to the needs of the work?
The artist's intention, for example, is important to the composition but does not determine it. Interestingly, an important aspect of the artist's training in miniature painting in Pakistan is that students are told to practice until the skill becomes instinct. From looking at the work, what do you imagine might be some of what Ferreira da Silva calls its "needs"?
Look at the caption under the image of Majuma.
What are the materials listed?
What do you imagine that it would be like to be in the room with them in the configuration that they are presented in?
The matter used in Majmua raise questions about what happens to the artist’s intention when attending to materials that have become familiar. We forget that they are both iterations of something that has always existed through the depths of spacetime and beyond, and always already commodities, as items of trade and products of labor.
What materials do the technologies of Artificial Intelligence persist in making familiar?
Rethink these materials both in the depths of spacetime and beyond and as items of trade and products of labor.
The artwork does not have to come before the appreciator as an “object,” with all the presuppositions and implications this entails.
If you stop regarding Majuma as an object, but instead see it as a recomposition and a decomposition of prior and posterior compositions, what does it make you imagine?
