BASIR MAHMOOD

is an artist who lives and works between Lahore and Amsterdam. His works have been widely shown in institutions and international exhibitions, including Lahore Biennale (2020); Karachi Biennale (2019); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Berlin Biennale (2018); Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2017); Yinchuan Bienniale (2016); Sharjah Biennial (2013); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Mahmood’s works have been acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; the Centre national des arts plastiques; M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. Mahmood is an academic who teaches and delivers talks at notable art institutions, and served as Curator of VideoClub x IDFA at the Stedelijk Museum in 2018.

Through the prism of cinema, the work traces the dangerous journeys of undocumented migrants across vast lands, exploring distance as a condition of diasporic lives just as it is a position intrinsic to the act of filming. The artist invited a crew from the cinema industry of his native Lahore—also known as Lollywood—to script and direct a series of sequences, the narrative of which would be loosely based on videos found online. Recorded by migrants as they travel from South Asia to Europe, such videos give insight into the harshness of their peregrinations––which often last for years and sometimes do not reach the intended destination––as well as offering practical pieces of advice to those who have yet to depart. The artist edited the remade footage into poetic sequences where, however, only the conditions of their assembly are visible. Screenshots of the original videos appear occasionally on the script sheets, while excerpts are played on the crew members’ phones. Rather than attempting to represent the migrants’ experiences, the artist evokes them through the exhaustion of the crew under the scorching sun, the difficulties faced by the cameramen in locating the actors lost in the barren landscape, and the exaggerated gestures of the directors as they coordinate the filming from afar. The work was conceived in spatial and symbolic dialogue with the church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti: the dramatically foreshortened framing is inspired by that of the altarpieces surrounding the installation, and the day-to-night unfolding of the film reverberates with that of the church . Entirely created in a recording studio, the soundscape amplifies the divergence between what we see and what we hear, between the near and the far. It is an integral part of an investigation that looks for moments of truth in the mise-en-scène, for facts within fiction. The work considers the landscape thematically, as a physical and existential space through which to navigate in search of salvation, while underlining the distance between the image as testimony and the image as product, between those who experience dislocation and those who are spectators to it.