TAKBIR

2022, single-channel video, colour, 5.1 sound, 9’58’

Courtesy of the artist, Experimenter, and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the exhibition “Penumbra,” 21/04/2022 – 27/11/2022, Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice

AZIZ HAZARA

Aziz Hazara (1992, Afghanistan) work addresses the lasting material and cultural legacies of Afghanistan’s foreign occupations. Through video installation, photography, sound, and sculpture, Hazara often reflects on the individual and collective relationship between memory and identity as well as reality and fiction in the context of war on terror.

Takbir has its metaphorical starting point in the 1980s when the residents of Kabul used the darkness of the night as a space to protest against the ongoing Soviet occupation. As soon as the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, thirty-two years of guerrilla warfare began across the country. The video establishes a connection between that turbulent period in the history of Afghanistan with the end of the more recent US-led NATO invasion of the country in 2021, when the residents of Kabul once again went on their rooftops and shouted the “Takbir:” they chanted Allah-u akbar as a sonic act of defiance, as a collective reclamation of space in the darkness. The film attends to the affective complexity of truth, sidestepping the attempts that both the incumbent US-backed Afghan government and the Taliban made to appropriate these aural demonstrations for their own propaganda. Takbir observes darkness and light, sound and silence as perceptual and metaphorical devices to dissect the transformations brought about by the War on Terror. Most of the film’s scenes were shot in Kabul, and conjure the beauty of a city glimmering in the night with the cruel consequences of normalized violence. Ultimately, Takbir weaves together near and far geographies as well as incorporates recent and distant sonic rituals with translocal and transtemporal displacements.