In Abul Hisham’s Man Near the Wall, a solitary figure stands against a forbidding wall, his back towards the viewer. On either side of this central panel are two wooden pillars, standing like sentinels. This work is part of Shrines, Hisham’s solo show at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Delhi, which depicts a different stage of his artistic practice. The large paintings have an unusual architectural form, with the main panel mounted on arched wooden carvings invoking temple architecture, and flanked by totemic pillars on either side. There are carved figures on the pillars resembling a procession of people moving in a queue.
This shift to three-format sculptural forms is a result of a residency at Rijksakademie when the Thrissur-born Hisham moved to Amsterdam in 2021. After his experience of large wood-panelled Renaissance and Venetian paintings, with separate panels inscribed with religious iconography, Hisham introduced wood and began adding accompanying panels to the main painting. Further, he renounced pastel in favour of acrylic. The introduction of casting powder mixed with glue and paint gives a rough, cement like texture to his works.
While Hisham is still preoccupied with themes of ritual, power, memory and desire, his works veer towards the autobiographical. The earlier narrative works with a host of robust characters drawn from fables, religious texts, miniature Mughal paintings, Ajanta murals and classical Indian sculptures have been streamlined into minimal imagery with wispy figures. “Hisham’s work was experiential even when it was pictorial, mythological or recognisable in its figuration. But now you are in the throes of the artworks in which you don’t need a large chunk of context to dive into,” says art writer and curator Shankar Tripathi. “He plays with inwardness, closeness and distance. There is a sense of defamiliarisation, a brooding atmosphere in his works that leave you with heightened curiosity.”
A man against the wall is a recurring motif. Hisham has painted 45 works of the same image with varying themes—three of these are at the show. The backs of these figures, turned towards the viewers, communicate wary watchfulness as if in anticipation of disruptive gazes or unwanted interceptions. This baleful threat becomes explicit in Distant Horizon, in which a man’s hands are tied behind his back. In Silent Whispers II, five men in front of a wall are in a huddle as if conspiring. “The wall is a global geo-political reality,” says Hisham. “Philosophically, politically, and conceptually, there are many meanings when you see a man facing a wall. I was thinking about borders, about conceptual walls that people create within themselves. If you look at art history, there are paintings with people near the wall as a kind of a death point. So the wall is the site of the last moment of their life. You can also refer to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s memoir Mathilukal in which a prison wall separated lovers.”
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Even in works where the faces can be seen, they are partially obscured by garlands, rain, branches of a tree or scars. There is a veil of anonymity as well as a screen of fantasy through which these figures are perceived, othering them into inscrutable subjects haunting the cusp of belonging and un-belonging. In Gathering, a group of faceless, shadowy pilgrims, are stranded in an indeterminate location besieged by a penetrating blackness. The varying shades of Goya-esque grey charge these tenuous figures with macabre menace.
Hisham skilfully employs the strategy of spectrality to address sociopolitical concerns of erasure of identity, displacement and discord. Apart from these large sculptural paintings and small paintings, there is also a site-specific installation of 12 carved pillars acting as a barricade or a “wall” in front of the display. The viewers experience the paintings through apertures in between the pillars. Through experimentation in space, scale, sequencing and material interventions, Hisham builds and steers the flow of the narrative with a deft curatorial imagination. “The entire exhibition space, with the large and small paintings, forms one art work,” says Hisham. “It is like entering into somebody’s mindspace, the pillars are like physical forms of thoughts, and the paintings are projections of moments. I am re-creating a kind of an ancient relic or a ruined architectural interior space.”
A shrine is a consecrated monument to pay homage at, but there is also a threat of violence in Hisham’s works. Some of the pillars are broken, others are fragments of architectural pieces forming a broken, ruined architecture. Hisham’s move towards the theme of dereliction was evident in the 2021 diorama Memorial II , a theatre of debris and dust composed of deformed statues, looted graves, sundered places of worship, lying scorched under a black sun. “I am fascinated by bringing this sense of religiosity back to art—it is a romantic way of worshipping and losing yourself in a work of art,” says Tripathi. “At the same time, not all that Hisham is creating is tinged by the hand of faith. There is a lot of desecration as well. You can see attacks, serrations and gashing, marks on faces, and you can’t help thinking of political acts that ruin spaces of worship.”
At Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Delhi, till 23 October.
Shweta Upadhyay is an arts journalist and co-author of I’ll be Looking at The Moon but I’ll Be Seeing You.