Asma Kazmi
After Jahangir, 2020
photograph
18”H x 24”W
ARTWORK STATEMENT:Artist’s self-portrait is in the convention of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (15691627). Jahangir was given the name “World Seizer” for his preoccupation with collecting. He had a keen attentiveness towards objects and he enthusiastically acquired plants, animals, minerals, and oddities from different parts of the globe. He scientifically recorded, measured, enumerated, and tested his possessions. His honorific speaks to Jahangir’s self-conception as a “naturalist”, and an acquirer of objects that were meant to amaze and impress, and project power. However, the art historian Sugata Ray argues that for the Mughals bioprospecting was not entirely envisioned through a top-down paradigm. The Mughals were a seaconscious empire and their accumulation was informed by “spectatorial regimes of seeing and ordering the natural world” rather than eco-colonial domination. Jahangir commissioned many royal portraits where he was often pictured with his arm lifted up to his face, holding up a distinguished object to ruminate on. Jahangir’s portraits represent an ancient, non-western, and Islamic form of ecological, spatial, and material awareness. This awareness, while it lacked ecological imperialist desires, was nonetheless extroverted and hierarchical. The artist’s embodiment of Jahangir’s gesture is an ecofeminist critique, an intervention, and an act of reading backward Mughal dynasty projections of power. In the photograph, the artist assimilates and subsumes Jahangir’s gesture to engender in the viewer questions and ideas about non-exploitative commitments for relating to matter and the material world.
Artist Bio:Asma Kazmi is a research-based artist who combines virtual and material objects to explore simultaneity—a tug of more than one time and place. Her work involves long-term engagement with cities, architecture, plants, animals, stones, and other matter to locate vestiges of relations forged by the legacies of colonialism and postcolonial contexts.
