Words by author/art critic Ashraf Jamal

More than two meters in height, just under a meter in the round, What We Carry is Abdus

Salaam’s largest sculpture to date. Carved from a single block of white Namibian marble, it

is as discrete as it is commanding. Despite its scale, this is no breast-beating work, no

egotistical declaration. Sculpture has a tendency to be shouty. But like all of Salaam’s works,

this form is as introspective as it is gentle. As for the chosen material? White Namibian

marble is subtly phosphorescent – it is crystalline. This allure, this aura, is vital given the

spiritual principle that informs the work – namely, Oneness.

The title of the work – What We Carry – can imply a human burden, but this misses the

mark. Rather, for Salaam, we carry each other, we carry the world – we are carried in turn.

Which is why, in its delicately incised and scalloped rotundity – without diminishing its

columnar power – the sculpture evokes a collective human embrace. This is intimated

without any explicit figuration. Rather, it is the way in which the soft-edged forms assume

human proportions – torsos, stumped rounded arms, bowed heads – that suggest this

intimacy. That everything is anthropomorphic, means that everything is in one way or

another an extension and expression of our humanness.

As such, Salaam’s sculpture is ‘embodied stone’. The artist speaks of its ‘totemic oneness’,

as a human embrace ‘within one, from one’. This because an undivided divinity courses

through the vision and its actuation, a belief in an ineluctable coherence that precedes all

attempts to divide and destroy the world. Unlike the dialectician who strives to synthesise a

contradiction, Salaam supposes an essential unity, some divine resolution. If his sculpture is

‘totemic’ it is because it conjures a primal ideal. If it is perceived by the artist as ‘a form

without prejudice’, it is because it refuses to succumb to judgement. Instead, its revolving

energy – its frisson – cancels a containing eye or mind. It is, after all, a sculpture in the

round, and, as such, perspectival – no single vision can contain it. And yet, while the

sculpture can be seen from different angles, it is not refracted. Rather, a totality, a

‘oneness’, binds it, some faintly audible sonority. For if one were to attribute a sound to this

work of stone, it would be a whisper, a gentle murmur. The enfolding limbs could be rapt in

prayer, which we, the viewers, cannot quite be privy to. Perhaps we are the eavesdroppers

on some secret confessional?

Because the sculpture is not explanatory, because it is inwardly attuned, we are compelled

to abbreviate our minds – our default mode of apprehension – and allow ourselves to

accept the spiritual root of its creation – compassion and consolation. For if there is one

abiding affect which What We Carry emits, it is the consolatory – some gentle balm, soulful

ease, quiet restfulness. For Salaam, the sculpture allows ‘an awareness of the other without

otherness’. This sensibility is akin to the creation of a non-prejudicial form. This because

Salaam abhors divisiveness and separatism. In its place he holds fast to an empathic

communion. The vitality of this spirit cannot be underestimated. To survive the boorish

cruelty and hatred of the current moment, we require what Roman Krznaric terms an

‘empathic revolution’ – a revolution, or evolution, irreducible to systems, laws, or

ideologies. A revolution of the heart and soul.

That Salaam sees his art as an embodiment of the ‘self’ and of ‘civilisation’ reaffirms his core

insight that the personal is historical. That selfhood – when freed from egotism – is

profoundly enabling. Oneness is as communal as it is singular. Oneness supposes connection

without division. This is because oneness does not dissolve connection, it amplifies it. That

Salaam is able to speak these truths in-and-through stone is a triumph. That he has done so

with the lightest of touches, all the more so. ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I

set him free’. These words, attributed to Michelangelo, speak to the vital connection

between extraction and divination. The sculptor frees the spirit from carceral stone. This,

however, is not Salaam’s purpose. Rather, spirit is one with stone. Beauty and truth live in

matter as much as it lives in the heart and soul of the artist.