Chapter One

Insaan: Chapter I begins with sound. As one walks closer to the NIROX screening room, the low bellowing vibrations of the original score composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Abdus Salaam during his residency are heard and felt — setting the sensation that settles the atmosphere of the space and the two sculptures within it, one ecological and bodily, the other surreal and polarised. 

‘One Drop at a Time,’ reflects our extractive economies and the spiritual heaviness that we carry communally as a result of our global transactional social culture. The work is made from a foraged and sculpted piece of quartz seated on a modified antique chair above a garden sculpted into a foraged slab of shale. Above, trickling along a thread of white cotton, are lit drops of pure spring water that drip into and purify a pool of polluted river water captured from the river that runs through NIROX Sculpture Park — its polluted state, a by-product of a defunct and neglected water treatment plant up river and various abandoned mines in the region. As we are made of water, on an earth that by all measures should be named Water, this reference to water and its vibrational essence is consistent throughout this body of work.

This is Abdus Salaam’s first use of the readymade, an application of such that implies a bodily, domestic tone that touches on a personal inner pollution of a spiritual nature — and its purification via the pure spring water from above, a purification that waters and feeds the earthly garden below. This cyclical oneness and beautiful reference to the heaviness and darkness of humanity gives a sense of relief and understanding that perhaps everything is as it should be, and perhaps our planetary state is but a reflection of our inner reality, and that these two matters are not separate but one.

As the music from the video work bellows on, the poem by Abdus Salaam on the wall reads: 

…Feel fallen rays

Among earthen rocks and clay

Of contrasts play book

Saying:

Some things special

Meaningful 

Untraced

One’s eyes catch a familiar form, ‘Our Last Stone: Fire & Ice’ — stone stack or kern, of melted white quartz with fiery orange, red and black veins sitting atop a pile of foraged un-sculpted white quartz. 

Inspired by the origins of sculpture as well as the moment that the earth will be engulfed by the sun, the work is at once a call to action and a surrender to what is and what will become in this universe of infinite variables. The juxtaposition of sculpted and un-sculpted quartz shows not only the intensive labour involved in the artist’s making of the sculpture during his residency at NIROX, working at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture, but also the notion of softness and sensuality that can come from a brittle molten and jagged razor-sharp hardness.

Finally, as one enters the video area the sound is given resolution and visual form. Ranging from darker earthly tones mirrored in sound, through golden luminous hues as musical movements rise and build,  the video and sound composition come together echoing the poem’s words:

One light shapes this space

Borrowing sight

Our transcendent escape

Softly

Gently

This radiant embrace

Whirling golden hues,

Reminders of what awaits

…  

Chapter Two

Beginning with sound once more, Chapter Two embraces the viewer in a familiar sonic key and tone but this time lighter, balancing between joy and sadness as though the sun has risen and the sky begins to clear — a bridge between chapters of terrestrial and Divine love.

Three sculptures are balanced within cotton canvas that traverse the space. Cocooned and suspended from the ceiling, these sculptures are held from above. Here the artist plays with boundaries, challenging both notions of painting and sculpture, where definitions intersect and blur.  The first of these (as shown above) is titled ‘Mother & Son.’ Inspired by the mortar and pestle, this work immediately brings us from Chapter One’s reference to terrestrial love into an ethereal love - one that transcends life, death and time itself. The form of the child looks to have transformed its mother into a nurturing, protective, soft state - one whose nature is overflowing, giving and stable.

In conversation with ‘Mother & Son’ is an acrylic ink painting on cotton canvas titled ‘Two Billion.’  This work is the sonic wave form of the artist’s heart, presented vertically and symmetrically - the central void of each canvas like lightning, a reference to the electrical charge and spiritual light that sustains the heart. This work presents a landscape of the heart, one that we experience between shadows and echos of light and dark - tying in the references to light and shadow in the works of Chapter One.

Buried just off centre is ‘Connection’ , the only work in this space to touch the ground. This work is made of foraged dolomite, a stone alleged to be over 300 million years old and comprised of ancient coral reef infused with limestone, quartz and shale. This black-blue heart shaped sculpture is the central work around which this body of work orbits. It is a work that invites us to return to nature for physical and spiritual nourishment — as its upper un-sculpted raw top like severed arteries holds a bed of flowers — the heart as a conduit of life, joy and connection.

Behind the large flowering black-blue heart is ‘The Weight,’ another sculpture held from above. This work is made of two sculpted pieces of dolomite, partially gilded with platinum and with a five Rand coin inlayed on the top. 

The triangle or pyramid is often referred to as a transcendent form, much like our own heart and soul. Here, the artist reinforces that connotation with the use of pure platinum gilding, a reference to divinity broadly implemented throughout art history. Upon this form is a plane of horizontal dark dolomite where a near worthless unit of currency sits embedded within the stone as though to oppress, withhold, or snuff out the body beneath it.  This work is a reference to the mind and the economic anxieties that plague us and often drive us toward a lonesome transactional society — a fire that can so easily be quenched if we simply recognise that it too is held from above.

Lastly, in the space is ‘The Arrowheart,’ a reference to the arrowhead, among our first tools and longest lasting remains, a reference to the hominid discoveries made in the Cradle of Humankind where NIROX foundation is located. The arrow is soft and heart-like, depending on the angle of view. It is gilded with platinum and holding a small pile of black platinum slag — a material waste that comes from the mining of platinum. This form, at once masculine and feminine, refers to the passage of time on the heart and the spiritual slag, like dust in the corner, that we collectively choose to carry with us, unknowingly and even expose consciously, often in communal contexts. Once again, held from above like ‘Mother & Child’ and ‘The Weight’ this work implies an ethereal and Divine safety that requires only trust and connection to flower, a reference once again to the garden in Chapter One and ‘Connection’ less than two meters away. 

Chapter Three

Chapter Three can be heard from the garden as one walks toward the door of the Residency Studio — the tones now soft, light and shimmering in celebration, one is greeted by ‘Dawn’ and ‘Dusk,’ two triangular canvases painted with acrylic ink and unpicked at their apex — sharing only their vertical reality. These works carry on from ‘The Weight’ in form, while referencing time, life, death, birth and the recreation of each moment that we collectively experience — two works that together place consciousness at the fore.

Upon entering the studio space ‘Tawakul (Letting Go/Trust)’ greets the viewer. A piece of foraged and sculpted white quartz rests like a grounded ship upon a bed of quartz/silica sand. This work is about what we build, what we own, what the self deludes itself into believing it controls. This ship that carries our belongings, our story, our joy, our trauma, and our love across time is of course spiritually held from above like the works in Chapter Two, from the perspective of the heart and mind. But as we focus within the reality of the Divine all things dissipate into their constituent particles before the scientific and scriptural certainty of ‘And Remember the day when We shall roll up the universe like a scroll 21:104,’ the painting that covers the wall, a reality before which our delusions scatter like dust and we become a vessel holding nothing, hoping to be of service, raw and real, a crystal bowl on a pile of its own withering — free and purposeful.

To the left, on the wall is a poem by Abdus Salaam that reads:

Dream of love’s final flooding

Drown in place,

When solitude is touching

Float upon knowing,

Where everything turns to nothing

And all I see is the feeling of your face.

Beneath which is ‘Saajda (Prostration),’ a foraged and sculpted piece of white quartz in the form of one hollowing, face down — whose underside is gilded with 24 karat gold reflected by the mirror upon which it bows, facing Qibla. This work is about many things, most of all reflection and the point at which humility and reflection anoint one with beauty and raw sincerity to the point at which the world’s beauty is reflected within and without. As though purified from above like water smooths a stone and ‘One Drop at a Time’ from Chapter One, this sculpture brings the world and all those in its presence into itself in an act that suggests that this point of reflection and luminous humility is fertile ground for empathy, mercy, and unconditional universal love.

This brings us to the sculpture titled ‘Islam (Surrender),’ a sculpture that is also made of foraged white quartz, sculpted and gilded. This work is the sculptural climax of this story. It is the culmination of form, gilding, rawness, and physical withering expressed from Chapter One through Chapter Three. It is the point at which Love, trust, humility, and sincerity come together in surrender to Oneness. A surrender so immense, so freeing, and so physically transcendent that it is the death before dying. Not a death of loss, but a threshold unto infinity and the boundless Love therein. One that can only be perceived as nothing and therefore a release — a breaking out of and from the cage or shell of materiality — one that leaves only a fragrance and a shimmering murmur of presence and a form that once was and still is.