“Lets Watch the Sunset?”
“Together?”
Two sided video installation (4 Editions + Artist Proof)
9 minute 26 seconds
2013
Available
My practice began as an intensely personal investigation of changing familial relationships within the framework of the discovery and articulation of my sexuality, later expanding to incorporate the use of outwardly disparate socio-cultural, political, historical and religious events in order to draw parallels and highlight disjuncture. I engage with the vocabulary of loss and absence, making difference and dislocation a core part of my modus operandi. However a layer of my work remains grounded and located around the presence of my mother; sometimes addressed directly and sometimes utilized as part of a historicized individual/collective/national/regional narrative. This key relationship appears to be a stable value in the work that potentially articulates a gentler more poetic subtext to a practice that often deals with the erasures of death engendered by time and/or harsh socio-political realities.
In “Lets Watch the Sunset?” “Together?”, two people (fictionalized on the artist and his mother) are having a conversation whilst watching the sunset. As the video progresses a second sun appears on the horizon and it is gradually revealed that both of them are in fact at two different places and are following two different suns. The conversation appears in form of subtitles only, with one person’s dialogues readable from one side only, and the other’s appear inverted from the same side. So the audience is meant to view the video from both the sides to make sense of the conversation. This division and separation of the two suns, two places, and of two people
becomes a live experience for the audience.
Fazal Rizvi graduated from the National College of Arts Lahore with a BFA Honors in 2010. Part of multiple international and national shows, Rizvi was selected for the Arcus Project Residency Japan in 2011 and is the recipient for The Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust – British Council Residency at Gasworks 2014.
Photo Credits | Fazal Rizvi