Aziz Harara
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‘Shab Nama I (Night Chronicles)’
In this video installation — a new commission for the biennale — the Afghan artist “reconstructs landscapes at night using both existing and generated data extracted from the circuit boards of abandoned military night-vision goggles,” the biennale catalogue explains. The installation is Harara’s exploration of the strategy of “plausible deniability,” defined in the catalogue as “a state strategy of manufacturing ambiguity to deny involvement in events.” The green images generated by night-vision goggles and other surveillance equipment intended for use in the dark have become a movie and TV trope over recent decades, but here Hazara “subverts the imperial tool of surveillance … to point towards the intangible cumulative trauma of decades of conflict experienced by generations of people, while simultaneously being sensationalized in mainstream media.” The work also uses the “metaphor of the night” as “a dual space of communal life and violence, transforming it into a site of resistance where fiction and humor counter the official record.”
Sarker Protick
