Basir Mahmood: Amassing Feathers in His Young Cap
With residency after residency, Basir Mahmood (born 1985, Lahore) is thriving in the international art world, while maintaining a low profile in Pakistan. Since receiving his BFA from Beaconhouse National University in 2010, the artist has travelled extensively in his nascent five years in the field.
Mahmood received a yearlong fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, in 2011. That was the start! Since 2011, his works have been exhibited widely: The Garden of Eden, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012; III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Russia, 2012; Inaugural Show, Broad Museum, Michigan State University, 2012; Asia Pacific Triennial (APT 7) at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2012; Sharjah Biennial 11. (2013); At Intervals at Cooper Gallery Project Space, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, 2014; Des hommes, des mondes at college des bernardins, Paris, 2014 and Time of others, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2015. He was also awarded at 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil Prize, São Paulo, 2013, Brazil. Recently, Mahmood has been awarded the 'South Asia Institute 2015 Emerging Artist Award' from the Harvard Art Museums. As part of this award, Mahmood has been invited to Cambridge this year to carry out a workshop and an artist talk at Harvard University. Even more recently, he has been shortlisted for the Abraaj Group Art Prize, 2016.
But what is it about his life and work that makes him so accomplished at such a young age? Let us dip into his pool.Mahmood graduated in 2010 but his career in the arts started years before that, in 2003. After his intermediate studies, he worked through sculptures and drawings (occasionally at Alhamra) till 2006. During this time, he met Mrs. Salima Hashmi, then Dean of the School of Visual Arts at Beaconhouse National University, who saw his work and offered him full scholarship for undergraduate studies at campus. The University grandeur inspired him to “explore and exploit everything”, and to hold on to any opportunity and maximize it. His “romance” with a new set of media (camera, video, theater, performance, drama, short films, script writing, Urdu prose and poetry), during undergraduate years, empowered him to move swiftly ahead and investigate newer ways of thinking and making meaning. His early perception of art making was associated with labor-intensive tasks but he learnt “softer ways” of creating through film, video, photography and poetry.
While Mahmood is reluctant to adhere to a physical studio space, his studio, he believes, is in his mind. His aesthetic decisions are independent of logistics. Ideas are his key domain. For him, the thought embedded in the work is far more enduring than the visual and, as a consequence, the (sub)text accompanying his work becomes crucial. “Ideas are precious, visuals destroy them”, he states.
From his earliest childhood memories, Mahmood recalls long walks in the neighborhood with his father, where his father quietly observed his surroundings to later converge his thoughts into poetry for the daily newspaper. His words were simple and basic. This simplicity, reticence and acuity for social reflection is his father’s gift to him, he believes.
My Father is a narration of his relation with his father, who is forty-five years older than the artist. As he was grew up, he saw his father grow weaker, he says. This image (or its corresponding video) represents the struggle of an old man trying to thread a small needle through repeated yet failed attempts. For Mahmood, this struggle is about “importance and worth” when seen through “time and mortality”.