Temples of Democracy

When we began to talk
I saw our words had the power to unmake history:
-Eaven Boland, A Dream of Colony

In Mahbubur Rahman’s expansive display, traversing and unsettling many geographies, liberal democracy stands on trial. The fissures in the rhetoric and lived registers of liberal democratic polities have often been denoted as aberrant impulses, as malfunctions, crises, or discontents. What is possible in the refusal to perform such a reading? In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019), Ariella Azoulay deploys the mechanism of a camera shutter to signify how imperialist epistemologies function. Just as the camera lesions time, space and relationalities, refusing the shutter as a method is to think potentially, to reject the givenness of “endless separations and infinitely missed encounters” through time and to attend to that which has been “distanced, bracketed, removed, forgotten, suppressed, ignored, overcome, and made irrelevant.” Working through a period of enforced seclusion that marked the start of the pandemic into the catastrophes of the past three years, Rahman locates his attention to the histories that have been clipped and confiscated, that palpate as more-than-spectres in the contemporary and in the words of Palestinian-Canadian poet Rafeef Ziadah, “teach the rest of the world life”. To refuse the shutter as a method and imagination, is to see associations that have been effaced, and to reject dissociation of the simultaneity of becomings that abets neoimperial denial. It is also to do the work of retrieving forgotten associations and forging new alliances, to foreground entangled trajectories and errantry instead of cartographic transections. It is to amplify the tremors—of comradeship, friendship, concertedness—that sustains resistance across structures of power. 

Temples of Democracy continues Rahman’s engagement with varied media, mobilising ways of making that enable a movement beyond the stasis and delimitation of represented forms to partake in the staging of emergent formations that perform acts of troubling through association, whether within the boundaries of works that organise an assemblage of critical symbols, or through a porosity that is implicated in the spatial vicinities and intersections that mark the axes of display. Consider the title, that conjoins “temple” with “democracy”, beckoning the multiple layers of power that accrete in a demos—the divine right or figuration assumed by populist leaders, the investment of the political field with religious supremacy and ritual, the sanctified status accorded to parliamentary structures, and the “temples” that form the core lexicon of the Hindu fundamentalist project. The artwork Temple of Democracy (2021–2023) references the attack on the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, in January 2021 by supporters of Donald Trump, yet in the form of the dome and an ascendant mob one can find echoes of other proximate acts of neofascism. In the work Timeline (2021), a militarized landscape is layered with verses by the Kashmiri poet Mahjoor. In this palimpsest are two faint structures, the Kashmere Gate in Delhi, where a colonial force suppressed a rebellion in 1857, and the contours of a temple in Kashmir, starkly situating the violence of postcolonial states in this history. Rahman is sensitive to the simultaneity of dispossession and displacement to narratives of nationalism and development, in considering the territorial regimes of settlements and borders, he is also aware of that which moves most freely—the global flow of consumer products. Coca-Cola cans are assembled in ceramic and soft sculptural forms with other icons of American consumerism, yet a keen eye can spot the keffiyeh on a can and be reminded that the corporation operates on Israel’s illegal settlement of Atarot. The keffiyeh, a symbol of Palestinian resistance, appears elsewhere, most notably in a work in the medium of stainless steel, Operation Magic Carpet (2023) that revisits and annotates the event through the history of Palestinian displacement; and in Homage to Duchamp (2023) where it is draped over a coat, devoid of a wearer, the absented body is testament to the precarity of life under siege. In late-stage capitalism, it is debilitation that is instant, abundant, and readymade. 

The repeated, reverberatory technologies of bodily discipline and subjugation within defined carceral spaces appear in a series of drawings and etchings on the Holloway prison—with Force Feeding (2022) referencing an image featured in Sylvia Pankhurt’s book The Suffragette (1911). The use of hunger strike as a tool has been characterised as “necroresistance” by Banu Bargu and has found resonance among various liberation movements. Malaka Mohammed Shwaikh has traced how political prisoners in Palestine and Ireland referenced each other’s experience of partaking in hunger strike. While citing the hunger strikes of the suffragettes as a political act, Rahman also draws attention to the colonial extractivism that intensified the deprivations experienced during the Irish famine of 1845, painting lines from Eaven Boland’s poem Quarantine onto a ceramic bag full of potatoes. That famines will occur again and are ongoing, by colonial intent and operationality in other parts of the world, animates a line in the poem which describes an act of radical love amidst starvation with the warning, “Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.” But history has breached this threshold, over and over, and the task of freezing the shutter before it closes, before a story becomes an episode, remains unfinished. 

In this constellation of potential history, Rahman nestles the intimate surfaces of love and care as punctuated by arrivals and departures. A series of photo etchings titled Madonna (2023) and Good bye 1&2 (2023) depict moments of warmth and intimacy, birth and loss in the familial ambit. Rendered with a material and processual sparseness that distinguishes these from others, the images remain resolutely particular and quotidian, even as they are extensions of the very attentiveness that creates an iconomy of struggles. It is perhaps apt to end at home, a sense of the hearth as an unbounded practice of loving, and in photo’s transfer to print, as that which the shutter could not sufficiently relay—potential history as an intimate portrait.

Arushi Vats