'Untouchables' 

'UNTOUCHABLES' photography © abulkalamazad / pigment print 40"x40"

"For the past six years, I have been working on the photographic project "Untouchables". The images are based on autobiographical reality and an understanding of everyday life. My work makes an active intervention in the common illustrative discourse of history. The images reflect and relates to the socio-political references. All the images are based on poets, literatures, politicians and objects. It is an ode to eminent people like Gandhiji,
Nataraja Guru, M.G.R, Kumaran Asan, Krishna Pillai, Medha Patkar, my mother. . . who have left an indelible stamp on the social, cultural and political sphere. They are "Untouchables" in the context of their stature, their achievements and so these documents hold timeless images dressed in modem metaphor" says Abul Kalam Azad.

Haunting, elegaic, amusing, and poetic, Abul Kalam Azad's images intersect and cross the boundaries of memory, art, culture, social life and politics, on the levels of personal memories, photographic recording, digital logic and illogic, fine art and pop art. Absolutely not releasing their secrets upon first viewing, these images continue to deliver and play with memory, not only the communal memory of Indian history and historical
figures, but also the personal remembrances of the artist often relating to his land, Kerala, and finally, the recent memory of the viewer who questions what he has just seen. Memory. Something we all have, remembrances of things past, personal and communal. But do we remember exactly or do we think we remember?

Abul's images, served up, many of them, in a Pop art style, for a retro effect, play with his South Indian Keralan, consciousness and evoke feelings of his native land. Using his and other’s old sepia-tinted photographic albums and images from other sources, everything is appropriated and recombined, as he says, a "re-looking" and a "re-doing", creating tableaux where himself, or his family or friends or architecture share the same stage as figures from history, gurus, leaders, politicians to create an image that resonates across time and space. Charlemagne is suddenly standing at the Indian school gate in 'Burgher Street'. The pretty, beautiful face of 'Rajan' is the 'missing' face that stood for the Kerala victims of lndian dictatorship, a consequence of the emergency declared in 1975-76. Against a backdrop of 'Tower Bridge', is illuminated native memory of the homeland. 'Ann-vesham': the artist himself as magnetic Kathakali figure, the classical dance drama of Kerala, is positioned against classical colonial sculpture with a historical temple as background. The personal and the socio-political are expertly intermingled in these images that successfully blend both digital and analogue photography. Some images have chaotic strokes and lines, almost 'brushstrokes' that mock the logic of digital to show the illogicality of the medium and interpolate the 'hand' of the artist, gently evoking memories of that age old discourse of

the validity of photography against painting, where the hand of the artist is presumed to make painting more desirable. And then, of course, there is color, applied ever so skillfully, bringing feminine and masculine closer together, lighting up aspects of a sepia tinted past, hovering and illuminating a democratic industrial workers cooperative: 'Kerala Dinesh Beedi', a successful attempt at workers' self management in a cigarette producing factory, as the artist says: "A portrait of action that lives on!"

"Abul Kalam Azad's new work 'Untouchables' transforms personal history through iconic local images that have punctuated the history of India, and Kerala in particular. Utilizing a wide range of allusions drawn through rare historical images of regional personalities, landmarks and symbolic objects" says George Thundiparambil.

Peter Louise , RL Fine Arts 2007 New-York

photography © abulkalamazad / pigment print 40"x40"