Artists  I  Continent  I  Asia 

In Hazara’s Eyes in the Sky (2020), the artist takes on the optics of surveillance and military reconnaissance as he examines one manifestation of children’s play in contemporary Afghanistan: the transformation of war remnants into yet another desert obstacle course. As he attempts to stand at a critical distance in his journey from the personal to the collective, Hazara continues to explore military conflict through the rituals and customs that define and connect Afghanistan’s many fragmented and intermingled ethnic communities. This movement from private to public is also manifest in his choice of filming technique, combining intimate closeups of ordinary details that are painfully familiar to those with a personal experience of the landscape and culture with long-range aerial shots that any viewer can recognise from the media. Eyes in the Sky tells the story of meaningless and useless wars, waged for generations, on foreign territory; the waste they leave behind; and the strength of these people’s hereditary faith in the steadfast power of spells against the evil eye.

Hazara’s Rehearsal, premiering here at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, is deceptively simple at first glance. One boy carries another on his shoulders, as an older child might carry their younger sibling. Meanwhile, the other boy mimes shooting a gun, a perfectly commonplace (albeit problematic) childhood game. Those who are more familiar with military weaponry, however, will immediately recognise the startling accuracy of the boy’s imitation of a Burst Assault Rifle. What exactly are they ‘rehearsing’ for? See their body language. Is the younger boy on the shoulders of the other an expression of care, or is he being sacrificed? What agency does he have left as he quietly and obediently takes up his imaginary rifle, whose shape and sound are so familiar? Their movements are tied together, and the ‘gunner’ becomes an extension of his ‘mount’, in the same way Afghanistan was so frequently used as a pawn and proxy between warring superpowers. Displayed together with Eyes in the Sky, the work forms a diptych of play deprived of innocence and encourages the juxtaposition of the two ‘games’ together. What is missing from these sparse and barren landscapes? Who is missing? What does it mean for the boys to play at ‘war’ when war has surrounded them since birth?