Alia Syed Date: February 12, 2008 - April 13, 2009 The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents the first showing in Spain of works by Alia Syed, an English artist of Indian descent. Her work Eating Grass (2003) is a twenty-two minute picture filmed in Karachi and Lahore (Pakistan) and London. The film composes a series of sequences on public and private spaces from these cities, framed in the form of a collage. Both poetics and politics, Eating Grass includes an explicit reference to a promise made by the president of Pakistan in 1974, who asserted that his country would have nuclear weapons like India, even if Pakistanis had to eat grass to fund them. The film only reveals this political reference in its title. However, its hypersaturated colors are what stand out, along with the total freedom of movement and some whistling voices that recite lines in English and Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, with allusions to the five daily prayers prescribed by Islam. The show includes her former work Swan (1989), a four-minute film that refers to avant-garde producers and her interest in using nature as a visual metaphor to express human subjectivity. |
