Alia Syed

Poetics and Politics, Eating Grass includes an explicit reference to a promise made in 1974 by the then President of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who stated that his country would have nuclear weapons as they did in India even if Pakistan’s people had to eat grass to finance them. In a conscious effort to avoid sinking under the weight of some images with an excessive violent load, the political connection of the film is not obvious. The work, an excerpt from a collection of images of people and places, only reveals its political reference in the title.

The collection includes an earlier work, Swan, 1989, a 16mm film that is 4 minutes long, which refers to avant-garde filmmakers and their interest in representing nature or, more importantly, by using it as a visual metaphor for the expression of human subjectivity. The sumptuous images of a white swan preparing for flight have a very careful composition, as if they were photographs. The movement of the swan, which extends its wings and flaps them over and over again, allows the spectator to contemplate the incongruity of the moment. Although the film seems to represent the swan while it unfolds its wings before flight, it doesn’t actually represent a narration, but creates a new story based on emptiness, which invites the spectator to reflect and imagine their own story.