Exhibition view from the Solo Performance Project “Shameless” , February 27& 28, 2016 at EMK Center,Dhaka.
As a performance artist I always believes my body is the main protagonist of my performance pieces. I wanted to give my viewers an intimate experience through sound, light and space transformation where they will experience a body as a live object. For my solo performance Project “Shameless” I projected some still image and video documentation of my previous performances from the project "Shameless" along with a 2 days long, 12 hour long duration live performance titled “Sinful Body”.
A body appears in a performance event: a body apparently as a reservoir for signs/significations, encoded with known valences of identity, a body that could yield to the observing gaze unbeguiled meanings and be readily perceived as a social object/product ; yet, this same body could also threaten to overthrow all ‘received’ expectations with the force of its intrinsic, potential agency, let loose through acts and gestures in a space and time coordinate of its own and one waits in trepidation for what follows… Because, now, art appropriates this very body for its peculiar end and art is performing itself.
Performance, an infant terrible in the praxis of art, has earned a reputation for notoriety- at times playful, more often than not brazen at that. By capitalizing on tactics of shock and surprise , not to mention, exasperation , and by intrumentalizing its ephemerality to thwart perceived art conventions in a self-reflexive way it attempts to engage the audience critically as well as creatively in the event itself. Live art as opposed to posthumous /mortuary (read museum) art! It is breaking away and breaking bad! And Ali Asgar, a print maker by training, turns to this vivacious practice to make known his interpretation of experiential living. Shameless – he names his performance, which examines notions of sexuality that govern gendered social behaviours and relationships.
Ali Asgar pronounces himself a queer, by which he aspires to locate himself in a ‘non-binary zone’, resisting to settle for the cushy terminus of gender parity he ‘wills’ his way to the imaginary of a gender free articulation of the self, or dare we say the unconscious. Yet, such citations are preemptively bound within the chain of signs that regulates ‘language’ and hence every aspect of existence. Even to say, ‘I am queer’ is to succumb to the existing scheme of legitimacy of embodied identity. Queer identity is already always suspect and allowed only to inhabit the realm of censor or a manifest pathologization of sexuality. And shame, guilt, fear are but a few social/cultural responses to all forms of non-normative, ambivalent sexual orientation. Those who ‘others’ and those who resist are both hapless preys to the hegemonic social sanction. In Shameless the bleeding lines that stains the wall of the performance space regales how the mother ‘shames’ his child for being ‘different’. It is an oracular taboo writ large that glares with the force of authority and cannot be erased from view. The metaphor of transformation that plays out in the way Asgar cuts himself free from his cocoon to theatrically evolve into a garishly colourful ‘entity’, is transitive in essence, in that it is a parody of becoming, of shifting selves, notwithstanding the caveat that no identity is self-evident, every gender in its formation and manifestation presupposes the other through opposition and denial. It could be seen as a ‘hyperbolic gesture’, in which exaggerated impersonation of a given sexuality works to expose its instability, by showing how it has to armour itself against the influx of what it denounces as belonging to the other. When Asgar paints his body in lipstick, or slips into the fishnet stockings, his masculine corporeality becomes a tool to mock the necessity of markers of appearance to consolidate ideals of masculinity. However, his recasting of the masculine in its fluid interplay with the feminine got lost in the labyrinth of ontologies of identity, with the mirror beneath his feet repeating familiar iconography , that reaches its saturation in , Don’t be a drag , be a queen; he becomes the uncontestable candidate for an avowed community. It is the cracking of the whiplash in another edition of Shameless, a symbolic act of self-flagellation, of purging oneself of all stigma of shame, where arrives one inscribing on his body marks of pain that aims to render the signs of ‘constructed’ corporeality illegible. Even the feeble bodily presence that prioritizes the ritualized acts over the body itself helps bring to the fore the unperformability of gender. One can hope that every following edition of Shameless, persistently ‘queered’ from its prior framing will serve as a vehicle for scrutinizing and disclosing the pitfalls of the ‘gender trouble’ that continues to plague our socio-political living at all levels.
Written By - Sharmillie Rahman, Writer and Executive Editor of Depart Art Magazine.
