Credit: John Lewis Marshall
The next stop on the journey of sonsbeek 20→24, the international Arnhem-based art manifestation, will be Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. This exhibition brings together three historical artistic positions, that of: Dutch-Jewish painter and composer Sedje Hémon, Afro-Brazilian painter, poet, essayist, dramatist and member of Parliament Abdias Nascimento, and Pakistani artist and designer Imran Mir.
Abstracting Parables is conceived as a three-chapters exhibition that highlights the artists’ multifaceted oeuvres across geographies and histories, as parables that stretch forms and ideas, and become carriers of aesthetic, socio-political, spiritual, scientific, historic-economic discourses.
The exhibitions showcase how Abdias Nascimento, Imran Mir and Sedje Hémon navigated the waters of abstraction, expanded the shutters of modernism, reconfigured and liberated minimalism from the firm grip of the Western invention myth and significations, as well as situated the notion of conceptualism within other and wider geographies, histories and cultures. It will be the first time that the works of Mir and Nascimento are presented as comprehensive monographic exhibitions in Europe and it will be the first expansive exhibition of Sedje Hémon in the Netherlands in decades.
By presenting these positions – anchored in different cultures, histories and artistic expressions and ingrained in the spheres of modernism, abstraction and minimalism – at the Stedelijk, the institution affords itself a critical engagement with the blind spots in its collection and acknowledges the multiple untold or silenced stories. The curatorial team of sonsbeek20→24 approaches this exhibition as a work of translation. With translation, in its literal meaning to ‘carry another across’, the curators focus on the act of carrying art and experiences across to the walls of the institution.
Imran Mir, Eighth Paper on Modern Art, Acrylic on Canvas, 183 x 154cm, 1996. Collection: Imran Mir Art Foundation
Imran Mir, Eighth Paper on Modern Art, Acrylic on Canvas, 183 x 154cm, 1996. Collection: Imran Mir Art Foundation
IMRAN MIR. A WORLD THAT IS NOT ENTIRELY REFLECTIVE BUT CONTEMPLATIVE
The contemplative nature of Imran Mir’s (1950-2014) work, the way the works, like essays or theses, in their forms and ideas elaborate on mathematics in general and geometry in particular, give an insight into how physics and the sonic is of consequence. The title of Imran Mir’s exhibition stems from an essay Beyond the Narcissism of the Self by artist and critic, Rasheed Araeen, in which he writes “it seems Imran Mir is turning his back to this mirror-image in an attempt to create a world that is not entirely reflective but contemplative, so that what emerges from it transcends the earthly needs of the body and its pictorial representation.” Born in Karachi in 1950, Imran Mir was an artist who excelled in painting and sculpting, a designer and conceptualizer of advertisements. He graduated from the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts Karachi in 1971 and obtained his master’s degree in communication design from Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, in 1976. He returned to Pakistan in 1978 and engaged as an artist challenging the norms of what art in Pakistan could be, but also as an award-winning designer of over 5000 logos and advertisements. He was one of the founding members of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. This solo exhibition at the Stedelijk will be Imran Mir’s first major exhibition in the Netherlands and Europe, and will be accompanied by a reader of the work of Imran Mir.