Africa 05 (2005)

Keith Piper, Donald Rodney and the Artists' Response to the Archive (2006)

Ali Kazim (2006)

Barbara Walker (2006)

The Importance Of Being Lady Lucy (2007)

Black British Photography (2007)

Port City (2008)

Next We Change Earth (2008)

We are never quite sure what to make of the narratives in Kazim’s works. Paradoxes abound. The figures he paints, all male, and for the most part only ever depicted from the waist up, are naked. Yet this nakedness conceals as much as it reveals. We might imagine that our gaze would render these naked, or semi-naked men vulnerable. But these figures decisively empower themselves by excluding us from the privacy of their actions, gestures, body language and interaction with each other. It is almost as if Kazim is allowing us glimpses of his inner self, or glimpses into the lives and preoccupations of men like himself. We can fondly imagine that the unclothed body might facilitate a greater understanding of these figures, but we can never know the totality of what Kazim depicts.

There is great beauty in the males that Kazim depicts. But, perhaps out of necessity there is also strangeness. In the work titled 7 am, a man is shown removing or trimming his facial hair with a distinctive cut-throat razor. In Friday, a male figure uses the same sort of razor for the trimming or shaving of armpit hair. There is something curious about a man seeking to remove bodily hair, particularly that which oftentimes remains hidden from public view. With hair being one of the major demarcations and differentiations of gender, is the male seeking to attain some sort of androgyny or hermaphroditism? Or does the shaving of ones armpits signify, for men, some sort of supposed cleansing or beautifying process, as it might do for certain women? The title of the painting indicates perhaps, a predevotional act of ablution, the ceremonial washing of parts of the body, on the holiest day of the week. Ultimately of course, answers to these questions, if genuine questions they be, evade us. Ironically, in facing Kazim’s work, the only thing that is certain is the beautiful and haunting uncertainty that characterises much of it.

We might ordinarily think that beauty (that near indefinable combination of visual qualities that please the aesthetic senses, especially the sight) is something we primarily associate with women; those blessed with it and those seeking it. But many of the males in Kazim’s paintings declare a fondness for beauty. They care not for that which is merely handsome (the more accepted term that we choose to apply to visually pleasing male features) and instead, unashamedly, outrageously seek and indulge a sense of male beauty, or male adornment. In Fragrance a man - I need not mention his now familiar nakedness - adorns his shaven head with a single flower, its luscious petals complimenting not only the man himself, but also the indulgent, decadent blue background of the painting. Does the male depicted beautify himself for a lover or himself perhaps? Is his adornment a defiant and provocative gesture against a society ill at ease with male sensuality or public displays of male effeminacy - that is, singularly unmasculine men, feminine in appearance or manner? Like Secret, this painting resonates with a delicious sensuality and again, the male takes certain pleasure in his sense of expectancy or anticipation. Like Secret, it is the colours of the background give Fragrance its sense of indulgence and anticipated pleasure.

The full version of the above text was published in the catalogue to accompany the exhibition 'Sacred Souls, Secret Lives' by Lahore-based painter Ali Kazim. The exhibition was at lightgallery, London, May 24 – June 3, 2006.