IBTISAM TASNIM ZAMAN
Iman, Al Safa WAl Marwa: Faith in the Pilgrimage
“We are all driven to move ourselves out of bed, take our children to school, move through the subway, or bus, or car - and go to work. It’s for the drive in our forced belief in racial capitalism, because we have faith in it. Waking up everyday to do it again, and again, and again. It consumes our lives, this belief. That we have spent in service, and reverence of this machine, unwillingly, and now blindly. And it’s so much more than just life, it’s all the time in your life. All of those seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years, the decades, and finally the centuries…into millenia.”
From portrait paintings of people commuting through New York City, to Black Radicals of American History, Ibtisam Tasnim Zaman’s recent works submerge into deep surrealist waters, materializing theories of Black existence. Iman, Al Safa WAl Marwa: Faith in the Pilgrimage, is an exhibition that encounters the Empire’s control upon the oppressed body, and the resistance that lies inside of it. Zaman deconstructs the western evangelization of what to follow, and who to believe in.
Iman(Faith) is an inherent belief. The religious belief, of God always watching, is what lies at the core of this exhibition. Zaman transforms this conviction into tools that unveil the entity of the state, always watching. Emphasizing how our blind adherence within belief, regardless of what your faith is, contributes to and becomes an instrument to racial capitalism. This body grapples with the paradoxes of dualistic functions. Visualizing the imperial state as religion, to recognize where its functions intersect.
Pilgrimage cannot be activated without faith. It is the arrival to sacred space that activates sanctity through action(movement), and the intention of what you bring to this temple.Through spirituality, Zaman is using the innate right to belief as gravity. Its purpose is to use the elusive aspects of life, and faith, to communicate irrationalities that exist in our world. Illuminating what has existed alongside the history of ourselves, the history of western civilization, settler colonialism, and enslavement.
Zaman’s Captive Maternals are the prominent figures with rings surrounding, floating over, and slicing through the body; illustrating the racial hierarchy of captivity, and anti-blackness. Inspired by Joy James’ Captive Maternal, Zaman brings the theory regarding those most susceptible to violence, war, poverty, policing, and confinement, to life. The existence of the Captive Maternal enables its ownership by the Empire that claims and dispossesses them. It is not solely their victimization that marks them, but their productivity, and the consumption of them.
In the early stages of her practice, Zaman's biographical portraits are fundamental to the transformation of her work. In the portrait of women's rights and voting activist Fannie Lou Hamer, Zaman begins to abstract the premises of struggle, to visualize methodologies and theory behind repression. In the height of modern culture co-opting, glamorizing and monumenting the struggle of Black radical leadership as the staple to our country’s progression, Zaman points to the complex material of their making.
Throughout this exhibition, we encounter a tumultuous relationship between the Captive Maternals, and the Hunters. These Captives exist in acts of prayer, moments of tenderness, and reproduction to show dichotomies of resistance that exist within inescapable white supremacist racial capitalism. This emphasizes the resilience of the oppressed - inside of this defiance, in the midst of chaos there is love, freedom, and faith.
Zaman creates symbols in her afro-surrealist realm through paint, sculpture, poetry, and textiles. Expressing the multidimensional experience as a Black Muslim Lesbian woman. Returning to America after fleeing Tulsa, Oklahoma post 9/11, Zaman spent her upbringing in UAE, and India. “I remember leaving the country and being at the airport’s security, the officers opening our suitcases, and dumping all its contents onto the belt of TSA. Watching all of my dolls' clothes fall to the floor, asking my mother ‘Mama, why are they doing that?’ and my mother telling me to “ be quiet.”, says Zaman. The footprints of her life pour into her interdisciplinary approaches that lean into self-discovery, and identity within systemic structures through her practice.
Zaman’s work resembles the tangible possibilities of impalpable reality. She is showing us her perspective of what these structures look like, personifying and translating the gears of our systems. Extending her hand to invite us in, she visualizes landscapes of invisible threads woven into our lives. Iman, Al Safa WAl Marwa: Faith in the Pilgrimage is an ambitious attempt that seeks to identify the victims, and the culprits that contribute to our realities. Unraveling the lens of manufactured natures, sewn into our ‘normalcy’.