It takes a brave artist to attempt to address “political issues” in their work. There is always the danger that making artwork with obvious political connotations could simply be regarded as a form of political protest. The voicing of such polemical views could, in turn, come to be seen as the artist’s sole preoccupation. Then of course there is the whole debate about whether, and indeed how, artists should try to turn contentious political events or real instances of immense human suffering and trauma (such as war) into art at all. Saad Qureshi’s new body of work, which is the highlight of Gazelli Art House’s Down to Earth group show, delves into this thorny area with an intelligence, sincerity and ardent sense of purpose usually reserved for artists twice his age.

Qureshi’s standout piece in the exhibition is a massive sculpture (10x2 metres) of a toppled mosque minaret. Fractured into three pieces it is left to rest, abject, on the cold concrete. Splintered like the broken bone of some dismembered limb, pieces of wood protrude from the wreckage, casting long shadows. From a distance this tower-like shaft has the appearance of verisimilitude, but as you edge nearer and examine the minaret up close you quickly take in its homemade, almost crudely fashioned nature.

This minaret is by no means a perfect facsimile, nor was it intended to be. The viewer is drawn to the traces of the sculpture’s own process of creation. The artist’s fingerprints, dark and sooty as he smeared tar like paint across the surface, are clearly visible. A few strands of human hair dangle from cracks in the wood, catching the light. In places the wood has been burnt and the whole is covered in a thin film of filth. This is a residue of the layers of mud, earth and hay with which the artist initially sheathed his tower, only on later consideration to remove. What looked from far off to be the intricate arches, cornices and pillars of a real minaret turn out, on closer inspection, to be made from old pieces of reclaimed timber and everyday household stairway banisters. Again we are reminded that Qureshi did in fact make the sculpture in the living-room of his family home, giving it a touchingly personal quality.

All this dust and dirt and the distressed condition of the piece give it the aspect of an object from an excavation, like some decayed artefact representing a crumbled culture or civilisation. The shadows made by the severed body of the minaret imbue the work with a slightly sinister, dreamlike quality, not dissimilar to Cornelia Parker’s “Cold Dark Matter; An Exploded View” (1991). Like Parker, Qureshi presents us with a sculpture that was only ever created in order to be destroyed, and whose charred remains are transformed into an artwork teeming with personal, political and poetic import.

The tower, with its domed head and unmistakably phallic form, has other connotations. As you gaze at this defunct phallus shaped sculpture lying shattered and spent on the gallery floor you also hear the barely audible murmur of a baby’s heartbeat emanating in vitro, from somewhere within or around the minaret. This sound installation and the inert structure it belongs to speak of life and death balanced on the scales. The human capacity for destruction, as well as for renewal, for giving love and perpetrating cruelty, for constructing beautiful religions and also for causing their collapse, is eloquently voiced by this work.

The minaret also looks grimly like an RPG missile lying discarded in ashes and rubble. Yes, one cannot but think, when encountering Qureshi’s sculpture, of the recent attacks on so many mosques in Iran, Pakistan, Libya and other regions of the Middle East. These newsreel images are still fresh in your mind as you circle Qureshi’s minaret in the glitzy and affluent surrounds of Gazelli Art House’s Paddington space.

I don’t think that Qureshi’s work can be fully understood or appreciated only in terms of the politics it is undeniably intertwined with. However, this context, considering that the events, which his minaret recreates in such a visceral and immediate way, are happening in the here-and-now, serves to make the nascent meaning in his work even more pertinent. The site of a fallen tower will also inevitably cause our thoughts to turn to 9/11, so ingrained on the public psyche has it become. Strewn amongst the detritus of all these fallen towers and holy shrines, lies the bodies of civilians, pilgrims, worshippers and of the actual bombers. We are reminded that some of the victims may have been perpetrators themselves. Qureshi’s work is not one-sided or didactic. On one level he is simply presenting us with the spoils of war.

The sepulchral gloom is lifted by other elements and pieces of Qureshi’s work which are scattered around the gallery. The baby’s heartbeat, recorded at the point of labour, can come to stand for a tentative whisper of hope for new life to rise out of the ashes. This hesitant hope is again glimpsed in another of Qureshi’s works. Across the vast room an intimate, barely A4 sized painting glimmers with translucent washes of glittering Payne’s grey, sky blue and pinky oil paint. A small cloud from an explosion hovers on the surface of the canvas. The black smoke of a bomb becomes a delicate yet jarring motif set against an azure sky and faint Persian patterns frame parts of the picture. There is sadness here, a form of melancholy through beauty.

This little painting bears a weighty title, “Soul of the Man Must Quicken Too”, which is a quote from T.S Eliot’s (1934) pageant play The Rock. Eliot’s actual line reads “the Soul of Man must quicken to creation”, which is probably Qureshi’s hopeful desire too. It is as if Qureshi has created his own Wasteland, like T.S Eliot’s epic poem (1922), which could be read as a disillusioned lament for the sorrow and futility of war.

Nestled on a shelf underneath the canvas are two real coconuts that have been smothered in thick sparkly looking grey oil paint so that they seem to twinkle and shine. Paradise lost perhaps? These two shrivelled little nuts also form a playful partner to the colossal tube of the minaret. Winking in the light, they somehow ridicule and immasculate the apparent power and glory of that totemic tower on the opposite end of the room.

On another wall hang seven sparse black ink drawings, which, like the painting, are done on a small scale. They depict fragmentary images, remains of non-specific landscapes and bits of architecture: they could be anything, anywhere. Nothing is explicit. Other ominous shapes appear drawn and scribbled over on the page. Almost whimsical in comparison to the hulking presence of the minaret, the drawings’ tone is passive-aggressive. With his doodlish drawings and tiny ephemeral painting, Qureshi actively deconstructs and tests the limits of pictorial language. He demonstrates the inherent failure of the pictorial image in the task of conveying meaning, or truly representing a traumatic reality.

The painting and these drawings are also reminiscent of the highly political and intensely visionary drawings of the late Nancy Spero, whose work coincidently (or not, as the case may be), is on show at The Serpentine gallery until 2 May. In Spero’s “War Series” (1966-1970) a cacophony of nightmarish visions and images of (the Vietnam) war are rendered in pale gauche on dirty pieces of paper, which are simultaneously grotesque and beautiful. Both Spero’s and Quershi’s response to war appears as a weird combination of the celebratory and horrendous.

The works on paper obviously form an important part of Qureshi’s artistic practice and provide an intriguing counterpoint to the sculpture. The multi-disciplinary nature of his working process reveals the rich and varied visual lexicon which he deploys to make the point that war is abhorrent and endlessly recurring. It is the minaret, though, which is undoubtedly the strongest of Qureshi’s presented works. It also marks a real creative leap for the artist as it is the first sculpture that he has crafted from scratch in such an intuitive and labour intensive way. His previous 3D pieces were more basic Arte Povera style assemblages of found objects and materials.

The title of the minaret piece is “Quicken”. Quicken towards what? Towards climax/ release/ death/ despair/ creation/ hope…? As well as being used for the Islamic call to prayer, minarets are also described as the “gate from heaven and earth”. For those who died during the numerous Middle East mosque bombings their journey towards the “other-world” was certainly “quickened”. Qureshi’s work operates and affects the viewer on many different levels, offering a multitude of unfolding meanings and possible interpretations.

Qureshi is still young, only 25, having just finished his Masters at The Slade in 2010. He has already exhibited widely in both the UK and abroad and was one of the finalists in the much discussed Channel 4 TV series, “School of Saatchi ”. His current work in the Down To Earth show represents something of a breakthrough moment for Qureshi and I believe is his most mature to date. With “Quicken” in particular he has shown himself capable of producing consciousness-raising work that can affect a large and diverse audience. Given time and an even bigger physical space in which his imagination could grow, you wonder what type of controversial and monumental work he might make…The Turbine Hall may not be too far off on the horizon of this ambitious emerging artist.

Jaya Mansberger

DOWN TO EARTH
1 – 21 APRIL 2011

Gazelli Art House
2 Kingdon Street
London
W2 6PY
www.gazelliarthouse.com
Info@gazelliarthouse.com

Exhibiting Artists:

AZIZ + CUCHER
JANE MCADAM FREUD
MARK PRETHERO
NIYAZ NAJAFOV
SAAD QURESHI