Past, Present, Future:
An Abstract Exploration into Temporality
An Abstract Exploration into Temporality
Past, Present, Future is a 2-year long labour of love by Jakarta-based artist Harishazka that brings together 13 compositions produced during a tumultuous confinement period.
In Harishazka’s first solo-show featured at Ruci Art, he employs his signature style of colourful geometric abstractions to investigate the relevance of time in his past, present and future.
In Harishazka’s first solo-show featured at Ruci Art, he employs his signature style of colourful geometric abstractions to investigate the relevance of time in his past, present and future.
His deep inquiry into notions of temporality affected by isolation brought to light some latent personal artistic desires: a healthier balance between work and after-work times, better practices for navigating a digital realm, and uncovering new frontiers in his creative practice.
For Harishazka, otherwise known as Azka, his background in interior architecture has characteristically shaped the way he meticulously and painstakingly creates.
His laborious use of masking tape and homemade stencils ensure not a line drawn is out of place. In his
compositions, simple geometrical shapes become the building blocks for constructing complex structures that challenge our perception of space.
compositions, simple geometrical shapes become the building blocks for constructing complex structures that challenge our perception of space.
Confinement saw a change in Azka’s usual artistic oeuvre – an introduction of a new graphic element as a set of interlocking circles winding and curling their way through his compositions.
These undulations mimicked the emotional surges and swells of their creator who struggled to find a sense of calm amid an unprecedented time of instability. He observed that time seemed to be increasingly fluid and unstable. “The continuous line of the circle is a loop in time,” he acknowledges in hindsight, on how the interlocking circles were borne from a subconscious desire to ‘catch time’.
Yet the more Azka tried to ‘keep up’ with time, the more it escaped him. This became apparent when he began to venture into making NFT art. Operating in a digital realm commanded perpetual attention and generated a to-do list that seemed endless. Azka found himself disoriented, and his belief that time is continuous and finite, debunked. Instead, he saw how our digital sense of selves could be considered immortal, our options infinite and in flux, our time as a 24-hour window immaterial, thereby rendering our distinctions of IRL, work-time and after-work time moot.
Azka invites the viewer to not only question the ways in which we feverishly worship and police time, but also how we might situate ourselves in it. He offers the possibility that our sense of time is unlike our five senses of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. We don’t so much sense time as we perceive it through these senses i.e. the linger of a smell, rendering time seemingly more elongated, or the flash of a light bulb, suggesting a quicker occurrence.
The works in Past, Present, Future explore the attributes of time in relation to the senses through a worm-like form that snakes its way through a dance of shapes. Sometimes, it moves in passing. At other times, it engages with, gets stuck in between or disrupts the flow of other elements. In more recent pieces, this circular worm-like element has evolved into a set of interlocking squares overtaking the composition, almost reminiscent of a malfunctioning digital interface spreading malware as a computer worm would through constant self-replication. It is a pictorial language which conveys the versatile dynamism of a digital universe that belies an overwhelming anxiety.
On one hand the parameters that comprise this geometric reality seem to be harmonious and in control, on the other hand they convey a feeling of chaos unrestrained.
Inspired by Soviet propaganda mosaics and space race graphics, Azka’s work feels simultaneously retro yet futuristic. The patterns used in his work are evocative of late 80s Memphis-era laminates, utilising colour combinations that border on being gauche. The pastel-coloured two-dimensional compositions harnessing a pop sensibility are characteristic of Azka’s past work, while new elements such as the worm, along with the use of darker, intense hues, and the introduction of three-dimensionality signify his creative maturation. It is a transition that represents an evolution of an old Azka to a new, revealing an artistic practice and identity that is in flux and beyond his control.
Past, Present, Future is an imaginative exploration of our existence within and in relation ship to time that sees Azka making sense of how we navigate a digitised space-time continuum through a prism of neon gradients, geometric shapes and fluorescent hallucinatory pathways.
Zarani Risjad (Curator)
