Muqaddimah: The War is Not Over Yet

How long can one hear the sounds of war?

- Aziz Hazara (AH)

Gazing at the poster that announced Aziz Hazara’s second solo exhibition, Muqaddimah, at Experimenter Colaba, I waited in anticipation to be let into the gallery. The source of my curiosity lay in a seeming contradiction presented by the title, given that the artist documents surveillance practices and global economies of waste affected by foreign interventions and proxy wars in contemporary Afghanistan. Why then did he decide to name his assemblage of works, Muqaddimah—the very title the Tunisian philosopher and historian of Hadhrami descent, Ibn Khaldun, gave his fourteenth century prolegomena to his planned treatise on universal history, the Kitāb al-ʿIbar, or Book of Lessons? After all, in Arabic, مُقَدِّمَة (muqaddimah) means a prologue to a larger work. 

In the context of our historical present, a present marked by the abrupt American evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021, is Hazara signalling a spilling of the present into the future through a harking back from the past? We have entered into a period that has begun to be called the post-American occupation in Afghanistan to mark “the end of the war”—"the longest war in American history” lasting twenty years from 2001–21, as American President Biden stated in his White House address on 31 August 2021. Is Hazara then suggesting, through a subtle but incisive critique in the very first instance, that the war is not over yet? 

As the wooden door opens and I step into the threshold of the gallery space, the intermittent honks of Mumbai’s slow rhythmic traffic in its colonial quarters give way to a high-intensity sonic transportation into Kabul. Before light is sound, reversing the natural order of things—a prologue of sorts, to Hazara’s parallax, subversive practice. The artist underscores repetitively, through a series of contradictions, the absurdities of war—the manner in which war detritus appears as recycled technologies of violence, the fragilities of mechanisms of control and waste as imperative to global circuits of capital. 

Kabul is considered the capital of the UN. At some point in the 2000s, middle-class parents aspired for their children to have successful careers in international human rights organisations. There is a term for it, NGO-bazi.

- AH

Following the sound, one sees Bushka-Bazi (2023), comprising of five yellow jerry cans, or بش کا (bushka) in Farsi, now turned into transistors that amplify a mixed tape. This includes samplings from digital cultures over Whatsapp, pop music, muezzin calls, drone warfare, ideological propaganda and traditional Naat songs that were reappropriated by the resistance to glorify martyrs and suicide bombers, rendering a poetic, oft-melancholic frequency to the sonic experience of a city torn apart by war. 

“Bushka-Bazi is a satirical portrait of the last forty–fifty years of warfare,” Hazara says. As cooking oil containers, bushkas were used by the mujahideen to smuggle weaponry from Peshawar to Afghanistan before 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev—General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—announced his decision to withdraw the Soviet military from its invasion of Afghanistan, a process that would take another four years before it was completed in 1989. Hazara further explains that in the post-2001 era, bushkas dotted the Afghan landscape in the form of water containers distributed as aid by international NGOs. These were transformed by Taliban militants into raw material for DIY bombs. As a result, the sound of دھماکے (dhamaka/ blast) grew to be associated with these buckets, even as the number of bushkas owned by a household—up to fifty, in many cases—became the measure by which the American military made decisions on which homes to target. Since the American evacuation in 2021, they have become symbols of the Taliban’s victory through a political campaign that expressly proclaims it has defeated Americans with buckets. In their various avatars, bushka proliferate Afghan homes as everyday objects of domestic utility that are inextricably entwined in the making of warfare across political regimes. 

By recycling the bushka into a container of sound, the artist creates a soundscape that is a commentary on various ideological factions struggling for political control of the nation. Hazara not only references the shifting nature of regimes of power and corresponding changes in the role of the bushka in Afghan society but also transforms the bushka—through a cleverly defiant act of play—into an instrument for critique. Bushka-Bazi thus slowly draws the viewer into Hazara’s method of collapsing form and content.

Placed in a circle on the floor in the centre of the room, it is surrounded by “straightforward images of objects left behind and found in military camps and air bases”—Untitled (Bagram) (2024)—which consist largely of electronic and technological objects that circulate in a global supply chain, sustaining the capitalist war economy. It is here that Hazara’s choice of title starts becoming clear, for this process of unveiling is only the first in his method of presenting a successive series of contradictions, every instance stamped with irony.

If the raw material for these objects comes from exploitative mining activities in Nigeria and Ghana, Hazara observes, they are manufactured as objects of war in Western Europe, China and America, where companies make supernormal profits by billing “super inflated” prices. 

For instance, a butt plug, worth only $10, was sold to the Pentagon at $2000, a rather satirical example of the travelling commodities of the so-called “war on terror” that leave American ports for Hamburg across the river Rhine, crossing the Mediterranean Sea through the Suez Canal, toward the ports of Sharjah and Karachi before finally being deposited in Port Qasim, connected to Afghanistan through a motorway. It is this trade route, now transformed into a network of war commodities that the artist wants to trace. 

For, quoting Julian Assange on American policy in Afghanistan, Hazara stresses, “Their goal is to wash money out of the tax bases of the United States…European countries through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security alliance…Their goal is to have an endless war, not a successful war.” Hazara’s subversive critique of  American occupation in Afghanistan as tethered to the logics of global capital enables him to trace the afterlives of war’s objects in Afghanistan. In the context of American complicity in Israeli occupation of Palestine and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, his exposé of the intricacies of the military-industrial complex also reveals Muqaddimah’s expansive capacity to understand universal mechanisms of imperialist wars. Viewing this body of work in Mumbai, India’s finance capital, one cannot but consider collective complicity in regimes of occupation at home and abroad—in Kashmir, Manipur, Bastar and Palestine—owing to the mutation of taxpayers’ funds into blood money through the nation’s significant participation in the arms trade with Israel, perhaps why India abstained from voting in the UNHRC’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza and arms embargo on Israel earlier this year. 

If one were to show that warfare was making money, how do use satire and imagination to tell this story?

           - AH

Part two of this essay will look at how Hazara uses abstraction to tell stories about the absurdities of war and the landscapes of memory that lie in its waste.

To learn more about Aziz Hazara’s practice, revisit Sukanya Baskar’s conversation with the artist about the show No End in Sight (2021) as well as Ankita Ghosh’s review of Hazara’s first solo show titled No Starting Point for Revolution (2023) at Experimenter and a conversation with about the same.

All works from Muqaddimah (2024) by Aziz Hazara. Installation views photographed by Abner Fernandes. Images courtesy of the artist and Experimenter.