An eerie wind howled throughout. A boy dressed in what appeared to be a perahan o tunban, traditionally worn by Afghan men, could be observed in the entrance-facing screen, the last of the five comprising Aziz Hazara’s multichannel video Bow Echo, 2019, installed within the oblong space of Mercer Union. In that part of the work, the boy struggles to maintain a foothold atop a small rock.
The screens surround the viewer and repeat the exact same scene, but with five different boys. In the background is a city nestled within a desolate mountainous terrain, obscured by what seems to be dust or smog, under dark cloudy skies. The children gradually appear, like spectral visions, each standing on that rock in the foreground. They persevere against the relentlessly strong winds. The boy in the last screen struggles the most, but he gets back up after being thrown off.
The protagonists exhale with all their might into brightly colored plastic whistles—some blow with such vigor that they almost scream—but the sounds they make soon get drowned out by an ominous reverberating musical note. Yet the squealing chorus returns, calling to mind the insistent, high-pitched shrieking of sirens heard when natural disasters hit, or at wartime—a tune I despised more than the deafening boom of fighter jets or explosions rocking the ground of Baghdad, my childhood home. The images fade, and the videos loop again.
Viewing Bow Echo was an endurance test in resisting interpretation. It reveals so little about Afghanistan, where Hazara shot this work, and is so clearly its focus. But the sharp contrasts within this tender yet unsettling piece allude to a difficult situation. The subjects’ actions alone seem like allegories, which oscillate between two readings: as children’s play, suggesting the kind of adaptation necessary for living in a troubled land; or as cries for help, sounding an alarm to bring attention to the ordeals of the artist’s kin. Both interpretations create a debilitating sense of defeat as we contend with the tribulations of innocent people who have a right to better lives. I feel the same helplessness toward my own people in Iraq, a country that also suffered reckless foreign—specifically, US—military interventions, which unleashed utter chaos: from suicide bombings to insurgencies, kidnappings, and the savagery of ferocious militias.
Hazara presented an irreconcilable paradox. The artist was tackling the formidable challenge of translating distressing realities into an artwork, displayed to mostly foreign, non-Afghan audiences, impassively encountering a mere representation of those immense adversities. I always find it perverse for a work of this sincerity, of this vulnerability, to be viewed within a culture of spectatorship, of voracious image consumption. Part of me hopes that visitors to these exhibitions engage in deep introspection; another part cringes at the thought that some might fancy themselves saviors in relation to those experiencing unimaginable horrors.
Nevertheless, Bow Echo is a forceful and necessary work, urging us to reflect on our collective responsibility, as a global community, for the fate of fellow human beings in distant geographies—hopefully without a vacuous bout of moral superiority induced by a few minutes of sympathizing. The work also raises critical questions about the ethics of representing children in such artworks and in such venues. My ambivalence is not just about their consent or safety (implicitly, the boys invoke what is invisible: the dangers women or girls could find themselves in had they appeared before the camera). What I take issue with is the subjects’ lack of choice and awareness at that young age, especially when these individuals grow up to realize they were gazed at within settings mired in voyeurism.
Eschewing sensationalized or stereotypical imagery of those who live in so-called war zones, Hazara’s installation polemically asked whether there is a place for such works within platforms largely incapable of coming to terms with their culpability in what is being beheld. I do not want to succumb to cynicism, and I do not want viewers to be indifferent. But for me, Hazara inadvertently interrogates the viability of presenting this work to societies largely apathetic to the plight of “others,” within countries that participate in decimating the subjects on view.
