He began his career in the 1980s, with exhibitions in and around Birmingham and the West Midlands, and his work found a home at the prestigious Barber Institute of Fine Arts.
#SAIF UL MULK POETRY SERIES#
In 2017, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the i-phone, Azam created a series of artworks described as ‘ Phone Painting’. Well-known for his official portrait of Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace prize-winner and youth advocate, displayed at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, Azam is a highly versatile and prominent artist of global standing. ACV readers will also know he and his brother made ‘ Tuning 2 You’, a programme about Indian folk music traditions broadcast on Channel 4 in 2017. Soumik’s own three-part documentary programme on the music of India is currently being broadcast on BBC4 and can be viewed on i-player. Soumik and Souvid and mother Sangeeta Datta, an established filmmaker and Shabana Azmi, an Indian acting icon, attended the launch last Thursday (May 29). The three hope to work together on some kind of installation bringing their different art forms together – but we will have to wait for that. “The journey (with Soumik and Souvid) was itself very magical, very hard, emotional and creative,” revealed Azam.Ī short film about the trip can be viewed at the exhibition and there are videos on Azam’s website too. L-R: Souvid Datta, Shabana Azmi, Nasser Azam, Soumik Datta, and Sangeeta Datta at the launch of ‘Saiful Malook’ Soumik is best known as a Sarod Indian classical musician and has collaborated with many musical artists, including Beyonce and Anoushka Shankar, among many other high-profile figures.
“I wanted to make this journey a collaboration and I was inspired by music and so it seemed appropriate to have a musician with me and a friend curator at the Victoria and Albert put me in touch with Soumik whom he had worked with.” The exhibition of mostly paintings is spread across two rooms in the upper section of the Saatchi Gallery and there are more than 30 works on display.Īzam travelled to the region with British India musician and composer Soumik Datta and filmmaker brother Souvid, who is also a musician.Īzam explained why he wanted Soumik with him. “I kept the palate quite dignified and simple – using primary colours and I am trying to capture the underlying themes of the poem in my paintings,” he explained to acv. Most were painted since his trip to the region in August 2018 but were deeply inspired and imagined there. He told acv that two of the current works on display were created in and around Saiful Malook. And the Prince’s story and the lake became conflated in the popular imagination. In fables well-known across the region, there was a Prince of Persia, who dreamt of a beautiful damsel and went to search for her – giving up his kingdom to do so and embarking on a journey that would take years.īehind this easily understood story lies a deeper and more spiritual one, posits Azam. The most famous of these was ‘ Saiful Malook’ (sometimes also written as ‘Sayful Muluk’ and named after the lake).” He wrote 18 books of Punjabi poetry and one in Persian. “It is a complex piece of Punjabi poetry by Mian Muhammad Bakhsh. “I really reconnected with the underlying themes of the poem – struggle, passion, sacrifice. “I found that he was born in the same city as myself, Jhelum (in Pakistan),” Azam told at the private view on Thursday, on the eve of the public opening (May 30). Intrigued and first inspired by Khan’s music, it prompted Azam to look into the background of the poet, Bakhsh. Khan adapted a famous poem by the Sufi saint and scribe, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh (1830-1907) to music in the 1990s. It was Khan who popularised the tradition of Qawwali in the West and reinvigorated it on the subcontinent (his nephew Rahat is widely regarded as a leading proponent of Qawwali today and enjoys global attention too), and Nusrat made it a recognisable genre which still has many millions of admirers and adherents across the world, both among the diaspora and the wider world, at large.
#SAIF UL MULK POETRY FOR FREE#
The exhibition called ‘ Saiful Malook’ can be seen for free at the Saatchi Gallery in London until next Monday (June 10).Īzam who travelled to Saiful ul-Malook, the name of the lake in Pakistan Kashmir, was himself drawn to the region by two other artists, one a musician of global renown and much admiration even today, the great late Nusrat Ali Fateh Khan (1948-1997). IT IS ONE OF THE HIGHEST lakes in the mountainous region of Kashmir and artist Nasser Azam’s latest exhibition is the most recent and contemporary articulation of a rich tapestry of ideas, culture and beliefs that have inspired many. Music and poetry echo through artist’s latest exhibition and suggest further ‘multi-media’ work to come…
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