Fazal Sheikh: Ether

ISBN-13: 9783869306537 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 88 str.

Fazal Sheikh; Fazal Sheikh

Opis

The pictures in Ether--Fazal Sheikh's first book in color--were made as a way to honor the experience of death and to try to comprehend its significance. Benares (Varanasi) is one of India's sacred cities, where many Hindus come to die in the belief that they will find salvation. As he walked its streets by night, Sheikh observed sleeping figures, shrouded in blankets, lost to an oblivion that seemed, in that holy city, to offer a simulacrum of death. In watching these ambiguous figures, which hover in the imagination between a dream state, sleep and death, Sheikh recalled his own experience with his dying father and their passage together through his father's final days. He remembered it as an invaluable period of emotional connection with the body and soul of the person he knew and loved, a connection that reached back to his paternal ancestors, who had travelled south from northern India a century before. To lose oneself in sleep is to abandon the senses and leave the way open to a dream state in which mind and body separate.

O autorze

Fazal Sheikh was born in 1965 in New York City. His previous publications include: A Sense of Common Ground (Scalo 1996), The Victor Weeps (Scalo 1998), A Camel for the Son and Ramadan Moon (International Human Rights Series 2001), Moksha (Steidl 2005), Ladli (Steidl 2007), The Circle (Steidl 2008), and Portraits (Steidl 2011). His work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums, including Tate Modern (London), the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation (Paris), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ICP and the UN (New York), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow). In 2005 Sheikh was named a MacArthur Fellow.