Split Beds and Windows

By: Zarmeene Shah 

Shalalae Jamil’s work accesses the intensely personal and the unavoidably political with an ease and an awkwardness that brings it as painfully close to real life as perhaps only the medium of video is capable of doing. Split Beds and Windows then follows the same broader trajectory that her oeuvre has had a distinct tendency to trace, in that it addresses the often highly sensitive issues embedded within the complexities of the forming of identity that unfold through inherently personal narratives of self and family, familiarity and belonging, love and loss.

It would be easy to load Jamil’s work with the weight and implications of her South Asian identity – of the fact that she is a young, female artist from Pakistan. However, if one is able to not forget but simply to accept these as given facts, Split Beds and Windows opens up to a much larger dialogue of the construction of a portrait of lives, relationships, intimacy, and the very mundane realities that contribute to its formation. Conversely, this is done through the often uncomfortably close window that it creates to an intensely intimate life, managing at once to draw one in due to this very discomfort and just as quickly dispel this unease through a poignancy and a beauty that it brings with it despite the odds – despite even perhaps its own efforts.

Viewed in this way, works like Colorado Vibe and Musical Morning then take on a multiplicity of layering that extends far beyond the immediate concerns that they delivers (for instance those of race, ethnicity, placement and displacement, in the case of Colorado Vibe). Through the course of their narratives, one begins to note the knowing touches, the familiar gestures and rituals that come to reveal a very real, and sometimes uncomfortably intimate relationship between two people. The Great Divorce then becomes the ballad of a life lived, of place and space, known, inhabited, remembered. The consistent archival aesthetic of the camera lends to the works the candidness of home movies and travelogues – an homage to memory.

The photographic works then can seem to carry divergent tones; particularly works such as the Untitled nude image of the young woman, and then the ‘fragile’ work. However, if we can understand the photograph of the bed to carry the same underpinnings as the video works, theses other works are also not so dissimilar, in that they confront the viewer and create a moment where we are made privy to this moment that we must face whether we would like to or not. They are thus suffused with an immediacy and intimacy that extends out to the viewer – the intimacy of the photographic experience, versus that of its representation within the video works.

Split Beds and Windows in its entirety then comes to construct another portrait, in the manner that the work of artists such as Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman’s do – an auto portrait that finds the truth within the subject/object that is the self by tracing a route around and through all that occupies and concerns it. This self is therefore as an assemblage, a montage of seemingly disparate parts that form that with which we identify ourselves. At the same time, it is this very route that the auto function takes that allows a greater discursive access to the work – in the same way that great works of writing allow for a greater reach and access than their immediate fact. Jamil’s work thus manages to create a rare double discourse – a double exposure so to speak. We are not only confronted with and must deal with her through the characters, moments, and situations that she gives to us, but we are also forced to be confronted with ourselves – beneath it all, this is perhaps the layer that is the most discomforting, and the
most integral to her work.


- Zarmeené Shah