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Shiraz Bayjooʼs works explore a common ground that lies between the autonomy in art through abstraction, and the emotive icons of fracturing cultural and religious identities.
Using multiple layers of translucent patterns and marks, a loose abstract landscape is presented. Whilst grounded and objectified within abstract composition, the spaces are dense and allow a sense of the mystical. Using restrained contrasts in colour, layers of iridescent and lucid paint unfold across the works.
Islamic motifs are used in the larger paintings creating a loose veil across the background, in contrast to the more graphic and stark representation within the light box installations, where the patterns are more prominent and open themselves up to a more literal translation.
The circles and dots are found reoccurring through much of the works, representing unified, un-manipulated icons, complete in their design, and suggesting something of the universal or otherworldly. Larger figurative brush marks provide dynamism and direction to the works, breaking up the space, whilst drawing the often-subtle layers of colour and surface together.
Patterns and icons are employed as part of a larger exploration of personal and collective identity. Images are broken down and re explored, offering what is often culturally or politically emotive back to the viewer a composition that is subtle and removed from its literal context. Whilst still emotionally charged and lending it self as a Universal experience.
In the series “In dreams, in memories, in death” the horse as an international symbol, is taken from the Islamic month of Moharam. The story of how the Prophet Mohammedʼs descendants were defeated and massacred in the Battle of Karbala (61 A.H: A.D. 680) is retold during the rites of Ashura. The thoroughness of the massacre knew no bounds; even the horses of the defeated army were decapitated and paraded on spikes – a symbolic gesture to further consolidate victory. This is an emotive history and culture, which at its peak abandons its identity and ascends into a state whereby the story of the Prophets descendants is harmonised and integrated within the individual experience. A focus on the negative and deeply harrowing experience of the massacre of the Prophets family (a family to which all Shiaʼs in sentiment belong to) is, through ritual, sublimated: From death comes hope, and the martyred horse is immortalised as a symbol of resilience and wisdom.
Art is, perhaps, the secular equivalent of such an experience, achieved through a moulding of material forms into a concretised abstract alternative form; the working of raw and negative existence and base material into a positive interpretation of individual and shared human experience. The new series of works finds Bayjoo pushing further the idea of shared identity and experience. Looking into the narrative of disappearing and fracturing cultures, Bayjoo looks away from his own cultural heritage, and finds common ground with obscure lesser-known realities. In the Xinjiang series, shifting political borders are presented though the pre 1940ʼs maps of the Middle and Far East, whilst the patterned motifs find yet more subtle connections with politicised flags.

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