Bending the Barrels, 2009
Bending the Barrels is a reflection on the paradox of authority. It explores military pageantry, and its emphasis on the states of significance through military music and rhetoric. The military rhetoric is staged against military pageantry. Examining the marching band as a political device, the video superimposes scenes of soldiers playing music with authoritative military pronouncements. While the events that take shape in the video follow an assumed order and logic, they often appear as random or puzzling, encouraging a closer inspection of where to attach significance or meaning.
The music performed by the soldiers functions as a navigational tool exposing its own paradox in striving to provide the emotional and creative space while occupying a precarious and awkward relationship to its own history.
The text is all quotation derived from the military’s public pronouncements; a rhetoric so well crafted that it is timeless. Intended to pacify it instead illuminates its inability. A sense of uneasiness and pending crisis is heightened by some of the passive, pastoral, almost peaceful scenes and the disruption of the formal and spatial via the inserted texts. Calling attention to it self, the text poses a series of questions concerning its intent, authorship, meaning and associations especially in the context of Pakistan’s long struggle against military dictatorships, Islamic fundamentalism, and failed democratic attempts.
The rituals of the military marching bands in Pakistan are rooted in tradition and courtly spectacle, a familiar topic also found in the Mughal and Company schools of Indo-Persian miniature-painting genre.