Sven Christian [SC]: Let’s start with the title for your show, Insaan.

Abdus Salaam [AS]: Insaan means ‘human being,’ which is why it works so well with the location where the work is being made — the Cradle of Humankind. There’s a connection between the title and the location of the show, where the stones come from and so on. ‘Uns-’ means ‘intimacy or love’ in Arabic, which is kind of comedic, because uhn-tiss uhn-tiss uhn-tiss, right? Thus Insaan means ‘the intimate one.’ Arabic is an ancient, somatic language. Its cousins are Aramaic, Amharic, and Hebrew, amongst others… You know, the oldest surviving languages, in Ethiopia and the Middle East.

There’s immense gravity to the Arabic language. You can have subject, object, verb, tense, pronoun, quantity, and gender in a single word. We don’t have that in English. It’s an extraordinarily poetic language too, as you can imagine. The Quran came via the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. He was an illiterate man, and the Arabs didn’t know what to do with themselves because they were living at the height of Arab poetry. So here comes this illiterate man with the most profound rhyme schemes and alliteration that anyone had ever experienced. The language itself is profound. The first grammatical scientific dictionary still in use is Arabic. Hebrew exists today because of what the Arabs did to preserve Arabic; when scholars came across words without meaning in the old testament they turned to Arabic most often, which is quite phenomenal.

There’s actually a story of the people in the city, after the life of the Prophet, and this young boy ran up to one of his companions, and the boy said, ‘Oh, the people are saying this, they’re saying that, and changing these words — they’re saying things differently.’ That was the moment when it was like, ‘Ok, we have to actually start preserving our language.’ But I’m on a tangent now.

SC: I’m interested though.

AS: Ja, it’s fascinating, because it was the first dictionary as we would recognise one today. The dictionary as we know it was invented by the Muslims, by al-Farahidi, within the generation following the Prophet, because it was so important to preserve the language. Arabic was isolated to the Arabian Peninsula. A lot of people, even today, will say that the Bedouin Arabs have the purest Arabic. It’s an argument, but it’s something that people say, because language changes very quickly in an urban society but it doesn’t change quickly within a family, especially when you have a sacred text that is the pinnacle of that language, and that sacred text is actually an oratory tradition. So the Quran is not a book, the Quran is in fact the oratory tradition. So the word ‘Insaan’ means the intimate one. That intimacy refers to the fact that we are animals who are very intimate with our families, partners, and each other. The spiritual and ethereal connotation of that word is that we are also the only animal that we know that can abstract, and our capacity for abstraction is our capacity to know God. So the word Insaan, meaning the intimate one, refers to the breadth of our intimacy; both our intimacy with each other, with the world, as well as with God. And it is through this intimacy that we have with each other and the with the world, according to Muslim scholars and mystics, that we attain intimacy with God.

This is a very distinct path from the Judea-Christian understanding of knowing God and becoming close to God. Even though Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are one religion, as the Quran says it is, Christians take a very monastic look at the world. Because that was the position that Jesus took, given the lavish, destructive imperial environment in which Jesus came, which was the early Roman Empire.

So the Judea-Christian ethos is essentially, ‘skirt the world — go around the world — to get to God.’ Islam says go through the world to get to God, and that everything is a manifestation of the consciousness of God, including our own consciousness. In the Quran, God says, ‘I’m closer to you than your jugular vein,’ which means, I’m closer to you than your very own consciousness. It implies that our consciousness is under the ownership and within the consciousness of God, which is just beautiful, and intimate. My hope for this show — within my own limited, silly artsy way — is to express what I can of that notion, given the materials that I have access to and the mediums that I am capable of using. It’s the reason why sound is one of the most important parts of the show, because sound is perhaps the most abstract form of expression. I can paint something and it will always look like something — the painting itself will be a square or a rectangle or a circle or whatever — but sound itself is sort of the height of abstraction within artistic forms.

SC: Sound can also be very personable. Thuthuka [Sibisi], when we had the equivalent of this conversation about his work, spoke about his process for a project, where he’d get someone to sing a lullaby that they had heard growing up. The person listening would receive that sound — it would touch their body, move through them, and part of it would locate itself within the body. The listener would then sing it again, in their own corporeal way. So they hear it, locate it, and pass it forward, but differently. The reason I’m thinking about that is because, I guess, before it gets located in the body, it does arrive as a thing that exists external to the body. There’s this interim period…

AS: I think it actually vibrates the body itself. There are theories that say that everything is vibration, and we can measure the vibration of colours compared to other colours. So we look at art and experience a vibration because the combination or arrangement of colours vibrate and have an effect on our consciousness and on our bodies. It’s why, when you look the image of an 8 x 4 metre painting on a phone, it’s very different to standing in front of the painting, because the matter itself is vibrating a frequency or series of frequencies which resonate with our being.

The same is true with sound. The kind of abstraction I’m getting at, even our capacity for abstraction, is what makes us so capable of the concept of existing within a consciousness beyond our own. That’s why I’m starting with sound. Sometimes it just transports us to a place. My hope is that the sounds I’ve made, combined with the vibration of the colours and the scale of the work, will transport whomever is in the space and will hopefully inspire a genuine response.

SC: You’ve been recording on an old cassette-tape, on a machine that was developed in the ‘80s — it was the first thing you began working on… But I’ve noticed, in general, that you have a propensity for analogue. Is that because you like the glitches and scratches, or the process of it, or the way it archives sound? What’s the draw?

AS: I am drawn toward analogue things, but I use both constantly — analogue and digital. The reality is that digital images, much like digital sounds, are recorded in a very different way. The saturation that you get from an analogue cassette-tape and the instant EQ that you get from analogue tape… You don’t get that from digital. I’m also drawn to the reality that this song or image or whatever is actually recorded — as you say, archived — onto a physical medium that I can hold in my hand and say, ‘It’s on here.’ There’s something really beautiful about that.

SC: That it feels more tangible or visible in some way?

AS: Yes, but the sound is also totally different. I would have to work very hard on a computer to come anywhere near close to the feeling that tape gives you. It’s about the feeling. The sincerity and integrity of the medium lends itself so beautifully to telling stories of intimacy, and I suppose there’s also an aspect of nostalgia. We are all nostalgic for something. It is the belief of the Muslims that there was a day, referred to in the Quran — people call it the day of Alasto birobicoom — when all the souls reached the point at which we were destined for earth, and God asked us all, ‘Am I not your lord?’ And all the souls agreed, ‘Yes you are.’ So one might say that we all have a nostalgia for the heavenly abode from which we came. That is an explanation, for many, as to the rates of depression, sadness, discomfort, and unease that human beings or Insaan feel on earth. So I found it fitting that the abstract moment that I was composing was to be recorded on this object of nostalgia; one that also shapes the sound, makes it softer, more approachable. There’s a little bit of fuzz to it, a bit of hiss to the tape, a softness that’s inherent in using that medium to record.

SC: Talking about such nostalgia reminds me of waiting for M-net Open Time — the noise that the TV makes when you switch it on. The absence of that noise, say, on a laptop, can feel quite cold sometimes.

AS: It is. Like when you started a movie back in the ‘90s, there was this ‘chooka-cha-chook-chook’ sound that the cassette made when it went into the VCR. The first thing you experience is, ‘pfffffffff’ from the speakers, right? As the ‘pffff’ starts to blend in with the sound of music or people speaking, we drown out the ‘pfffffffff’; our ears become immune.

SC: What instruments were you recording?

AS: I have four guitars with me, and I use all four: an acoustic six-string guitar; an electric six-string guitar; an acoustic/electric four-string bass; and an electric six-string lap-slide.

SC: And you’re using those interchangeably, to produce something that can be looped?

AS: It’s not a loop. It’s a unique, forty-five minute composition. It doesn’t feel verse, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus, bridge, chorus, end; it doesn’t follow four bars of this and then four bars of that, then four bars of this, then four bars of that, and we’re done — the bass ain’t gonna drop, is what I’m saying. It builds and flows to a place.

SC: But you were also saying you don’t want it to be like an arts soundscape, right?

AS: Interestingly it does have an element of that. Technically speaking, it’s a contemporary work of classic music, in its composition. If you played what I’m playing on guitar, on cello or violin, you would definitely not think, ‘Oh, this was a pop song that was converted,’ you know what I mean? Because of the structure and nature of the song, it sort of falls between three categories: soundtrack — because of the space in which it’s being used — contemporary classic music, and ambient music, but ambient music is often void of complexity. Key changes, for example. This song has a key change in it. This is not necessarily something that one experiences much in ambient music, which usually features a drone of some sort. It has one note which underlies the whole experience, and it attempts to create a space, like Brian Eno with his famous first album, that basically invented ambient music, called Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978). Just brilliant! He uses the sound, the exact tone, when they’re beeping in — ‘dee dung dung: your flight is about to depart.’ So ja, it bridges contemporary classic music, ambient, and soundtrack.

SC: You’re working across sound, sculpture, painting, poetry… They’re all viewed as part of the same whole, so it feels like there’s an experiential quality that you’re bringing to the table — maybe not cathartic but something that is certainly moving?

AS: I feel that if art doesn’t move you it’s decorative. I would say that’s the distinction between art and decoration. One is inherently moving, whether you understand it or not. Like on a subconscious level. The things I consider to be art move me. The same is true with music. I think we need to make a distinction between music and social media soundtrack, because nowadays we don’t have much music being played to young people. Young people are experiencing the lowest common denominator on social media. We’re experiencing the same shift in art, where an artist will say, ‘I took material A and made it look like material M and therefore it’s art.’ I just don’t feel like that’s sufficient in depth to move people. It’s interesting, but for me it’s not art.

SC: But we’re talking in terms of what you want from your work?

AS: I want people to have genuine experiences from my work, whether negative or positive, but a sincere moment with themselves. We have a very loud world, particularly for people who live in urban areas. My hope is that the music and the works themselves bring a sense of quietness and a sense of solace and peace within people, regardless of what they believe, where they’re from, or what language they speak. Yes, I’m a Muslim, but my work is not specific or particular… It’s not iconography, you know? My language is nature and beauty.

I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty lately, because sometimes my works are shown and I’ll ask my gallerists about the feedback that they received. Sometimes they’ll say, ‘Ah, they loved it, and it sold,’ and I’ll say, ‘Ok, but tell me the range of feedback?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, some people say that it’s too beautiful, that it’s too pretty,’ you know? I’ve been thinking about that because I’ve noticed that in a post-Duchampian world, where anything can be considered art, the term ‘tension’ is very much at the forefront for those who went to art school.

SC: Like opposing forces or opposites?

AS: Like there needs to be tension in order for the artwork to be successful or complete; that if something is beautiful or pretty it’s thrown into this category of being ‘decorative’. That fascinates me, because I feel as though we’re at a turning point, when people are not so sceptical of beauty anymore.

SC: How would you define beauty?

AS: I think it was Cezanne, or one of those masters, who said that nature is the baseline for beauty, and everything is then compared to the beauty of nature, because humans find solace in nature. You rarely find someone leave nature in a worse state than when they came in, right? Everybody complains about this level of anxiety and tension in their lives and then you look at art schools and they preach tension. It’s as though the art world is suspicious of beauty, and I find that very strange. There’s this direct correlation between the aesthetic that is taught and the aesthetic of the inner-reality that we inhabit.

SC: When I think of nature I also think of tension, though. There are a lot of forces happening concurrently, all the time — visible and invisible. I also sense tension in your work, so I guess I’m curious about the implied distinction between tension and beauty?

AS: There was an inherent ugliness in the work of post-war artists. Granted, post-war is hectic. When you look, there’s this anger and ugliness that is intentional in the work. I feel like that has become the baseline tension, where, in order to complete the contrast or dynamic bandwidth of a particular artwork, there has to be this ugliness and then this relief, at the same time. Whereas I suppose I strive for the utmost beauty that I can produce.

SC: The quartz work that you’ve just made has both beauty and tension, in the sense that you know you’re looking at a rock, or a few rocks, and that they’re weighty, but that they’re also very light — there are these rounded edges, this poofiness… So there’s a tension there, for me, in terms of what you know of the material versus what you’re looking at.

AS: But there isn’t an inherent ugliness, and I suppose that’s what I’m getting at. When I get such feedback I think, how interesting that people expect there to be a level of ugliness. That you can say something is too pretty or beautiful. That implies that there needs to be a sprinkle of ugliness. It tells me a lot about where people are, within themselves, for the work to resonate in such a way that they demand ugliness.

SC: And is that a common response regardless of where your work is shown?

AS: No, that’s only in the Western world. The more west you go, the more ugliness it needs. That’s not a commentary on the West, but that has been my experience. When I do residencies, the further west I go, the less they understand it, and the more they imply that it needs more ugliness. The further east I go, the more they understand it and appreciate its beauty. Obviously these are generalisations, because there are definitely people who love and resonate very deeply with my work in the West. But in the Middle East nobody has ever told me that it’s too beautiful or that it needs to be more ugly. I think in the East people were more concerned with conquering their inner ugliness in private and sharing an optimistic beauty communally.

SC: So at what point did you start working with rock, because as a material, rock in its raw form is pretty rough. It’s both beautiful and ugly. How did you come to work with rock, and what was the approach?

AS: As a child growing up on the farm, amongst my mom’s hippie community, I’d always loved crystals and stones — the natural forms that rocks take or end up taking. “Soft as Stone” was the first time that I began working with rocks. I crushed up gemstones like malachite and sandstone ochre, in order to derive a pigment. But as a child I was obsessed with crystals and I feel like that’s where my fascination began. I honestly never thought that it would be possible, or feasible, to make gemstone sculptures, so I started sculpting sandstone and made this metre-and-a-half tall curtain called Earthen Curtain (2022). After that I found someone who deals in gemstones, wholesale. I was able to get gemstones like rose quartz, malachite, clinazoisite and sodalite — all these amazing stones — at wholesale price. It made it more affordable, more reasonable, to work with. One thing led to another and here I am, sculpting foraged quartz from NIROX. It’s amazing that you have this bounty of stone here. Not only quartz but shale, dolomite… I plan to make sculptures with all three varieties of stone available.

I went to Waldorf, where they start teaching you how to sculpt wood in like Grade 4. I was making eggs and owls and all sorts of little things when I was young. I feel like that stuck with me. As I became more immersed, stone was a no brainer. It’s just so weighty. But it was quite something to start working with stone. I quickly realised this was not clay. Whatever I remove is gone. It’s a reductive experience, so it’s very daunting to just wonder into stone sculpting. You have to have an idea of what you want to sculpt, and to know that that stone is going to allow you to fulfil that idea. If you bought a particular stone — and they’re not cheap; transportation is not cheap — then there’s a lot of pressure. If you don’t see it through then you’re just storing time and money in these stones. It becomes even more challenging when you’re using gemstones, because they rarely come in blocks. You’re sculpting a foraged object, which means the possibilities for what you can do are very limited. I feel like the human brain can’t necessarily map foraged stones to the extent that it can a block or cube or rectangle.

SC: Your gemstone works seem more singular. You’re working with an individual stone, its form or shape; an area cut away into a straight vertical...

AS: I know the work you’re talking about, based on your hand gestures… You gave me a straight line and a curve. That work’s called Compass (2022). It has a line, a curve, a finished, and an unfinished side; these four polarities that I thought was really interesting. It’s quite difficult to take foraged stone, sculpt and polish parts of it to completion, and leave parts completely raw, and still have that be an interesting object of beauty and speculation and narrative. That was the goal with Compass: how do I leave this raw Clinazoisite crystal — which is a very rare kind of tourmaline cluster stone — in its raw state? It’s like, do as little as you can for as much as you can.

SC: In those works your approach is quite different to, say, the two recent stone-stack works.

AS: Yes, the stone-stacks are definitely a departure from the monolith or the singular.

SC: They also feel closer to the paintings.

AS: In their layered-ness?

SC: Yes, and the capacity of different forms to hold different forms. With your paintings, it’s about the meeting point of varying shades of colour, where that line between becomes a meniscus of sorts… For me, that’s also happening with the stone-stacks. Then again, you’re not playing with variation… Well, there’s the variation around the part that cups, that holds the next shape, but those shapes are not centrifugal. They’re gravitational. The force field is downward, rather than outward.

AS: It is weighted. It’s interesting because the shape of the stone that sits on top is completely dependent on the form of the stone below. There’s this relationship between each stone that I find both exhausting to produce and also really beautiful. Because the line that is created between those two stones and the way that the many lines interact is also a big part of the work. That is a challenge in-and-of itself, especially when you add the foraged nature of the work into the soup.

SC: They remind me a bit of Dali’s clocks.

AS: I’ve heard that.

SC: I think it’s almost inevitable. That association or form is kind of seared into one’s head.

AS: It is, you know, surrealist. I never thought of it that way, but I am accelerating time. So there’s a direct correlation to Dali’s clock — I’m accelerating time to the tune of that clock, so to speak. But that was never the inspiration. I was actually on a residency in New York. There was a man who kept talking about public art, specifically land-based art. I don’t know why, but I woke up one morning and the exact image of this sculpture just appeared. I was like, ‘Woah, those stones look melted. Those stones look like the stones on all the mountain tops, by the rivers and by the sea, at the moment at which the sun is about to engulf the earth.’ And I thought, ‘I wonder if it’s even physically possible for me to make that?’ And, ‘If I made a small one, is it scalable? Can I make it bigger? How does this even work?’ Because you’re sculpting something that you cannot see. That’s why it’s so intense. It’s easy to have a thing here and to sculpt it, and it’s done, but when you take object A and object B and put the one on top of the other, and I ask you to sculpt the bottom of object B according to the top of object A, you think, ‘Where do I even begin?’ It’s sculpting the invisible.

I think all my work also has a sensuality to it, which is the correlation between natural beauty, love, and spirituality. Beauty is a spiritual experience. There’s this little trinity of elements that exists, whether I’m talking about climate change, personal, or ethereal matters. When I look at the stone stacks, even though there is a narrative, they just feel soft and sensual. There’s a calmness to them, which is in direct conflict with the narrative of the work. I suppose that’s where that tension comes in, because it’s such a violent moment that I’m encapsulating. At the same time, it’s presented as this really beautiful, soft, surrealist fluffy cloud — pillows, bread, marshmallows… I’ve heard them all.

SC: Yesterday you spoke about the difference between working with sandstone and quartz, particularly with the finish and the polishing — how sandstone has this gritty surface…

AS: From beginning to end, it’s a completely different beast. You can beat sandstone left, right, and centre. Same with marble. Same with granite. Because their internal structure isn’t so brittle, you know? Sculpting quartz is like sculpting glass. It just wants to shatter. And it shatters really nicely, which is great, because when you’re using a hammer and chisel you don’t have to hit it so hard. But when it comes time to cut it, it’s overwhelmingly hard. Then, when it comes time to make small movements and changes, it takes an extraordinary finesse to know exactly what’s going to pop, and when it’s going to pop. Then there’s the added hazard of silica dust being life threatening. You have to wear a mask and be very careful with your clothes, when you stop working and have to blow everything down and wash everything off — it’s a very intense process. And then, as you were saying, when you start polishing… You know, if you polish sandstone it’s just so easy. Marble is so soft that you can change its shape with a cheese grater. If you try to do that on glass you’re just going to scratch it, maybe. Glass is probably the best comparison to quartz. It’s really the closest thing. On the other hand, it also polishes like glass. You’d never be able to get marble or sandstone to the same finish, but you can get quartz to a glass-like finish, and that is so beautiful; to be able to polish something to the point where it reflects the world around it. Especially given the narrative of the work, that’s a really powerful and beautiful anecdote.

SC: And have you worked with dolomite before? When it comes to the large work you’re planning, is that all going to be fresh territory?

AS: Totally. I have no idea what that stone is like and I can’t wait to dive into it. I feel like I develop a personal relationship with every stone that I sculpt, because I’m humbled by the stone, you know? It’s a relationship where I’m just kindly asking it if it would please do this. And that’s when things get really interesting because I have to surrender to that, and allow it to just be whatever it’s going to be.

SC: For that work, you found a boulder that’s about 800 kilograms and by the time you’re done with it you’re expecting it to weigh about 400. Could you walk us through your plans for it?

AS: This idea started in a different place. I had an idea and now I have two. So this will be the first iteration of the idea. With this particular sculpture there are many unknowns, but it stems from an artwork that I made in 2021. It was a darkroom light painting, made with sand and light and photo paper and chemicals. There was an augmented reality aspect embedded in the work. It looked like the milky way, spread across two panels. There were stars made of sand. It looked as though the stars, or sand, were falling to the ground when you pointed your phone at the wall, and on the ground were these two piles of black sand.

They were my first sand sculptures. I’d never seen people sculpt with sand before. I loved it, but the logistics of putting the work outdoors stumped me for a couple of weeks. I came to the conclusion that I’d try and see how it goes. The idea behind the sculpture is the hourglass. That’s the jumping point. We all have a specific amount of time in this space, on this plane, on this earth, and we can see that as an hourglass, so to speak, because everything kind of washes away. Or at least, the material of us will. Expanding the narrative of this particular exhibition — because it’s an open ended and broad subject (human beings and love and forgetfulness) — the centre of the exhibition is in the Covered Space and focuses on the heart. So I have the painting, which is of the waveform of my heartbeat, then I have the sculpture. Both are very much about time.

SC: Is that the painting that’s being horizontally de-threaded?

AS: No. The de-threaded, picked-out paintings are more related to Chapters 1 and 3, because one of them is sunrise and the other is sunset.

SC: You bought a whole bunch of platinum slag that’s going to form a pyramidic structure at the base, on top of which the dolomite rock will sit, right?

AS: Yes. It relates to the local mines as I will be using platinum leaf mined here, processed in the east and then sold back to us via the UK — it’s funny. And the dolomite relates to some of the oldest human remains found here. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s like 2.3 billion years old? Which is exceptional, because that puts it among some of the oldest stones that we know. The dolomite started its life as coral reef. Chert formations in the Dolomite created these thin roofs through which hominids and animals would fall and be preserved. So there’s a lot of integrity in this body of work: I’m using all three rock types found here, I’m referencing the Cradle of Humankind directly, the polluted river directly, in the video and sound work. All three sound works have elements of NIROX incorporated into them, as well as my own intuitive expression of my time here, and the inner reality that I am expressing physically — matters of the heart and spirituality and more.

SC: What I enjoy about the painting is the sense of this blossoming. When I look at it I picture a close-up of an orchid.

AS: I love that. I can’t wait to hear more about how people see that, you know? Going back to what you said earlier, I definitely feel like that work has tension. It reminds me of this particular verse in the Quran, which talks about how the universe will be rolled up like a scroll. Its interpreted as it will either be folded up or rolled up as a tapestry or a scroll, because the words — like I said, Arabic is deep and the breadth is wide; words can mean different things given different contexts,—but it’s there and it’s really beautiful because it parallels what scientists have discovered, which is that at a certain point, the reverse of the big bang will ensue. As everything expanded, everything will once again contract.