Review: Fazal Rizvi's Dubai exhibition is a rewarding trek through Gilgit-Baltistan

In his third solo exhibition at Dubai’s Grey Noise gallery, Fazal Rizvi is presenting traces of his experience in trekking through the mountains of Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan . The region spans more than 50 peaks rising above 7,000 metres. It is home to some of the highest mountain ranges in the world, including Karakoram and the western Himalayas. With some active engagement on the part of the viewer, the works presented provide insights into an area rich with mythological, geopolitical and colonial history. Rizvi alludes to these facets through props, risoprints and collected images, all while unpacking the nature of the image in itself, in both material and conceptual turns. In a way, the works being presented were conceived in the trail of a single stone tumbling down a glacial moraine. “In 2018 I went on a short trek to witness a glacier. I was with one of my oldest friends, Sohail,” Rizvi reveals in one of the typewritten pages pinned to the gallery wall. “At some point we started hearing a sound. It was the sound of moving earth. At first I panicked, thinking that the rocks may gather more force, making their way towards us. "But within seconds we spotted this one small rock, making its way down the very face of the mountain that it had possibly broken away from.” Rizvi evokes the sound the stone made in an abutting page, with the onomatopoeic kar, karr and karhs typed in sloped and stacked forms. The artist returned to the area in 2020, as part of his residency project at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. His aim was to rediscover and record the sound that tumbling stone had made. “I set out on a journey to record the sounds of glaciers and their surrounding sites,” he writes on another pinned page. “I was chasing the sound of that falling rock. That rock that I had lost track of in 2018, as it made its way down the face of the mountain. The rock that got lost amongst all the other rocks that too had broken off and fallen at some point.” However, returning to his studio with the sound files, he found they contained “nothing of what I had listened to". Rizvi considered this exercise “a failure of listening". But there were other materials that Rizvi had accidentally gathered that would become the foundation of the work he would show at the end of his residency in 2021, and now at Grey Noise. During his trek, his phone camera had inadvertently turned on, snapping photos. The images were by no means representative of the landscape. Spotty and almost kaleidoscopic, they gave the sensation of looking at a diamond through a microscope. However, it seems that for Rizvi, they provided a better documentation of his experience than any of his sound recordings. It is this that inspired the exhibition’s title: A Mirror in My Pocket. The accidental photographs inspired Rizvi to examine the glaciers and peaks of the Northern Areas of Pakistan in visual terms. He began printing the images using a risograph, a machine in between a photocopier and screen printer. Risographs print one colour at a time, requiring pages to be manually re-fed into the machine. The results can be surprising but nonetheless visually striking. Rizvi seemingly sought to deconstruct the images he had accidentally taken across several colours, evoking the mesmerising shimmer of the Sun and snow as perhaps seen in the heights of Gilgit-Baltistan. In the typewritten pages, Rizvi underscores why he chose to work with a risograph for the project, alluding to the process of image making much like a trek, where a person hopes to achieve a certain vantage point. "Riso means ‘ideal' in Japanese,” he writes. “But it breaks. It shakes. It shifts. It quivers. It builds up, one colour at a time. "With each added layer, it moves closer to the image you desire. With each added layer, it drifts further away too. "Sometimes close, sometimes not close enough. So what you see here before you, is a riso machine approaching an image. An ideal image.” The risoprints are laid horizontally across a wooden strip, arranged as if in a spectrum. The typewritten pages are pinned above, gradually revealing Rizvi’s experiences in the mountains as the prints approach their "ideal" form. However, Gilgit-Baltistan’s geography is interesting even beyond its high altitudes. The region borders China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, and its Pakistani counterparts. As such, it comes to surprise that the history of the region ripples beyond Pakistan, with histories and mythologies shared and told across neighbouring countries. Rizvi touches on this by highlighting an ancient Sanskrit story. "Ram and Ravan, were at war. Ram's brother gets injured in conflict. So Ram sends Hanuman to the Himalayas, to look for this magical herb called sanjeevani which would cure his brother," Rizvi writes. "Sanjeevani means immortality. Hanuman flew to the Himalayas, looking for sanjeevani. "It is said that upon reaching there, he did not find the magical herb, or that the herb was not revealing itself in order to be saved from its extraction. So Hanuman uprooted a whole mountain, and carried it back with him.” Besides detailing the story, Rizvi presents various images related to Hanuman’s uprooting of the mountain, depicted in various ways across cultures. He also alludes to the colonial presence of the region, presenting stills from the 1924 film Tragedy of Everest by Capt John Noel, detailing how “Noel, in one of his earlier journeys into Tibet, had rubbed boot polish on his face to mix in and disguise to enter the region". Rizvi's research culminated in the Netherlands with a performance piece, where he bought a large print of the Himalayas online and proceeded to mask off the mountain range. There are photographs of the performance at Grey Noise, as well as close-ups of the props that Rizvi used to allude to his research. A monkey tail, for instance, is pinned to the wall – in reference to Hanuman. There are stacks of boot polish, as well as potted plants that reflect on the sanjeevani. Rizvi’s use of a purchased print also touches on the commercialisation of the region’s culture worldwide. Other artworks in the exhibition also do this, namely close up images of Himalayan pink salts, which the artist licked before taking photographs of. The works are titled Licking Salts Won’t Heal You , and address the belief that the pink salts – which have become used worldwide in foods and as lamps – have medicinal properties. There are also stills from a video advertisement for a palm-sized calcite pyramid on Etsy. The advertisement details it as a symbol of "spiritual ascension, unity, oneness, wholeness and completion.” A Mirror in My Pocket, which is running at Grey Noise until July 20, provides a thought-provoking and investigative body of work that comes to life only with active audience engagement. The exhibition echoes many of the themes Rizvi presented in his previous two exhibitions at the gallery, namely the act of documenting, recreating and remembering. His 2022 show, The Sherbet Project, revolved around Rizvi’s efforts to recreate a syrup his late maternal aunt would make. His 2019 exhibition, How Do We Remember, explored his grandmother’s struggles with dementia before her death. The show featured a dimensionally accurate recreation of her room. Visitors were given a pamphlet of instructions and were required to activate the installation themselves. In that way, too, A Mirror in My Pocket seems very much in line with Rizvi’s artistic practice. The artist is less concerned with directly providing his findings, and instead provides traces that beckon the viewer to follow in his steps, to investigate for themselves and to create new threads of meaning. A Mirror in My Pocket is running at Grey Noise until July 20