Essay by Sathyanand Mohan (PhD)

In the Ruins of the Present

In the Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin writes that “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule.”¹ He proposes that historiography is largely conceived as an account of teleological progress, a narrative of victory marches and the spoils of war (which, he observes, trample underfoot those who have been vanquished or left behind). Caught in the wings of this storm, the Angel of History looks back at the catastrophes piling up behind him, at the debris of failed revolutions and wars, trying in vain to make whole what has been broken. Benjamin's reflections, which date from a time of great historical upheavals, continue to remain relevant to this day. Contemporary thought, indelibly stamped by the long list of horrors in the twentieth century, underlines the increasingly carceral nature of governance all over the world, as well as the ways in which ideologies of progress have often gone hand in hand with totalitarian belief systems. These introductory remarks frame my reading of Zakkir Hussain’s works in this short text, in which I focus on a few prominent elements that have remained consistent in his oeuvre, namely the logic of fragmentation which structures his visual language, the economies of objects and bodies in the pictorial space, and the ways in which these elements articulate contemporary sociopolitical anxieties about an oppressive and inegalitarian present, but also seek to think through the impasses of this predicament.

Hussain presents a visual world of packed spaces teeming with incident and detail, which demands from the viewer a methodical, patient and readerly approach. The picture plane is a space of discontinuities and ruptures, of unstable compressions of scale and perspective, and its governing logic is fragmentation and disintegration. Tableau-like, the diegetic space is also analogous to a proscenium, where theatrical spectacles of destruction are staged in its amalgamations of objects and body parts. Hussain utilises a recurring set of visual elements and motifs which make up what one might call a rudimentary grammar of forms, which gain new meaning through a logic of recombination and recontextualisation. In Hussain’s case, this formal logic is pushed to extremes in order to present an alienated object-world that has lost whatever benign meanings it might have had and progressively assumes ever more sinister and terrifying connotations now tied to its capacity to maim or enslave the body in innumerable ways. Objects acquire an independent existence of their own and become prosthetic organs which further the task of degradation or dismemberment—the hand is detached from the body and floats freely in the picture plane, engendering phantasmatic composites of its own; pincers take the place of the hand or the beak; the blacksmith’s anvil, in its inert thingness, signals a capacity for blunt force, but also gains quasi-organic or corporeal attributes as an index of its place within the economies of labour that are indicated everywhere in the paintings; metal girdings fuse together the yoke and the human in order to propel the machines of degradation at the centre of this universe. These displacements and object-body hybrids that they create allude to the ceaseless cycles of predatory violence and humiliation that is inflicted upon ordinary people—the everyman or woman—in Hussain's paintings. In this text I will examine how these visual strategies, as well as an ever evolving set of significations that they make possible, are deployed in these works in order to allegorise overlapping forms of exclusion—the economic exploitation of labourers and the working poor within the neoliberal world order, as well as their systemic political disenfranchisement through their othering on the basis of ethno-fascist ideals of religious and cultural belonging.

We could draw a parallelism between the structure of Hussain’s visual language—its punctured and layered surfaces, the exaggerations of scale and perspective, the erasures and overpainting—and the metamorphoses that are staged through it, where forms are disassembled and reassembled in ever novel configurations. The fragmentations of form and space endemic to Modernism, for example, was understood by thinkers such as Adorno as indicative of a larger historical loss of any sense of wholeness or totality, produced as much by the bureaucratised atrocities of the early 20th century, as it was by the ruptures set in motion by the accelerated temporalities of capitalist modernity. In works such as Prolonged Hours of Disguised Situations (2011–2014) and Pieta and Other Works (2010–2011), the picture plane becomes a graph of processes through which this loss is metaphorically presented—as the churning of a diabolical machine that breaks down and spits out the remnants of bodies which are strewn across the diegetic plane like the gutted and eviscerated carcasses in an abattoir, their entrails and lungs, bones and teeth concatenated into grisly assemblages, the sport of some cruel demiurge who presides over these proceedings on plinths cobbled together out of these fragments. Here the exercise of power, while fundamentally irrational, is often presented as still being tied to a logic of production. While there are certainly echoes of the penal colony or the labour camp in these depictions, these spaces also create mutations and freaks, particularly in works such as The Procrustean Bed (2017), and are the product of a narrative universe ruled by a capricious law where the boundaries between things and the spaces that they occupy are porous and shifting, and which is presented pictorially as the breakdown of visual legibility itself. One could perhaps argue that this opaque pictorial surface symbolically enacts the invisibility of the nameless and faceless people who are the victims of economic and political violence everywhere and who make up the primary subjects of Hussain’s work. It depicts a world where objectification is complete, and where power operates by estranging the body from itself and by making it but one thing among other things, stripped of subjectivity and agency.

This is amplified through Hussain’s use of repetition where the instrumentality of the violence is underlined. In purely formal terms it is deployed in order to create the busy and packed spaces of the picture plane through the proliferation of visual elements which parallel and mirror but also devour and cancel each other. Repetition also works through displacement and inversion where formally equivalent elements exchange places—the bird’s beak mutates into a pincer, the umbrella handle turns into a meathook upon which the remnants of bodies are hung. In another register, in works such as Apartments with Three Human Figures (2008), it operates more directly through enumeration and aggregation; forms are piled one on top of another, the debris of lost or thwarted futures metaphorically represented through the serial accumulation of quotidian objects such as the dress or the house. Here the human is attached to and dwarfed by this excess, an appendage crushed under the weight of the aspirations and dreams that it has birthed. Some elements feature more often than others in these latter aggregates—the dress, the house, beds, the branches of a tree—most of which could be said to signify the comfort of the commonplace, everyday world, whose meanings are nevertheless inverted. For example, the dress might be seen as a spectral double of the body, or its remains after life has been extracted from it by the machine. The fan, the modular form of the house, the surgical table—the use of these mass-produced objects in the paintings underlines the ways in which power and domination structure the most intimate spheres of domestic life, within the larger, more synoptic view of its working. Bodies hang like strange fruit from the ceiling fan in Dresses, Ceiling Fan and Two Female Figures (2010–2011), perhaps echoing the photographs of family suicides that were common not too long ago in the local newspapers, and the everyday violence and despair that they graphically made visible, of the fate of people “too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement.”²

Hussain's works generally address these experiences of violence and marginalisation as a universal condition, until recently, when more pointed references to contemporary events and issues have begun to make an appearance. Nevertheless, one can observe objects particular to the region scattered through the works, such as the Kerala lamp, which situates these allegories more firmly within a recognisable cultural geography. These objects have specific religious and political connotations deriving from their circulation within the caste and class dynamics of the state, and in their interactions with bodies, make visible the micro-fascisms which inhere in everyday social interactions in the region. Within the symbolic economy of paintings such as Pieta and Other Works (2010–2011) as well as in a more recent set of paintings titled Premonitions of Obliteration (2025), they amplify the insidious relationship between religion and politics in contemporary life, where the lamp also becomes an altar at which the martyrdom of the innocents takes place, and is an instrument of sacrifice through which the operations of power consolidate and mask itself. Hussain observes that religious objects and rituals often hold contradictory significations; on one hand, they symbolise the egalitarianism and brotherhood that all faiths promise, but on the other hand, are also devices through which forms of othering are effected, particularly today, at a time when the ascendancy of ethnoreligious fundamentalisms multiplies social fractures that have been historically prevalent. Echoing Marx, Hussain contends that religion functions in contemporary life as both “the soul of soulless conditions”, and as the “inverted consciousness of the world”, both of which keep those disenfranchised by economic and political power in a state of narcotised passivity.³ While the critique of religion is very much in the foreground of these works, its emancipatory promise appears at various places in Hussain’s oeuvre as the possibility of an opening out of the overdetermined universe that he presents before us.

Lacking the heroic materiality of flesh in the art historical tradition—in displays of painterly virtuosity in its depictions in abattoirs where meat glistens and seduces, or on the cross, where flesh is seized in agony—to which these paintings and drawings continually refer, the bodies here are essentially cartoon-like, and populate a world in which the form’s narrative conventions are often mirrored. The pneumatic écorchés, the rictus of multiple disembodied mouths in works such as Prolonged Hours of Disguised Situations (2014)—these are among the many motifs which refer to, but also invert, the integrity of the body in the art historical traditions which Hussain draws upon, but also holds at a critical distance. The parallelisms of Hussain’s visual language with “minor” forms such as the cartoon (as well as other “marginal” traditions within art history) warrant some brief remarks. As critics have often pointed out, the cartoon universe is often a world of irrational violence that is embodied in the stretchable and mutable physiognomies of its protagonists, and in the strange afterlives of objects and body parts which make up the mise-en-scène. Philosophers such as Adorno and Benjamin have also drawn attention to the ways in which the early Disney films, for example, in their morbid narrative sequences and ghoulish humour, refract the psychoses of modernity, capitalism and fascism and the chaos and destruction that they identify as their metaphysical cognates, as well as the corresponding fragmentation of the self and any sense of the real itself. In a set of serigraphs which Hussain exhibited first in 2008, which include The Supervisor and The Parade, he distils the essential features of the minor genres referred to above (as well as the graphic immediacy of other vernaculars such as the political poster or cartoon) down to their most concentrated and abbreviated form within his oeuvre so far. In Hussain’s estimation, these “imperfect” and “weak” languages gain significance for his practice precisely on account of their distance from the claims of—and made on behalf of—the grand traditions and the historical rationality that they embody.

Some of the smaller works on display in this exhibition, and in particular the set of drawings titled Monologues of the Estranged (2023–25), vividly illustrate Hussain’s longstanding pursuit to fashion a language which can convey the gravity of these concerns with economy and precision. These drawings and prints, where the basic semantic units of the language are explored and mapped, comprise a vital strand of his practice and serve as rehearsals for elements within the larger paintings; they are also meant to stand alone as individual works where recurring themes are made visible in their most rudimentary form. One of the topics that this series obsessively returns to is the attenuation of public morality which follows the compact between religion and politics in contemporary life, and which is staged here through a strategic rereading of iconographic conventions in religious art from India and elsewhere. A number of the more recent works, which include An Imaginative Document of the Desolated (2020), feature citations of fragments and motifs from representations of creation myths in religious art, such as the umbilical cord and the breast, which carry context-dependent meanings within the diegesis. For example, we could relate the figures in these drawings, who are tied to a number of visual elements and motifs through their umbilical cords, to an unlikely source in Hindu creation myths, or more specifically to the iconographic representation of Vishnu dreaming the universe into being. This motif, which Orientalist mythographers have interpreted as a metaphor for the infinite potentiality of autopoiesis through which the universe is sustained in its cycles of creation and destruction, is critically refashioned here, particularly through the ways in which the umbilical cord now originates from, or wraps around the flag—the pre-eminent symbol of hyper-nationalist excess in our times—in order to depict the subverted morality of a world experienced by those excluded from it.

The strategic recourse to some of the visual and narrative conventions of the animated or printed cartoon in Hussain's work, can also be situated in relation to its association with childhood, and the violation of innocence that this implies. One could perhaps propose that in Hussain’s universe innocence is a fundamental, ontological attribute of the human condition; it is both enabling, in that it is the a prioiri which opens up the space of love and regeneration, but it is also that which paralyses action and agency and makes it so easy to be broken. The figures in these works often appear as completely administered entities—victims of the massive apparatus that keep them in a condition of enslavement, with little in the way of any form of resistance. The harsh, even light in these paintings brings everything into visibility all at once, and these are spaces where one cannot hide oneself or one’s shame, except perhaps in its gaps or interstices, where Hussain introduces scenes or motifs of respite and recovery. In the earlier works, these biblical echoes, of a prelapsarian arcadia before its capture by the instruments of power, are scattered everywhere; but one has to look closely for these figures and events which can only be glimpsed, almost as an aside, in the margins, discontinuities and openings within the picture plane—the intimate couple, the rudiments of a tree growing out of a hand, the child’s drawing of a sunrise, now overturned.

These preoccupations become visibly central in the more recent work, where there is a focused engagement with the forms of agency exercised by the oppressed. In the set of paintings titled Premonitions of Obliteration (Performance of the Migrant Labourers in the Unknown Corners of Kochi City) (2025), which we might consider a summation of concerns that Hussain has explored so far in his work, there is a renewed emphasis on the oppressed body, but this time, presented through a series of figures who performatively act out forms of exclusion within a specific cultural location. The motif of violated innocence is again foregrounded here, as we can see from the lifeless baby and the dead bird which the eponymous labourer (and the main protagonist) holds in his hands in what might be understood as a gesture of supplication or surrender, which is at the same time an accusatory gesture thereby making the viewer complicit in these acts of degradation. The central figure also cradles a group of migrants arriving in boats—an image which has acquired critical force in contemporary debates about globalisation—to an unknown fate whose vagaries are delineated with such force here. This gesture can therefore also be read as an act of care, a capacity that Hussain identifies primarily with those who have been disenfranchised and the solidarities that are forged through a shared condition. Other elements, in particular the image of the figures attached to the stillborn and frozen composites that they engender, which was explored in embryonic form in the series of drawings mentioned above, is here—in works such as Light Among Ruins (2025)—extended into a consideration of the precariousness of livelihoods brought about by the historical circumstances that we are living through. In these paintings the excessiveness of the picture plane mirrors the violence of the struggle to claim space in the world itself, and graphically represents the uprootedness and displacement of the protagonists, in which elements literally attempt to find legroom in the diegesis itself.

Hussain's works are allegorisations of a fractured present, the intimations of an eschatological end-time whose coming the works appear to proclaim. The titles of the works often reflect this prophetic register, and echo the millenarianism implicit in its idiosyncratic iconography. His philosophical pessimism looks back to, but also carries forward a long lineage of despair in the twentieth century, but it can also be related to events germane to his own development as an artist. The immediate prehistory of his education as an art student in Kerala, when artistic practice was intimately tied to an emancipatory politics—and the disillusionment of this strand of revolutionary praxis which briefly flared up in the 1980s as it enters the 1990s—-is certainly one (art)historical vector that has shaped the trajectory of his practice in a decisive fashion. Hussain’s works have also been moulded by the other historical exigencies that he has lived through. In particular, we could identify the gradual erosion of utopian aspirations through these years, as a relatively secular polity unravels with the consolidation of majoritarian ideologies in the 1990s, and later the emergence of an art market in the country in the early years of this century propelled almost entirely by the logic of speculation where the critical force of the autonomous art object becomes attenuated through its progressive and complete reification, and today, the disorientations endemic to neoliberalism itself—the ideology that gives the contemporary (art) world its cognitive orientation—and the symptoms of that crisis in the renewed vigour of xenophobic and exclusionary ideologies gaining momentum all over the world.

After the calamities of the early 20^th century, the question of hope, of the future, prompted thinkers to revisit the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. While it is beyond the scope of a short essay such as this to delve into all the complexities of these debates, we could indicate a few ideas which might illuminate aspects of Hussain’s practice to date. Walter Benjamin observes that only the historian (or, extrapolating from that for the purposes of this text, the artist) who can brush history against the grain, “will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”⁴ For Benjamin the ruin was the space where this potential could be glimpsed—as a structure where the foreclosed emancipatory potential of the past still resides, haunted by the weight of the what-might-have-been. Hussain presents to us the ruins of the present itself, within which the promise of a more egalitarian world may be occasionally glimpsed. His work is firmly rooted in the conviction that aesthetic reflection and experience can catalyse the work of remembering, reimagining and rebuilding. Hussain’s contention, that traumatic historical events force a reckoning with, and can prompt the work towards a more just future, is evidenced in an artistic practice which incessantly queries the conditions of its own presence within the historical constellation to which it belongs.

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Sathyanand Mohan has been active as an artist and writer for the last two decades. He is a Professor at the Contemporary Art Practices (CAP) program at Srishti-Manipal Institute of Art Design and Technology, Bangalore. He did a BFA in Painting from the Govt. College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum, an MFA in Printmaking from the M.S. University of Baroda, and a PhD from the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT-Bombay.

Copyright: The Guild