SLADE 2007 SUMMER SHOWS, Naheed Raza, MA,

Baroque Table
String, 100cm x 50cm

Baroque Fold
String 12cm x 6 cm x 8cm

Wall,
Brick, 6ft x 9 inches x 70ft

Artist's Statement

My research is into the notion of excess. Confronted with excess, words and knowledge cannot help us. This not knowing might be the condition in which our capacity to be affected is strongest. I have articulated these concerns through sculpture, video and performance. In all forms I work with, there are certain strategies I use to reveal the excess. In video work this might be using close ups, holding our attention on something for longer than we would normally give it, or revealing contrary functions. Fundamental to this approach is the belief that an internal understanding  can be externalised through sustained vision of the subject and that  'revelation' has a relationship both to duration and privately experienced time or 'contemplation'. When working in sculpture I deliberately use very simple everyday materials, those which are most abundant and about which our knowledge would seem to be certain but whose useful qualities might be exploited to create tense immersive environments. The excessive potential of these household materials is realised and our normal control over them is reversed.

Rendering something excessive or infinite is thus a strategy for ‘emptying out’, not only of the ordinary coding of the subject but also of the way we consider the world and our situation within it.

Recently I have become interested in mass production as a means for achieving this emptying out. According to certain writers, Foucault, Negri and Agamben amongst others, life is becoming increasingly unnatural mediated by new technologies. We are living in a 'biopolitical' age. The normal reaction to this, especially from artists, is resistance or a counter reaction, however a strategy could be developed which would extend or mimic the processes of industry, repetition for example, or production via a removed gesture,  but to different ends. Here the intention would be to extract a variation. This variation might be enough to retrieve what is most human not only in those processes but also in art and our lives. Contrary to Galileo's ideas on the subject, division might be a useful tool for producing the infinite from the finite.
This is the starting for much of my current work.