Portfolio: Bilal Mohamed
Spring (I can’t keep myself from evil), 2021, gel transfer and oil pastel on naturally-dyed raw Turkish cotton, 30 x 20 in.
[Image description: A geometric collage featuring green tones with flecks of red and blue. Several sections of the collage are ripped in texture. Top center is a large image of a woman’s head. A hand in front of her offers a cigarette. Her eyes are censored with a red rectangle.]
Cycles play out in all our lives: in our patterns, plans, and habits. They allow us to anticipate where or who we may be tomorrow, or a year from now. Our routines and assumptions of predictability are comforts, but our comforts can betray us. While many of us avoid any disruption to these comforts, artist and writer Bilal Mohamed embraces it, making work— exemplified by his series Tales of the Four Seasons— about the relationship among cycles, disorientation, and the perception of self.
Summer (As seasons change...), 2021, gel transfer and oil pastel on naturally-dyed raw Turkish cotton, 30 x 20 in.
[Image description: A collage of geometric shapes and warmer tones. Two figures— a copy of the same man smoking— feature in the top center. One wears a red, patterned shirt and the other’s shirt is covered in writing. Their eyes are censored with blue rectangles. Beneath their image is a typewriter on a stool.]
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Mohamed creates episodic collages with thick, layered gel transfers and oil pastel, rendering situations summoned by the cycles of the seasons through each composition’s aesthetic storytelling and few words. Mohamed began the series during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the largest disruptions we’ve collectively faced. He found inspiration in Éric Rohmer’s quartet of films, “Tales of the Four Seasons.” Mohamed related to the ways in which the characters made decisions based on faith and morality— mirroring, he felt, his experience as an African Muslim in the West, and the duality of sacrifice and justification made in regards to his own faith. His collages offer disorienting scenes of liminality. The fleshy texture and intricate imagery beckon us to fall into each composition and its story of a season. The series’ narrative feels familiar but also strange, sparking a desire to discover the cues we might be missing and to learn the full story.
Autumn (If they die by dawn... find me weeping in the moonlight.), 2021, gel transfer and oil pastel on naturally-dyed raw Turkish cotton, 30 x 20 in.
[Image description: A collage of muted tones sectioned into various-sized squares. Flashes of blue and yellow disrupt the composition. Three faces appear across the collage, their eyes censored by yellow rectangles.]
In Islam, there is the concept of Al-Ghaib, or the “unseen”; the Qur’an refers to it as the realm of the divine and of non-human creation. The hidden and liminal space that holds the answers to spiritual secrets. It is, ultimately, withheld from us, remaining the realm beyond our own understanding and only for Allah to know. Reading the Holy Qur’an itself evokes a feeling of the unseen, as the scripture’s poetics draw us to revisit it over and over again, to find a new layer or changed interpretation that further develops or challenges what we think we know. In viewing Mohamed’s collages, I feel a similar phenomenon crafted by his material choices and compositions. They beckon a return, a cycle of viewing and analyzing that yields new perspectives on the narrative or a different mood than before. Together, the works require faith in the series to tell its story. As with the unseen, I cannot point directly to a specific message, but know through feeling that it is there.
Winter (I’m telling you stories. Trust me.), 2021, gel transfer and oil pastel on naturally-dyed raw Turkish cotton, 30 x 20 in.
[Image description: A four-panel collage featuring predominantly black and white tones with hints of pink and blue. Figures in black appear at the top of the piece, while a figure riding a bicycle enters the image from the right. On the left, a woman in a crowd looks over her shoulder. Hand-written cursive in the middle and bottom right reads, "I'm telling you stories. Trust me."]
In Tales of the Four Seasons, Mohamed employs a disorienting effect in an effort to disrupt his perception of self and invoke the benefits disruption of cycles can bestow upon all of us. In conversation, Mohamed paraphrases a piece of popular wisdom he kept in mind during his process; “First, you learn, then you become arrogant, then you learn again and realize you know very little.” When we invest in a narrative, we expect to walk away with a more thorough understanding of the subject than when we first approached it. Yet stories presented through abstraction offer the blessing that is the realization that we understand less, creating a cycle of return and deeper analysis, free of the expectation that meaning throw itself at us. Mohamed’s collages act as a reminder that art is not a passive experience— Tales of the Four Seasons is a participatory piece that requires our mental presence. In allowing ourselves to be disoriented by each season’s narrative, we experience liminality and, perhaps, a whisper of the unseen.
— Yasmine Kasem, artist