Rehearsal

2020 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

1:05 minutes

Aziz Hazara

---

Youthfulness and gestures of play are central to Aziz Hazara’s practice. The artist uses these mechanisms as a lens to give pause to the behaviours of children as foreboding reflections of the enduring and all-pervasive effects of conflict and war. In the short video Rehearsal the artist documents two young Afghan boys imitating the guttural rattling of an automatic rifle, play-shooting in the field in front of them, and swivelling as if to suggest the gun is mounted. Their expressions are focused and deadpan, one taking aim and the other acting as the faithful machinery. They are both weapon and wielder. While this form of play is not unique to Afghanistan or other war-torn nations, the eerie accuracy of the motions the boys make points to learned behaviour, experience, and witness, questioning the innocence of their gestures. What are they waiting for, or, as the title asks, what are they rehearsing for?

---

Aziz Hazara works across various media such as video installation, photography, sound, and sculpture. Growing up in Afghanistan, and having recently exiled in Germany, his poetics and mechanisms of representation intend to address the sensibility of what it is to live in a war zone; where the body and the landscape are besieged, and yet, inherently at an outbreak. Hazara’s practice has become pivotal to explorations of moving image as a medium that registers social and historical memory. His practice addresses legacies of American warfare and imperialism, in particular in the context of Afghanistan, wherein war and an age of global islamophobia changed the country and the world.

---

Colors:

---

• young_person.n.01
• war.n.01
• conflict.n.01
• violence.n.01
• body.n.01