Galle Fort; Fort Kochi

In Muhanned Cader’s works, landscapes are freed from the rectangular frames within which they are usually imprisoned. As he explains, like cartography, the rigid framing associated with the western art genre we know as landscape painting is ideologically linked to colonial era efforts to order and conquer distant lands and people. In Cader’s works, landscapes take a myriad of alternative shapes, often forming slivers of sea and sky that simultaneously penetrate and float over the surfaces on which they are painted.

Inspiration for this comes from a range of sources: From the shape of found objects to what he imagines was the first frame through which man perceived the world– the mouth of a cave. In the installation Galle Fort; Fort Kochi (2014), Cader once again breaks the conventional rectangular frame, a process he describes as an allegory for the rejection of fixed notions of identity. Made with graphite on wood, these works employ a range of images and shapes that the artist encountered on the coast of Kochi. According to Cader, turbulent ocean surfaces being indistinguishably similar, the Arabian Sea he saw in Kochi merged in his mind with familiar seascapes such as that of the historic Galle Fort area in Sri Lanka where his family hails from. Inspired by this ambivalence, Cader in these landscapes frees identity from notions of fixity linked to land. Instead, he envisions a fluid, ever-changing merger of land, identity and history.