These works form a personal visual archive of passing time by Baaraan Ijlal, made over the past year, marking the everyday and its capacity for extraordinariness.

Bahār aa.ī to khul ga.e haiñ na.e sire se hisāb saare
(Spring has come once again asking the same questions, reopening account after account).

-Faiz Ahmed Faiz (translated to English by Agha Shahid Ali)

“The virus arrived in winter and grew with the advent of spring, giving the poet’s verse a whole new meaning. The ground was as though breeding for a virus to grow. The ground that was divided, that was steeped in violence, was almost waiting for something.
I started taking photographs of the tree across my balcony. As the numbers grew, new leaves emerged on the branches of the naked tree. On the road, the long march of people going back home began, some of whom permanently kept at a ‘social distance’ and all of them constant casualties. Casualties of violence, casualties of displacements.The physical hollowing of the already hollowed up cities began. The people-less streets of the city, covered with dry leaves. Leaves that had only recently witnessed resistance and violence all in a matter of a couple of months.
This prompted me to return to my notebook to process what was going on and to document.
Drawing, painting, making notes, everyday led to the making of a book, a book of now, this moment, page by page. Turning to it for sustenance, for shelter, for hope, for strength to reassemble, I drew the trees that witnessed violence, this city, my silence, my fears, my longing, to see my parents isolating faraway, friends isolating alone in quiet rooms.
The tree across my balcony holds me in its web of intense lacework. So I don’t fall. The branches make new patterns every day, the patterns that I see everywhere, within me, around me, in the objects of my surroundings.

This book of now, this shelter, will be a reminder to me of the time a pandemic stopped the world.”

Frames and mounts by Moonis Ijlal
Verses by Ijlal Majeed

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