Description
Pomegranate
The struggle for optics – for the visual/audio-visual field – constitutes a struggle of world formation, knowledge production and power at every level of existence.
- Armitage & R. Bishop (Eds) (2013:8) Virilio and Visual Culture
Hulusi’s work doesn’t point to easy answers but perhaps reminds us what’s been sacrificed and what’s at stake if we continue blindly on with the politics of national self-interest at the expense of any broader human compassion. He doesn’t believe that art can change the world. What acute contributions to visual culture
can do is seismically shift feeling and sensibility, affect personal, even international ‘dispositions’ so as to refocus and reassess where priorities might lie.
It’s been said of Daniel Buren’s 1970s striped placard protests that he was reclaiming the ‘radical and social ambitions of geometric abstraction, taking it into the streets.’ From the late 1990s
Expander series announcing his ‘arrival on the art scene’ to the more recent series
Pomegranates where again Hulusi intervened on the urban environment with Delphian images of rotting fruit, this artist continues to provoke and delight with full-frontal figurative assaults on the senses as well as more ambient sideways glances, decentred art that works on peripheral cognition, encouraging us to question preconceived notions and address political, cultural and perhaps even personal prejudices.
www.mustafahulusi.com
