"What is not understood on earth can be understood underwater."
Excerpt from “The Griffin Fish” by the Albanian poet and historian Moikom Zeqo (1949-2020).
In the new gallery season-opening, Martin van Zomeren welcomes you to Homemade Equations, a solo exhibition by Ehsan Ul Haq. In his photographs and sculptures, Ul Haq creates a space where ideas of absurd and reasonable, real and imagined, collapse into insoluble solutions.
These possibilities that Ul Haq defines as ‘equations’, are inconsistencies that may not conform to the standard pattern of thought. Within his sculptures, he creates these so-called unreasonable imagined states that could easily live as mythical beings. These beings seem to have accidentally bumped into the real, creating an absurd moment that bring disequilibrium in a perfect equation.
In his mathematical equations, he uses objects with living features to find reason in illogical outcomes. By positioning and re-arranging compositions with dead fish, he highlights the notions of objectivity associated with the ontology of beings: the living and non-living beings. Action and compositions where the dead fish come together to make a star, resembling a starfish, and a mirror composition of two fish with an apple, are examples of stripping away the inherent meanings of these objects in search of new representations.
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The exhibition opens Thursday September 3 and will run until October 10.
Thursday, September 3: 5 - 9 PM
Friday, September 4: 12 - 6 PM
Saturday, September 5: 12 - 6 PM
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Biography
Born in 1983 in Lahore, Pakistan, Ehsan Ul Haq currently lives and works in Amsterdam. His work has been shown in various solo- and group exhibitions, such as; “Survival kit” at Latvian center for contemporary art in Riga, Latvia; “1 is older than 2: Logics of a futile action” at Felix Frachon Gallery, in Brussels, Belgium; “An Age of Our Own Making - On Another Nature and Ecology” Images festival Holbaek, Denmark; “No Real Body”: 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Yekaterinburg, Russia; “VOID: there’s nothing more left, but a little trace from human beings”, Ginkgo Space, Beijing, China; Moscow International Biennale For Young Art, Moscow; ‘The Rising Tide’ at the Mohatta Palace Museum, Pakistan. He has been a resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten.