On I: A High Stakes Gamble by Taslima Ahmed by James D Bowman 3

Each key piece in I: A High Stakes Gamble by Taslima Ahmed (Real Fine Arts) seems to call into question the most interesting suppositions of a previous chapter of discursive praxis in the arts: that of, say, the last half-decade. The hauntological presence of the dead, who insist, in spite of their corporeal absence, on reestablishing obsolete modes of self-analysis is, I feel, by no means an incidental aspect of Ahmed’s impressive enterprise. A kind of reckless wedlock between art and society ("polite" or not) risks not only an internal identity crisis (in the grip of which art loses its vitality in the service of relative relevance) but also and more chillingly the naïve but easy-to-adopt practice of treating society itself as a rather static thing: a saucer of tepid broth in which nothing of vitality hatches. The relationship between art and culture is (of course) one of communication, but not of infatuation. They can be neighbors, and should, but never spouses. In essence, the show takes prosaic customs and habits of allegory and lacerates them en masse, refusing to view the antagonism between the intentionally non-iconic and the merely subliminal as an antagonism. Ahmed breaks the always-only-ethereal-if-present-at-all fourth wall. Innocuous images don’t risk taking themselves too seriously in the nexus of the alleged calamity of implosion. Is the feather of some logos (a.k.a. the feather of some plea or expectation, some rational principle that sows and grows the “known” in the soil of chaos) being blown, as it were, away, "out of hand" (and abandoned)? Or is the hand—in the midst of much obsolescence—attempting to catch it; to acquire some kind of primordial spark amid the claustrophobic trappings of self-consciousness-without-self-awareness? Both?