The myth of silence

Neshreen Mohamedi, Untitled, 1970

Silence is a word that, despite its apparent emptiness, is full of ideas. Maybe the fullest. And it is a magnificent word because, in fact, it has no actual existence. It is something like a myth. Silence is a mythical notion. It was John Cage, the first who discovered this “mythicality”. The non-existence of silence and, at the same time, the wealth of its conception. Exactly as myths can be filled with whatever we want —using them as broad metaphors— silence is always a possibility and an indicator, a metaphor and a reality revealing by her non-existence the existence of the non-perceptible (consciously or unconsciously), whatever this could be, the surrounding sounds or our hidden thoughts.

Horror vacuum is a term that may characterize the whole of western civilization. This fear of the void could be the real culprit for consumption society, for overindulgence, for capitalism. People needing something to fill the void with. People not being at peace with the notion of emptiness as empty is something negative; considering something empty is like saying that it was supposed to be full, an empty space an empty mind like an empty glass.

Aristotle didn’t believe in emptiness. As emptiness would lead to the (impossible) infinitive movement, nature should be against empty spaces, trying continuously to fill them. Nature had been the primaeval Horror Vacui.

Baroque was more obviously than other styles inspired by this Horror. This excessiveness of decoration and adornment, the focus on details and the extended use of natural forms and the sense of infinity have their sources in patriarchy, wealth and a desire for expansion and controlling nature. Although Baroque as a movement had a specific life span, its influences remained to abstractly dominate western politics and lifestyle up to now.

The trending idea of minimalism as a way of life is a response to the fear of the void. Being so used to full and consuming so much of the natural energy resources came up dangerous for our natural environment.

In the middle of the 20th century, there was a noticeable turn towards the void. Powered by the modernist desire to break up with tradition and the new interconnections with Eastern cultures, Buddhism and Hinduism, art discovered empty spaces and silent pieces. Minimalism was a stray forward answer to horror vacui, consumerism, and the art market's new state.

Still, minimalism could have other roots too.

The Pakistani Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) was a pioneer of minimalistic art beyond modernism. Her beautiful quiet art is in conversation not with the western society of products’ accumulation but with a Buddhistic sense of continuity. Her work, especially after 1970, is compiled by black and white drawings and photographs in an admirable consonance. Her minimalistic geometrical drawings are creating imaginary landscapes creating unexpected similarities with the ones she photographs. In fact, her artistic language reduces nature — in her most empty forms — into geometrical schemes and geometrical schemes to nature. Her painting seems like a game with restrictions, a walk through the visual silence, searching for discrete elements that can create a poetic code, a subtle communication with the natural world.

Her bias towards simplicity, repetition and open space is in an open dialogue firstly with her own cultural influences, as Rumi’s poetry, the ecstatic Sufi’s whirling dances and the Indian landscape and in a second level with Malevich, Mondrian, Agnes Marten and western modernism.

Nasreen Mohamedi’s has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, Documenta in Kassel, Germany and at Talwar Gallery. Her last big retrospective was in The Met Breuer in New York, 5 years ago.

Yet, despite her recognition as one of the leading figures of modern abstraction, she remains unknown to a wider audience.