Zahid Jiwa is a Canadian fine art photographer and filmmaker currently based in London, UK. Jiwa’s work is often characterized by its complex iconography, thematic portrayal of obscure figures, and unclear cultural references. Existing somewhere between the built and the unbuilt, Jiwa’s compositions and subject matter hint at an obsession with the vanishing cinematic potential of the everyday condition, playing with symbols of historicity, time and aging to render the estranged sensation of urban and rural science fiction. Today we’re excited to share images from Zahid’s projects Terrain Vague and American Apparent.
The images being presented are collected from two recent bodies of work produced within the last year.With TERRAIN VAGUE, we find ourselves trailing Zahid Jiwa in his attempts to define “Mediterraneanism.” Seamlessly collapsing his wanderings through France and Italy into a single essence of being, his images, created over a five week period in the Summer months of 2015, are at once a study in luxurious experience and bodily decay, the region’s ubiquitous antiquarian symbols, and paradisiacal spaces. Dramatic simplification of form provides a sense of calmness with underlying tension, which appears to be an ongoing symbolic motif lurking ominously behind the stained red curtain of Jiwa’s contemporary but classicist inspired romanticism.
Captured in New York City and surrounding environs in 2015, the images that comprise Zahid Jiwa’s American Apparent speak for themselves as a series of photographs characterized by the uninhibited but at the same time fleeting glance inherent to the restless modern man, stylised by the possibility of quiet reflection amid the busy doings of modern, dynamic life. Jiwa’s razor sharp preoccupations gesture past the behavioral mutations necessitated by American Empire and gaze into the vague and romantic transcendence that occasionally appears within the cracks of totemic routines and obligations.
To view more of Zahid’s work, please visit his website!