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Exile Paintings, Rouben Mohiuddin
March 10-April 2, 2011
ON BACKGROUND
Rouben Mohiuddin was born in Bangladesh on March 6th, 1973. At the mere age of three, his father joined the diplomatic corps, which took him on a 17-year journey to North Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This journey instilled in him with a bounty of diversity, which influenced what would become a life long appreciation for Art and Architecture.
In 1991, Rouben settled in the United States where he pursued an undergraduate degree in Architecture and Environmental Design at the State University of New York at Buffalo followed by a Graduate degree in Architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. His architectural education was a trans-disciplinary education that integrated the arts, sciences, and the humanities through creative, analytical and immersive thinking and development. After working at select architecture firms in Los Angeles, in 2002, he established his own design practice, Scale In(TER)vention.
His teaching career also started in 2002. Currently he is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Chico and in the past has held positions at the Art Institute of California, Otis School of Art and Design, University of California, Los Angeles and also Chaired the Interior Architecture program at American Intercontinental University. As an academic Rouben has always been interested in the extreme social and environmental conditions in which to debate the nature of art, architecture, the future of cities, and the changing role of architects, designers and artists.
ON ARCHITECTURE
"I am searching for an alternative mode of production as a journey propelled by the desire to detour from this world of simulacrum and compulsion not to return to the hyper-reality of nostalgia"
The essence of a work of architecture is an organic link between concept and form. Pieces cannot be added or subtracted without upsetting the fundamental properties. A concept, whether a rationally explicit statement or a subjective demonstration, establishes an order, a field of inquiry, and a limited principal. Within the phenomena of experience in a built construction the organizing idea is a hidden thread connecting disparate parts with an exact intention. The intertwining of an idea and phenomenon occurs when a building is realized. Before beginning, architectures' metaphysical skeleton of time, light, space, and matter remain unordered. Modes of composition are open: line, plane, volume, and proportion await activation. When site, culture, and program are given, an idea may be formed, the idea is only a concept in incubation.
The site of a building is more than a mere ingredient in its conception. It is its physical and metaphysical foundation. Building transcends physical and functional requirements by fusing with a place, by gathering the meaning of a situation. Architecture does not so much intrude on a landscape as it serves to explain it. Architecture and site should have an experimental connection, a metaphysical link, and a poetic link. Let space go beyond the confines of words and numbers, proportions and the technical; these are actual physically defining things…but like music, like art like poetry let it be dynamic within its presence. Let it be natural shifting and seething like a pulse of life, fluid with vitality ever changing combining the notions of mind and spirit, metaphorical to the nature of nature.
ON ART
Rouben's interest in art started at a very young age. Although always a restless child, his parents would say how 'still' he would become when experiencing art as a child. Art seemed to have some kind of effect on him and as he got to 'understand art' he realized that he was interested in its creative process and its self-expressive meaning."Art has been a way for me to understand the 'self' and express my thoughts and experiences in life. Most of my art tries to address being a Bangladeshi by ethnicity, political background and trying to search for answers to fill a void that I have. This void is my departure from Bangladesh at the age of three and being a spectator in the trials and tribulations of our country for the last three decades. It is in the last decade that I have come to terms with my identity as a Bangladeshi".
In reference to nature, what is the nature of nature? Nature is reproductive in idea, complex in form, yet born out of simplicity. All things are restless, animate in time and space. Stories house worlds within worlds, an interpretation of lives. Each can be separate/distinct, yet indivisible with all others. The restless force of thoughts ensures the potential of what thought can form; landscapes of emergence. A second nature exists where living things grow and lifeless things are that are assembled can come together. This nature is one of being and one of becoming. The organic and the synthetic become one: a mythic evolution of instrumentation. Nature seethes with the forms of energy, which like fluid, are ever moving and changing".
ON EXILE
(Work produced between 1996 – 2007)
The void of language is an utter reverberation in the loss of identity. Scriptures of being undulates, ebbs and flows like a river twisting and bending carving its pathway. 30 years earlier there was no tears shed, yet, a history of propaganda has been written by those who have quenched their thirst for power and money. And now there is no loss of being but rather an aberration of 'being' towards an unknown future."I was born in the early seventies, carried in my mothers womb during our war of liberation. Her departure from West Pakistan was a journey which had an unknown direction. My father a Bengali from East Pakistan, at the time was an officer in the rank of Captain serving in the Pakistan Military. He had the misfortune of being held prisoner in West Pakistan until released to a new Bangladesh two years post liberation. I met my father for the first time at the age of three…"
In his paintings he is trying to create a multi-layered quality of space – almost like inscriptions as one peels the layers back. The overlapping landscapes bends ones line of vision and foils attempt to see the entire story. The landscape is not integrated through vision, but is in fact compelled to flex and fragment into a constructed space. The absence of a vision is a consequence of the multi layered quality of the landscape and as in reality – it is always fragmented. As a result of this overlapping, there are parts that are hidden. A hidden part, if one changes their viewpoint becomes and what had been visible now becomes latent. For the viewer the landscape at each moment certainly exists in front of his eyes, but the plan of the whole is difficult to structure. It is difficult to measure position relative to the entire landscape without a clear order; multiple landscapes are generated as ones point of view shifts. The multilayered surfaces constitute the parts of the landscape. These parts do not simply and willfully link themselves. Perhaps what he is trying to do is to create a path of evolution and anticipation of experiences. Perhaps there is always something to be discovered in the ways that the paths are connected.
In 1996 Rouben's family was exiled to the U.S. In 2007 after 11 years of exile and persecution from the Bangladeshi government, his father was extradited back to Bangladesh on political grounds. In 2010 he was executed by the current government without being given the opportunity to defend himself. Currently Rouben is trying to re-unite with his mother. This is his exile.