Mamdhuh/Virusika - A Portrait of an Artist

Photo credit: Artist

It’s around six o’clock in the evening now, and Villingili is quieter. I hear a child softly laughing somewhere in the distance. My eyes fixate on the new (wretched) bridge that’s under construction. There’s a light breeze over here, despite the warmth in Malé today. I hear a snap, I think I've accidentally stepped on a twig, then I realise that we’re finally here. Mamdhuh opens the door and smiles, telling us to settle down. There’s coffee served in a French press, with some short-eats and banana bread on the coffee table. I survey the room, there’s a tidy bookshelf filled with books in a corner. There’s a strong smell of incense that reminds me of the kind of evenings I'd had at my childhood home. And wood; every corner I glance, there is wood. Charming, I think. The lighting is dim, and perhaps a tad dark, but I think I prefer it that way.

Mamdhuh is tall, dark-skinned with a gaunt face. He has the manner of a man who is simultaneously both firm in his intention and entirely carefree. He says he’s 40, but appears to have aged backwards, I refuse to believe the man is a day over 27. Mamdhuh’s work is undefinable, as is he; he operates in a kind of ‘hyper-camouflage’, as Mr. Negarestani would say (We talked a bit of the madness that is Cyclonopedia). When I hear him speak I feel as though I’ve known the man already, from a long time ago, absurd as it may sound. He’s full of purpose, as wavering as he may seem to some. His voice, though deeply critical, comes from a place of intense love and longing for this world. He’d taken his cynicism to its extremes, so far into a place of extreme excess that it self-translates into a deep love for the world and humanity that surround him. As I write this, I hear the sounds of Miles Davis’s instrumental rendition of ‘Nature Boy’ somewhere from the corner of my room. I hum the lyrics to myself, “A very strange, enchanted boy, they say he wandered very far, very far, over land and sea….”. One may get the impression that this is a man romanticising and yearning for a time long past, but this is far from the truth.

I listen to him reminisce of his boyhood days, filling up every sketchbook his parents got him almost immediately; to the point where they were forced to resort to purchasing a stack of A4’s instead of investing in a new sketchbook every time he’d run out of pages. He’d quickly been taken under the mentorship of his artistic cousins, whom he still credits as being some of his earliest partisans. They’d provided him with an endless supply of materials, brushes, pens, sketchbooks. The whole works, so to speak. Eventually he’d become an object of concern to his family- he was prone to exclusively expressing himself with imagery that could perhaps be considered dark, or grotesque. People would react with shock and horror that this child of little to no words, and no apparent worries (of the worldly sort at least), spent his years creating these disturbing images; but there was always a story, a narrative that made sense to himself.

Photo credit: Arist

His work has always reflected his reading at the time, he says. The years between 2013-18 had him creating political pieces; a turbulent period which he aptly references as his ‘reactive period’. Images of politicians, depicting them as evil, cut-up excerpts from leftist literature all come together in righteous anger, a direct message aimed at the government and the likes of them.

“I don’t necessarily define myself in that manner anymore,” he explains. “It’s only natural to be politically reactive in one’s youth. I don’t dismiss it either though, it was, and will always be, a fundamental part of who I became over the years.”

Our ramblings go many places, from the stigma around addiction, to the desecration of the artist, to the falsified optimism of 2008- all the way to the rise of the modern movement of ‘neo-traditionalism’. On Evola & Guenon, the famous (infamous?) critics of modernity in their time, he chimes in: “I think they were onto something you know? We don’t have to take everything they say for granted of course; they were reactionaries of their own political environment, but maybe there’s something there.” 

Mamdhuh argues that the word ‘ތަރިކަ’ is derived from ‘tariqa’, meaning ‘a path’. Tradition is a path, not a dead end, he says. His work expresses this; his art is a continuation of this tradition. It’s simply of its time, in the same way the embroidering of brocades and stone-carving were of theirs. The medium may differ, but the path remains the same. He seeks to illuminate an eternal bridge, even if it’s as thin as a strand of hair; between the past, the present and the future to come. The bridge goes on, aimless as it may seem to some, to arrive at something, somewhere at some time (The end times? One can only wonder)

The reader may find themselves wondering, ‘When do we get to the ‘art’ of it all!’, And to them, a succinct reply: “Y’know this, this right here, us sitting together, speaking on the same wavelength; imagine more people, together talking of these things we are passionate about; that’s how art comes to be, that’s how we get somewhere”

Mamdhuh is inseparable from his body of work. It is simply innate to his nature, his work does not function as a prosthetic limb, an external arm to flex to the public. They aren’t intended to be works for commercial galleries, neither are they meant as empty political statements. This was a man on a tirade for radical sincerity, a shot in the dark at breaking free from the shackles of a meta-postmodern world, an attempt at grasping at something in a sea of confusion.

Photo credit: Artist

But of course, this comes with its own troubles. He speaks to us of being written off as deluded or a ‘junkie'. (Which reminds me, I must of course mention, that he did indeed pay homage to a certain Mr. William S. Burroughs for his utilisation of his ‘cut-up’ method) It may be easy for some to dismiss him as a ‘free-loving hippie’; it may also be easy to hurl insults and ridicule the man in private, but it is undeniable that his work has something to say; whether one agrees with it or not. And this isn’t work that comes from nowhere, rather, it’s ayered, intentional; an amalgamation of his lived experiences and ideas. Mamdhuh says that he does not harbour resentment toward the people that see him negatively; some may not want to see beyond the curtain. I find myself hearing distant music again; this time it’s the faint sounds of John Maus’ singing on his track Losing Your Mind…. “Can’t write a word, so you lock yourself up, so they say you’re losing your mind! Cooking DMT up in the basement, so they say you’re losing your mind….”

“I think there’s a kind of purity or innocence when it comes to madness, it’s people who everyone calls ‘crazy’ or ‘out of their minds’ who end up being the happiest ones, don’t you think?” says Mamdhuh. “They’re free, they don’t have to think of all this.”

He then proceeds to talk of the problem of referentiality in relation to Mr. Burroughs’ cut-up method.

 “I don’t mean that I attempted to imitate him y’know?” he says. “What I’m trying to get at is that I use these frameworks, whether it be an artist, something I’m reading, or things I come across on the internet, I internalise these ideas and they find themselves into my own expression”.

The names of artists seem to be given constant lip service, but the heart of the work is ignored. Perhaps it’s a problem of social hierarchy; One does not look at, let’s say, Max Ernst, as an untouchable figure that must only be referenced for social or financial credit, but rather you find something of yourself in his works. An ‘inspiration’ cannot be mere referentiality, but rather, an ability to embody and internalise the heart of a work of art and express it in one’s own manner.

Photo credit: Artist

He speaks of his asemic writings, a form intuitive writing; a writing free of semantic context. It’s a meditative process to him, he says. Repetitive harsh black lines merging together to create an alphabet of it’s own. But it’s more than that, he says. “

It’s my form of breaking free from conceptuality; the rest of my work is conceptual to an extent, this is my freedom from that”. 

Perhaps it is a kind of communication of the subconscious, from the writer, to the observer. Even with no semantic context, there is a meaning conveyed.

Our conversation spills into historiography, and the importance of theorising alternative histories, instead of dwelling within the negative spaces, the gaps in our past. He talks of the behaviour of certain circles of academics, who are quick to dismiss theories that do not hold up to their ‘rational’ evaluations. One might observe that Mamdhuh’s work itself is a projection of that negative space in history, a continuation of a tradition; to express the imaginal world. What here is meant by ‘imaginal’? Is this imaginal world of rich history entirely separate from our reality? We might be led to believe ‘Maldivian tradition’ is a monolithic reality. Mamdhuh disagrees:

“We can never be completely certain of the historicity of our culture and tradition; if someone is to say that my perception or my theory is an unfounded claim, to that I reply, which claim is founded then? Are we to believe that our tradition followed an ordered structure? Are we to believe that a tradition is a relic of the past that must be re-enacted for amusement? A wax museum of women draped in red libaases?”

I must note here that Mamdhuh did in fact mention that ‘there’s nothing inherently wrong about red libaas or drawing them’. He himself has done so. And that the ‘libaas’ here, functions as a simple signifier for the forceful imposing of this falsified monolithic idea of culture on everyone. Each to their own!

Around then, Umberto Eco’s novels seep into our conversation, a man he adores. He talks of Eco’s method of intertextuality in historical fiction, and how it helped him describe his own work to others: “it’s meant to either create tension, or resolve it,” he says. Dialectical, perhaps.

“I started describing my collages not as an artwork, but rather, a phenomenological object,” continues Mamdhuh. “I don’t intend it to be simply an ‘artwork’. It’s a form of communication, through the digital.  it’s ephemeral.”

Is it possible for technology to be a part of our living tradition? Mamdhuh thinks so. In fact, it is integral to a living tradition of today. His collages can be subtle at times, and more direct at others; but the medium is of utmost importance. One might be inclined to recall the infamous line by the little Canadian man from the 60’s, The Medium is the Message. The collages are meant to be observed through a screen, it is to be experienced, not merely observed in the manner in which one would observe a painting at a gallery.

Photo credit: Artist

“Let’s say you’re scrolling through Instagram, and you happen to glance at a collage I post, and it disappears almost immediately,” he says. “But something sticks, a string of words, an image, maybe. It’s meant to burrow itself into your subconscious, to sear through your mind so that it evokes something in you, in some way or another.”

He is full of expression, one can almost witness his archive of thoughts and memories weaving themselves together when he speaks, every conversation bleeds into another, but they mesh together to allude to something beyond them. His collages function in this same manner, bits and pieces of imagery, fragments of texts, composed together, an attempt at expressing that no, we do not have to accept our fate as eternally doomed and yes, there is a fourth way, a way that we can define and re-define ourselves, free from categorisation and without being imposed upon. Perhaps his fourth way functions as a verb, rather than a solution, a constant doing and un-doing, a knowing and unknowing. I hear the voice of Nat King Cole now, it’s the last few verses of Nature Boy this time; And while we spoke of many things, Fools and kings, This he said to me: "The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is just to love….”