Press Release
The Sherbet Project revolves around a syrup for a drink that my late maternal aunt used to make, using mint, apple cider vinegar, sugar and water. I have been trying to replicate this recipe of the drink from my memory, a drink that I used to love as a child at my aunt’s home. In this process of measuring, mixing, cooking, stirring, playing, smelling, tasting, remembering, and replicating, what did I arrive at?
And is the arrival at a particular place or a point important? To that perfect recipe of Sekanjabeen; the right ratio of mint to vinegar to sugar; to that smell that would pervade her kitchen, the apartment air and all the linen in her house; to that whiff of vinegar that is left behind as an aftertaste in your mouth; to that dark gold hue that glistens in the faintest light; or to that perfect sticky consistency where the syrup mistakenly sticks to your fingers, only for you to lick it clean and get an instant hit of the past.
It may have been about these arrivals when this journey towards the sherbet began. However, soon after, the process became about the stops in between. About those moments of slowing down to pay attention and care. It turned to revisiting a life that has been, and reconfiguring and reimagining what this woman’s life perhaps could and should have been. It looks into rooms to pause and to acknowledge; at those overlooked dust-filled crevices; at the enamel paint chipping off the walls in her apartment; peeks into her cabinets, receptacles and repositories and the stale air that they still hold; and stares at those photographs glossing with smears of flash, and in this process of looking, it tries to bear witness. It attempts to sink into her belongings, longings and desires and makes a wish or two. And somewhere in the midst of looking at her and back at her life, one perhaps may end up looking back and ahead at the course of their own.
This sherbet project, is a constellation of unfinished thoughts; a play; a walk; a mirror gazing back; a desire; a wish; a gift; an homage; a mourning; and a living, breathing and an ephemeral monument to Zareen.
About the Artist
Fazal Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Karachi. His inquiry rests somewhere between the personal, the social and the political. Having spent a few years thinking about the materiality and immateriality of the sea and its borders, Rizvi also keeps returning to the personal and familial as a place of trigger, which has taken him to a sherbet recipe that his late aunt used to make. Rizvi is also beginning his long term engagement and research in reference to the glacial and mountainous terrain in the north of Pakistan, where he hopes to settle later this year.
Rizvi graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2010. He has been an artist in residence at the Arcus Studios, Japan in 2011, and was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust award for Gasworks Studios Residency, London in 2014. Pro Helvetia New Delhi studio residency in Zurich, 2020 and a resident artist at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands for the year 2020-21.
