Drawing from the painting traditions of the Indian subcontinent, particularly Mughal, Rajput and Company styles, Ali Kazim’s work often refers to the region’s buried histories, bringing ancient civilisational survival strategies into dialogue with contemporary concerns.

Birds recur throughout Kazim’s oeuvre, appearing sometimes as subjects—lenses through which human life is explored—while at other times, such as in the ‘Bird Hunter Series’ I & II (2020), as hunters’ prey, their survival determined by human action. The watercolour works in this particular series reflect on how migratory birds in the Indus Delta were once targeted by hunters.

As in many of Kazim’s works, Untitled (‘Bird Hunter Series I’) and Untitled (‘Bird Hunter Series II’) present a human figure against a flat, unmodulated background, stripped of geographic or historical markers, as if suspended in time. The birds perched upon each subject culturally signify their rootedness within the Indian subcontinent. Kazim paints with natural pigments and water to ‘give an impression of the passing of time.’ 

In Untitled (Bird Hunter Series I’), the subject appears with a bird perched on his head, almost as an adornment or possession. In Untitled (‘Bird Hunter Series II’), the division between figure and bird collapses—the body aligns with and extends into the bird, referencing hunting methods where men camouflaged themselves with bird-like headgear to deceive their prey.

Together, these works bring into focus survival as a historically embedded practice shaped by environment, ritual and human intervention. By collapsing the distinctions between hunter and prey and situating the figure outside fixed time or place, Kazim links migratory ecologies, inherited knowledge systems and acts of subsistence to broader questions of memory and responsibility. The ‘Bird Hunter Series’ ultimately frames survival not as an isolated struggle, but as a negotiated relationship between humans, animals and landscapes—one in which nature and culture remain deeply entangled.

^{*Currently exhibited at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai}