Shumon Ahmed

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What I have forgotten could fill the ocean, what is not real never lived is a complex title for a very complex narrative. Indeed, my grammar checker on my computer has a problem with the syntax; it apparently doesn’t make sense, but to the observant reader it does. In short, the human mind can grasp what the machine can’t and herein lays the significance of the work. Shumon Ahmed, the author/compiler/photographer/poet explores an extraordinarily complex relationship, that between mother son through series of photographs, montage, poetry, sound and found pieces of everyday life like envelopes. At one level it is a meditation upon the relationship that is deep and highly personal but at another it is profoundly universalizing.

The collection of images is memory traces that the author invests with meaning and thus constructs a moving, confessional narrative about the necessity of love. Few people write or comment as frankly as Shumon Ahmed on the complex relationship between mother and son. Freud has taught the West that sons desire their mothers only to reject them in maturity otherwise tragedy ensues. We have accepted this as the Oedipal myth. Ahmed reverses the trajectory of the narrative. He confesses to disliking his mother because of her alleged ‘intellectual disability’ and the way she was spoken to and about by relatives; she was an embarrassment. It seems that Ahmed needed to distance himself, both from a culture that rejected his mother, and his mother who touchingly retained unconditional love for her son, expressed in letters and gestures, leading Ahmed to examine his position and then recognized the injustice that had been heaped upon his mother, including his own rejection. “ I have forgotten could fill an ocean, what is not real never lived” Has become an act of atonement.

There are several other dimensions to the entire work that invite comments. Ahmed’s seemingly dispassionate use of what are little more than essentially banal signifiers of the everyday become loaded with meaning because they are so personal and redolent of the mother son relationship. Consider the leaves lying on an indistinct background or the bird resting on a spire, or the wingtips of the plane that creates the separation. Individually they are to all intents and purposes meaningless but here they form a sequence that becomes the memory of the ongoing relationship and thus become invested with considerable depth and insight. These are the things we remember when we are trying to retrieve what has been lost and seek to regain.

Ahmed points towards another phase of photographic practice where the found can become profound if it is subject to scrutiny and intelligent manipulation. A logical conclusion then is that anyone can produce the images and make them significant and, in a sense, they do; homes are full of folios carefully organized and annotated photographs that have great personal meaning. The difference between these and What I have forgotten … is that they remain private rather than public documents and is the fact that Shumon Ahmed has chosen to go public that adds to the power of the ‘work’.

- Brian Shoesmith

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Courtesy of Artist and Project88

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‘What I have forgotten could fill an ocean, what is not real never lived’