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From Earth to Elsewhere
Abdus Salaam’s Continuing Journey
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In 2024, Abdus Salaam entered a period of sustained research and making during his six-week residency at the NIROX Foundation in South Africa. Set within the profound landscape of the Cradle of Humankind, and taking place during the month-long fast of Ramadan, this residency culminated in Insaan: Human Being—a body of work exploring humanity, spirituality, ecology, and our relationship to the natural world through sculpture, painting, sound, and poetry. At the heart of this presentation is an intimate film by Earl Abrahams created during the residency. More than a mere record of the artist at work, Abrahams' film captures a pivotal moment in Salaam's practice, offering a poetic portrait of the ideas, experiences, and reflections that underpin the entire enquiry.
The title itself carries a profound dual meaning. The Arabic word انسان (Insaan) translates to "human being," originating from two distinct roots: انس (uns), meaning intimate or love, and نسي (nasyia), meaning forgetful. This defines the human being simultaneously as the intimate one and the forgetful one. It is a poetic fragrance often alluded to by Islamic mystics and scholars, poignantly delivering us to the essence of humanity: that our core reality is rooted in love, a truth we so often forget within our terrestrial, ethereal, and Divine planes.
Salaam’s work ties this sacred ancestral land and its hominid remains, its river and its polluted state, and our global environmental shortcomings alongside deeply intimate, personal moments. Through this juxtaposition, Insaan asks if perhaps love—or the reminder of it—might ease the anxieties, tensions, and personal fears that we project outwardly into the echo chamber of forgetfulness.
This narrative unfolds across three physical and conceptual spaces. In the Screening Room, Chapter 1 anchors the presentation with Abrahams' film alongside water, earth, and light, reminding us that we are embodied souls whose transcendence is achieved through our earthly experience, and that our planet is but a reflection of our communal state. Moving into the Covered Space, Chapter 2 resonates with tones of the heart and time, where change is most true. The journey concludes in the Residency Studio with Chapter 3, the immediate space of physical translation and making.
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"My earliest conscious memories were on a farm in a small town called Riversdale beneath this really tall mountain... It was a really just as primitive and as close to a primordial existence as i think the early 90s could have offered."
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Chapter 1
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"I have found in my own practice that making inspires more making, and transcending oneself even when one is exhausted... that’s when you really disappear. I mean, my work is not about me; it’s about realities and sensations beyond me, but these are realities and sensations that we all share as beings, embodied souls."
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Chapter 2
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"The title of the show is Insaān, which is the Arabic word for human being. There are two roots to that word: one is uns which means intimacy or love, and the other is nasia which means forgetful. And I think that as a species we tend to forget that our essence is love."
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Chapter 3
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"I have found in my own practice that making inspires more making, and transcending oneself even when one is exhausted... that’s when you really disappear. I mean, my work is not about me; it’s about realities and sensations beyond me, but these are realities and sensations that we all share as beings, embodied souls."
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The work emerging from Salaam's residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris begins with a theological and metaphysical question: what is form if it is never finally fixed? Through sculpture, painting and material exploration, he investigates matter as something continually renewed—held between appearance and disappearance, permanence and transformation.
Informed by the Islamic concepts of khalq jadīd (continuous creation) and the barzakh (the threshold between states), these works propose existence not as something fixed or complete, but as an ongoing process of becoming. Matter, image and perception become sites through which renewal, relation and the unseen are made subtly perceptible.
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