“Might Last Forever" and "If I find myself there again” by Jalil Bokhari
Posted on
Jalil is an artist with a background in photography. He has spent the last decade documenting his travels and experiences with friends, family, and partners, mostly on 35mm film.
In his work he seeks to evoke intimacy and a recurring motif is the exploration of connection between people and place.He forges, nourishes and investigates personal connections between himself, subject, and viewer through the objects he presents.
Jalil is inventive with the media on which he displays his images, challenging traditions of photographic presentation and foregoing framed print or screen in favour of more textural and three dimensional materials. He has printed images on fleece, silk, and custom made puzzles, constructing objects to be experienced and contemplated.
Throughout the years he has collected ephemera from travels and experiences which he has cataloged by scanning, compiling a digital scrapbook of sorts.He has explored the flat-bed scanner as a photographic medium, a process which began by scanning items individually and then compositionally by accumulating and arranging layers of objects and images.
His collage-like assemblages are composed in the inverse, foreground first, background last, with objects, scraps of paper, and memorabilia facing the scanner bed. The process is one that is both indexical and expressive. Jalil captures intervals of reflection on materials in relation to each other, himself, and his community.
The resulting images allude to traditions of both still-life in their depiction of inanimate objects with embedded symbolism, and self-portraiture in their representation and construction of character and identity.