Sitting on the edge of his bed with his legs crossed as he listens to music on a record player, Abu Omar seems at first glance a caricature of art historical introspection – a composite of countless portraits of a nostalgic subject cradling the smooth stummel of his parabolic pipe. But the scene of utter destruction in which Abu Omar’s romantic frame incongruously sits (from the shattered shutters shielding paneless windows to the shrapnel strewn carpet and bedspread) is all too literal and unstaged – an admonishment for blurring the boundaries between life and art. What we see is not an imagined projection of interior introspection or a fanciful tableau woven from waftings of symbolic smoke. No, this is not a pipe. It’s something far more powerful than that.
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