In an update on the Pictures generation, Nihaal Faizal takes photographs of printouts of digital images to cheekily claim authorship of the background shots that became wildly popular with the launch of Windows XP. Within Faizal’s series of inkjet prints “Landscape Photos,” 2015, the camera registers in the moonlike flash reflected by each image. Altered by aspect ratios and the development processes, these pictures are no longer the same as the original but have been recalibrated to today’s time and technology in a bid to complicate ideas of originality, veracity, and provenance. Here, the copy serves as a mode of preservation and archiving, but also as a means to critique circulation and distribution as well as nostalgia.
Throughout his practice, Faizal continues to mine inherent and situational humor while exploring the history of technologies, the digital image and its duplication and dissemination, and the hardware and by-products of recording devices. For Dummy, 2022, the artist placed a collection of imitation CCTV cameras along the gallery floor as if they were on sale at a market. Complete with battery slots to get the red lights blinking, these decoys are cheap alternatives to installing (and maintaining) functional surveillance, offering an illusion of security. Unlike Faizal’s other works, Dummy foregrounds a device that is incapable of producing an image and is thus liberated from the pressure of documenting and generating more footage.
The show takes its title from red curtains opening, 2014, a four-minute-and-fifty-nine second video that is essentially a collation of stock footage. Animated red curtains open and close to reveal black and green screen backgrounds. Until these foils are purchased and populated, the Shutterstock watermark serves as the proxy protagonist. It is in chance observations such as these that Faizal truly excels, bringing together nostalgia and stock archives through digital kitsch.
