Masnoor Ramli Mahmud combines imagination and social commentary, writes Samantha Joseph
IN 2012, Masnoor Ramli Mahmud was invited by an art collector to take a trip in a single-engine plane, from North America to Europe, with five other people. The plane was a privately-owned Pilatus PC-12, powered by a turboprop engine and seating seven. The entire trip, which would normally have taken nine hours on a commercial flight, took almost two weeks to complete.
“The whole thing happened so fast,” the visual artist says of the suggestion and subsequent realisation of the trip. The collector wanted an artist to come along on the rather anachronistic trip, to capture the spirit of the adventure more accurately than a few photographs taken by amateurs would have. Pathfinder#PC12 is the culmination of Masnoor’s documentation, a series of nine paintings and 13 aluminium prints.
MARKS OF HISTORY
Masnoor is no stranger to turning travels into artwork. In 2007, Galeri Petronas hosted his solo exhibition Bumi Manusia — Journey Through Nusantara, where he put to canvas his experiences travelling through the Malay archipelago with the Petronas Adventure Team. The 55-day trip took him through Borneo and Indonesia, including the virtually untouched island of Flores.
For Pathfinder#PC12, the timeline was far more compressed. Even though the entire trip took 14 days, it covered several refuelling stops in various places covering North America (including Canada), Greenland, Iceland, Scotland and England some of which were only a couple of hours long. Although it gave Masnoor a limited time to physically explore the locations that he passed through, it gave him plenty of food for thought.
“One of the most interesting stops we made was Greenland, which actually had a lot of ice,” says Masnoor. “The stop was only two hours and we remained in the airport area but I met a young native girl and took her picture.” This is the same young Greenlander who features in Narsarsuaq, gasping at the sight of the slim blue plane against the backdrop of an ancient Greenland map.
The artwork that Masnoor produced as a result of this trip is richly informed by the cultural aspects of the Pathfinder travels. An element that is repeated through several mixed media canvases is old maps. Narsarsuaq, Every Man Dies, Not Every Man Really Lives and Norseman all feature these maps with their frond-like coastlines, names of places littered haphazardly across available spaces, and in some cases, tiny, magical illustrations that recall the myths of an older time.
At the foreground of Every Man Dies is a stone monument of Scottish independence leader William Wallace, while in the background the shadow of the Pathfinder’s tail falls across a browned map of Scotland.
“It just intrigued me, the idea of these old maps that were created before people knew how to fly,” Masnoor muses. “How did they manage to create maps entirely from their minds, without the help of planes? And they managed to get pretty accurate approximations of what they were mapping.”
Such are the things one ponders after spending an extended amount of time looking out of an airplane window.
HOMELAND OBSERVATIONS
At the Malaysia Art Expo this year, Masnoor participated in the the Great Malaysia Contemporary Art show, presenting a piece titled Moulding The History — The Eyes That Blink Our Minds. In it, US President Barack Obama stares out towards a stormy sea, while Chinese President Xi Jinping turns to look toward him — an allusion to the turmoil following MH 370. Masnoor seems to enjoy creating these works of political statements and observations on history, and he continues this in Go My Hero ... For The Love of the Country, Immigrant and At the Edge Of Nowhere.
The former two are interpretations of his perceptions and experiences of North America. In Go My Hero ..., two panels of conventional cowboy imagery frame a band of Native Americans holding shotguns, the words HOMELAND SECURITY printed above them in red. Immigrant places a Native American man with a headdress in the forefront and a faded image of Mount Rushmore in the background, while again the words HOMELAND SECURITY is stamped across the top of the image, along with replicas of passport stamps for entering America.
Both works are commentaries on America and the perceived wrongs done to the native population of that country.
His most vividly colourful work, At The Edge Of Nowhere, is another take on MH 370, which takes from the Malay saying “bagai telur di hujung tanduk”, in reference to being in particularly delicate situations. In it, a seladang under Oriental style waves balances a large red egg at the end of its horn, the shadow of a commercial jet airliner falling across the surface of the egg. In the sky, a bright green stylised dragon trades blows with a squawking grey eagle.
For Masnoor, art is an important way to draw attention to contemporary issues as it allows the artist to bring to life aspects of public opinion. “I’m trying to capture a current situation on canvas so that when the public see it, they can share their discourse.” Art, he says, should have historical value.