Aziz Hazara

Aziz Hazara (b.1992), lives and works between Berlin and Kabul. Aziz Hazara often employs sound as a medium to signify both conflict and the collective. In Takbir (2022), silence and sound, darkness and light, operate as metaphorical devices in a transfixing nexus. The camera shifts into a steady, almost nauseating circular motion, causing city lights to dissolve into a trail of light calling out to infinity as resounding cries of Takbir (which describes the call Allāhu Akbar/God is great) emerge from all directions in unison. The call of Takbir resonated the night sky of Kabul, whose landscape the film follows, in the backdrop of the announcement of evacuation of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021, making way for the Taliban to once again take over the lives of citizens, symbolising a call to action for some, or a call in anguish for others. The sound echoes across the vast expanses of the starry night sky as a gesture of protest and mourning, juxtaposing both the individual and the collective engulfed in a perpetual war. All this, while tracing blind spots of night raids, newfound complicities, media ‘fog’, and the blur of overnight displacement, Hazara poignantly meditates on how darkness can also offer a refuge.