Homemade equations | Gallery Martin Van Zomeren | 2020

“What is not understood on earth can be understood underwater.”

Excerpt from “The Griffin Fish” by the Albanian poet and historian Moikom Zeqo (1949-2020).

In his photographs and sculptures, Ul Haq creates a space where ideas of absurd and reasonable, real and imagined, collapse into insoluble solutions.

These possibilities that Ul Haq defines as ‘equations’, are inconsistencies that may not conform to the standard pattern of thought. Within his sculptures, he creates these so-called unreasonable imagined states that could easily live as mythical beings. These beings seem to have accidentally bumped into the real, creating an absurd moment that bring disequilibrium in a perfect equation.

In his mathematical equations, Ul Haq uses objects with living features to find reason in illogical outcomes. By positioning and re-arranging compositions with dead fish, he highlights the notions of objectivity associated with the ontology of beings: the living and non-living beings.

Action and compositions where the dead fish come together to make a star, resembling a starfish, and a mirror composition of two fish with an apple, are examples of stripping away the inherent meanings of these objects in search of new representations.