It’s the odious street smoke of the preceding decade – a barren, guileless era born of the excess and unbridled bizarreness of the 80s. Grunge was terrible, punk on life support, pop was awful. Anything good that happened in the last 30 years happened after the 90s.
And 90s Maldives was, in common parlance, ass. The magazines were atrocious. Sangu – sophomoric. TVM had one good programme – Muhammad Rasoolallah. The architecture, appalling, even at the resorts.
You can always count on history to mess things up for the future. And by God, were the 90s a masterclass in that!
No, friends. Don’t be lured into the bubble-bath of nostalgia by the 90s crowd (you know who you are). We are living in the best possible period in the Maldives. On the cusp of revolution, true revolution unlike the ousting of Maumoon to replace one ugly capitalist regime with another.
Exhibit A and the only one necessary: Handle with Care, it could never have happened in the 90s. If existence can only be (eternally) justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, we witnessed an attempt at such a justification through a series of meticulously curated works. It was one that addressed, interpreted, and explored our existence in this city, in our fragile state of being. It was an expression of a class of Maldivians (one expatriate among them), a class of Dhivehin whose concerns range from the purely personal to broader environmental, socioeconomic and sociopolitical concerns, including geopolitics.
And among other things, Handle with Care unleashed Deth upon the world. It is an aesthetic Deth, an existential Deth, an expose, an exploration of, and a wide-eyed witness to our life in the capital, Male.
I am speaking of course of that portrait of a person in the throes of an explosion: awash in references to both personal, local, and international talent. A pure encapsulation of the spirit of the time and place reveling in its subjectivity.
Such expressions have no room for the dishonest, and the 90s were a period of great dishonesty as we know because people didn’t know what else to be. Maybe ignorance is a kind of excuse to not dare to become what we are. We never looked inwards but were frequently looking out towards the other, observing, recording, reporting.
Yet here we have a group of people who don’t make excuses, who put it all out there, even bits of their very own, deeply personal lives for our scrutiny. If the spirit of the 90s is embodied in artists like Baachy and the MAC-led exhibition Unveiling Visions at the NAG, Handle with Care is their counterpoint – the rooh of the new century finally bursting forth and finding expression through a new generation of artists. It is a refreshingly courageous attempt at creating the vocabulary to articulate not just the present but what may well follow.
Fuck the 90s.
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