The past in perfect clarity

K. Azril Ismail’s works beckon you to move in a little closer and satisfy your curiosity.

SPACE, video, sound and a very special collaboration do the impossible – make K. Azril Ismail’s photographs of the Sentul Workshop even more real.

I ask Azril what he hopes people will feel when they enter the exhibition of photographs at the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre.

In Iron Dragons of Malaya, K. Azril Ismailcaptures the present before it disappearswith so much of the past, swallowedforever by progress.

“Curiousity,” he smiles.

As we walk up onto the platform, he points out the ramp that will make the exhibition friendly to wheelchairs and baby strollers. As he has told me time and time again, his work is for “the people”, every one of us.

“In the beginning, I wanted the first feeling to be power ... awe,” he explains. Everything was going to be large, but Azril works on instinct and that did not feel right. So he scaled down his exhibition, removing more than half the photographs and stripping down the huge centrepiece, originally covered in canvas, to the bare framework.

It works. Like the old trick schoolteachers use: instead of speaking more loudly to get your classes’ attention, speak softly and the class will quiet down, straining to hear what you have to say.

Azril’s work is a whisper, inviting you to come closer and closer. With curiosity.

I first saw Azril’s photographs of the Sentul Workshop several weeks ago. I was at KLPac to watch a show, and always worried I’d be late, I gave myself plenty of time and arrived 40 minutes early.

Now, one of the great things about KLPac is that as a true artists’ space, there is always something to see or do. In addition to scheduled events such as movies, plays or classes, you can take a walk by the lake, read about current or upcoming performances, get a drink or meal in their restaurant, browse through the resource centre or catch one of their exhibitions.

Every bump and scratch on a rusty locomotive is sharplydefined.

The exhibitions are what I always head for first. There is something nice about walking among art, ambling along to see what the artist community is up to and whether anything catches your eye.

Azril’s preview exhibit of Iron Dragons of Malaya did not just catch my eyes; it grabbed them, yanked them in and held them prisoner.

One of the greatest gifts an artist can give his or her audience is to show us the beauty of what we take for granted. Like walking through an old workshop we might barely glance around. Through Azril’s lens, though, you can’t help but stare at the colour, the detail and the magnificence. You can’t help being drawn into the photographs, arms reaching out to touch what you suddenly realise is a piece of history, a piece of you.

The clarity is unbelievable. Every bump and scratch on a rusty locomotive is sharply defined; the sunlit leaves of a tiny plant are a shocking green among the dark shadows. In one of my favourite photographs, two shirts and a pair of trousers hang in an office. I can feel the texture of the plastic chair, I can almost read the tag on the trousers.

Azril spent months in Sentul, KL, the old “city of locomotives”, taking pictures. Using a technique called high dynamic range photography, the process takes five or six times longer than more conventional methods and the photographer considers himself lucky to get three or four good shots in a day.

Azril is the kind of artist a rapidly evolving society needs, one who can capture the present before it disappears with so much of the past, swallowed forever by progress. This year, we lose the historic depot as it moves to Perak.

“There are so many stories,” says Azril. “There are workbenches with tools so old that no one remembers how to use them anymore.”

Although he keeps emphasising that change and progress are inevitable, there is a forced bravery to his voice as if he were trying to convince himself, trying to make it sound like he can bear it that this tangible history will soon be sold off for scrap metal. Looking at his images I can hardly bear it myself.

I was not the only person to fall in love with Azril’s work. Among others, Iron Dragons of Malaya attracted the attention of an exciting young company, 360 KL, which approached Azril about collaborating on a new exhibit, one that would use new media, including video and sound, to add even more depth to his photos.

Azril spent monthsin Sentul takingpictures using atechnique calledhigh dynamicrangephotography.– Photos from K.Azril Ismail

One of the main things that attracted 360 KL was that Azril is not exclusive. Quite the opposite, he freely shares his work because he believes the subject belongs to everyone. And 360 KL aimed to help “democratise” his work even more. Many of Azril’s images, the sounds and videos, will be available on the Internet. The new exhibit, still free to the public, has moved his work from the KLPac gallery into Pentas 2, where visitors can immerse and surround themselves in the striking images.

If there had been a single problem with his previous exhibit, it was that the spotlights glared off the glass covering the photos. The new exhibit takes care of that problem by showing the photographs in light boxes so the images glow at us from the darkness.

“I can control the brightness with this,” says Azril, showing me what looks like an air-con remote. Once everything else is up, he is going to experiment again, until he knows he has it just right.

There is a platform in the centre of the room, bringing the audience up to eye level with the surrounding photographs. The platform itself goes around two video screens. These will show the brilliantly crafted videos of Latfy Latif (whose work on this, incidentally, has gained him such attention that he is now in high demand for similar projects). Latfy uses cutouts of Azril’s photos to create 3-D environments, allowing visitors to move through the workshop as if we were really there. Not content to go the extra mile, Latfy went the extra 400, taking the eight-hour train ride from KL to Butterworth and back, filming all the way to create a narrative he calls 8x8.

Award-winning sound engineer Azman Abu Hassan has put together ambient sounds that will “move” around the room with the images.

The journey here has not been easy. Like many artists, Azril has fallen in love with his own subject. His open heart is vulnerable to bruising and he takes it deeply and personally if even one person fails to see the beauty he is so intent on displaying.

Luckily for Azril, and for us, his passion is shared and propped up by those who do recognise the exquisiteness of his work. In addition to 360 KL, he says he is grateful to KLPac’s Datuk Faridah Merican and Joe Hasham for teaching him to go with the flow.

“When things don’t work out, we improvise,” he says. The results are unexpected, “but things turn out, and we look at it again and say: now, that’s interesting”.

■ ‘Iron Dragons of Malaya’ by K. Azril Ismail, Anis Ramzy, and 360 KL will be showing daily until Jan 25 from 11am to 8pm at the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (Sentul Park, Jalan Strachan, off Jalan Ipoh). For more information, call 03-2078 8090 or visit klpac.org, irondragonsofmalaya.com, or 360kl.com. ‘Iron Dragons of Malaya’, the book, was launched on Jan 10 and is available at KLPac and the Iron Dragons website.