The Black / Black  Project

Walking into Zabo Chabiland's installation, The black project, the viewer is confronted with a series of squares, black canvases, whose depth and solidity give them the status of objects or architectural features. The mood is sombre and ordered, with minimal and classical associations, while the canvases themselves allude to representations of an infinite space or a barren void.
It is with these ideas in mind that the viewer begins to detect disturbances of light breaking through the black surfaces, which on closer inspection reveal the faintest traces of a human face. Each image/object - the status is now ambiguous - 'contains' a face: disembodied, eyes closed, hovering somewhere behind the picture plane. The faces, though barely visible, register as photographic images, which, when matched with an overall three-dimensionality, give the works an unnerving human presence. But, like death masks, the faces betray no indication of an expressive life. We are left to consider them as relics whose physiognomic stories might be read more by anthropologists, or as abstract signs of a precarious human condition. Chabiland's simple and eloquent works have a spectral grace that seems at odds with a time when pain, trauma and visceral revelations of death are writ large in our collective consciousness - a time when death, both private and public, is considered fair game for advertisers. These are reverent, unsettling works, dark spaces where the emblems of the human spirit lie dormant, just out of reach.

David Chandler, Exhibition Manager, The Photographer's Gallery, London.
Texte in the catalog of the exhibition "Presence" 1993.