On Saturday, Sept. 20, in Room 226 of the Weitz Center for Creativity, Carleton studio art major Rahim Hamid hosted a reception for their exhibition.
Hamid said the show began with a question that sits uncomfortably in the background of daily life: where do we accept violence, even celebrate it? “There’s a lot of political discourse around when violence is acceptable,” they said. “But we don’t always acknowledge the places where we’re totally fine with violence happening, as long as it benefits the nation or the spectator.”
The path to the exhibition was practical. Hamid received a Carleton fellowship funding that gave them a summer to paint. “There are limited creative spaces on campus, which is frustrating,” they said, “but once I had the room it was straightforward.” They did a quick walk-through to learn what they could and couldn’t do to the walls (not much, as it turns out), considered an offer of installation help and then decided to hang the show themselves. They’d done it before.
All seven paintings were made this summer, but the ideas have been percolating for about a year. The original proposal was different. “I was going to focus on Pakistan, and how leaving it behind—being here for three and a half years—has changed me,” Hamid said. They created several paintings in that vein. Only one appears in the show, however, and even that piece shifted once they started thinking explicitly about violence. “There’s a viscerality I wouldn’t have put in otherwise,” they said.
Hamid kept the scope honest. They focused on Western contexts in part because that’s where reliable, legally usable source material is most available. That practicality doesn’t mean the work endorses those systems; it means the show is clear about what it can depict with integrity and what it can’t. And while the paintings raise hard questions about spectatorship, they refuse easy moralizing. “I don’t come to a concrete answer,” they said. “I want to hold the contradiction.”
The paintings move between two arenas. One is state or extrajudicial force, the kind that is documented, debated, and too often normalized. The other is combat sports—the ring, the octagon, the mats—where harm is ritualized and regulated. That second arena complicates easy judgments of what kind of violence is acceptable. “In the cage, the violence is consensual, and both participants are willing,” Hamid said. “That word—consensual—matters.”
Hamid is a fan as well as a critic. They work from books, YouTube videos and documentaries.
“Fighting has been [around] for quite a while, but it also has a very rich history from the first Olympic Games, way back when in ancient Greece,” Hamid said. “So there’s thousands of years worth of people fighting each other for spectacle and money. And that’s something that hasn’t changed from then to now.”
“And I think that, in and of itself, is an interesting enough question to raise,” Hamid contended. They raise the questions “What forms does it take now? What sort of relationships do the fighters have to themselves to the organizations?”
“Because bear in mind, this is taking place in a system of money for capital. You’re fighting for money, and so what does that do to the relationship between you and your opponent or you and the reasons you would fight in the first place,” Hamid said. “So that’s the inspiration behind it: my own experiences watching combat sports and then having to think more critically about what I’m actually consuming.”
Hamid alters images in paint, slowing down split seconds into a scene that holds the viewer’s eye. The result is direct, not sanitized. “I want people to be a little disturbed,” they said. “There’s blood. There are injuries to the bodies of the fighters. There is a recognition that what is happening isn’t easy to watch or easy to understand. But I want viewers to look past that and see the humanity that persists through it. I think that’s ultimately what I want viewers to take away.”
Hamid is interested in the “strange intimacy” of fighting: how a space coded as ultra-masculine still produces images of closeness. “What’s more manly than two guys beating each other up?” they said with a smile. “But there are moments where they’re literally holding each other, rolling together on the mat. It’s a bond between fighters, and in its way between fighters and the audience.”
Hamid cites a documentary, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, as formative. The documentary is a five-part series from SB Nation that covers the history of MMA and its evolution from distinct combat sports to martial arts and its subsequent commodification in the mid 20th century.
“I think it’s a really interesting documentary, and I don’t think my work addresses all aspects of it, because there’s just so much there, but one of the paintings actually takes its name directly from the documentary,” Hamid said.
Hamid keeps their focus on culture and economics, on what it means to push the body to the limit. Money is part of the tension. Entry-level pay in major promotions is often discussed in terms of a base “show” amount plus a “win” bonus; fighters may only compete a few times a year, and expenses stack up: coaches, training, travel, recovery. MMA athletes take immense sacrifices to stay in peak physical condition and get little pay even when they win.
“Despite the low pay and the high risks, they still do it,” Hamid said. Why? They don’t pretend to have a single answer. The work suggests a knot of reasons: devotion to craft, identity, the relationship with an opponent who understands your limits better than anyone else, and the audience’s mirrored stakes.
What’s next? The show is documented, and Hamid is happy to share images after it comes down. If you missed the reception, the exhibition runs through October 22. Come with friends; this exhibition is about connection.
“I think that’s a really interesting space to think about how we think of playing or violence as a bonding mechanism, specifically within combat sports, because it’s not just also between the fighters, also between the fighters and the audience,” said Hamid.
