WHO'S GONNA CARRY MY BOAT?

In Who’s Gonna Carry My Boat?, Asif Hoque explores the relationship between endurance, vulnerability, and the weight of human experience. Developed during his residency in Capri with Plan X Gallery, this new body of work reflects on what it means to carry oneself forward, confronting the forces that shape us while searching for the strength to move beyond them.
The exhibition takes its title from a phrase associated with endurance athlete David Goggins, transforming a call for physical determination into a broader existential question. What do we carry through life? Which burdens belong to us, and which have been passed down through generations? And what happens when the strength to continue becomes inseparable from the need to be supported?
Drawing from mythology, personal memory, and the traditions of figurative painting, Hoque creates a visual language in which human bodies and symbolic gestures move between the earthly and the transcendental. His figures inhabit a space where strength and fragility coexist, suggesting that resilience is not necessarily the absence of weakness, but the capacity to acknowledge it.
The experience of Capri introduces another dimension to this investigation. Surrounded by the island’s dramatic landscape, changing light, and enduring mythological associations, Hoque approaches the Mediterranean not simply as a geographical setting, but as a space of passage and transformation. The sea becomes both a physical presence and a metaphor for uncertainty, distance, and the continuous negotiation between resistance and surrender.
At its core, Who’s Gonna Carry My Boat? is less concerned with finding an answer than with reconsidering the question itself. Through these works, Hoque proposes an understanding of endurance that moves beyond individual strength, revealing the complex relationship between what we carry, what we leave behind, and what allows us to keep moving.