Anneka Lenssen, Tarjama/Translation: Contemporary Art from the Middle East, Central Asia, and their diasporas
Review of Tarjama/Translation: Contemporary Art from the Middle East, Central Asia, and their diasporas (New York: ArteEast, 2009)
Queens Museum of Art, May 10-September 27, 2009
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, August 21-October 24, 2010
In one provincial town in Kazakhstan, bas-reliefs decorate the administrative building. This in itself is unremarkable. But, as Kazakh artists Yelena Yorobyeva and Victor Yorobyev attest in their photographic series, “Kazakhstan. Blue Period (2002-05),” the banners within those bas-reliefs underwent a significant change after the fall of the Soviet Union. Once painted red, they are now painted a precise shade of blue-green: kok. Indeed, as the artists document, not only is kok the color of the new national flag, but it also proliferates in the village landscape to appear in kiosks, on walls, painted onto crosses on new graves, or dyed into new cloth. One beguiling photograph in the series shows two girls standing proudly in a kok-colored doorframe. They face outward, toward the camera and into the future, while the several pairs of adult shoes on the stoop point backward and into the house interior. With utter clarity, the piece proposes that ordinary interventions have made rural Kazakhstan into a vast expositional field for asserting a post-Soviet condition. It is also the only piece in the recent exhibition Tarjama/Translation: Contemporary Art from the Middle East, Central Asia, and their diasporas that exhibits a direct and legible re-coding process from one state into another.
Curated by Leeza Ahmady, Iftikhar Dadi, and assistant Reem Fadda under the auspices of ArteEast (a New York-based arts non-profit), Tarjama/Translation brought together new work from a loosely defined region following an even more loosely defined critical interest. The use of the word ‘translation’ here is perhaps best understood not as a process, but rather as a claim to the freedom to reject the pedagogical burdens placed upon the native informant, the cultural worker, and the minority citizen in the art industries of the contemporary United States. Tarjama/Translation was conceived in direct response to frustration with the critical reception of modern and contemporary art from the Middle East, a reception that has become ever more confined to object lessons in tolerance, i.e. appreciating the existence of art in enemy lands. Jessica Winegar - one of the guiding voices behind the exhibition - has given a thorough critique of this “‘art as evidence of advancement and humanity’ discourse.” She argues that most Middle East-related arts events in the U.S. are shaped by that discourse’s corollary investments in a celebratory multiculturalism that privileges art carrying recognizable signs of its difference from the Western norm while de-privileging art that meets the tastes of the global contemporary art market. As Omnia El-Shakry succinctly puts it, all art carries some marks of its location, but “only non-Western art is expected to have questions of identity function as a touchstone.” The initiatives devoted to showcasing Middle Eastern art in the United States have only grown after 9/11, which brought in its wake a renewed sense that such anodyne cultural understanding will ultimately prevent terrorism. These discourses easily recognize and support the kind of translational process documented in “Kazakhstan. Blue Period (2002-05),” i.e. movement from grim Socialist control to idiosyncratic expressions of personal freedom. They are less sanguine, however, about artworks that pursue conceptual interests other than the exploration of cultural transformations. As a result, the work from the Middle East on display in the U.S. is hardly representative of contemporary work valued in the Middle East (much of which tends to be right in step with tastes for big showy paintings or biennial-ready HD video).
To its credit, Tarjama/Translation refused to be guided by these simple identity and civilization categories; it also resisted the perceived obligation to present the consonance of supposed Middle Eastern and American values. The curators instead assembled a trans-regional sampling of artwork that span any number of unstable ethnic categories without claiming to fix them into cultural pieties. More than half the artists on the exhibition checklist hail from the contemporary nation-states of Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, or Kazakhstan. Beside work from artists supported by secular nation-states, visitors thus saw work from artists living in Islamic republics that are not Arabic-speaking (Iran), work from nations that have been dissolved (Afghanistan, Iraq), from unrecognized states (Palestine/Israel), from regions that are not “post-colonial” (Turkey, Iran), and myriad permutations of geopolitical sensibilities therein.
If Vorobyeva and Yorobyev asserted the post-socialist sensibility of people in the ex-Soviet Bloc, then the work of Egyptian artist Khaled Hafez offered a different testimony about the condition of being “post.” His video installation Revolution is a kind of vampy enactment of lingering Socialist and Muslim dreams in Egypt and their continued predication on drama and violence. Meanwhile, British-Iranian artist Mitra Tabrizian’s 2004 film Predator works outside the timeliness of cause and effect altogether. It plays with the now well-worn journalistic tropes that ‘explain’ terrorism, following an alienated and impoverished Muslim teenager whose neediness, we understand, makes him an easy pawn for fundamentalist warlords who arrange for him to kill a writer. Where Tabrizian departs from the standard tale of motives is in her staging of the story line. She shoots her scenes in sumptuous and impeccably lit detail and scripts the sparse dialogue in English so as to further prevent the projection of alterity or authenticity onto the characters. After twenty-six minutes of beautiful suspense, the film’s rapid, bloody resolution offers a sense of relief without emotional affect.
Other pieces in the exhibition could be experienced simply as art qua art. Pouran Jinchi, an Iranian born artist based in New York, arranges calligraphed fragments of the Qur’an into beautiful compositions in his small canvases varnished in a smooth layer of Elmer’s glue. John Jurayj, an American-Lebanese painter, translates photographic images of war-torn Lebanon into a pastiche of abstract expressionist marks and 1980s neon sensibilities. If any particular work of translation can be supposed for these pieces, it would have to center on notions of the artist's privileged individuality in which he or she translates the immaterial contents of mind and experience into materialization as art.
But why give these works the imprimatur “translation?” Tarjama/Translation’s curatorial apparatus did not really step up to the challenge of articulating a specific value or function for “translation” within the evaluative discourses of the contemporary art world. Many texts accompanying the exhibition itself were excerpts from previous essays and contexts whereas the curatorial statements in the catalog are a cacophony of different authoritative discourses. Ahmady’s essay treats the figure of the artist as a great humanist interpreter, rendering the world's surface appearances into deep meaning. Dadi’s essay highlights the act of translation as a means to map the dislocations and antinomies of an incompletely realized region he describes as “characterized by nationalist ideological fantasies and widespread political repression that persist despite their increasingly hollow status.” He proposes that if modernism may be understood by its confidence in the possibility of a completely smooth translation of material (built form, visual language, planning rubrics, etc.) from one setting to another, then the contemporary acts of translation on view should be seen in the absence of pretense to perfectability, i.e. as processes that assume failure within structures for communication. Fadda for her part, however, sees the verb ‘translate’ as a responsibility to non-didactic action and an endeavor that can bridge breaks in social systems and correct misinterpretations.
The incoherence of “translation” as a framework for an exhibition ultimately meant that visitors to the exhibition looked elsewhere for coherence. Notably, quality – that old standard of aesthetic judgment – reemerged as a contender. As New York Times critic Holland Cotter described in his August 13 review, the merely basic and broad connections between artists left the visitor “still pretty much on your own in finding a focus.” For Cotter, that meant directing attention to individual artists in search of the good ones. Evincing a similar outlook, Ahmady wrote that the exhibition was, at root, a showpiece for “internationally recognized artists, each practicing an exceptional command of aesthetics and genres specific to themselves.” In other words, responses to the Tarjama/Translation project – both before and after its conception – ultimately privileged a form of art that claimed to require no translation. It may seem an uninspiring outcome that genre- and quality-centered systems of evaluation might be deployed to cope with heterogeneity. Yet such responses should also be seen as a symptom of exhaustion with a second trend in exhibitions of non-Western art, particularly those with ambitions to communicate internationally rather than domestically: for artists from regions that do not completely share political or economic interests with the United States, overt criticality has been de rigueur. In fact, Egyptian artist and critic Hassan Khan’s recent curatorial project “A New Formalism,” a collaboration with Bidoun Projects for the March 2010 Art Dubai, also demonstrated a desire for formally rigorous artistic constructions rather than one-note social statements. There, Khan showcased only art that made arguments about art, one that built itself through sustained engagement with itself. Certainly, to allot oneself a space to show art that speaks the language of art is to forestall the problematic desire to extract from contemporary art from the Middle East, Central Asia, and its diasporas a kind of ethnographic testimony that offers ‘cultural understanding’ or ‘cultural criticality’ for liberal consumption. What remains to be seen, however, are whether, and how, these curatorial strategies (or lack thereof) might rearrange normative cultural experiences into new topographies of global talent.
--Anneka Lenssen
Anneka Lenssen is a PhD candidate in the history, theory, and criticism of art and architecture at M.I.T. She researches the production of modern painting in Damascus in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s with a particular interest in the new patterns of investment in contemporary art, culture, and state building that followed WWII.
Fayeq Q. Oweis, Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists (Artists of the American Mosaic)
Review of Fayeq Q. Oweis, Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists (Artists of the American Mosaic), (Greenwood Press, 2008)
The difficulty of making national or ethnic origin a defining factor for the consideration of art while dodging the notoriously reductive lens of the East/West binary is one all too familiar to any curator, artist, critic, or scholar dealing with art from the Arab world and its diasporas. Of course, this dilemma is one whose reach extends far beyond that region; every exhibition, catalogue essay, dissertation, or in this case—the ever-ambitious project of an encyclopedia—¬ whose organizing principle is art produced by any group perceived as either marginalized, displaced, and/or outside the mainstream cannons of Western art, inevitably faces the same unrelenting problem: that is, how to present their work under the umbrella of a shared cultural experience without subscribing to the rather stale discourse of “the Other” and its inevitably grim aesthetic in which diverse artistic practices are consistently contextualized within a struggle for inclusiveness, or worse, a fetishized narrative of victimhood.
In other words—and more specifically—when it comes to Arab American art (a term, in its own right, glaringly problematic in its infinite ambiguity), how do we describe an art as located between home and another country without inadvertently reinforcing dangerously paradigmatic dichotomies based on issues of national identity (East/West), authority (center/periphery), temporality (tradition/modernity), gender (male/female), subjectivity (oppressor/oppressed), and space (local/global)? How do we speak of difference without naming it? And conversely, how do we account for cultural unity without succumbing to totalizing systems of thought associated with the practice of identifying, classifying, and essentializing—processes integral to the formation of a survey such as that of an encyclopedia?
While such questions related to the notion of hybrid identity may feel like desperately exhausted and ubiquitous anxieties firmly instilled into us by the lessons of post-colonialism, Fayeq Q. Oweis appears to remain blind to such concerns in his Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists¬¬—a blindness that while paradoxically empowering to some degree, proves itself to be immensely problematic throughout the book’s entries; indeed, there is no doubt that Oweis’ endeavor is admirably bold in light of the aforementioned theoretical stalemates, however, his decision to organize the text with an encyclopedic paradigm of analysis gravely undermines both his accomplishments and those of the artists he discusses.
The latest installment of Greenwood Press’ “Artists of the American Mosaic” series (other encyclopedias in the series are of Jewish American, Asian American, Native American, and African American artists), the Encyclopedia immediately smacks of the classically 1990s exercise of “flavor of the month,” inclusionism—a strategy that reverts to the false assumption that to simply attempt to account for, represent, and describe will alleviate repression, misinterpretation, and homogenization. Oweis even goes so far as to state that in his effort to provide “a cross-section” of Arab American artists from varying backgrounds, he has made a concerted attempt to include artists who are openly homosexual in order to “add diversity” to his selection of artists; here, Oweis seems to do more to legitimize sexual difference (albeit, inadvertently) than to call it into question all together. A more effective tactic, as some of the artists profiled in the encyclopedia itself demonstrate, is to seek not so much this kind of cosmetic inclusiveness, but rather, elicit a discussion that calls for a dislocation of center and shift in discourse.
Each of the 85 entries in Oweis’ encyclopedia roughly follows the same basic organizational scheme: an identification of that artist’s preferred medium/media; a brief biography; an identification of his or her key thematic content; a description of one or two specific examples from his or her body of work; a list of exhibitions in which he or she has been included; a bibliography of the sources used to write the profile; and the websites and spaces where one can view that artist’s works. While the structural redundancy of the encyclopedia is excusable given its conventional association with that format, more troubling is Oweis’ repeated deployment of a laundry list of formal, political, and theoretical concerns. Among these, and by far the most recurrent refrain, is that the artist “explores issues related to “identity,” “ethnicity,” “displacement” and/or “exile,”— broad generalizations that, rarely fully unpacked, very quickly become tiresome. By insufficiently explaining how such heavily loaded issues arise from the works themselves, nuanced explorations of complex socio-political questions are watered down into what reads as a ready-made list of formulaic, symptomatic grievances.
Oweis states his intentions in the introduction as seeking to “provide a window into the lives of Arab Americans in general and the lives and contributions of Arab American visual artists in particular, with an aim of educating the readers about issues and challenges facing people of Arab heritage,” (xiii). However, the format and function of the encyclopedia, with its traditional role to summarize, survey, and fix threatens to undermine the boundary-obscuring, anti-narrative strategies adopted by many of the artists discussed in its pages; from the open book structure of Dalia Elsayed’s evocative “emotional maps” of her daily routines, to Walid Raad’s stealth critique of our impulse to gravitate towards the tangible, linear, and authoritative, to Yasser Aggour’s bold interrogation of social taboos, to Amina Mansour’s dual-pronged critique of social constructions (wealth, gender) and fantasies (identity and nostalgia) alive in both Egypt and the American South, to the revolutionary spirit of Samia Halaby’s abstractions, many of the artists included in the volume brilliantly transgress the most repressive ideological demarcation lines.
Perhaps just as many of the artists overviewed, however, adopt artistic strategies that often manage to reinforce the very same stereotypes they seek to disrupt. Take for example, Andrea Ali’s work created following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which the artist sculpted ten veiled women fashioned as bowling pins. As they wait to be run over by a bowling ball covered with stars and stripes, Ali’s sculptures deliver not a poignant examination of violence and oppression, but a contrived perpetuation of the “us verses them” narrative. Indeed, throughout the encyclopedia, Oweis identifies reactionary works like these as a “turning point” in an artist’s oeuvre (see Sumayyah Samaha’s entry)—a pattern that when so frequently applied, does little to dismantle the myth of conflict and strife as a generator of artistic activity when in comes to Arab artists and/or artists of Arab descent. Thus, it is not just a given work on its own that is the sole contributor to these kinds of clichés, but rather how Oweis contextualizes it in terms of its importance within that artist’s greater oeuvre, and where he locates its meaning. For instance, instead of exploring the ways in which Hala Faisal’s depiction of the female nude in various positions of repose, erotic pleasure, and vulnerability functions to subvert the traditional notion of the power relationship prescribed by the male gaze, the use of nudity in Faisal’s work is identified as a means to expose the sadness and suffering of her subjects, particularly the women of Iraq, thereby reinforcing stereotypes surrounding the oppressed Arab woman. Often equally misleading are Oweis’ formal analyses; abstract and calligraphic works in particular, are paradigmatically explained as a fusion between Arab artistic traditions and a Western modernist vocabulary—a recurring claim that again, when redundantly deployed, risks insulating that the multidimensional nature of Arab American abstract art can be attributed to the mere fact that Arab American artists have been exposed to a visual culture outside of that belonging to their native country.
While the use of plain, straightforward, and easily digestible language, as opposed to lofty art historical jargon, is more than acceptable for the purposes of a preliminary source such as an encyclopedia, describing paintings as “full of excitement and happiness,” or “colorful with vivid tones and shades” or simply “expressionistic”—full stop¬¬—fails to do justice to the finely-tuned inventiveness of these artists formal contributions— a problem exacerbated by the dearth of images provided by the book. In place of the black and white photographs of the artists that accompany the majority of the profiles, certainly the reader would be far better served by an additional image of the artists’ work (many profiles have none), if not more in-depth written content.
That said, gathering together artists of such disparate artistic practices, mediums, generations, political attitudes, religious backgrounds, relationships to their country of origin, institutional and commercial success and I would argue, quality, does provide a realistic cross-section of and practical introduction to the broad range of contributions Arab Americans bring to the visual arts. Even more importantly, it does successfully help dispel assumptions about what Arab or Arab American art should look like—a task whose continued importance should not be underestimated. Essentially, Oweis’ most unfortunate downfall then seems to be that he appears to have confused breath with depth, inclusion with redemption, and diversity with multidimensionality. As such, The Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists demonstrates the need to come up with far fresher, more rigorously critical, theoretically engaged, tightly-curated, and yet loosely-structured modes of analysis in order to better accommodate the many overlapping and intersecting strata that comprise such exceedingly complex artistic practices and their related discourses.
- Ranya Husami
Ranya Husami recently obtained an M.A. in Modern Art and Curating at Columbia University. Her Master's thesis, "The Dog Ate My Framework"; The Origin-ality of the Post-War Lebanese Avant-Garde and Other Post-Modernist Myths," examines the formation of narratives and origin stories that have crystallized around conceptual art practices in Post-War Lebanon.
Hassan Khan’s Nine Lessons Learned from Sherif El-Azma, 2009.
On Hassan Khan’s Nine Lessons Learned from Sherif El-Azma, 2009.
Languages: English and Arabic
No. of Pages: 80 pages
Publishing House: Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo
ISBN No.: 977-17-6873-5
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| Cover of Hassan Khan's Nine Lessons Learned from Sherif El-Azma |
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--Walid Sadek
Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. He is currently associate professor at the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut.
Ariella Azoulay, The Civic Contract of Photography, (NEW YORK: ZONE, 2009)
Review of Ariella Azoulay, The Civic Contract of Photography, (New York: ZONE, 2009).
In an evocative passage in Memory for Forgetfulness (August, Beirut, 1982), Mahmoud Darwish writes that the image which Palestinians have created for themselves is a problematic foothold of vision. Setting the political reality against its own materiality, such image invokes, in his view, a specific kind of representation that becomes reality itself by way of its becoming image –what Jean Baudrillard termed the Hyperreal. Since the 1980s, Elias Sanbar has posed the problem of imaging Palestine and Palestinians as predicated upon an absence: expelled and obliterated from their land and without a state, Palestinians are absent from their own image. More recently, within a global politics of visibility, Palestinians represent themselves as demanding recognition and restitution, at times underscoring the universality of their struggle and suffering. Moreover, within the context of the humanitarization of the conflict, Palestinians are represented as victims bearing witness to their own catastrophe, denouncing the violation of their rights. Through this lens, “traumatic realist” images are always falling short of accounting for catastrophe: at best, they may arouse empathy, pity or compassion, and at worst, they become illustrations of a situation towards which spectators have become manifestly tired or apathetic. Is it possible to think of these various ways of imaging Palestine, Palestinians and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict differently, or should we consider them as specific to historical and discursive junctures?
In a major contribution both to the field of political theory and the theory of photography, Ariella Azoulay proposes radically new and vital arguments that help us rethink the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the imaging of Palestine. By summoning us as spectators of “The Citizenry of Photography,” she urges us to take responsibility for what is visible. Stressing a shift away from ethics in discourses about war and conflict, and in an effort to bring back politics as a space of speech and action, Azoulay’s placing of photography as potentially such a space is radical and necessary. When the idea that we are all jaded viewers of disaster pornography and catastrophe predominates, The Civil Contract of Photography’s essential contribution is precisely the stress it places on the visual praxis of watching images that bear traces of the administered perpetuation of disaster in occupied and besieged Palestine. In her book, Azoulay focuses on images that were taken by Israeli photographers (artists and journalists) of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and Gaza since the beginning of the Second Intifada in order to examine what kind of encounters take place in such photographic acts. Without dismissing the possibility of the act of photography as an appropriation of another’s image—and thus an act of violence—her case studies feature photographs in which the subject stakes a claim by addressing the camera lens directly. She then explores how these conditions of visibility open up possibilities of political action.
In her first chapter, Azoulay sets out to establish her own working definitions of citizenship and non-citizenship by examining different formulations: From the French Revolution to the 1948 Declaration of the Rights of Man and from Hannah Arendt and François Lyotard to Giorgio Agamben’s recent articulation of the figure of the refugee. The second chapter is devoted to a study of the practices of photography since the medium’s inception in 1839. Encompassing more than a technical skill, photography in Azoulay’s argument serves as a form a civil knowledge, and thus a potential space for political relations. The chapter that follows posits the act of photography as an agreement between the viewer, photographer, and photographed. The fourth chapter addresses the problem that even if we consider the act of photography as an agreement between those involved, the current field of vision of catastrophe (as “images of horror”) hinders photographs from making direct “emergency claims” to the viewer. Chapter five is devoted to injury perpetrated to women vis-à-vis the visualization of rape, concluding that subjects vulnerable to rape bear the status of “impaired citizens.” This is a status shared by Palestinians as they are always placed on the verge of catastrophe by the actual state that governs them and this is the argument put forth in chapter six. Chapters seven and eight are devoted to the viewership of catastrophe and to a description of Palestine as a Penal Colony respectively. The last chapter addresses the figure of the woman collaborator and the sanitation of sexual violence inherent to Israeli torture of Palestinians.
Shifting the current paradigm of analysis of the occupation from the violation of Palestinians’ rights, Azoulay demonstrates how Israel governs all Palestinians through a set of mechanisms that deny them citizenship by treating them as exceptions to the rule, maintaining them on the verge of catastrophe. Azoulay also highlights the discrepancy between considering Palestinians as citizens of a hypothetical Palestinian state and as citizens of the actual state of Israel that governs them. She then argues that to consider Palestinians as refugees is to deny their existence as political agents – unless they have a state of their own. Azoulay thus asks: how can citizenship be rehabilitated to a collective of non-citizens who are governed as exception to the rule, in other words, as “impaired citizens”? The notion of citizenship in the Declaration of the 1948 Rights of Man considers citizenship as an inalienable, universal right bestowed by the nation-state. Azoulay insists that such a universal notion of citizenship renders the citizen the only figure capable of struggling against the abuses of power. By establishing the categories of citizenship and non-citizenship, she suggests doing away with the ghost of nationalism and instead, substituting it with a non-universalizing and territorializing notion of citizenship, thereby awarding political status to non-citizens. Her politization of non-citizenship is thus necessarily based on a radical separation between state and nation and on the principle that everyone everywhere is entitled to citizenship in the territory in which he or she lives. Azoulay’s categorization of Palestinians as bearers of impaired citizenship, therefore, diverges from a conception of the conflict based on the violation of rights and ethnic cleansing, which poses dispossession and obliteration as moral and ethical problems and Palestinians as dispossessed refugees demanding restitution and recognition. In her account, both the humanitarization of the conflict and the terms that are currently used to describe the practices of sovereignty over Palestine and Palestinians restrict and circumscribe the field of vision of the conflict.
In her study, Azoulay describes the way in which power is programmatically deployed in the territory in which Palestinians live by creating a state of suspension premised on violence and the threat of violence. Through preventive and punitive aggressions like targeted assassinations, destruction of infrastructure and homes, violent arrests, restrictions on travel, bombings from the air, raids, expropriations and the prohibitions of demonstrations, the existence of Palestinians remains at the threshold of catastrophe, a chronic and prolonged situation known to the locals in the West Bank and in Gaza as “the tyranny of incertitude.” This kind of violence, as Azoulay puts it, “prevents, delays, complicates, disrupts priorities, upsets plans, hurts the sick, harpers students, destroys livelihoods, intensifies hunger, creates malnutrition harms family relations, inhibits growth, fosters diseases and drives people out of their minds.” Azoulay further argues that the practices of detainment, imprisonment, torture, and the restriction of movement maintain the Occupied Territories and Gaza as a Kafkaesque Penal Colony, characterized by the haphazardous inscription of an infringement into the colonized bodies and psyches.
Azoulay also explores how beyond the territory in which they live, the social tissue and the psyche of Palestinians are imprinted with the Israeli ruling apparatus, rendering Palestinians vulnerable through an incriminating machine that produces collaborators by way of coercion and torture. Reading testimonies gathered by B’Tselem, alongside examining their use of photographs (that exist or not) of Palestinian men and women naked or having extra-marital sex, Azoulay describes how the Shabak instrumentalize photography in order to extort Palestinians into collaboration. Using these photographs as a means of torture, Israeli Authorities, according to Azoulay, reduce images to their denotative existence. The implication is a form of concentrated violence to which women are the most vulnerable.
For Azoulay, the kind of violence and aggression exerted on Palestinians produces non-events whose visibility depends on the viewer’s capacity for drawing énoncés from them by establishing a referent that exceeds the images’ status as documentation. Positing photographs as an exchange of gazes, Azoulay, claims that the act of photography, photographer and photographed assume a hypothetical spectator who can potentially interact with them in the space of photography. Proposing an ethical viewership that transcends the passive and desensitized spectator, Azoulay politicizes photography not by considering it as documentation of an event, but as a politicized space that can actualize speech and action. In her formulation, spectatorship is a civil duty and the subjects of the photographs that she examines are non-citizens presenting their injuries. Therefore, those involved in the photographic act are enabled to address the terms by which they are being governed. Moreover, considering photography as a testimony of the photograph’s eventuation—by the encounter between photographer, photographed and camera—she posits photography as a mutual obligation, as a means to organize political relations extrinsic to the sovereign power. In this way, citizenship is both a tool for struggle and as a duty – not to the nation, but between individuals. To participate in the act of photography, especially to produce photographs on the verge of catastrophe, is to refuse to accept the status of Palestinians as non-citizens and instead, to demand their participation and recognition. As opposed to bearing witness, being photographed on the verge of catastrophe is to make a civil address, insofar as it is the presentation of a grievance claiming the spectator’s civil gaze. To practice citizenship as a duty means to speak on behalf of the photograph by watching it, re-opening it to negotiate what it shows, and reconstructing the event by introducing the dimensions of space and time. Watching, for Azoulay, is not recognizing: also different than visualizing or looking, watching demands reconstructing and examining the circumstances of the photograph’s dissemination.
Azoulay’s approach to photography highlights what the invention of photography offers to the gaze as an encounter and thus potentially a political space, as opposed to a “has been.” In this way, her argument brings to mind those of photo historians and theorists John Tagg and Allan Sekula who suggest returning photography to its public social and political concerns. Azoulay thereby challenges the kinds of (private) reception-centered, aesthetic and semiotic approaches to photography that have predominated since Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980). A central shift in how photography has been understood as a political tool that Azoulay makes, is to consider the photograph itself (as opposed to the photographer or the viewer) as the mediator for political relations. In this way, she both furthers Walter Benjamin’s politization of photography as “a crime scene,” and problematizes Susan Sontag’s notion of ethical responsibility regarding the pain of others. In The Social Contract of Photography, Azoulay understands photographs of Palestinians on the verge of catastrophe as énoncés of horror, as textual and visual expressions describing catastrophe as it occurs. However, the current conditions of visibility of catastrophic events impend catastrophe to be witnessed, addressing a blinded spectator. Thus, civic spectatorship has the duty to actualize the passage of the photograph from énoncé of horror to an emergency claim. Insofar as the traces of the injury are imprinted on the surface of the photographic image, they are “awaiting the spectator to assist them.” But because photographs are not pure objects of vision and cannot speak for themselves, they are handicapped and thus require additional verbal and textual support. In other words, the visibility of horror remains unseen unless the spectator actively assumes the role of reconstruction of the photographs, understood as moving images that elude a stable gaze. Azoulay’s focus on the viewing conditions that are specific to Israelis over Palestinians highlights the problem that further harm occurs when the conditions of discourse distort the meanings that are contained in the photograph. Even though a referent can be established, Israeli-Jews look at Palestinians as the enemy, thus they may miss the position of being addressed and simply regard the statement of horror as a confirmation of what they already know. For Azoulay, everything can be seen, but what horror shows can neither be seen in the current tribunals nor translated into emergency claims, thereby evading the real dimension of the emergency. The pressing task she urges the spectator to undertake is not to render horror visible, but to mind the gap between the two. To do this implies to actualize the demands addressed to the spectator-citizen, whose protection and well-being are legitimating the perpetuation of injury of the non-citizens.
-- Irmgard Emmelhainz
Recently obtained a Ph.D. from the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto and joined the ranks of international precarious intellectual labor. She is currently rewriting her dissertation into a monograph on Jean-Luc Godard and the Palestine Question.
Palestine c/o Venice: Collatoral event of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Ed. Salwa Mikdadi (Beirut: mind the gap, 2009)
Review of Palestine c/o Venice: Collatoral event of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Ed. Salwa Mikdadi (Beirut: mind the gap, 2009)
Over the past ten years we have witnessed a number of publications, predominantly out of Europe and the U.S., dedicated to the subject of contemporary art from the Arab world and its diasporas. What remains lacking, however, is a substantial body of scholarship dedicated to the history of modern art of the region. In other words, the roots of the contemporary have yet to be examined. The consequence is the assumption that contemporary art in the region is a novelty. Unfortunately this holds true for those working abroad and, at times, even among those living in the Arab world. Dispelling this myth is the most significant contribution of the essays published in the exhibition catalogue for Palestine c/o Venice.
The foreword by Salwa Mikdadi, one of the first curators of modern and contemporary Arab art in U.S., sets the tone for the catalogue. Outlining her agenda and goals for Palestine c/o Venice, Mikdadi stresses the historical and contemporary significance of Palestinian participation at the Biennale. Not only is it a first, but also (and perhaps more importantly) the chosen framework for the exhibition aims to challenge the assumption that Palestinian art derives its strength from a position of victimization. Certainly an exhibition platform premised on the paradigm of the nation state is a structure that automatically excludes Palestinians in their current state of occupation. And whereas exhibitions of contemporary non-western art, particularly in the context of biennales, often are accused of being didactic political lessons, artists Taysir Batniji, Shadi HabibAllah, partners Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, Emily Jacir, Jawad al Malhi, and Khalil Rabah instead choose to broadly explore the intersection of art, audience, and geography without relinquishing attention to the complexity of the current socio-political Palestinian context. Moreover, the essays by Mikdadi, commissioner Vittorio Urbani, curator Jack Persekian, curator and critic Adila Laidi-Hanieh, and art historian Tina Sherwell unearth a longer history of art in Palestine and its overlaps and divergences with global contemporary production.
Urbani’s What If? is a personal reflection on the contingencies of dislocation and the role of art within this nexus of possibility. For Urbani, exhibitions and the curatorial choices they require are far from neutral. Rather than an “act of protest,” however, Palestine c/o Venice represents “an act of optimistic reconstruction,” one that must insist on an awareness of reality and one that in the Palestinian case has been “disrupted and almost frozen by delayed justice,” (7). This leads Urbani to question the “heavy, postcolonial heritage” of the Venice Biennale that is national representation. Yet in an unresolved paradox—one that deserves more attention—Urbani notes both the history of cross-cultural interactions informing a city like Venice and the contemporary opportunities for such meetings that develop out of the Venice Biennale (his collaboration with Salwa Mikdadi, for instance).
Perkesian also critiques the structure of the Biennale, arguing that it serves to comfort those involved by the mere fact that they are ‘doing something.’ He begins by ruminating on the gap between the subject and viewer, a distance that prompts the simultaneous and apparently paradoxical responses of empathy and inactivity. This launches Perkesian into a discussion of his experience and accompanying disappointment setting up the Palestinian Department of Visual Arts in the Ministry of Culture during the nineties. Despite Perkesian’s acknowledgement that he risks “the pitfall,” of “confessional mode,” his text unfortunately reads as a justification on why he no longer works in Palestine.
The remaining essays by Mikdadi, Laidi-Hanieh, and Sherwell take a more historical approach and are therefore the more substantial contributions to a scholarly discourse. Mikdadi’s essay opens with an explanation of the title, “Palestine c/o Venice,” a reference to the postal system that she aptly considers a metaphor for Palestine’s colonial history: the seemingly perpetual inability for one to mail a letter to and from Palestine proper with a Palestinian stamp due to a series of foreign occupiers, dating from the Ottoman Empire to contemporary Israel. In other words, Palestine is accessible only via a mediator. She then discusses post-Oslo changes in art (a media shift from painting to installation; the presence of international curators in the region; the growth in the number of NGOs institutions and art academies; the move from the isolation of the artist’s studio to the community’s engagement in the public sphere) before situating the Biennale projects within a local and global context.
Laidi-Hanieh also presents a historical outline of Palestinian art in different media (painting, film, literature). Moving from the 1960s through the 1987 Intifada to the post-Oslo period, she charts the influence of these radical socio-political shifts on artistic production and reception. She concludes by characterizing the case of Palestinian art with a paradox: “an anachronistic, unique, post-colonial colony that despite its small size, obliteration from the map, and relentless destruction and isolation, still manages to inspire its artists to create a diverse and vibrant cultural expression, which has shaped modern Arab culture and is now celebrated internationally,” (22). With this observation, Laidi-Hanieh distinguishes Palestinian cultural production from Franz Fanon’s paradigmatic analyses of a post-colonial revolutionary art due to its continuing occupation. At the same time, she refuses to consider this socio-political context as one that stifles art.
Sherwell’s “Intimate Landscapes/Dissected Terrains,” is of the most interest to art historians as its focus on one genre allows the author to theorize art’s role in shaping a community through a shared perception of the land. Moreover, she employs careful formal analysis of particular works to trace the changes in how the nation is produced via art (from the female figure as representation of homeland in paintings from the 1980s to an empty suitcase, void of identity markers, in Khalil Rabah’s work from 2002). Her essay concludes with an equally intriguing discussion of how the Palestinian works included in Biennale participate in this longer history.
The catalogue’s minor disappointments (from grammatical typos to content repetition) do not detract from its overall contributions. Together, the essays offer a timely commentary on state of contemporary Palestinian art and its scholarly discourse, one that has the potential to both provoke unproductive empathy and make substantial contributions to critical discussion on art and politics.
--Sarah A. Rogers
Sarah Rogers is currently a Post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art where is she researching American artists in Lebanon during the cold war.
Making Interstices – Central Asia Pavilion: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Ed. By Beral Madra
Review of Making Interstices – Central Asia Pavilion: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Ed. By Beral Madra
Echoing the grandiose optimism of Making Worlds, the designated theme of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, the Central Asia Pavilion has responded with Making Interstices, a title as self-aware as the art it represents. In her lead essay, Beral Madra, pavilion curator and editor of the accompanying catalog, reminds readers that an interstice is a small space in body tissue, an “empty cell compartment.” Interstices, she suggests, are where the potential for real creativity and social responsiveness exist. At its strongest, the catalog’s scholarly essays and featured artworks are assessments of the accuracy of Madra’s belief.
Much about the contemporary art, cultural identity, and scholarly discourse of this region reflects the relative newness of these territories as independent political nations. This newness is the source of both challenges and opportunities for the regions’ artists. Not least among the issues these artists face is the lack of knowledge in the larger global art scene about their respective country’s artistic traditions and contemporary production. Thus, among the highlights of the catalog are the four short thematic essays, each featuring one of the included nations: Oksana Shatlova writing on Kazakhstan; Gamal Bokonbev on Kyrgyzstan; Larisa Dodkhudoeva on Tajikistan; and Boris Chukhovich on Uzbekistan. Particularly useful are the contributions by Bokonbaev and Dodkhudoeva, which survey artistic developments in their respective regions over the two decades since independence.
Beyond an introduction to the contemporary art scene in central Asia, the scholarly essays respond to Madera’s search for socially engaged cultural forums. There is a constant tension running throughout these essays as the authors attempt to balance claims to cultural particularity with both a regional affiliation and a global art scene, or recognition of traditional cultural elements with an apparent disdain for the legacy of the Soviet past. Thus, when these authors contradict each other or even their own assessments (as they often do), they reveal their engaged effort to contend with the particularities that make this region fascinating and promising as a source of artistic inquiry and cultural criticism today. Herein, these essays leave many questions unanswered: what distinguishes the particular identities of these post-Soviet states and how does their shared Soviet legacy unite them, or how will these newly independent nations contend with the diversity of their own histories or relate to the politically contentious nations that surround them? Nevertheless, these questions provide a foundation for what is already a growing presence of these nations’ artists in the global arena and, thus, what will surely be a growing interest in and study of the region.
The subsequent portion of the catalog provides images from each of the five artistic installations paired with a statement. Unfortunately, inconsistent and partial documentation in this section limits the voice of the art and artists in the debates begun in the previous section. Although Madra’s curatorial essay highlights video as the central component of the pavilion, no video stills or installation shots are included in the catalog. Such a fundamental disconnect between text and image provides readers a partial understanding of the exhibition. The catalog also lacks an exhibition checklist cementing the catalog’s failure to serve as the permanent document of an ephemeral exhibition.
Other omissions also disturb the success of this publication. Place, location, and issues of proximity versus distance are chief concerns throughout the catalog. The central design strategy of the catalog is a stylized brown and white pattern that stretches over both the cover and a centerfold of the interior dividing the essays and images. Sited with pinpoint dots, the names of the artists, curators, and the Venice Biennale commissioner draw the pattern into focus as an interpretation of the landmasses and seascapes that stretch between Venice and central Asia. (Inexplicably, the names of the essays’ authors were not included on the map and the contributors’ section contained only select biographies.) Elsewhere, the pavilion’s artists’ and administrators’ names are labeled with their respective city of origin, but without national location. Given the desire of the pavilion to see these artists as part of a region, rather than four separate nations, or given the globalized culture of the contemporary art economy, it may make sense to remove the political boundaries and to see these people as relatively proximate or distant within space. However, I argue, it is precisely the recognition of these political boundaries as marking independent national territories that permits their inclusion among the pavilions of Venice Biennale. For that reason alone, the catalog would be stronger had it included a detailed map demarcating the territory of these nations and, also, those surrounding them. This visual design omission is a ready symbol for the stunning absence of any reference to the extremely dynamic cultural geography of this formerly Soviet region, located at the crux of the its former ruling empire, China, India, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Moreover, contextualization into the larger contemporary art world is conspicuously lacking. Indeed, contrary to Oksana Shatalova’s statement that “Kazakhstan arts … [do] not hav[e] an empiric referent,” or Boris Chukhovich’s statement that “Uzbek contemporary art takes its own way,” the images in Making Interstices are laden with cultural references and read as post-modern montages of charged symbols from the global art scene. Specifically, Uzbeki artist Anzor Salidjanov’s Photoshop montage Danae, Tribute to Rembrandt works with countless referents from the likes of Lisette Model to Yasumasa Morimura, in addition to the obvious titular reference. Meanwhile, Shatalova’s own performance-based photographs of herself wearing scarlet accessories and submerged in milk recall the feminist photographic performances of Hannah Wilke in their awareness of the feminist strategy of self-subjectification as a means of reclaiming power as well as their use of the bathtub as a place of illness, rest, and healing. Such striking quotations of international art can be found throughout the featured artworks, suggesting that no matter how stifled by Soviet rule or disenfranchised from the art economy this region was previously, its artists have quickly subsumed the aesthetic language of the global art era.
Indeed, Making Interstices proves itself to be a fitting title as this modest catalog brings together a group of artists and cultural critics determined to use their small space in this much larger body to agitate, question, and prove themselves, often it seems, to each other as much as to any others. They reveal a territory of cultural production at the crossroads of significant issues facing contemporary art today and, perhaps more importantly, they leave this space open to further research and new voices.
--Mitra Abbaspour
Mitra Abbaspour is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where the focus of her studies is modern and contemporary art from the Middle East. Her dissertation Defining the Present, Archiving the Past: Three Histories of Middle Eastern Photography examines three contemporary projects aiming to archive the history of Armenian, Kurdish, and pan-Arab photographic practices respectively.
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