Art, Borders and Belonging: On Home and Migration 9781350203068, 9781350203099, 9781350203075

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Art, Borders and Belonging

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Art, Borders and Belonging On Home and Migration Edited by Maria Photiou and Marsha Meskimmon

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Selection and editorial material © Maria Photiou and Marsha Meskimmon, 2021 Individual chapters © their authors, 2021 Maria Photiou and Marsha Meskimmon have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover image: Almagul Menlibayeva, Red Butterfly, 2012, Duratrans print in lightbox, 91 x 120, Ed. 3 + 2 AP. Courtesy of American Eurasian Art Advisors LLC, Almagul Menlibayeva © All. Rights. Reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Photiou, Maria, editor. | Meskimmon, Marsha, editor. Title: Art, borders and belonging : on home and migration / Maria Photiou and Marsha Meskimmon. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045736 (print) | LCCN 2020045737 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350203068 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350203075 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350203082 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Dwellings in art. | Home in art. | Homeland in art. | Belonging (Social psychology) in art. | Art and society–History–21st century. Classification: LCC N8217.D94 A78 2021 (print) | LCC N8217.D94 (ebook) | DDC 700/.4564–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045736 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045737 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-0306-8 ePDF: 978-1-3502-0307-5 eBook: 978-1-3502-0308-2 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of illustrations List of contributors Introduction: Art, Borders and Belonging – On Home and Migration Maria Photiou and Marsha Meskimmon

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1 Weaving together: Narratives of home, exile and belonging Maria Photiou

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2 Parastou Forouhar: Materializing pain and beauty Lydia Wooldridge

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3 Deciphering home through Hajra Waheed’s archival investigations Sarah Fox

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4 Recreating the place of home in Remedios Varo’s La creación de las aves 73 Nadia Garcia 5 Identity and (not) belonging: Art and the politics of British-ness in 1980s Britain Imogen Racz 6 Aftershocks and (un)belongings: Reflecting on Home Strike Alexandra Kokoli and Basia Sliwinska

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7 Crossing literal and conceptual borders: Nepantla practices of the borderlands in performance projects by Guillermo Gomez-Peña Eva Zetterman

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8 Boundaries and belonging in Kazakh art: A case study of Red Butterfly by Almagul Menlibayeva Aliya de Tiesenhausen

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9 ‘Arrival city’ versus ‘dysfunctional nation’: Exhibiting the ‘migration crisis’ at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale Joel Robinson

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Index

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Illustrations 1.1 Vassia Vanezi, Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory, 2017 1.2 Vassia Vanezi, Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory, 2017 1.3 Vassia Vanezi, Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory, 2017 1.4 Emily Jacir, Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which Were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948, 2001 2.1 Parastou Forouhar, Eslimi, 2003 2.2 Parastou Forouhar, The Papillon Collection, 2010 2.3 Parastou Forouhar, Weaving Pain, 2013 2.4 Parastou Forouhar, Kiss Me, 2013 4.1 Remedios Varo, La Creación de las aves, 1957 5.1 Rasheed Araeen, Look Mama… Macho, 1983–6 5.2 Catalogue image of Attempts to Fill Vacant Spaces by Veronica Ryan in From Two Worlds at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 30 July–7 September 1986 6.1 Małgorzata Markiewicz, The Resistance Kitchen, 2017 6.2 Paula Chambers, Domestic Front (2016–) 6.3 Paula Chambers, Feminist Clutter (2018–) 6.4 Sera Waters, Boring Conversations #2: Cloak of Invisibility (front), 2016 6.5 Sera Waters, Boring Conversations #2: Cloak of Invisibility (back), 2016 6.6 Sera Waters, Camouflage Cloaks for Invaders: Robe, 2016 7.1 Emily Hicks and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Border Wedding (1988) 7.2 Emily Hicks and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Tijuana-Niagara (1988) 7.3 Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Madrid (1992) 7.4 La Pocha Nocha, Mapa/Corpo 3 (2013) 8.1 Almagul Menlibayeva, Red Butterfly, 2012 8.2 Saule Suleimenova, Steppe Guard 1, 2016

14 18 21 22 35 37 40 46 76 96

97 119 123 124 128 129 130 145 147 148 153 160 167

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8.3 Aziza Shadenova, Aydan (From Girls of Kyrgyzstan series) Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, colour photograph, 2011 170 8.4 Asel Kadyrkhanova, The Machine, installation, mixed media, 2018 172 8.5 Almagul Menlibayeva, Aral Beach 2, 2011 176 9.1 Opening in the wall forming the entrance to the exhibition in the German pavilion (Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country), 2016 186 9.2 View of the exhibition in the German pavilion (Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country), 2016 188 9.3 Documentation of housing and recreational projects for München and Berlin-Tempelhof at the exhibition in the German pavilion (Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country), 2016 189 9.4 EOOS, Social Furniture: Living, Cooking, Working, documentation of the project on a workshop table at the exhibition in the Austrian pavilion (Places for People), 2016 192 9.5 next ENTERprise Architects, ‘HAWI –Experimental Living’ prototype, UN/COMMON SPACE - UN/DEFINED LIVING, exhibition in the Austrian pavilion (Places for People), 2016 194

Contributors Nadia Albaladejo García is a recent PhD graduate at University College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests focus on art history, surrealism, gender theory and intermediality studies. Her recent writings include fashion and surrealism and ecofeminist readings of Varo’s paintings. She has published on Remedios Varo online at Literary Encyclopedia (2018). Sarah Fox is an arts administrator with an MA in Art History from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests focus on contemporary Asian Canadian visual culture and archival-based practices. Alexandra Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Middlesex University London, and Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. She has published widely on the fraught but fruitful relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis, visual activisms and contemporary art practices informed by and committed to feminism. Her recent books include The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016) and (co-edited with Deborah Cherry) Tracey Emin: Art into Life (2020). Her research into the aesthetics of feminist anti-nuclear activism at Greenham Common is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre (2019) and the Leverhulme Trust (2020). Marsha Meskimmon  is Professor of Transnational Art and Feminism, and the Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University (UK). Her research makes connections between transdisciplinary feminisms and contemporary art, with a particular focus on the important cultural contribution of women and other marginal subjects. She has published a number of books and articles in the field, including The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century  (1996),  Women Making Art:  History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics  (2003),  and Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination  (2010),  and  is currently writing a trilogy,  Transnational Feminism and the Arts, the first volume of which has

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just been published:  Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections (2020). Maria Photiou is an art historian and a research fellow at the University of Derby, UK. Her research focuses on women’s art practices and the connections between migration, gender, memory and the politics of belonging. Her recent publications include Who Are We, Where Do We Come from, Where Sre We Going to? Writing Greek Cypriot Women’s Art Histories in Contemporary Cyprus (2021) and National Identity and the Politics of Belonging in Greek Cypriot Visual Culture (2021). Imogen Racz is Assistant Professor in Art History at Coventry University. She has published widely on late-twentieth-century art that relates to the home, identity and belonging. Her book Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday (2015/2019) considered sculptural practices since the 1970s that explored the abstract concepts that we have around ideas of home, including alienation, sentiment and enclosure. Her book of interviews with artists and facilitators working during the 1980s – British Art of the Long 1980s: Diverse Practices, Exhibitions and Infrastructures (2020) – extends the understanding of that vital decade. Joel Robinson is an art historian with an interest in modern and contemporary architecture. He is an associate lecturer and honourary associate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The Open University. He has an interest in the exhibition histories of architecture and urbanism, with particular attention to biennials and triennials. Basia Sliwinska  is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at the University of the Arts London and Associate Research Fellow at the University of Gothenburg. She has published on  feminist visual activism(s) and  transnational figurations in  contemporary  women’s art practice. Recent and forthcoming books include: (as editor) Feminist Visual Activism and the Body  (2021),  The Female Body in the Looking-Glass:  Contemporary Art, Aesthetics and Genderland (2016, 2018) and (as co-editor) The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self (2018). Basia is on the research team of the  Visual Activism and Sexual  Diversity in Vietnam  project, supported by the AHRC.

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Aliya de Tiesenhausen is an independent scholar of Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asian art. She co-curated and edited the catalogue Focus Kazakhstan: Post-Nomadic Mind, London, 2018 – the first major exhibition of modern and contemporary art from the country in the UK. She is the author of Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics (2016). She regularly participates in organizing academic exchanges in her area of interest including Art and Culture: Actors of Representatives, the Seventh Annual Doctoral Research Workshop on Central Asia at the Senate House, 2019. Lydia Wooldridge teaches at Bristol School of Art and is Associate Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of the West of England (UWE), UK. Her research focuses on postmigration and the visual arts, specifically the interrelationship between transculturation theories and textile practices. Eva Zetterman is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Studies at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. After her dissertation on the imagery of Frida Kahlo, published in four editions (2003, 2005, 2007 and 2011), she has conducted research on critical museology, street art, the art scene in Los Angeles and Chicana/o artists. Her present research areas are critical historiography and the feminist art scene in Gothenburg.

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Introduction: Art, Borders and Belonging – On Home and Migration Maria Photiou and Marsha Meskimmon 

Art, Borders and Belonging:  On Home and Migration takes its lead from Hamid Naficy’s statement that exile ‘thrives on detail, specificity, and locality’1 and investigates how three associated concepts, house, home and homeland, are represented in contemporary global art. The volume brings together essays that explore the conditions of global migration as a process that is always both about departures and homecomings, indeed, homemakings, through which the construction of migratory narratives are made possible. Although the volume is centrally concerned with how recent and contemporary works of art can materialize the migratory experience of movement and (re)settlement, it also explores how the curating and exhibition practices, at local and global levels, can extend and challenge conventional narratives of art, borders and belonging. A growing number of artists migrate; some for better job opportunities and for the experience of different cultures, others not by choice but as a consequence of forced displacement caused by political, religious or military destabilization, economic or environmental collapse. In recent years, the theme of migration has emerged as a dominant subject in art and curatorial practices. Considering the contemporary developments around the so-called migration crisis – in 2017, 68.5 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide2 – and the increased security of borders, it is a matter of urgency to understand key issues regarding the migratory experience. Art, Borders and Belonging thus seeks to explore how the migratory experience is generated and displayed through the lens of contemporary art.

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While this is a burgeoning field of interest, and one in which diverse perspectives collide productively, it is not ‘new’. In the latter 1980s and through the 1990s, a number of important exhibitions, publications and institutions emerged, signalling the power of decolonizing discourses and practices to redress a normative, Eurocentric vision of ‘international’ art and visual culture. Key examples, such as the second Havana Biennial (1986), the Asia Pacific Triennial (est. 1993), the first two Johannesburg Biennales (1995, 1997), the founding of the journal Third Text (1987) and the creation of the Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA, 1994), demonstrate how the stage was set for a global reconfiguration of the arts and culture that examined migration, exile, diaspora and empire with a critical eye. At this same moment, one of the earliest and most insightful writers on the implications of migration, diaspora and globalization in the arts and culture, Nikos Papastergiadis, published two pivotal volumes that further helped set the agenda for the field at the start of the present century: The Turbulence of Migration (1998)3 and Dialogues in the Diasporas (1999).4 By the century’s turn, therefore, a number of publications and exhibitions had already begun to place the significance of ‘home’ and belonging at the heart of the migratory and diasporic condition,5 and were continuing to interrogate the power politics of the Global North in the international art world.6 Our collection stems from this important legacy. Also significant for the intellectual trajectories of the present anthology, ‘postcolonial’, ‘Third World’ and ‘transnational’ feminisms had emerged strongly by the 1990s, facilitating an intersectional dialogue with the politics of globalization, migration, diaspora and belonging.7 The impacts of globalization are not gender-neutral; women are positioned very differently with regard to the economic, social, legal and cultural processes that underpin the movement of global capital, commodities and, of course, people.8 The experience of migration – both the disruptive displacement of departure and the labour of reinventing ‘home’ in a new location – is materialized through gendered norms and conventions.9 There is not one, universal ‘migrant subject’, but myriad, intersectional processes through which migration comes to mark becoming-subjects in the full weight of their embodiment.10 The early insights of transnational feminisms have facilitated the later wide-ranging critique of geopolitical power politics and raised important questions of sovereignty in a radically reimagined world of vital matter, beyond the human.11

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Scholars working in feminist art theory have not been slow to ask searching questions concerning how historical and contemporary art practices confront the gendered terrain of global movement, diaspora, migration and exile. The volume edited by Ella Shohat, Talking Visions:  Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (1999), is a pivotal early instance of the insights of transnational feminisms connecting productively with a decolonizing take on contemporary global art.12 A number of other books from the first decade of the twenty-first century extended these intellectual connections in important ways, particularly in rethinking the cultural contribution of women globally, both past and present.13 Marsha Meskimmon continued to explore the complex interrelationship between transnational feminisms, gendered geopolitics and contemporary art and visual culture in two further co-edited volumes:  Women, the Arts and Globalization:  Eccentric Experience14 and Home/Land:  Women, Citizenship, Photographies.15 In addition to a strong focus on tracing women’s agency under the conditions of global movement, the potential of migration and diaspora to promote complex dialogues across difference, led cultural theorists to develop renewed conversations with the concept of cosmopolitanism as an embodied and immanent form of engagement with others in the world.16 More recently, transcultural, queer and new materialist methodologies brought additional sophistication and nuance to decolonial feminist analyses of art and the geopolitical landscape within which it circulates.17 The present anthology is situated within this field of contest and connection, demonstrating the importance of close attention to detail in delineating the specificity of any and all migrants’ tales. The chapters collected together in this volume explore how the concepts of ‘migration’, ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are articulated and displayed in the visual arts. Each chapter examines these concepts from very different perspectives through a variety of media and from art across the world. Reflecting on the ways in which the migratory experience is constructed, the volume seeks to critically explore narratives of border crossings (both physical and psychological), past and present histories, and the sense of belonging to one’s homeland (both ‘lost’ and existing). Considering belonging as a process, the volume weaves together a series of concepts and conversations that have become prominent in studies of migration: memory, identity, hybridity, transnationalism, multiculturalism,

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ethnicity, mobility, nomadism and boundaries. Through attentive visual analysis, the chapters that follow explore artistic strategies employed in representing exile and displacement; curatorial strategies in representing the migratory experience and (un)belonging; and the role of art and architecture in fostering the construction of inclusive cities that could become ‘arrival cities’ for migrants.

Development of the project The development of this book reflects the collaboration and dialogue(s) the editors have had with one another over the past decade. Our roles as the editors of this volume have differed; Photiou was the driving force of the project as it emerged from her postdoctoral research and a session she organized at the annual conference of the Association for Art History (AAH), when it was convened by Meskimmon and colleagues at Loughborough University in 2017. Meskimmon joined as co-editor by kind invitation shortly after the project was conceived and we have subsequently enjoyed many exchanges about the essays and the direction of travel of the ideas, since. But the relationship between us preceded the publication project by some considerable time and began when Photiou embarked upon her doctoral work in 2009 under Meskimmon’s supervision. While still a graduate student, Photiou became interested in exploring how contemporary art practices engage with the concepts of ‘home’, ‘migration’ and the sense of ‘belonging’. These issues came to the fore in her successful doctoral thesis, Rethinking the History of Cypriot Art: Greek Cypriot Women Artists in Cyprus, where her research uncovered how Greek Cypriot women artists confronted and challenged conventional understandings of their histories and cultural traditions, as well as their experiences of exile, citizenship, identity and belonging in a divided nation after 1974. Photiou continued to work with Meskimmon, developing her ideas through a postdoctoral project Narratives of Contested Lands, funded by an AHRC Cultural Engagement award. In this project, Photiou began weaving together a set of debates concerned with home, exile and belonging in both Cyprus and Palestine, drawing important affinities between these similarly divided, but very different, locations.

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At the same time that Photiou was exploring the art and activisms of Greek Cypriot and Palestinian women, Meskimmon was completing the research for Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies (a project that emerged through a network she convened with colleague Marion Arnold) and starting the work that would lead to the Trilogy Transnational Feminisms and the Arts, the first volume of which was published earlier this year.18 In 2017, our paths converged again through the AAH conference, where Photiou’s excellent session Home, Exile and the Politics of Belonging attracted an unusual range of speakers, particularly focusing on unconventional geographies and horizontal histories.19 The speakers offered close readings of artistic and curatorial practices and highlighted the conditions of mobility and the migratory experience from different disciplinary perspectives and geographical locations. Following from the lively debate generated at the conference, it became obvious that there was a need to offer a renewed understanding of the notion of home and the sense of belonging being articulated in the visual arts – there was a gap that might be filled by a well-placed anthology. It is our hope, as editors, that this anthology begins that process. The majority of the essays in this book originated as papers presented at the 2017 AAH, but a number of further contributions were commissioned in order to reinforce the interdisciplinary nature of the volume and extend its intellectual remit. The range is not intended to be geographically inclusive and the volume is not a survey text. Rather, the essays cohere around their commitment to exploring the multiple processes of ‘uprooting and regrounding’20 that contemporary migratory experience manifests. These are neither solely positive nor are they relentlessly negative. Likewise, gender, class, ‘race’, mobility, language and culture are not conceived here as fixed or immutable entities, and their interplay within the processes of making and curating art are multidimensional and fluid. The narratives that coalesce in the volume open different perspectives on migratory subjects, often in very different voices, and, on this point, we have been inspired by recent work in the field that explores art’s worldmaking potential, as well as its political role in a ‘post-migrant’ culture.21 The volume begins with Photiou’s investigation into two projects that were exhibited during the 2017 international art exhibition documenta 14. Examining the works of Greek-Cypriot artist Vassia Vanezi and Palestinian

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artist Emily Jacir, both of whom invited communities to participate in the making of their projects, the text argues that asking the audience to participate and weave together in the making of these works constructs a politicized narrative of home that is charged with references to past historical events and the ongoing occupation of both of these contested ‘homelands’. The two works can thus be understood as politicized ‘projects of belonging’ and sites of national remembrance for the lost homeland. Textiles have been used as a powerful communication platform, particularly in the practice of women artists. Lydia Wooldridge explores textile constriction techniques in the work of Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar in Chapter 2. She offers insights in the connection between biographical experiences and the symbolic metaphor in Forouhar’s practice. In her analysis, she considers the use of weaving and entanglement techniques as a platform to communicate ‘complex and often contradictory ideas concerning beauty and pain, religion and secularism, and tradition and modernity’. To develop these ideas, Wooldridge addresses the critical connection between Forouhar’s migratory experience (between Iran and Germany) and the politicized combination of diverse motifs used by the artist. In Chapter  3, Sarah Fox considers Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever and Ariella Azoulay’s Archive to explore the work of Canadian artist Hajra Waheed. Similar to Wooldridge, and Photiou, Fox reflects on the artists’ migratory experience and recording of personal narratives. Accordingly, Fox investigates how Waheed uses archival material to situate ‘individual narratives within the context of state-propagated ideas of nationhood and belonging’. Using what Fox descripts as ‘manipulation of archival images’, she reflects on how the artists’ archival intervention becomes an alternative archive. The new archive is deployed strategically to reveal narratives of home and homeland. Further unpacking the migratory experience, Nadia Albaladejo Garcia explores the ways in which exiled Spanish artist Remedios Varo recreated the space of home in Chapter 4. In a critical analysis of the 1957 painting La creation de la aves, Garcia examines the process of re-creating space as the place of home from an exilic perspective. By adopting a phenomenological approach, she argues that Varo’s creative process is ‘embodied and rooted in space’ and that at the same time ‘contributes to modify/construct space as the place of home’. As Garcia mentions, Varo’s ‘conception of home, given her

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exiled position, is of a place where femininity is at the centre of the creative process’. Questions around identity and belonging are crucial in understanding the migratory experience from a non-Western perspective. In Chapter 5, Imogen Racz offers an insightful analysis of the 1980s artistic scene in Britain. Taking into consideration major 1980s shows focused on contemporary Black art, Racz addresses some salient points in relation to how and where exhibitions were constructed. In her text, she also interrogates sociopolitical and gendered marginalization developed in curatorial practices and how this affected the sense of (not) belonging in Britain. A significant element of this project is the inclusion of new perspectives in exploring and recording the migratory experience and the sense of belonging. Chapter  6 is an epistolary exchange between two European academics who share migrant backgrounds and explore feminist approaches in representing the concept of home. Reflecting upon the 2018 exhibition Home Strike, which they jointly curated at l’etrangere gallery in London, Alexandra Kokoli and Basia Sliwinska engage in a dialogue around their own migratory experience. Their conversation is stimulated by local and global politics and their personal reflection of (un)belonging. Concerns of historical geopolitical division(s) and formation of borderlands is pertinent to the performance projects of Chicano artist Guillermo GomezPeña. In Chapter  7, Eva Zetterman analyses the manner in which the 1848 relocation of the US-Mexican border is being represented in Gomez-Peña’s work. Similar to Vanezi’s and Jacir’s work discussed in Chapter  1, GomezPeña’s work acts against historical erasure. Zetterman’s text offers an incisive account on how the memories and autobiographical narratives are articulated and become a platform against historical amnesia. The question of border crossing and cultural dialogues is explored in Chapter  8. Taking as starting point Kazakhstan’s geographical and cultural setting, Aliya de Tesenhausen analyses key themes and influences in the work of contemporary Kazakhstani artists. Since 2005, Kazakhstan artists have actively participated in the international art scene, particularly in Europe and Asia. In her text, de Tiesenhausen considers the work of Almagul Menlibayeva and examines key issues in relation to gender and ethnicity, colour and history,

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textile and environment. She examines in particular the photographic work Red Butterfly and addresses metaphors related to the sense of belonging. The final chapter, Chapter  9, examines how the migration crisis was exhibited at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. While the previous chapter explored representations of migration presented in different international exhibitions, this chapter investigates how the ‘Arrival City’ is being constructed and exhibited. Joel Robinson discusses the exhibitions ‘Places for People’ (Austrian Pavilion) and ‘Making Heimat’ (German Pavilion), which both act as interventions and become platforms in which refugees are given agency. Robinson examines the extent to which the Biennale was being leveraged to help shape the space of the ‘arrival city’. Considering the extent in which the visual arts are intertwined with reallife events, this volume acts as a vehicle of knowledge transfer of cultural perspectives and enhances the importance of understanding artistic interventions in relation to home, migration and belonging. In bringing this volume to fruition, we concur with the comment made by T. J. Demos in The Migrant Image:  ‘Today, what is needed more than ever are powerful and creative artistic expressions and interventions that join other movements for positive change, social justice and equality, working together toward the progressive re-creation of our common world.’22

 Notes 1 Hamid Naficy, ed., Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 4. 2 UN Refugee Agency, Global Trends Forced Displacement in 2017, available at https://www.unhcr.org/5b27be547.pdf (accessed 1 March 2019). 3 Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). 4 Nikos Papastergiadis, Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1998). 5 George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam, eds, Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement (London: Routledge, 1994); Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson, eds, Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement (Oxford: Berg, 1998).

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Naficy, Home, Exile, Homeland; Bruce Grenville, ed., Home and Away, ex.cat. (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2004); Gill Perry, Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2014). Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi, eds, Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen: NAi, 2001); Hanru Hou, Philippe Vergne, Kathy Halbreich and Paulo Herkenhoff, eds, How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2003); Nikos Papastergiadis, ed., Complex Entanglements: Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2003); Gilane Tawadros, ed., Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalisation (London: InIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts), 2004); Saloni Mathur, ed., The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2011). Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belonging (London: Routledge, 1996); Nira Yuval Davis, Kalpana Kannabiran and Ulrike M. Vieten, eds, The Situated Politics of Belonging (London: Sage, 2006). Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?’, in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa De Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 191–212; Inderpal Grewal and Caren Caplan, eds, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (New York: NYU Press, 1998); Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Gender, Europe and the Culture of Travel (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996); Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castaneda, Anne Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller, eds, Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (New York: Berg, 2003); Iris Marion Young, ‘House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme’, in Gender Struggles: Practical Approaches to Contemporary Feminism, ed. C. L. Mui and J. S. Murphy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), pp. 314–46. María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Joanne Barker, ed., Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall, eds, Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

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12 Ella Shohat, ed., Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). 13 Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2003); Elaine H. Kim, Margo Machida and Sharon Mizota, eds, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (Oakland: University of California Press, 2005); Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century (Middlesex: Ashgate, 2006). 14 Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe, eds, Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 15 Marion Arnold and Marsha Meskimmon, eds, Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). 16 Mica Nava, Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference (Oxford: Berg, 2007); Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London: Routledge, 2010); Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). 17 Siobhán Shilton, Transcultural Encounters: Gender and Genre in FrancoMaghrebi Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Alpesh Patel, Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational Asian Art Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Leon Wainwright and Kitty Zijlmans, eds, Sustainable Art Communities: Contemporary Creativity and Policy in the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 18 Marsha Meskimmon, Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections (London: Routledge, 2020). 19 A number of academic symposiums and conferences generated significant debates that deal with the concepts of home and homeland, e.g., the 1995 symposium House, Home, Homeland, organized at Rice University, United States, and the 2012 conference Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies, organized at Loughborough University, UK. 20 Ahmed et al., Uprootings/Regroundings, p. 1. 21 Michelle Antoinette, Reworlding Art History: Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014); Anne Ring Petersen, Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-Making in a Globalized World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Moritz Schramm and Anne Ring Petersen, eds, The Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, special issue (Post)Migration in the Age of Globalisation: New Challenges to Imagination and Representation, 2017. 22 T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. xxiii.

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Weaving together: Narratives of home, exile and belonging Maria Photiou

Over the past decades, the Eastern Mediterranean region has experienced enduring wars and armed conflict that have resulted in a migration crisis and an increase in the security of borders. This chapter explores narratives of exile and the complexities of belonging, leaving and returning in Cyprus and Palestine. I have chosen to focus on these two countries because they share similarities in terms of their experience of leaving, returning and belonging. Both countries have experienced wars and are under military occupation  – Palestine since 1948 when the Israeli army conducted a forced migration exercise and Cyprus since 1974 when Turkey invaded the island in response to a military coop, which was backed by the Greek government.1 The two countries share similar sociopolitical specificities and have been physically and psychologically traumatized by these conflicts. The political conflict in Cyprus and Palestine resulted in a mass-population forced migration and still to this day refugees are not allowed to return to their homes. Cyprus and Palestine share similar narratives in relation to their exilic conditions and attachment to the notion of homeland. They also share a powerful quest for return to their place of birth, home and roots. For people in Cyprus and Palestine, their lives and sense of belonging is complicated in similar ways. The geopolitical division of their homeland is constituted by a series of checkpoints and roadblocks across their respective partition line. The aftermath of their internal displacement means that for many people their exilic condition is living at a close distance to their lost homes. The experience of growing up and living under military occupation affected not only the generation who experienced the events but also the following

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generations. Crossing to the other side requires passing through a border that separates them from what constitutes their identity: their place of birth, land, neighbourhood and home. For many, their crossing to visit what has been left behind is followed by the disappointment of finding out that someone else is occupying their ancestral homes. My aim in this chapter is to bring together a set of debates concerning concepts of home, exile and belonging. In doing so, I will examine a few of the salient issues that are prominent in exilic experience and refugee narratives. This chapter builds on the knowledge that exile is ‘inexorably tied to homeland and to the possibility of return’2 and explores the ways in which politicized narrations of home engage in debates about exile and rootlessness. It addresses the issue of internal exile and how it is articulated in works by migrant artists. It focuses on the work of Greek Cypriot artist Vassia Vanezi and Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, who assert in their work ongoing issues in relation to exile, borders, belonging and history of their respective homelands. I am interested in unpacking the projects where the two artists use powerful metaphors to represent protracted exile. These projects, which I consider to be ‘projects of belonging’ are: Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory (Vanezi, 2017) and Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948 (Jacir, 2000). Both artists have participated in the international art exhibition documenta 14 and have invited communities to participate in the making of their projects. I  chose to focus on the two works because the participatory element is very similar and the making of the works constitutes a significant event where people weaved together. In this chapter, I will weave together two different cities and two different artworks. What these two cities and artworks have in common is the ways in which the issues of internal exile, quest to return to homeland and sense of belonging are mutually intertwined.

Learning from Athens In April 2017, documenta 14 opened in Athens, Greece and two months later in its traditional home city Kassel, Germany. While previously documenta was staged exclusively in Kassel, the 2017 exhibition offered a new perspective by



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staging a series of art events in both venues. The curatorial team of documenta 14 aimed for the exhibition to have a ‘politicised, transversal reading of our present moment and its attendant histories’.3 Therefore, the works exhibited during documenta 14 were able to engender a ‘transformative insight into the artists’ daily circumstances as part of the time of upheavals that came to be our own’.4 The theme of learning and the different processes of collective experience were visibly embedded into the exhibition’s approach. This was also reflected in the exhibition’s subtitle Learning from Athens that comprised 160 artists across 40 venues. In Athens was the Victoria Square Project, a social sculpture initiative by artist Rick Lowe, which aimed to bring people together during the exhibition. Athens-based artist Vassia Vanezi staged her project Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory in the Victoria Square Project following Lowe’s invitation to participate in documenta 14 in Athens. Born in Nicosia, Cyprus, Vanezi explores in her work themes of loss, displacement, history and the sense of belonging. A  particularly important element of her work is that she uses autobiographical experiences to represent the geopolitical division of her homeland, Cyprus. This formed a key part in her project Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory. For the project, Vanezi invited people to gather every Friday evening and weave together (Figure 1.1). Vanezi talks about the notion of weaving together: Weaving together is a common work. It is about coming together, sitting together, talking together, eating and drinking together, making together, bringing our lives, our cultures together, sharing words together, sharing our stories and history together, confessing our pain and fears, our hopes. It is about companionship. It is about gathering. It is about human condition.5

Participants who responded to Vanezi’s call found themselves on a fascinating and intimate new journey. Over sixty people participated in the process of weaving and making the fabric:  during the project, they were provided with multicoloured threads and an artist book called LEXICON/ ΛΕΞΙΚΟΝ with written words chosen by Vanezi. The participants were invited to choose words from the book, and in some cases they chose to stitch a word of their preference.6 An important element of the project is that it provided an opportunity for participants to reflect and form their own narrative in relation

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Figure 1.1  Vassia Vanezi, Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory, 2017, Happening (Victoria Square Project: Athens, Greece). Source: Courtesy of the artist.

to the question of memory. During a recorded narration, Vanezi expressed what memory is for her: Memory is a grid of words, images, sounds, smells. The objects of memory. They are dressed in words when they return to our consciousness. They sound when they are being spoken, when they become languages, when they turn into a story. A call, a coffee, words that we recall from memory, we knit them, we make them a story, a narrative.7

Memories of the physical and emotional departure are pivotal in Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory. The work becomes an instrument for the artist not only to transfer her own memories as a refugee but to also express her wish and ongoing hope in returning to the home she was forced to leave as a child: I’m a refugee. The house I was born is in occupied Nicosia. It was very nice my home. In the front there was a window and a bower and a lemon tree in the backyard. The last time I saw it was on July 20, 1974. On the day of the



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Turkish invasion. I left and I never went back. I was five years old. The sirens were blowing, the bombs were falling and the sky was black. I did not have the chance to take anything with me. Not even my favorite doll. We left with nothing but the clothes we wore. All I have is that little dress. A red treasure of memory. I do not forget and I expect to go back.8

As a survivor of the 1974 Turkish invasion, Vanezi carries the burden of having a personal memory of the tragic event. Remembering the home she was forced to abandon is a haunting and intimate experience. Such memory becomes a powerful form of sharing the conditions of displacement and exile. I suggest that the project Weaving Together acts as a coping strategy to negotiate the past and the memories from the lost homeland. Storytelling can be a powerful survival tool, as ‘telling stories about oneself, about one’s life, and about oneself in the world can be a way to help the individual negotiate a place in the wider world of society and culture’.9 The work becomes a site of memory that not only embodies the artist’s experience of migration and exile but also reflects the experiences of the generation who experienced the 1974 events. The 1974 Turkish military invasion resulted in the displacement of two hundred thousand Greek Cypriots and the occupation of 40 per cent of Cyprus’s territory in the north. Even today, Cyprus remains divided into two communities: Greek Cypriots in the South and Turkish Cypriots in the North of Cyprus.

The politics of belonging Vanezi’s narration in Weaving Together is a powerful chronicle of the 1974 Greek Cypriot displacement that reveals the complexities of belonging, leaving and returning. In Weaving Together, Vanezi begins her narration by saying, ‘I’m a refugee.’ This reflects a series of arrangements introduced by the Cypriot government in the post-1974 years. This included financial and governmentbuilt housing estates. Soon after the invasion, the new social formation of refugee identity was introduced as a result of the forced displacement. Consequently, refugee identity cards were issued to exiled persons whose primary residency or property was in a Turkish-occupied area. Usually, the term ‘refugee’ is used for people who found accommodation ‘outside their country of origin’. In the case

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of the two hundred thousand Greek Cypriots who were ‘internally displayed’ in 1974, the term ‘refugee’ is used as a ‘convenient and realistic designation of their social status and identity’.10 Greek Cypriots who fled in the South in advance of the Turkish army had to find accommodation in temporary refugee camps and later in refugee housing estates. The term ‘refugee’ has a symbolic meaning that emphasizes the alienation of the place they found accommodation and that they did not belong there. Nira Yuval-Davis describes belonging as an ‘emotional attachment, about feeling at “home” ’ and ‘about feeling “safe” ’.11 In the aftermath of 1974, refugees expressed a strong desire to return to the homes they were forced to abandon, the places they had felt at home and safe. Vanezi describes her ancestral house in her narration: ‘The house I was born is in occupied Nicosia, Cyprus. It was very nice my home. In the front there was a window and a bower and a lemon tree in the backyard.’ Her narration reveals not only her longing for her home but also how her memory sustains material belongings, for example, the bower and the lemon tree. The abandoned house and the gardens with trees are crucial components for the majority of Greek Cypriot exilic narratives. Maria Roussou emphasizes that Greek Cypriot women ‘have lost their houses and with them the thing they valued the most: their homes’. Roussou also explains that those women who came from rural areas also lost ‘the land bequeathed them by their fathers, land on which they had worked for years to make productive’.12 The houses they left behind, built after years and years of hard work from the parents, were the places they felt and still feel they belong. There is a strong attachment to the land as it was the land provided from the ancestral and trees were planted and nurtured by the family for decades. Rebecca Bryant writes about the relationship between land and rootedness in Cyprus: The land is in the first instance the soil, the place where one’s ancestors are buried, becoming part of its substance. One waters the land with one’s sweat; one drinks the same water that runs through it. It has an odor as familiar as the scent of one’s own child. … One dwells in places that have a historicity that is already given. … One may trace one’s history, then, in the soil itself. At the same time, the land acquires a character in interaction with those who live there. There are weddings, there are holidays, and these are all celebrated in the ‘local’ way, with the red figs that grow there and no where else. … The land has a language, one’s own language, the language spoken by one’s ancestors who always lived there.13



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Vanezi’s narration of the home and the yard reveals a sense of belonging to her childhood house. The narratives of the trees are highly significant, as the trees ‘do not solely bear a “sensual” presence but also an existential one; they preserve the ownership, property, continuity, existence and analogy of the person’.14 Aybil Goker refers to ‘being rooted’ as a sign of belonging: the trees ‘represent the rootedness to their home and, with the smell and taste of [lemons], create the wholeness of the memory in Cyprus’.15

The politics of leaving The experience of the 1974 invasion is vital in Vanezi’s narration: ‘The sirens were blowing, the bombs were falling and the sky was black. I  did not have the chance to take anything with me. Not even my favourite doll. We left with nothing but the clothes we wore.’ This reveals the terror of the flight and that Vanezi’s family had to leave speedily and take nothing with them. Like every refugee Vanezi’s family thought they would return back after the war. The abandoned house was a common cause of sorrow for all refugees, as it symbolizes the loss of familiar values, local traditions and community. Women’s loss can be considered somewhat different to men’s loss because they lost their dowry-house. This is of high importance when we consider that mid-1970 Cypriot society’s custom required a dowry system, in which newly married couples had to have their own house, which should have been built by the bride’s parents as a wedding gift. In losing their home, Greek Cypriot women experienced both a ‘material and symbolic deprivation’, as Roussou puts it: In short all the material world they were acquainted with and which was theirs had been taken away overnight. Their flight from the bombing and fighting was so sudden that none of them was able to take any of their most precious belongings.16

For Vanezi, at the time of the invasion, the most precious belonging was her favourite doll that she left behind. The only personal item she had from the pre-1974 years was the dress she wore on the day when she left her home in the occupied Nicosia. The little dress is the one thing that links Vanezi to her past life and is, as she calls it, a ‘red treasure of memory’ (Figure 1.2). The actual

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Figure 1.2  Vassia Vanezi, Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory, 2017, Detail. Source: Courtesy of the artist.



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red dress was displayed in the 2010 exhibition 50 Years of Artistic Creation, organized by the Cyprus Chamber of Fine Arts in Nicosia, Cyprus. Vanezi participated in the exhibition with the installation titled 1974. The installation was composed of a series of wooden hangers that were suspended from the ceiling. Three of the hangers carry the clothes she and her family wore on the day of their flight: her mother’s dress, her brother’s shirt and her own little red dress. Some other hangers hold her father’s military uniform, her grandfather’s kompoloi, two white dresses made of paper, a girl’s school uniform, a doll and various label carts with the words ‘points’, ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘brother’, ‘grandfather’, ‘forever’, ‘never’ and ‘I do not forget’. By using old belongings (clothes from the day they left their home) together with items she obtains in post-1974 times (such as the doll that is alike to the one she left behind), Vanezi creates a site to explore the complexities of belonging, leaving and returning. These belongings become a powerful device through which Vanezi negotiates time, memory, remembrance, loss and trauma. Vanezi’s evocative strategy is direct: she employs specific belongings from specific people (herself and her family) and transforms these into reminder-instruments that act as metaphors of loss, trauma and memory. Vanezi negotiates in her practice her homeland’s division and her wish to return to the occupied house. This is obvious in her narration in Weaving Together:  ‘I do not forget. And I  expect to go back.’ Since 1974, the idea, or question, of return has been a dominant narrative for all Greek Cypriot refugees. Significant to this is what Roger Zetter describes as the ‘myth of return’: ‘[It] evoke[s]‌a familiar, idealised past and sustain[s] the memory of collective loss’ while it associates the ‘concreteness of a familiar home or “point fixed in place” (e.g. the villages, farms and houses in the north of Cyprus)’.17 Throughout the post-1974  years the government of the Republic of Cyprus sustained the myth of return and established the slogan ‘I Don’t Forget’18; the literature on Cyprus and refugees, the educational system and social media were all permeated by the slogan. In Weaving Together, Vanezi uses the participatory event as a memorial for her homeland that forty years later still suffers from occupation and a complicated sociopolitical situation. The event provides a space for the telling of untold stories and experiences from a woman’s perspective. Irini Savvides writes that, in terms of gender, there is ‘a record of experience missing in

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current narratives’ in relation to the 1974 war and its aftermath: ‘One aspect of the “Cyprus problem” is that the stories of what women have suffered as a result of the continued occupations and violence have not been given equal voice in the available literature.’19 Women’s loss can be considered different to men’s loss due to their specific exilic conditions, as James Clifford points out: ‘Life for women in diasporic situations may be doubly painful – struggling with the material and spiritual insecurities of exile, with the demands of family and work, and with the claims of the old and new patriarchies.’20 Central to the work Weaving Together is the evocation of an intimate subject matter, that of the home and the ways in which it is being developed with the public’s participation. During the event, a series of photographs recorded people’s efforts of decorating the fabric while sharing stories and memories. The completed work included multicoloured threads of variously shaped lines and different words stitched in Greek and English, such as ‘gate’, ‘memory’, ‘power’, ‘pain’, ‘breath’, ‘together’, ‘alive’, ‘safe’, ‘life’, ‘dignity’ and ‘tears’. It is important to consider the relationship between weaving, text (words) and textile; as Victoria Mitchell points out, ‘text and textile share common association through the Latin textere, to weave. These fragile references suggest for textiles a kind of speaking and for language a form of making’.21 In this sense, the embroidery produced by the participants becomes a powerful metaphor for Vanezi’s evocative narration. The structure of the collective textile can be seen as a visual memorial of Vanezi’s homeland. The work features the word ΠΥΛΗ (Greek for gate) enclosed to what can be a reference to the territorial space of Nicosia and the walls that surround it (Figure  1.3). Another embroidery shows a little red handmade dress with the word MEMORY. Every single stitch conveys a powerful meaning in understanding Vanezi’s image of home and sense of belonging. The work produced during documenta 14 evokes the medium of personal life used by twenty-first-century feminist women artists (such as Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin). As Rozsika Parker writes, ‘[women artists] employ embroidery as the prime medium of personal life not to proclaim that the personal is the political, but that the personal is the universal’.22 The myth of homeland and the myth of return are universal notions and are found among several exilic communities. The case of Palestinians is perhaps



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Figure 1.3  Vassia Vanezi, Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory, 2017, Detail. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

the closest to Greek Cypriot protracted exile and desire to return to their homeland. As William Safran argued, They have memories of their homelands; their descendants cultivate a collective myth about it; and their ethnic communal consciousness is increasingly defined by  – and their political mobilization has centered around – their desire to return to their homeland.23

Remembering Palestine The concept of homeland and the ways in which displacement is defined is pivotal in Emily Jacir’s practice. Born in 1972 in Bethlehem, West Bank, Jacir engages in her work the 1948 Palestinian depopulation from West Jerusalem and the ongoing Palestinian occupation by Israel. This is obvious in her work titled Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948. This piece, which was also exhibited during

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documenta 14, consists of a direct approach in representing Palestine’s sociopolitical conditions for a local and international audience. The work was the result of a three-month community-based project that Jacir prepared in 2000 when she was invited to participate at the Museum of Modern Art P.S.1 Studio Programme in New York. For the preparation of the project, Jacir bought a family-sized refugee tent, similar to the ones distributed to refugees during crisis by the United Nations. She erected the tent in her New York studio and stencilled the names of 418 Palestinian villages on the tent’s side and top; as the tile indicates, the villages were destroyed in 1948 following the forced migration exercise conducted by the Israeli army (Figure 1.4).24 The 1948 war marks a national catastrophe for Palestinians, with over half of the population becoming refugees and several hundred Palestinian villages being abandoned and destroyed. Since then, ‘the landscape of Palestine had been utterly transformed’ with the Arabic names of the villages being removed and renamed into Hebrew; this was because Israel did not recognize ‘the Arab’s

Figure 1.4  Emily Jacir, Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which Were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948, 2001. A  work in progress consisting of a refugee tent, embroidery thread, daily log of names of people who worked on the tent. Variable dimensions. Purchased in 2004. Collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. Source: Photograph by Katerina Paraskeva.



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political proprietorship of the land’ or the Arab’s ‘spiritual proprietorship and their names’.25 The reinvented landscape had a twofold impact on Palestinians:  they had lost not only their historic homeland but also their historic collective memory associated with their birthplace. The precise events of the 1948 war and its aftermath are often misleading when discussed in historic narratives. T. J. Demos discusses the erasure of the Palestinian history: Because of the polemical terms of the political conflict, the violent origins of the creation of Israel have been subjected to much denial in Israel and in the West, in favour of a whitewashed narrative that claims, among other myths, that Palestinian villages ‘voluntarily’ left their homeland during the conflict of 1948, a mytholigization that minimizes Israeli responsibility for the violent events of the war.26

The fact that Jacir chose to title her work Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948 acts as a powerful strategy to prevent misinterpretation of the true meaning of the work: ‘[This] was because if they ever wrote about it … they would have to put what it is, otherwise, with my experience with speaking about this issue, they always try to obscure what happened or change the history.’27 By stitching the names of the 418 Palestinian villages, Jacir creates a visual intervention that prevails the erasure of the Palestinian narrative. Using the names of the villages recorded in Walid Khalidi’s book All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Istrael in 1948, she transforms a historical record into a visual memento of those villages. It is fascinating that Jacir uses language as a dynamic strategy to address the Palestinian narrative for the international audiences. As the artist explained, Our narrative, our story is absent from history books. When I  made ‘Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948’ I chose English not only because the piece was made with 140 people in New York but because I wanted people to be able to read the names and say them out loud and question why they had not heard them before and why that history is not in their books.28

While for the first steps of the project Jacir was working alone, thinking that it would be feasible to stitch all the names of the Palestinian villages into the

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tent, she soon realized that she would not be able to complete the project in time for the opening of the P.S.1 exhibition in 2001.29 A  call for help with the project resulted in over 140 people visiting her studio in New York and assisting with the handwork of stitching the names onto the tent’s fabric. The project brought together a diverse group of participants such as Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, Egyptians, Syrians, Yemenis, and Spaniards.30 During the embroidery sessions, each time someone started stitching a new name onto the tent, they would read aloud the relevant passage from Walid Khalidi’s book to learn the history of the village, who lived there and how the village was depopulated. What is significant with the making of the tent is that it became an act of collective remembrance for Palestinian history. Also important is that each of the stitched names acted as a signifier of the village’s history. The passage readings from Khalidi’s book had a pedagogical aspect for all participants. For Palestinians who were originally from these villages it was an opportunity to find out more about their ancestral home, and for others it was an opportunity to understand the history of the villages associated with the tent and the people they met during the sessions: ‘Where is this town exactly? Have you been there? Did you say that woman who was here yesterday had family there? Where did they all go?’31 The making of the tent happened during the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.32 For many of the participants it was a stressful time, as they were concerned with what could happen to their families who lived in Palestine. Therefore, even though participants were gathering to help with the handwork of the tent, they were also gathering to talk about what was happening during the Second Intifada: You would get on a subway train in the morning, and there would be these horrible headlines, and you just didn’t feel safe. So, even though we were sewing these names from what happened in ’48, we were also gathering in a space where we could be together to deal with what was happening in the contemporary moment. And that was really important.33

While the tent has names stencilled on its side and top panels, the space on the front two panels is completely empty. This is part of Jacir’s evocative strategy, as she explains, ‘The destruction of Palestine is a work in progress that’s still going on, so [Jacir wanted] to imply that I would be adding more names later.’34



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After the three-month period, the tent was displayed for the P.S.1 exhibition, unfinished, with some villages remaining unstitched. Since then the work has been exhibited at various international art exhibitions including document 14. Significantly, the unfinished tent acts as a visual intervention to prevent the erasure of Palestinian history:  as the artist explains, ‘For me, in each space it functions like a document, a photograph. Like a photograph, it shows the remains of something that happened.’35 During documenta 14 the tent was located in a large open space alongside the transparent windows. The large structure of the work (a reproduction of a refugee tent) invites the audience to walk around it and to go inside if they wish. Viewers thus encounter in this static installation a multi-sensory experience where they are invited to read the names of the villages that are stitched onto the tent. The act of reading the names enacts a knowledge practice where viewers (re)think their own awareness of the history of these villages. As explained earlier in this text, it is not coincidental that Jacir chose the extensive title for the project. In doing so, Jacir provides a significant agency on how the Palestinian narrative is remembered and how the past events and history are produced. This subtle strategy determinates what should be remembered: the 418 Palestinian villages, which were destroyed, depopulated and occupied by Israel in 1948. This proved to be an effective strategy, because, when the work was displayed in an exhibition in New York, the description placed by the museum did not reflect the true meaning of the work.36 Similar to Vanezi’s project, this installation demonstrates its powerful format of communicating a historical event as well as the process of making the work. The record book of the names of the list of participants who helped in the making of the work was displayed alongside the refugee tent. The physical presence of the record book encourages visitors of documenta 14 to interact with it and read through its pages. In the record book for the making of the installation, the artist states that it was a ‘record of the days spent sewing in my studio and the people who created this memorial ... The majority of the people who came to my studio were people I did not know before.’37 The collective embroidery effort is obvious when looking at the tent. At some parts the needlework is immaculate and methodical, whereas at other parts it has been done loosely. Rozsika Parker suggested that embroidery

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can ‘provide a vehicle for dealing with highly ambivalent, complex feelings provoked by a significant other’.38 Here, I  consider as ‘significant other’ the erasure of the Palestinian history. The participatory practice of the stitched work provided a creative outlet in dealing with the historic and contemporary trauma. The repeated action of the embroidery provides a powerful mechanism in expressing how the idea of homeland can be performed in the Diaspora. Catherine de Zegher suggests that ‘the techniques of weaving allow a mobility of doing and undoing within the accumulative medium of textiles …, thus increasing the meaning, power, value, and visual display’.39 In her incisive installation, Jacir reinscribes the Palestinian disaster in a symbolic narration. Each of the village names call to us as a reminder of the past and become a crossing point of past and present, reality and mythologization of local and global politics. The tent stands as a powerful visual reminder of a nation that still suffers from the ongoing occupation and conflict. The juxtaposition of the tent and text is critical to understanding the loss of ancestral home. Tents were transformed into housing at the Palestinian refugee camps in the years after the 1948 dispossession. The white tent exhibited at documenta 14 is a living memorial that embodies the history of the Palestinian villages – a history that is told from one generation’s memories to another. I would agree with Muhammad Siddiq that the Palestinian narratives constitute ‘one sustained epic quest for return to home(land), self(hood), and nation(hood)’.40 This quest unfolds the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes and the right to freedom of movement to their neighbourhoods and villages. In negotiating this quest, Jacir sets up a powerful context for exploring exile and the politics of belonging. The making of the memorial acts as an evocative site of remembrance that articulates meaningful discourses in visualizing exile and loss. Significant to this is John Peter’s definition of the concept of exile as a ‘painful or punitive banishment from one’s homeland’ and states that it ‘implies a fact of trauma, an imminent danger, usually political, that makes the home no longer safety habitable’.41 Narratives of exile and displacement can be a powerful tool to claim ones right to return to their place of origins. In the case of Palestine, memories of ‘the home villages and images of return, imbued with intense cultural meaning, are the stuff of many such Palestinian stories, told within families and refugee communities’.42



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As I discussed earlier in the chapter, women’s loss can be considered different to men’s loss due to their specific exilic conditions. Palestinian women’s experiences recount the experiences of women who endured extended wars and displacement:  ‘They have lost home as a way of life, a way of being, a culture and a way of thinking linked to their deepest sense of identify.’43 For Palestinians, their sense of identity has been marked by the experience of becoming a ‘refugee nation’:  ‘Along with memories of the homeland left behind was often rekindled a desire to remake the abandoned way of life … an attempt to construct a meaningful identity in the context of life in alien … circumstances.’44 In this context, Jacir’s tent becomes a site of national remembrance, linking the ‘memories of the homeland left behind’ with the quest for a national ‘meaningful identity’. The specific work asks us to (re)consider the complexity of the meaning of home and the trauma and insecurity of the lost homeland. I would agree with Griselda Pollock that the encounter created by contemporary art practices ‘can open up the borderspace to become a threshold between now and then, us and them, to create a shared borderspace that acknowledges the gap between different beings, times and places’.45

Conclusion: Weaving together and the politics of belonging The Documenta 14 audience participated in a ‘journey in time and space  – both present and historical, both political and personal’.46 As I have argued in this chapter, the two works acted as ‘projects of belonging’. By asking others to participate and weave together in the making of their works, Vanezi and Jacir constructed a highly symbolic constellation of narrations that are charged with references to the past historical events and the ongoing occupation of their respective homelands. The two works contain intertwined references of historical and present events and personal and collective narrations. These references are pivotal in establishing a platform to expose untold stories and experiences. By inviting the audience to participate in their artistic projects, each artist enables a dialogue to share memories and stories. The making of the works

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is fascinating, as it possesses the ability to embody individual emotions and collective experiences. Using the textile medium as a metaphorical expression, the projects become the site of national remembrance for the lost homeland. The powerful metaphors in Vanezi’s and Jacir’s projects introduce audiences to untold histories and experiences. Their participatory projects have embodied the exilic narration as a subject-theme, voicing in this way their own experience of loss and sense of belonging. The two works, as constructions of belonging, reflect ‘emotional investments and desire for attachments’ to specific places.47 Both works embody powerful connotations of ‘being and becoming, belonging and longing to belong’.48 Following Nira Yuval-Davis’s point that ‘belonging tends to be naturalized, and becomes articulated and politicised only when it is threatened in some way’,49 I suggest that the two works act as politicized projects of belonging. This is obvious in both the making of the works and during their exhibition at documenta 14. By enacting on personal narratives, the two works become allegories of the complexities of belonging, leaving and returning in Cyprus and Palestine. What the two works also have in common is that they act as bridging projects that connect the past (memories and belongings) and the present (gathering of shared narratives). Both works provide a significant agency of how historical, political and personal narratives should be remembered. They underline the importance of making visible absent narratives  – in particular, how the places were depopulated and occupied by strangers, and the enduring desire to return back. This desire is fuelled by the yearning of belonging and feeling of being ‘at home’ and feeling ‘safe’. As projects of belonging, the two works disclose the negotiations and struggles of exiled nations who claim a particular place as home and are transmitted over generations. As Edward Said pointed out, there is an intertwined connection between exile and nationalism: Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture, and customs; and by doing so, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages. … Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. … Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people.50



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Vanezi’s and Jacir’s approach of inviting the audience to weave together becomes an innovative mechanism to record valuable narratives of exile and the sense of belonging. The making of the works provides an innovative outlet for the making and recording of oral histories of post-war trauma. As portable structures, the two works call attention not only to the forced displacement of people but also of their memories and the desire to return to one’s place of belonging.

Notes 1 In 1947, the United Nations proposed a resolution for the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. Soon after the adoption of the resolution by the General Assembly, the war broke out and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes. 2 Hamid Naficy, Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 3. 3 Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk, documenta 14 Daybook (Munich: Prestel, 2017), Wednesday, 12 April. 4 Ibid. 5 Vassia Vanezi, Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory. Available online: https:// www.vanezi.com/documenta-14-vsp-weaving-together-upsilonphialpha943nuo micronnutaualphasigmaf-mualphazeta943.html (accessed 8 June 2018). 6 Email communication with Vassia Vanezi, Wednesday, 30 May 2018. 7 Vanezi, Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory. 8 Ibid. 9 Jan Shaw, ‘Story Streams: Stories and their Tellers’, in Storytelling: Critical & Creative Approaches, ed. J. Shaw, P. Kelly and L. E. Semler (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 3. 10 Roger Zetter, ‘Reconceptualizing the Myth of Return: Continuity and Transition Amongst the Greek-Cypriot Refugees of 1974’, Journal of Refugees Studies 12, no. 1 (1999): 20. 11 Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’, Patterns of Prejudice 40, no. 3 (2006): 197. 12 Maria Roussou, ‘War in Cyprus: Patriarchy and the Penelopy Myth’, in Women and Political Conflict: Portraits of Struggle in Times of Crisis, ed. R. Ridd and H. Callaway (New York: New York University Press, 1987), p. 35.

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13 Rebecca Bryant, The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 87. 14 Aybil Göker, ‘Senses of Belonging and “Belongings” and Making “Home” Away from Home’, in Cyprus and the Politics of Memory, ed. R. Bryant and Y. Papadakis (London: I.B.Tauris, 2012), p. 135. 15 Ibid. 16 Maria Roussou, Greek Cypriot Women in Contemporary Cyprus with Special Reference to the 1974 War and Its Consequences, unpublished PhD thesis (University of London, 1985), p. 99. 17 Zetter, ‘Reconceputalizing the Myth of Return’, p. 4. 18 The actual ‘I don’t forget’ phrase was created by Greek author Nikos Dimou in 1974 as a tribute to the occupied parts. 19 Irini Savvides, ‘No Man’s Land: A Revisionist Story of “The Cyprus Problem”’, in Storytelling: Critical & Creative Approaches, ed. J. Shaw, P. Kelly and L. E. Semler (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 132–3. 20 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 259. 21 Victoria Mitchell, ‘Textiles, Text and Techne’, in The Textile Reader, ed. J. Hemmings (London: Berg, 2012), p. 7. 22 Rozsika Parker, ‘The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine’, in The Textile Reader, ed. J. Hemmings (London: Berg, 2012), p. 300. 23 William Safran, ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 87. 24 For more, see Sumantra Bose, Contested Lands (London: Harvard University Press, 2007). 25 Ibid., p. 232. 26 T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 117. 27 Jenny Gheith, ‘Exhibiting Politics: Palestinian-American Artist Emily Jacir Talks About Her Work’, The Electronic Intifada, 4 November 2004. Available online: https://electronicintifada.net/content/exhibiting-politics-palestinian-americanartist-emily-jacir-talks-about-her-work/5295 (accessed 29 June 2018). 28 Institute for Middle East Understanding, ‘Emily Jacir: Artist’, 18 June 2014. Available online: https://imeu.org/article/emily-jacir-artist (accessed 6 July 2018). 29 John Menick, ‘Undiminished Returns’, in Folio Verlag, Emily Jacir, Belongings (Austria: O.K. Centre for Contemporary Art Upper Austria, 2003), pp. 23–4. 30 Ibid., p. 24. 31 Ibid. 32 The First Intifada occurred between 1987 and 1993.



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33 Amy Goodman, ‘Artist Emily Jacir Brings the Palestinian Experience to the Venice Biennale’, Democracy Now, 12 August 2015. Available online: https:// www.democracynow.org/2015/8/12/artist_emily_jacir_brings_the_palestinian (accessed 13 July 2018). 34 Ibid. 35 Stella Rollig, ‘Interview with Emily Jacir’, in Folio Verlag, Emily Jacir, Belongings (Austria: O.K. Centre for Contemporary Art Upper Austria, 2003), p. 16. 36 Jacir recounted during an interview the story of a friend of hers who saw the tent in an exhibition in New York and said, ‘Thank god that you have this title because the blurb the museum has put up does not say what it is,’ in ibid., p. 19. 37 Emily Jacir, Record Book exhibited in documenta 14. 38 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1984), p. 213. 39 Catherine de Zegher, ‘Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots’, in The Textile Reader, ed. J. Hemmings (London: Berg, 2012), p. 143. 40 Muhammad Siddiq, ‘On Ropes of Memory: Narrating the Palestinian Refugees’, in Mistrusting Refugees, ed. V. Daniel and J. Knudsen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 89. 41 John Durham Peters, ‘Exile, Nomadism, and Diaspora’, in Home, Exile Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, ed. H. Naficy (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 19. 42 Marita Eatmond, ‘Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research’, Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 248–64. 43 Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar, ‘Women and the Politics of Space’, in Development 45, no. 1 (2002): 9. 44 Gina Buijs, Migrant Women: Crossing Boundaries and Changing Identities (Oxford: Berg, 1993), p. 18. 45 Griselda Pollock, After-affects|After-images (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 19. 46 Latimer and Szymczyk, documenta 14 Daybook, Tuesday, 11 April. 47 Yuval-Davis, ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’, p. 202. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 197. 50 Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Literacy and Cultural Essays, ed. E. Said (London: Ganta Books, 2001), pp. 176–7.

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Parastou Forouhar: Materializing pain and beauty Lydia Wooldridge

In her diverse body of work, Parastou Forouhar (b. 1962)  uses distinctively textile means to interrogate and re-narrate perceptions of cultural difference between Iran and Germany. Textiles communicate. From an etymological perspective, the English usage of the word ‘text’ stems from the Latin texere, to weave, to braid, to join together or to fabricate. Forouhar uses textiles or textile construction techniques as a language through which to examine complex, discrepant and interrelated ideas simultaneously. Whilst analysis purely based on ethnicity is reductive, Forouhar’s artistic practice is informed by specific personal circumstances relating to Iran’s recent past. It is, therefore, necessary to interweave the personal, the national and the international in any analysis of Forouhar’s work. In this way, my analysis aligns with postmigratory approaches in art history, which shift emphasis from migration and migrants as objects to study and focus instead on ‘migration as a perspective’.1 An initial frame for reading Forouhar’s artistic practice is the assassination of her parents, Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar, by the Iranian government in 1998. Consequently, her work is often read as a critique of the theocratic regime in Iran. However, Forouhar’s artistic practice also concerns the transfer of culture and understanding between Eastern and Western cultures, in particular Iran and Germany (her chosen home). Whilst other critics have focused specifically on these approaches in her work, I use textiles or textile construction techniques to consider her practice from a new perspective. In this chapter, I  analyse Forouhar’s use of textiles or textile processes to materialize commemoration, cultural difference and identity. Looking specifically at Eslimi (2003), Weaving Pain (2013) and Kiss Me (2013), I  examine how metaphors associated with

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entanglement, weaving and appliqué can be used to read the heterogenous works created by Forouhar. These works simultaneously communicate complex and often contradictory ideas concerning beauty and pain, religion and secularism, and tradition and modernity. Forouhar was born in Tehran to Dariush and Parvaneh in 1962. Dariush was a politician in the Mohammad Mosaddegh era and Parvaneh a political activist. They both opposed the post-revolution (1979) theocratic regime in Iran and championed human rights and democracy. In the early 1990s, the Forouhars encouraged their children, Arash and Parastou, to seek asylum outside Iran. Parastou relocated and settled in Germany, studying for a masters degree at Offenbach College of Arts. On 22 November 1998, Dariush and Parvaneh were murdered in their own home in Tehran. Their assassinations formed part of ‘The Chain Murders’, which sought to eradicate intellectual dissidents in Iran. Their deaths provoked large demonstrations throughout Tehran with twenty-five thousand people taking to the streets to commemorate their lives and protest for dissident rights.2 Forouhar’s artistic practice has always been concerned with ‘abstraction and the formation of metaphors’ drawing on what she learnt from students who ‘expressed dissent through highly coded and alternative methods’.3 However, in the aftermath of her parents’ murders, pain formed the central subject of Forouhar’s artwork. Eslimi, Weaving Pain and Kiss Me all feature references to physical pain. Whilst it is tempting to read Forouhar’s artistic practice as autobiographical, it is also important to look at the broader cultural themes raised in her work. These include mourning, martyrdom, ritual, language, dictatorship and democracy. Examining these themes allows Forouhar to interrogate supposedly different cultural practices in the Middle East and Germany, thereby providing a snapshot of the reciprocity and interconnectedness of cultural interactions in contemporary societies. When viewing Forouhar’s complete body of work, ornamentation appears to be the dominant aesthetic. It was whilst studying at the Academy of Arts in Tehran (1984–9) that Forouhar first understood the communicative power of ornamentation and subversive coding.4 In addition, her subsequent education at Offenbach has situated her artistic practice within European histories of ornamentation, including the rejection of ornamentation by Modernists in the twentieth century. Her earlier textile work, Eslimi (meaning ornament), is a clear example of combining traditional Persian ornamentation and subversive



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coding. Forouhar digitally creates complex patterns out of unexpected objects such as weapons and genitalia. These erotic and violent shapes are repeated and arranged to form intricate patterns, which disguise the individual motifs. Abbas Daneshwari suggests that the highly structured, repetitive patterns in Eslimi are metaphors for the ‘intricate and sophisticated structures of [theocratic] control [in Iran]’.5 He asserts that the works are more than just biographical; ‘they are critiques of a society ruled by anachronisms’.6 The full and half drop and mirror repeat patterns of Eslimi are printed onto woven cloth and displayed as a soft furnishing catalogue, intended to be flicked through. Russell Harris suggests that Forouhar’s imagery and realization in the form of a sample catalogue ‘makes a strong statement about harsh religious interpretations infiltrating the most banal and quotidian aspects of life’.7 Any initial suggestion of the erotically charged Orient is challenged by this restricted daily reality and by the inclusion of delicate patterns created by instruments of torture.8 Violence and intimacy are entangled (Figure 2.1). In relation to textiles, entanglement describes the process of fibres, yarns and threads interlocking in chaotic and unexpected ways. Entangled imagery

Figure  2.1  Parastou Forouhar, Eslimi, 2003, sublimation print on fabric, 594 × 420 mm. Source: Artist’s collection.

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features prominently in Forouhar’s later series, Red Is My Name, Green Is My Name (2009). Here we see the familiar male genitalia and weapons of torture present in Eslimi, but the patterns are interrupted when we realize human figures in submissive positions intertwine with the ornate and macabre patterns. From a philosophical perspective, the notion of entanglement is commonly associated with postcolonialism and transcultural encounter. Édouard Glissant, the Martinican scholar, drew on Levinas’s philosophy of entanglement to explain a postcolonial world view countering the reductive colonial processes of assimilation or annihilation. Glissant considers ‘entanglements of world-wide relation’ in his Poetics of Relation.9 His model of entanglement highlights the web of encounters between all cultures (including peripheral-peripheral). As explained by Duncan Yoon, Glissant’s model of entanglement respects the encountered difference in the ‘other’ and thereby protects the ‘diverse’.10 I argue that Forouhar entangles her specific experiences of two cultures (Iran and Germany) by subverting Persian ornamentation and miniature traditions. Her use of imagery depicting sexuality and torture disrupts the traditional Persian decorative techniques and challenges Western perceptions of the ‘ornamentally beautiful Orient’.11 Ornamentation also captures the entanglement between Austro-German and Iranian cultures, as Forouhar makes direct associations between ornament and crime in the forms of torture and murder. Ornament and Crime was a seminal lecture by the architect Adolf Loos in 1910. As a backlash to the ornate decoration found in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art and design, Loos suggested that ornamentation was symptomatic of degeneracy and argued for a minimalist approach to design, its simplicity enabling a greater appreciation of the materials. He proposed a link between ornamentation and regression, urging instead for pure forms which express rational functionality.12 Ornament and Crime is considered a fundamental discourse surrounding the development of modernism and the shift from ornamentation, particularly within architecture. In a solo exhibition of her digital drawings in 2013, Forouhar directly challenges Loos’ concept outlined in Ornament and Crime. Her ironically entitled exhibition ‘Parastou Forouhar: Ornament and Crime’ recalls Loos’ assertion of the link between decoration and degeneracy, but Forouhar instead champions the postmodern appetite for ornamentation whilst highlighting sociopolitical mechanisms of inequality and violence.



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Forouhar’s ability to draw on and entangle references to Austro-German and Iranian traditions through the lens of ornamentation demonstrates that there are convergences between supposedly different cultures. In Forouhar’s digital drawing series, Papillon Collection (2010), signifiers of both her Iranian and German identities are further intertwined. The butterfly motif is highly symbolic in Persian poetry and miniature painting; it symbolizes the ideal of beauty and freedom, whilst paradoxically connoting death. Butterflies, like moths, are attracted to bright lights or flames that in turn lead to their demise (Figure 2.2).

Figure  2.2  Parastou Forouhar, The Papillon Collection, 2010, digital print, 1000 × 1000 mm. Source: Artist’s collection.

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Forouhar’s butterflies are created by symmetrically depicting human forms in both positions of exploitation and submission. This alludes to one of the overarching themes in Forouhar’s practice – ‘the simultaneity of beauty and harm and the ambivalence of their co-existence’.13 Her experience of living in post-Second World War Germany has led her to experience the legacy of, and collective guilt for, the crimes committed during National Socialism. As Lutz Becker states, Forouhar sees ‘historical and psychological parallels with the Iranian trauma, she invests her art with a sense of personal responsibility that clearly implies a collective dimension’.14 However, in the same instance, her use of butterfly imagery can also be read as a link to her mother, as ‘Parvaneh’ in Farsi means ‘butterfly’. Whilst purely autobiographical readings of Forouhar’s work simplify the complex cultural critique inherent in her pieces, the assassination of her parents has strongly influenced her practice. In an interview with Saeed Kamali Dehghan, Forouhar states, ‘Every time I produce one [butterfly], it’s as if I’m creating an image of my mother.’15 In a further acknowledgement of specific German histories, the butterfly also aesthetically recalls the inkblots created by the German physician and poet, Justinus Kerner. In 1857, Kerner compiled a collection of embellished ink blots and poetry, entitled Klecksographien.16 Kerner’s collection of poetry and inkblots drew on themes such as memento mori, with his inkblots creating symmetrical forms which he turned into ‘creatures of chance’.17 During the nineteenth century, Blotto became a popular parlour game across Europe. Drawing on Kerner’s approach, customers would create or buy readymade inkblots to embellish with drawing or poetry. In the twentieth century, the game Blotto inspired the Swiss psychologist, Hermann Rorschach. He devised the well-known Rorschach technique for assessing individuals’ psychological characteristics. Just as Forouhar subverts Ornament and Crime, she engages critically with Rorschach in her photographic series Rorschach:  Behnam (2008). In the series, a man is dressed in the chador and his covered torso creates symmetrical forms reminiscent of the butterfly or inkblot. Forouhar’s butterfly forms depict the ‘simultaneity of beauty and harm’ whilst also locating the imagery within historic Iranian and German poetic and artistic traditions.18 Again, this entangling or intertwining of cultural references enables the artist to challenge the spectators’ understanding of transcultural difference.



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Weaving is another textile technique that Forouhar uses to convey the synchrony of beauty and suffering. In Weaving Pain, strips of Forouhar’s drawings are woven together at right angles to create a wall hanging. The imagery on the strips includes figures entangled together, enacting scenes of torture, and recalls her digital drawings from A Thousand and One Days I-III (2012) and the Papillon Collection. The varying symmetrical patterns of the warp and weft threads are reminiscent of the mirrored yet organic inkblot or Rorschach drawings. However, Forouhar’s plainly woven construction transforms the imagery into a highly intricate repeat pattern. The edges of the piece are left raw, making it easy for the audience to see her construction method (Figure 2.3). Like entanglement, the textile process of weaving has often been used as a metaphor for explaining social structures or cultural encounters. Early uses of textiles as metaphor appear in Plato’s dialogue, known as Statesman (360 bc). As outlined by Arthur Danto, Plato was aware of the different skills required to maintain sustainable political order. Weaving offered him a suitable metaphor for describing the way these ‘disparate but necessary elements can be held together in a whole that offers shelter, protection, and fulfilment’.19 The connective and constructive qualities of weaving have led to it being used as an analogy for describing postcolonial cultural relations between former colonizers and colonized peoples. Although Germany and the Middle East did not have a colonial relationship, Germany had colonies in what is now called Cameroon, Tanzania, Uganda, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Nauru and the Solomon Islands. Much the same as France, Spain and the UK, Germany’s history of imperial expansionism cemented Eurocentric perceptions of the world. Eurocentrism developed a world view in which non-European countries, cultures and citizens were considered as subaltern. Furthermore, National Socialism fostered and endorsed public disapproval of difference in relation to race, sexuality and disability. Post-Second World War German politicians had to address these established and complicated public perceptions in the rebuilding of the Federal Republic. I acknowledge that the relationship between Germany and Iran is not based on colonizer/colonized interactions. However, as Anne Ring Petersen suggests, there are interconnections between scholarship on postcolonialism and postmigration, with both terms being used to criticize and renegotiate ‘European colonial, postcolonial and national systems’.20 She

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Figure 2.3  Parastou Forouhar, Weaving Pain, 2013, digital print on laser cut paper, 2350 × 1350 mm. Source: Artist’s collection.



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stresses that both theories engage with ‘different aspects of repression’ and that postcolonialism ‘gestures towards a decolonial emancipation,’ but in doing so it opens up a ‘postmigrant perspective on society’.21 Whilst I draw on research from the field of postcolonialism, as a vehicle for examining transcultural encounters, I use this scholarship to highlight the marginalization of minority groups within national structures. In her chapter, ‘Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Saïd and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison’ (2011), Françoise Lionnet uses the weaving metaphor to explain Khatibi’s concept of ‘double critique’. Khatibi developed ‘double critique’ to disrupt binary ways of thinking such as Orient or Occident, Self or Other (colonizer/ colonized). Lionnet highlights the unbounded, ‘future-orientated’ qualities inherent in the weaving metaphor: ‘This motion is directed forward and back toward what precedes it so as to overlap with it, envelop it, and then point toward its exterior so as to move beyond it’.22 I suggest this weaving metaphor could also be applied to Helmbrecht Breinig and Klaus Lösch’s transcultural theory of ‘transdifference’, which suggests that cultural identity is in permanent flux and oscillates between irreconcilable cultural differences. They distance their concept from other prominent postcolonial terms associated with cultural interactions, such as hybridity, and instead highlight its emphasis on ‘a simultaneity of – often conflicting – positions, loyalties, affiliations and participations’.23 As explained by the authors, Transdifference … denotes all that resists the construction of meaning based on an exclusionary and conclusional binary model … It does not do away with the originary binary inscription of difference, but rather causes it to oscillate. Thus, the concept of transdifference interrogates the validity of binary constructions of difference without completely deconstructing them.24

Therefore, the individual threads (warp and weft) are analogous to the different and irreducible cultures, which are simultaneously held in close proximity (weave structure) but retain their independence. The weave, in its entirety, can be read as an illustration of the interactions between the different ideas, loyalties or affiliations during transculturation. The weaving metaphor is useful for analysing Forouhar’s artwork, as it helps to explain how she renegotiates the binary oppositions of beauty and pain (and death), religion and secularism, and tradition and modernity without the expectation of resolution.

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Forouhar follows a long tradition of associating weaving with pain and trauma. In Homer’s Iliad, Helen is seen weaving a tapestry which depicts the course of war. At once her actions can be read as an output for processing pain, similar to the war rugs woven by female victims in the Soviet-Afghan war (1917–89). However, Helen’s role is ambiguous as she is also portrayed as the weaver of the brutal scenes that unfold. Forouhar’s Weaving Pain also makes direct reference to pain in the title of the artwork. The symmetrical patterns of torture that line the warp and weft threads have been likened by Joanna Inglot to the abuses in contemporary Iran and the revelations of violence and torture at American-run prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay in 2004.25 By weaving imagery that can be associated simultaneously with Iran and the United States, Forouhar emphasizes transcultural convergences that are often overlooked or ignored by the Western spectator. Therefore, Weaving Pain can be seen as representing the systematic, ingrained or even interwoven structures of power, abuse and violence that form part of Iranian and Western cultures. In Weaving Pain, Forouhar’s artistic practice is also strongly reminiscent of Penelope’s weaving of Laertes’ funeral shroud in The Odyssey. Both Forouhar and Penelope experience loss and engage with textiles as a form of mourning. Penelope weaves (or weaves and un-weaves) to delay remarrying after the presumed death of her husband, Odysseus. Instead, she agrees to marry once the funeral shroud for her father-in-law is complete. She weaves the cloth by day but at night unravels all of the day’s labour, thus never completing the cloth or remarrying. Forouhar, on the other hand, weaves her digital drawings to create artworks that examine the abusive institutional structures in the world, including those that led to the assassination of her parents in 1998. Although mourning and ritual feature more prominently in Forouhar’s artworks made from Ashura banners,26 her use of weaving in Weaving Pain could thus be interpreted as a therapeutic or cathartic processing of trauma and grief. In a similar manner to Forouhar’s earlier work, Weaving Pain interweaves signifiers to both her Iranian and German identities. Again, the symmetrical inkblot imagery, alluding to historical German illustration and poetry, forms the central motif of Forouhar’s woven artwork. Nevertheless, references to her Iranian heritage are evident through her critique of institutional abuses



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of power. However, as explored above, this critique is not reserved solely for Iran’s theocratic regime. Indeed, it returns the spotlight to Europe and America with their shared legacy of human rights abuses post-9/11. These polyvalent illustrations of torture, blindfolds and restraint straps, are repeated and intertwined, thereby creating intricate arabesque shapes that are reminiscent of Persian calligraphy.27 The warp and weft strands which are decorated with repeating inkblot drawings intersect with each other at right angles. This overand under-lapping at ninety degrees emphasizes the woven construction of the piece, as well as the symmetrical structures of the individual patterns. For me, this recalls Catherine de Zegher’s analysis of Cecilia Vicuña’s work, in which she suggests that the crossing of warp and weft threads are the ‘crux of [the] weaving, where change and interaction happens through encounter’.28 This emphasis on encounter is reminiscent of my metaphorical reading of Breinig and Lösch’s concept of transdifference, where cultural strands or elements interact, interlock, sit in tension, are transformed, yet remain independent. Therefore, weaving provides an effective material process to communicate the complexity of contemporary transcultural encounters and highlight the convergences between German (and Western) and Iranian cultural practices. Unlike her other work, where cultural signifiers are entangled or intertwined, Weaving Pain provides a more structured representation of how German and Iranian cultures overlap, interlock and interconnect. It is not only perceptions of violence and torture that Forouher holds in tension within her woven structures. Indeed, the binary of tradition and modernity is also interrogated through her material and process choices. Modernity is suggested through the artist’s use of digital technologies, whilst tradition is evoked through her use of weaving and engagement with Persian ornamentation and calligraphy as well as historic inkblots.29 By oscillating between traditional aesthetics, processes and digital technologies, Forouhar’s work can be read as highlighting how global cultures and identities are dynamic and remain continually in flux. Neither culture nor identity are static, even if traditions, habits and practices signal to an imagined stable past. Whilst weaving enables Forouhar to interrogate many themes simultaneously, including her German and Iranian identities, the tradition-modernity binary and the paradox of beauty and pain, its rigid and uniformed structure limits the freedom she has as an artist to evoke the complexities of transcultural

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encounters. As the artist and researcher, Jill Magi suggests in relation to her own identity: Instead of expressing a desire to be ‘part of the weave’, embroidery, as a model for subjectivity, presents the ‘other’ as capable of elaboration, proliferating beyond official or presumed status, working upon the surface of the cloth, piercing it with its presence in order to make something else that is not utilitarian, perhaps asking:  are the benefits of full citizenship–integration into the weave, or melt into the melting pot–really the desired outcome?30

Instead, I propose that Forouhar’s later work, Kiss Me, demonstrates engage­ ment with another textile technique that more aptly describes her experience of transcultural encounters. Like Forouhar’s other work, Kiss Me provides a platform for dealing with multiple, complex cultural themes simultaneously. What is particularly compelling is the artist’s use of appliqué to stitch and layer these divergent ideas together. Stitch and suture have been explored by theorists as models for subjectivity. Stuart Hall considers the metaphor of suture to describe sociological identity construction. For Hall, ‘identity thus stitches (or to use a current medical metaphor, “sutures”) the subject into the structure. It stabilizes both subjects and the cultural worlds they inhabit, making both reciprocally more unified’.31 Although Hall applies the stitch metaphor to identity construction, the process is reminiscent of transcultural encounters, as both unify distinctive elements through joining or stitching. In Kiss Me, Forouhar uses stitch to manipulate individual components or material fragments to create a new fabric (her banner), yet each fragment retains part of its original characteristic. Moreover, stitching represents one of the paradoxes most prevalent in Forouhar’s work, that of beauty and pain. The term ‘suture’ is a medical term, which implies pain, whilst stitching has commonly been associated with embroidery and decorative ‘women’s work’.32 In like manner, Leon de Kock uses the seam analogy to describe how national identity is constructed when multiple cultures meet and interact. He describes the seam as ‘the site of joining together that also bears the mark of the suture’; thus, the seam represents the process of connecting multiple cultures (the suture), whilst highlighting inherent convergences and divergences (through connection and juxtaposition of separate fabrics).33 The German sociologist Andreas Ackermann takes the concept of the seam one step further by suggesting that



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postmodern, multicultural society is reminiscent of patchwork.34 Patchwork or piecing is the process of joining together geometric shapes to construct a larger fabric. As with de Kock’s seam metaphor, the patchwork analogy conveys connectedness and interdependence. Yet, rather than focusing on the connection at one juncture, patchwork infers visible multidirectional joins to create the whole fabric. This multidirectionality inherent in the patchwork metaphor resonates with Corrado Fumagalli’s concept of ‘patchwork multiculturalism’, which highlights the ‘highly decentralised mix of discursive interactions’ inherent in contemporary multicultural society.35 However, using multiculturalism as a tool for describing the complex and nuanced interactions that occur during transcultural encounters is restrictive. In multiculturalism, multiple cultures live side by side but they remain distinct, removed from mutual understanding and unable to transgress barriers. In patchwork, fragments are only connected at the periphery, leaving the centre of the fabric pieces intact and unaffected by neighbouring fragments. Instead, appliqué offers a better tool for describing the complex relationships of ‘selection and adaptation’ that the postcolonial theorist, Mary Louise Pratt, introduces in her theory of the ‘contact zone’, which describes how ‘subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture’.36 Appliqué provides the artist freedom to work outside the lateral realm of patchworking or piecing geometric shapes. Instead, the artist can layer diverse motifs and fragments on top of each other, resulting in the concealment and exposure of different fabrics. Thus, the artist has autonomy over the selection and adaptation process and is in charge of what cultural associations are revealed and obscured from view. In her banner series, Kiss Me, Forouhar uses appliqué to represent divergent aspects of contemporary Iran, whilst challenging Eurocentric perceptions held by the largely Western audience of her work (Figure 2.4). Kiss Me is a series of eight textile banners that are constructed using material fragments from Ashura banners and garish haberdashery elements, such as marabou feathers and faux-fur. Ashura is the Islamic mourning ritual performed by Shia Muslims. It is the day of commemoration for Hossein ibn Ali, a Muslim martyr and grandson to the prophet Mohammad. The commemoration ritual includes street processions of chanting and selfflagellation. The Ashura banners adorn the walls of the city and offer a

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Figure 2.4  Parastou Forouhar, Kiss Me, 2013, appliqué Ashura banners. Source: Artist’s collection.



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vibrant and colourful contrast to the black mourning garments worn by the participants. Over the years the banners have become increasingly gaudy and include depictions of mosques and traditional Persian ornamentation. Since 2003, Forouhar has created artwork using the Ashura banners, including Funeral (2003), Safari (2005) and Countdown (2008). However, Kiss Me is the only piece which refers to the banners’ traditional forms. Whilst mourning is suggested through Forouhar’s use of the Ashura banners as medium, the title of the artwork also suggests commemoration. Kiss Me or Mara Beboos was a secular pop song from the 1950s, written by an admirer to the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh.37 The song is known as a mournful ballad about the separation of two lovers. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, it became emblematic of the failure or death of democratic rule. Mourning is, therefore, the link between the religious ritual of Ashura and the secular pop song Mara Beboos. By associating religious and secular approaches to mourning, Forouhar demonstrates the convergences between supposedly oppositional societal practices. Although commemoration and mourning are evident as the central themes of Kiss Me, Media Farzin’s analysis highlights Forouhar’s more humorous and subversive engagement with these rituals. The Ashura processions bring together individuals (although men and women are separated) and have developed into an expression of collective identity for Shia Muslims and the theocratic regime of Iran. This does not mean that the social event is ‘teenager proof ’. As Farzin suggests, the Ashura processions provide an opportunity for young adults to interact and flirt with members of the opposite sex.38 Appliqué enables Forouhar to select and adapt individual letters and accents from the original Ashura banners and flirtatiously rearrange them to form lyrics from Mara Beboos. By doing so she subverts the traditional sombre sentiments expressed during Ashura to indicate the modern manipulation of the religious procession by teenagers looking for romantic relationships. The appliqué calligraphy of Kiss Me alludes not only to the personal romantic relations between Iranian teenagers but also to the lack of understanding across transcultural groups. To the Western spectators, who are predominantly non-Farsi speakers, each banner appears to say something different, due to Forouhar’s use of tashkil and harakat accents. However, despite the visual differences, the imperative displayed on each banner remains the same: Kiss

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Me. Non-speakers of Farsi remain unaware of the message the script conveys and, therefore, only engage with the aesthetics of the calligraphy. This process is reminiscent of Glissant’s theory of opacity, where he argues for an acceptance of difference, even if the differences are opaque and untranslatable.39 Glissant states, If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I  have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps judgements. I have to reduce. … Accepting difference does, of course, upset the hierarchy of this scale. I  understand your difference, or in other words, without creating hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. … For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures.40

In relation to Glissant’s concept of opacity, Forouhar’s appliqué calligraphy prevents Western spectators from translating and thus fully understanding the phrases. This challenges Western thought and instead provides the spectator with the experience of opacity. However, untranslatability is not reserved for language; it is also highly relevant to the understanding of imagery and symbols. Forouhar’s artworks are laden with culturally specific imagery, and these visual symbols are likely to be understood, or not understood but accepted, in different ways by her diverse audience. Whilst Forouhar’s use of calligraphic appliqué symbolizes untranslatability or the opacity and transparency binary, like in Weaving Pain, her use of materials in Kiss Me also represents the opposition of tradition – modernity. Traditionally men and women are dressed in black; yet, by contrast, over the years the Ashura banners have become increasingly colourful. Although tradition is signified through references to the historic ritual, modernity is suggested through Forouhar’s use of contemporary commercial Ashura banners, with their showy neon colours created using modern synthetic dyes. Furthermore, Forouhar alludes to modernity through her use of synthetic backing materials, as well as manufactured haberdashery items, including faux-fur, lace, sequins and tasselling  – materials commonly associated with fashion and clothing. By using modern Ashura banners as a medium, Forouhar embraces the contemporary developments of a traditional ritual.



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The use of ornamentation to entangle references to her Iranian and European art education which we find throughout Forouhar’s work is also important in Kiss Me. Whilst Kiss Me does not conform to the rigid, repetitive structures evident in Eslimi or Weaving Pain, the work does include dense sections of ornamentation that create symmetrical motifs. These decorative forms, with their longitudinal symmetry, are reminiscent of other Persian textiles, including the carpet. Forouhar selects and adapts different decorative patterns from commercial Ashura banners, and these material fragments are layered and pieced together to create dense and intricate sections of symmetrical ornamentation, which in turn resembles the original form of the commemorative banners. It is through appliqué that Forouhar has the ability to select, cut, layer, connect, reveal and obscure intricate sections of ornamentation that would not have patchworked neatly together. Just as in Pratt’s description of the ‘contact zone’, Forouhar is in control of the visual elements she wishes to select and adapt, hide and reveal. Overall, Forouhar’s artistic practice examines and interrogates cultural difference between Iran and Germany by using multiple textile techniques. The plasticity of textiles means that as a medium it is uniquely placed to communicate the processes of transculturation and transcultural encounters. The use of weaving, stitching and patchwork metaphors to explain interactions and interconnection is prominent in cultural, literary and postcolonial studies, yet scholars engage with textiles in abstract ways. In contrast, my analysis shows how Forouhar provides material forms that concretely articulate the transcultural, relational and reciprocal process of cultural exchange. Entanglement is prominent in Eslimi, her earlier work printed on fabric. The repeated, interlocking and intertwined digital imagery remains a central motif in her subsequent work on paper and mixed media. It is through this process of entanglement that Forouhar examines the crossovers and divergences between her Iranian and German identities, thus challenging purely monolithic readings of either culture. Weaving is an ancient construction technique that has been metaphorically employed by philosophers over the years to describe politics and cultural interactions. Forouhar’s use of weaving in Weaving Pain enables her to interrogate ornament as a cultural metaphor. The artist uses dense, interwoven ornament to examine totalitarian authority and the associated, but often obscured,

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structures of pain and suffering. Finally, using stitch, patchwork and appliqué metaphors, my analysis of Forouhar’s Kiss Me recalls Pratt’s concept of the ‘contact zone’ and her description of the selection and adaptation processes that occurs during transcultural encounters. Whilst appliqué is similar to patchwork, it provides the artist with creative freedom and autonomy, as it allows for the concealment as well as the exposure of certain material elements. Through a range of textile processes, Forouhar creates a nexus of discrepant yet interwoven loyalties, histories and identities.

Notes 1 Regina Römhild, ‘Beyond the Bounds of the Ethnic: For Postmigrant Cultural and Social Research’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2, no. 9 (2017): 69–74 (p. 73). 2 Catrin Lorch, ‘Their Audacity Leaves Me Speechless’, Quantara, 24 November 2017. Available online: https://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-the-iranianartist-parastou-forouhar-their-audacity-leaves-me-speechless (accessed 12 April 2018). 3 Saeed Kamali Dehghan, ‘Is It Art or Pain? Iran’s Parastou Forouhar on Family, Death and the Failed Revolution’, The Guardian, 29 September 2017. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/29/art-iran-parastouforouhar-family-revolution-artist (accessed 9 April 2018). 4 Parastou Forouhar, ‘Veiled, Unveiled’, [lecture] presented at Fundamentalism in Art (Dusseldorf, 2002). 5 Abbas Daneshwari, ‘Amazingly Original’, Parastou Forouhar [website], 2014. Available online: https://www.parastou-forouhar.de/amazingly-original/ (accessed 5 April 2018). 6 Ibid. 7 Russell Harris, ‘A Cultural Predicament’, in Parastou Forouhar: Art Life and Death in Iran, ed. R. Issa (Saqi: Lebanon, 2010), pp. 10–13 (p. 12). 8 Alexandra Karentzos, ‘Eslimi Patternbook’, Parastou Forouhar [website], 2003. Available online: https://www.parastou-forouhar.de/portfolio/eslimi/ (accessed 5 April 2018). 9 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. 31. 10 Duncan McEachern Yoon, ‘World Literature and the Postcolonial: Ngugi’s Globalectics and Glissant’s Poetics’, The Global South Project, 2013. Available online: http://www.globalsouthproject.cornell.edu/



1 1 12

13

14 1 5 16 17

1 8 19

20

2 1 22

23

2 4 25

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world-literature-and-the-postcolonial-ngugirsquos-globalectics-andglissantrsquos-poetics-page-2.html (accessed 5 April 2018). Karentzos, ‘Eslimi Patternbook’. Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998), p. 170; Ewan Rawn, ‘Spotlight: Adolf Loos’, ArchDaily, 2017. Available online: https://www.archdaily.com/576187/spotlight-adolf-loos (accessed 15 May 2018). Bree Richards, ‘Interview with Parastou Forouhar’, ATP7 Catalogue, 2012. Available online: https://www.parastou-forouhar.de/interview-atp7/ (accessed 21 May 2018). Lutz Becker, ‘Art, Death and Language’, in Parastou Forouhar: Art Life and Death in Iran, ed. R. Issa (Lebanon: Saqi, 2010), pp. 16–19 (p. 16). Dehghan, ‘Is It Art or Pain?’. Klecks means ‘blot’ or ‘smudge’ in German. Christopher Turner, ‘Blots’, Tate: Deliberate Accident in Art, 1 January 2011. Available online: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/deliberateaccident-art (accessed 25 May 2018). Dehghan, ‘Is It Art of Pain?’. Arthur Danto, ‘Weaving as a Metaphor for Political Thought’, in The Textile Reader, ed. J. Hemmings (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 205–10 (p. 208). Other philosophers engaging with metaphors of weaving include Deleuze and Guattari. They used the analogy of the woven fabric to explain their concept of smooth and striated space. Anne Ring Petersen, ‘Migration and Postmigration as New Frameworks for Art Theory’, in Handbook of Art and Global Migration: Theories Practices and Challenges, ed. B. Dogramaci and B. Mersmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 366–84 (p. 377). Ibid., p. 377. Françoise Lionnet, ‘Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Saïd and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison’, in Companion to Comparative Literature, ed. A. Behdad and D. Thomas (Sussex: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 387–407 (p. 405). Helmbrecht Breinig and Klaus Lösch, ‘Introduction: Difference and Transdifference’, in Multiculturalism in Contemporary Societies: Perspectives on Difference and Transdifference, ed. H. Breinig, J. Gebhardt and K. Lösch (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlangen-Nürnberg, 2002), pp. 11–37 (p. 21). Ibid., p. 23. Joanna Inglot, ‘A Thousand and One Days’, Parastou Forouhar [website], 2012. Available online: https://www.parastou-forouhar.de/portfolio/a-thousend-andone-days-i-iii/ (accessed 21 May 2018).

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2 6 Safari (2005), Funeral (2003) and Kiss Me (2013). 27 Inglot, ‘A Thousand and One Days’. 28 Catherine de Zegher, ‘Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots’, in The Textile Reader, ed. J. Hemmings (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 134–57 (p. 145). 29 Weaving is an ancient practice, as Anni Albers discusses in ‘Constructing Textiles’. She suggests that ‘the process of weaving has remained virtually unchanged for uncounted centuries’. Anni Albers, , ed. B. Danilowitz (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), pp. 29–34 (p. 29). 30 Jill Magi, ‘Stitches in Excess: Embroidery as Model for Social Thought and Art’, Jacket 2, 2015. Available online: https://jacket2.org/commentary/stitches-excessembroidery-model-social-thought-and-art (accessed 25 May 2018). 31 Stuart Hall, ‘Identity in Question’, in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert and K. Thompson (Sussex: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 274–81 (p. 275). 32 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010). 33 Leon de Kock, ‘South Africa in the Global Imaginary: Introduction’, in South Africa in the Global Imaginary, ed. L. de Kock, L. Bethlehem and S. Laden (Pretoria: South Africa Press, 2004). 34 Andreas Ackermann, Patchwork: Dimensionen multikultureller Gesellschaften:  Geschichte, Problematik und Chancen (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2002). 35 Corrado Fumagalli, ‘Patchwork Multiculturalism’, International Political Science Association. Paper presented at the 24th World Conference of Political Science at Poznań in 2016. 36 Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008). 37 John Eipper, ‘Golnarghi’s “Mara Beboos”’, World Association of International Studies, 19 March 2015. Available online: https://waisworld.org/ go.jsp?id=02a&o=92346 (accessed 25 May 2018). 38 Media Farzin, ‘Dark Ornament’, Parastou Forouhar [website], 2014. Available online: https://www.parastou-forouhar.de/amazingly-original/ (accessed 10 April 2018). 39 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 195. 40 Ibid., p. 190.

 

3

Deciphering home through Hajra Waheed’s archival investigations Sarah Fox

Canadian artist Hajra Waheed (b. 1980, Calgary, Alberta) uses archival material as a means of situating individual narratives within the context of state-propagated ideas of nationhood and belonging. In doing so, she traces the personal stories of her subjects and the factors that inform their understanding of home; yet the narratives she presents are notably incomplete. An archive is characterized by its fragmented nature and often what is missing is more revealing than what is present. The narratives shown in Waheed’s work reflect the structure of the archive itself, and it is this inevitable lack of completion that asserts the narratives of individuals living under conditions of diaspora and surveillance, revealing what is excluded from narratives dictated by the state. Through an application of postmodern archive theory, this is evident in two of Waheed’s ongoing projects: Sea Change (2011–present) and Drone Studies (2011–present).1 Sea Change is an installation series that continues to be realized in stages, where archives that present the personal histories of nine missing migrants emerge in fragments over time to unveil their ties to home before their displacement.2 In the series Drone Studies, Waheed grapples with themes of surveillance and its ubiquity within the state apparatus. Each iteration within the series represents an archive of objects and records that are meant to reflect the artist’s own experience of growing up in a gated oil community in Saudi Arabia, where strict surveillance conditions resulted in the prohibition of record-keeping.3 Jacques Derrida’s text Archive Fever:  A Freudian Impression and Ariella Azoulay’s work ‘Archive’ offer theoretical frameworks for understanding why

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and how Waheed’s work resists completion and what is at stake when state narratives that speak to home and homeland are read as absolute. As a result, the potential of archival material in relation to Waheed’s practice can be read as a subversive tool through its fragmented, fluid and possibly fictional nature. The postmodern approach to the archive, rooted in the foundation of Derrida and Azoulay’s texts, emerges as a departure from what scholar Terry Cook terms the pre-modern positivist movement in archive theory. Pioneered by mid-twentieth-century archive theorist Sir Hilary Jenkinson’s A Manual of Archive Administration, this text characterizes archives by their static nature.4 Jenkinson writes, ‘Archives state no opinion, voice no conjecture:  they are simply written memorials authenticated by the fact of their official preservation, of events which actually occurred and of which they themselves are formed a part.’5 This approach that Jenkinson outlines in his manual renders the archive, in the sense of a physical structure and body of material, as an official holding that is both inaccessible and unchangeable. Feminist scholar and art historian Griselda Pollock cites this pre-modern positivist approach as problematic because in fact, the archive is selected, not comprehensive. It is pre-selected in ways that reflect what each culture considered worth storing and remembering, skewing the historical record and indeed historical writing towards the privileged, the powerful, the political, military and religious … The archive is overdetermined by facts of class, race, gender, sexuality and above all power.6

In other words, if an archive is read as absolute, much of the society that it is meant to represent would not exist. The creation of alternative, vernacular archives against the state-sanctioned model, such as the projects that Waheed works through in her artistic practice, arguably stem from this absence. In Pollock’s text Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive, she cites Derrida as a central figure of the postmodernist approach, where the archive is no longer regarded as ‘a kind of inert depository in which by means of documents the past is stored’.7 Additionally, postmodern archive theory is described by Tate Archive archivist Sue Breakell as an archive continuum, a term that speaks to the fluid quality of archives; in other words, no fixed meaning can be attributed to a single document.8



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Breakell’s work, similar to other postmodern archive scholars, is an expansion on theory put forth by Derrida in his influential work, Archive Fever. While using Freudian literature as an example, Derrida stresses how Western societies are constantly trapped in the search for beginnings and completeness within archives. Allan Sekula echoes Derrida in his work on the photographic archive, stating that ‘archival projects manifest in a compulsive desire for completeness’.9 However, if we disregard the archive as authoritative and consider the ambiguous nature of the archive continuum, this is not possible and this is the so-called archive fever:  a desire for completeness. Orienting Waheed’s artistic practice within these structures, initially through an application of Derrida’s writing, invites further speculation of archive fever as a phenomenon in contemporary artistic practice, bringing to light more recent scholarship by Azoulay. Waheed seeks to examine the implications of national identity, political power and colonialism within a global context on narratives that pertain to individual bodies and how those bodies are tied to notions of home and homeland. Her archival and media-based practice realizes, reveals and documents the lives of individual subjects that have the potential to become lost as a result of displacement and migration. Through the manipulation of archival images and state records, Waheed constructs her own vernacular archives in which she privileges individuality as a means of subverting the authority of the state and the discourse that governs the existence of her subjects. As a result, an alternative archive is created. In Waheed’s 2010 work, the Anouchian Passport Portrait Series (2008– 10), she mined a set of 198 photographs from the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, Lebanon.10 The images were taken by Armenian photographer Antranik Anouchian (1908–1991) between the years 1935 and 1970.11 Rather than re-presenting the sourced photographs as a quasi-archival exhibition, Waheed manipulates the images by recreating them in a series of meticulously crafted pencil-drawn portraits. Her use of archival material acts as not only a personal process of record-keeping and preservation of the individual but also a means of questioning the power structures that inform the dominant narratives produced by paternal, state-sanctioned archives and records that often remain unquestioned.

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The photos in Anouchian’s series were initially taken as identification photographs for governmental use and the sitters are shown as individuals by the nature of the passport being an identification document.12 Though the images in Waheed’s series retain this label, the artist employs a textual-based intervention in order to reference the contradictory notion of the passport as something that continues to dictate and regulate the freedom and movement of the individual. In the process of revealing her hand in the manipulation of archival material, which functions to offer an alternative archive, Waheed reveals the importance of authorship and the complexities of how knowledge is made and presented. Within the framework of cultural race politics as theorized by Canadian scholar Monika Kin Gagnon, Waheed’s construction of a vernacular archive does not seek to dismantle state-sanctioned narratives and the authority of governing entities, but rather the artist uses her practice as a way to call into question how authorship figures in the erasure of these narratives of exile and exclusion.13 It is not necessarily an intervention but rather an assertion of the marginalized individual at the hands of the state, achieved and visually articulated through the artist’s practice, which implicates the viewer in the creation of the narrative itself. Waheed’s work raises important questions that Gagnon’s scholarship similarly calls into question – who is constructing narratives that become discursive and what does that mean in terms of the representation of marginalized voices?14 Who has the right to access archival holdings? Who decides who is included and who is erased; who is remembered and who lost? Rather than operating solely as a conceptual tool to address this, Waheed’s archival manipulation and attentiveness to the mining, re-presentation and creation of archival material extends to a larger discussion of authorship, the creation of cultural value and the role of the individual within these frameworks. In the installations Sea Change and Drone Studies, the artist’s hand is present in the formal and aesthetic manipulation of found objects and archival material. Both works seek to tell stories that pertain to individuals and their ties to home as it is influenced by diaspora and surveillance. However, the narratives that are presented are left intentionally incomplete. Taking cues from Gagnon’s writing and drawing from Derrida’s postmodern understanding of the structure of the archive and the concept of archive fever, the incomplete



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nature of the narratives Waheed’s work presents act as forms of resistance to their otherwise erasure. In Derrida’s 1995 lecture Archive Fever, he introduces the concept of mal d’archive, or archive fever. Archive fever is characterized by our compulsion to search for beginnings and completeness within the structure of the archive in order to learn more about ourselves. In this text, Derrida recalls what the term ‘archive’ connotes. Its etymology refers both to ‘commencement’ and ‘commandment’; it represents origins in the course of history and, at the same time, the ability to govern social order according to law based on this history.15 Archives were traditionally housed in a structure called the arkheion and were in the possession of and only accessible to those who dictated the law, the archon.16 From Derrida’s initial deconstruction of the origins of an archive, we are able to understand the multiple meanings the word connotes: it can constitute a physical structure or building in which to house records and documents or refer to a collection of records that constitute a history themselves. An understanding of how law and governance pertain to the structure in which records are historically kept establishes that there is an existent power dynamic between those who preserve archives and carry out law based on their content and those who are governed by this law and thus in a subordinate position. This is applicable to Waheed’s works Sea Change and Drone Studies, specifically in how the relationship between the state and individual in the specific contexts of these two works are challenged as a result of the artist herself building a vernacular archive. Central to Waheed’s artistic practice is Derrida’s concept of en mal d’archive  – which roughly translates to:  ‘to be in need of archives’. Derrida argues that to be en mal d’archive can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness, from a trouble … It is to never rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away … It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed to repetition compulsion, no ‘mal de’ can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archive.17

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Derrida stresses the compulsive desire that we in Western society have in search of commencement and completeness within the structure of the archive. However, an archive itself is regarded as a fluid structure rather than a repository of knowledge; it remains inevitably incomplete. Derrida suggests that despite our knowledge of this, we continue to be drawn to its ambiguous nature in a perpetual search for totality, and this is the phenomenon of archive fever. He further cautions of the interpretation of an archive as a sole locus of authority, stressing that we should consider its fragmented nature.18 In Martin L. Davies’s text, Imprisoned by History, Aspects of Historicized Life, he echoes this sentiment with the notion that ‘history is also illusory, therefore, because this discrepancy between potential and performance makes it deceptive’.19 It is through this idea of the fragment that aligns Derrida’s concept of en mal d’archive to Azoulay’s text, ‘Archive’, in order to untangle how the activation of the archive manifests in contemporary artistic practice as a means of critiquing structures of governance. Azoulay elaborates on Derrida’s Archive Fever as a basis for the central argument of her essay where she states, ‘Archive fever challenges the norm that stands at the basis of how sovereign power defines archival documents.’20 She specifically recalls Derrida’s historical discussion of the sentries of the archive who prevent access to the archive both in the sense of the physical space and its contents. Despite being a repository of a state as a whole, access is restricted to few, ‘[preventing] an outbreak of archive fever’.21 The inaccessibility of these spaces, Azoulay notes, creates distance between archivable material and those who wish to enter, but also historical distance, as the longer these items are kept away the more historical value they accrue. Azoulay poses the question, ‘What do we look for in an archive?’, only to answer, That which we have deposited there. Not necessarily you or I personally, but you or I as those sharing a world with others … ‘we’ who ought to have been regarded as the reason and sense of the archive, but were instead replaced by ‘history’.22

Returning to archive fever, Azoulay picks up where Derrida has left off in discussing this phenomenon, where she explores ‘individual initiatives of creating new archives and depositories, and of claiming the right to re-arrange and use existing ones’, that even exceeds the realm of contemporary artistic



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practices, such as Waheed’s.23 Archive fever not only implores the individual to search for totality within the structure of the archive that Derrida poses but also ‘enables one to retroactively reconstruct the right as one that is inscribed of the logic of the archive’.24 Asserting that the archive should be seen as ‘a shared place, a place that enables one to maintain the past incomplete’, a shift in authorship in the creation of the archive has moved from the sovereign state to the individual or collective.25 This phenomenon that Azoulay discusses extends to artistic practice, whereby, intervention, imagination and transmission are the main practices through which researchers and artists today exercise their right to the archive … the right to make use of the archive in ways that do not take it (merely) as a depository of the past, storing materials that document what is over and done with.26

Both Waheed’s works Sea Change and Drone Studies align with this notion, where archival holdings of the state and the subsequent narratives produced are mined, manipulated and presented in a new light, returning authorship to the artist and those implicated in the viewing process, by revisiting narratives that were deemed stagnant by the way in which they were housed. Waheed works to expose stories pertaining to individual identities that have been erased or have gone missing as a result of state-propagated discourses through the manipulation and re-presentation of archival material. The artist asserts the narrative of the individual by tracing the narratives of nine missing and possibly fictional individuals in Sea Change and recalling her own experience living under strict conditions of surveillance in Drone Studies. Borrowing from Azoulay and Gagnon, the vernacular archive that is presented in the ongoing creation of these two series makes narratives that have been silenced at the hand of state authority physically present – not as a substitution for dominant narratives but as a means of creating dialogue and raising questions pertaining to authorship. By physically altering and fabricating new archival material in a reassessment of individual ties to home and nationhood, Waheed challenges the archive as a structure from which power originates, how law is governed and at the same time utilizes the fluid structure of the archive to write a vernacular history. In a return to Azoulay,

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the way in which the archive is structured and subsequently manipulated by Waheed is a representation of the artist exercising the right to the archive and its contents while implicating the viewer in the process. An archive is a set of relations. When the contemporary artist repurposes and recontextualizes archival material through the act of juxtaposition, a new set of relations between these archival fragments emerge. Recalling both Azoulay and Derrida, the power of the archive in this fragmented nature renders it inherently incomplete as the search for totality prevails. Despite the archival impulse that drives investigation into a search for origins, Waheed’s installations demonstrate an active resistance against the completion of a narrative or at least a prolonged search for conclusiveness. The artist’s installation Sea Change, which began in 2011, is ongoing to this day as a project to piece together what remains of the lives of nine migrants who disappeared on their individual journeys in search of a new home. Similarly, the installation series Drone Studies began the same year, addressing larger themes of surveillance through a collection of found and manufactured objects and records and has yet to reach a conclusion. For example, Waheed’s work in the Drone Studies series titled The Cyphers 1–18 (2016) attempts to recount the artist’s experience of living under strict surveillance conditions, where record-keeping was prohibited and installations such as KH-21 (2014) and Signed R.E. Moon (2015), other aspects of the series Drone Studies, address surveillance and occupation through found archives, sculpture and sound. Through the incomplete nature of Sea Change and Drone Studies, the archival impulse compels us to search through these fragments and make meaning from the unfinished narratives presented. Waheed’s apparent manipulation of archival materials seeks to uncover and rewrite the stories of the individual as a means of challenging the power structures that have governed their lives by questioning how memories of home held by the individual have been lost or erased and how these narratives can be recounted through an ongoing and dedicated artistic practice. In Waheed’s words, Sea Change resembles the unfolding of a visual novel that ‘is about the missing and the missed’.27 Over the course of a series of installations and projects, the artist chronicles the narratives of nine migrants, who in the course of their journeys to a better life have gone missing. In particular, the artist is ‘deeply influenced by [her] many lived experiences



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traversing borders, or rather, living among them. So many of us who live along these lines (either by choice or force) do go missing or disappear at times, just to re-emerge later.’28 The project itself was conceived of after Waheed heard that 166 pilgrims had gone missing on a journey from Kolkata to Saudi Arabia in order to travel to the Hajj, but what struck her the most was how this disappearance was soon overlooked by the media.29 Sea Change seeks to slowly unveil the fragments of what these nine migrants have left behind. The installation series is formatted like a book, revealing the life of one new individual with each chapter. Waheed’s work pays particular attention to the way in which the individual was situated in relation to their homeland, focusing on the life they lived before their departure in each installment. The visual novel thus far consists of the first iteration, titled An Introduction, where the missing characters and the journeys they embarked on are revealed, while details of the life of the first individual in this narrative are presented in the second installment, Chapter 1. Beginning with An Introduction, the Sea Change begins with the nine individuals who are unveiled to the viewer in an installation piece titled The Missed 1–9 (2012). The Missed 1–9 is a series of portraits of nine individuals, presumably the protagonists in Waheed’s chronicle. Each individual photograph is taken from the chest up, resembling that of an identification card, and is taped in a collage-like manner to the back of a brown piece of notebook paper. Devoid of many identification factors, the portraits do not immediately reveal anything other than the face of the sitter. Through the manipulation of the photographed works by Waheed, the identities of the sitters are refused to us in several ways. A second portrait series in Waheed’s An Introduction is titled The Missing 1–20 (2012). Consisting of twenty portraits, the facial features of those portrayed have been obfuscated. Unlike The Missed, only fragments of individual body parts remain. These segments predominantly focus on the individual’s midsection, which might reveal something to us about their profession based on their attire or the objects they are interacting with. However, these portraits do not necessarily coincide with the nine sitters featured in The Missed as some are of multiple bodies. Presenting these obscure portraits in dialogue with one another in a gallery space and under the guise of the series, Waheed employs the tool of juxtaposition, raising the question of how these individuals are

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related and how they figure in the larger narrative. By bringing these fragments of individual lives together, we are compelled to assess their relation. Five additional series of archival records are included in Waheed’s installation of the introduction to Sea Change alongside The Missed and The Missing. Using similar display techniques, the work titled Witness 1–17 (2013) is arranged to resemble journalistic field notes and archaeological evidence. The images are stylistically manipulated onto a series of glass slides and displayed in a linear manner. These photographs that are predominantly images of land and seascapes perhaps bear witness to the journey of Waheed’s missing individuals. Alongside The Missed and The Missing, these photographs presented in Witness can perhaps divulge information about who has been lost, suggesting a journey; but similar to the portraits of The Missed and The Missing, the views are disrupted and cut off as a result of the artist’s manipulation. Prevented from following the landscape into the distance or understanding where the boat sitting atop the sea will embark, the archival material Waheed reveals in Witness becomes a fragment in a larger narrative. She has also manipulated the works in such a way to purposefully deny the gaze of the viewer. From the hand of the artist, the witness is literally and figuratively being cut off from the landscape. The works that comprise the introduction to Sea Change all place emphasis on absence. With each component intentionally and carefully rendered to draw attention to a lack of totality, Waheed’s artwork mimics the incomplete structure of the archive. By focusing on the construction of the lives of these missing individuals through these gaps, the viewer becomes subsumed in the creation of Waheed’s archive, writing a collective narrative which seeks to preserve those who may otherwise be completely lost. The archive emerging from Waheed’s series becomes vernacular in its structure, as the understanding of the narratives presented is informed by a collective reading of the total work of art, rather than a singular, authoritative voice. This transfer of authorship to the citizen, to which Azoulay posits has the right to reconstruct and intervene in the archive, results in the creation of an alternative archive, achieved through the intentionally fragmented nature of the works.30 The second part of the visual novel, titled Chapter 1: Character 1: In the Rough, is the first glimpse into the life of one of the nine missing individuals



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from the introduction. Based on the archival material that comprises the second installment of the project such as Gem Studies 1–25 (2014) and Rock Densities 1–6 (2013), the first migrant is read as a geologist. Described by Waheed, this chapter solely comprises ‘a series of manic field notes and pseudo-scientific drawings, geological maps and survey guides, returned love letters, dragged and left objects, spliced and reconstructed photographs and film’.31 This is particularly evident in a series of archival documents titled Returned 1–24 (2014), which consists of collage work on paper that contain faint scribbles of communication, likely between our first protagonist and a lover. Some inscriptions on the notepaper merely indicate sample numbers that pertain to each photograph of sediment; however, some read as personal exchanges such as ‘forgive me Jaan, please’.32 These records are an attempt to accumulate and preserve what remains of this individual’s life, and many of the records, such as these brief written exchanges, are deeply personal and revealing. In a telling manner, one note in Returned reads, I tried to think of you as a summer lake I could plunge into, sink into … But I would die there; I would stay under – like your bed, like your balcony and kitchen all these parts of you/me, a giant naufrage.33

There is a reference to the word naufrage, which translates to wreck in English. Though the text might allude to a tumultuous relationship between two individuals as a wreck, the additional records Waheed presents in Chapter 1 are dominated by imagery of the sea. Alongside the work Witness, which was revealed in the introduction of Sea Change, works such as Our Naufrage 1–10 (2014), which consists of ten images of the sea mounted on brass and wooden frames at varying heights on a wall, and Quell This, Swallow Me 1–5 (2014), a series of five gouache on masonite panels mounted on wood, demonstrate Waheed’s manipulation of imagery documenting vast and varying seascapes that lead nowhere. The way in which the images that comprise Our Naufrage and Quell This, Swallow Me give the viewer no sense of orientation or attachment to place reinforces their ubiquitous quality, while at the same time offering an ambiguous sensation of calm and foreboding.

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The installation A Short Film 1–321 (2014), which also appears within Chapter 1 of the visual novel, utilizes film as a means of continuing the narrative of Waheed’s protagonist through the act of looking at collaged archival film stills. Arranged horizontally on a wall, these stills can also be viewed through a handcrafted slide viewer. Picking up similar visual cues to works that have been presented throughout Waheed’s An Introduction, particularly reminiscent of the work Witness, The Missing and The Missed, A Short Film plays with the idea of fragmentation. The slides that Waheed uses in this particular installation are handcrafted, displayed before the viewer as a type of collaged field note from a journey, standing as evidence of the life of her first protagonist. Rendered in small scale, all 321works that comprise A Short Film suggest participation in a grand narrative as a result of their title, but all are rendered before the viewer as incomplete. Each slide reveals only a fragment of a landscape attached to this narrative, where intentional, transparent gaps are left on the surface of each slide. The artist’s careful construction of each individual fragment functions to reveal the course of a narrative, utilizing a lack of totality to drive an archive impulse within the viewer to contemplate and determine the narrative’s direction. Art critic Gabrielle Moser writes that Waheed’s hand in manipulating each archival photograph is ‘the function of displacement and transference, both as an artistic practice and as a metaphor for the imprints colonialism leaves on its subject’.34 These imprinted histories of migration and colonialism are inescapable, yet they are often lost or erased. Read in today’s context, Waheed’s seascapes and references to incomplete journeys through the employment of the word naufrage evoke symbols of migration that over time have become ubiquitous. Not only do the incomplete nature of Waheed’s works allow viewers to contemplate the journeys of these missing individuals, but the fact that the incomplete nature of the series is reflected by the structure of the archive itself perhaps inevitably mirrors the structure of lives that are dictated by conditions of surveillance and state-sanctioned narratives. Borrowing from photo scholar Elizabeth Edwards, ‘even images emerging out of the profoundly asymmetrical power relations of the colonial period might be understood in this way that, through tracing social being, such photographs carry a humanizing potential that allows the possibility of subjective experience’.35 Waheed’s creation of a vernacular archive as a means



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of tracing the stories of these missing individuals is therefore a mechanism to push back against erasure of narratives driven by colonial force while, at the same time, compelling the witnesses of her unfolding narrative to search for meaning. This implication of the onlooker in the construction of Waheed’s archive is the right to the archive as a shared space, as Azoulay would argue. Through this approach, the archives that Waheed constructs ‘are not items of a completed past, but rather active elements of a present … they might enable some restitution of that which continues to exist as present, in the present’.36 The latest iteration of Chapter 1 was presented in the Canadian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Bienniale in 2017. The series Avow 1–38 (2017) consists of a series of thirty-eight paintings on tin completed by the artist and mounted in a row on a wooden shelf, reminiscent of previous works in the series. Moving away from the motif of the sea, the artist’s latest addition to her protagonists’ narrative alternates between figurative and abstract imagery. She ‘[uses] the cosmos as a marker of time, [hinting] at love, longing, loss and displacement through the eyes of Character 1’.37 Alternating between landscape in distress, scenes of the night sky and an individual’s hands grasping at small mementos such as flowers and locks of hair, Waheed reveals a personal act of reverence in the form of a votive offering.38 Highlighting the deeply personal, the slow unveiling of the life of this individual prior to their disappearance is carefully traced in Waheed’s installation, in light of state-sanctioned narratives that created such erasure. The individual whose life is documented in Chapter  1 operates as synecdoche, speaking to the lives of many others making journeys as a result of displacement and colonialism, some of which are marked and often kept by the sea. Through her archival investigations that manifest in a lifelong project, Waheed attempts to piece together these traces, a testament to the laborious undertaking of documenting the life of an individual where they may have otherwise been erased. Through the accumulation and presentation of manipulated archival material over time, Waheed continues to reveal the narratives of the nine individuals in a fragmented, ambiguous timeline that reflects the fluid and incomplete structure of an archive itself. Subsumed in the artwork’s ongoing creation, the material continues to refuse us while we are plagued with the archive fever that drives investment in the unfolding narrative. Waheed makes

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space to contemplate fragments and gaps, returning access and interpretation of these archives to those whom they were meant for. These displaced individuals, despite being relegated to the peripheries of history by statesanctioned narratives, will continue to exist in collective memory, driven by the ongoing creation of a vernacular archive. Sea Change presents a compelling narrative of Waheed’s characters, but is it true? Driven by the focus on an individual, Waheed’s work allows for space to question the validity of state-propagated archives dictated and held by governing bodies, borrowing from Derrida’s discussion of the arkheion, often which displace the narrative of the marginalized individual entirely. Based on the fluid and fragmented structure of the archive that Waheed’s works give way to, we question whether seeking fact within this framework is possible or even necessary. For example, several of the portraits and photographs that Waheed uses in Sea Change are sourced from postcards and other travel documents that she has acquired over time. These images were taken between 1930 and 1940, commissioned by British imperial authorities, and their aesthetic remind us of the sitters in the Anouchian Passport Portrait Series. By integrating these found images in her vernacular archive, they are imbued with new meaning. While the narrative that Waheed recounts through her visual novel precariously fluctuates between fact and fiction, it acts as a testament to the power of the archive for whomever claims ownership over it. In an act of physically manipulating the work the artist presents in order for the narratives of these nine migrants to refuse the viewer, they are given agency as the authors of this tale, the creators of the archive. Similarly, these identification documents that have once propagated a colonial gaze in their original function are actively resisted and subverted through their aesthetic manipulation, whether they are meticulously traced over in pencil or intentionally cropped and obfuscated. Waheed’s archival intervention problematizes the relationship of these individuals who lived under conditions that led to their displacement and exile from their homes, to their governing bodies. Sea Change reflects the fluid structure of the archive and is riddled with incompleteness. The intentional fragmented quality of Waheed’s works, which take on an almost scrapbook-like aesthetic, further counter the calculated and systematic ordering that classifies official archival holdings of the state,



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as exemplified by a pre-modern positivist understanding of the archive.39 In addition to the ongoing visual novel Sea Change, Waheed’s series Drone Studies similarly addresses the implications of state surveillance over the life of an individual. Completed in 2016, The Cyphers, which is the most recent addition to Drone Studies, consists of a series of objects and records neatly arranged atop a white sculptural plinth that stands barely a couple of feet off the ground. The documents depict drawings and coordinates of satellites and photographs of the sky and are arranged around the perimeter of the plinth. A  group of found objects such as scrap metal pieces fill the centre. Though there appears to be order to the arrangement of this makeshift archive, The Cyphers is meant to resemble objects and ephemera gathered from a wreck, perhaps from a satellite or another tool of surveillance that has fallen from the sky.40 The production of Waheed’s body of work is closely tied to her own experience of living under conditions of surveillance. Though she was born in Calgary, Alberta, at a young age the artist moved with her family to Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, where she lived for twenty-two years. Her family moved to Dhahran because her father worked for Saudi ARAMCO, an oil company that distributes product to approximately a third of the world.41 Waheed was raised in a gated community for all of ARAMCO’s employees during the end of the Cold War and monitored by the United States government. Strict conditions of surveillance were imposed on her family and others in the community, which could only be accessed through the presentation of identification cards examined at multiple checkpoints. The keeping of any personal records or documents, with the exception of a passport, were prohibited. Waheed has often attributed her compulsion to document personal histories to the isolation she felt at home during her childhood. Unable to film, photograph or make records of daily occurrences, she reflects upon developing a personal visual language for identifying aircrafts and flight routes above her community.42 The Cyphers is one of Waheed’s works that is imbued with symbols of power and sky surveillance. While the objects that constitute the installation are meant to resemble a wreck, they are meticulously placed across the plinth. The paper documents reveal images of satellites, travel coordinates that appear to be taken from a flight manual, aerial landscape photographs and fragmented

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images of the sky. Some of the found and fabricated objects include what look to be parts of metal resembling wires, engines and other mechanical components that have possibly fallen from satellites or planes. These fragments are displayed across the plinth in an archival manner, but the narrative they illustrate is not immediately clear. According to Waheed, the work consists of ‘unrecognizable fragments accompanied by drawings and collages, [imbued] with violence, calling viewers to decipher and validate their presence’.43 Unlike the nine individuals who comprised The Missed in Sea Change, there is no developing narrative to guide us. Instead, we solely rely on the objects presented before us. Despite what can be inferred, the relation presented between these objects resist total interpretation, and this strategically calls attention to Waheed’s process of preserving personal histories that were purposefully left undocumented. By bringing forth and re-presenting objects and records that stand as evidence to these actions of erasure and surveillance, Waheed recounts and archives her experiences and memories of home that were not possible before. Through a reflection on her own experiences, the artist’s creation of a personal archive presents an alternative to the official, state-sanctioned policy which sought to erase individual documentation. The Cyphers brings into question the making of knowledge, particularly the power the archive holds in writing histories and governing bodies. The objects that are central to the installation are all fabricated, rather than found, by Waheed. Similarly, the paper documents demonstrate manipulation by the artist, who presents them in a collage-like manner. Rather than solely recontextualizing archival fragments, Waheed also creates her own. Her steps in creating this archive of evidence actively work to challenge state-sanctioned agendas of surveillance that she has personally experienced, through a vernacular rendering. The physical act of record-keeping reasserts the power of the individual to form their own narratives in the wake of personal archives being erased at the hand of the state. Waheed explains that ‘the display of these items [conjure] the notion that stories and events exist only if they are registered, recorded and recounted’.44 In this sense, she is ‘striving to actualize [the right]’ of sharing the archive, which Azoulay believes ‘is embodied in the archive as such’.45 Informed by the artist’s biography, other installations in this series that foreground The Cyphers, such as KH-21 (2014) and Signed R.E. Moon 1–24



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(2015), are coded in a language of surveillance and air militarism. In a juxtaposition of works on paper, audio and sculptural elements, KH-21 alludes ‘to the recently declassified HEXAGON Program whereby 20 photographic reconnaissance satellites were launched between 1971–1986’.46 The sculptural work transmits an audio track of the reverberation of a flight path, while accompanied by works on paper that contain floorplans of mosques, pieced together with outlines of spy planes. In an act of collecting and manipulating pre-existing documents and data into fragments of a total narrative, Waheed renders her work in such a way so the viewer is left ‘unable to decipher fact and fiction, [finding] themselves in a space where the real merges with the imagined’.47 In addition to this multisensory archive of materials and objects, Waheed produced the work Signed R.E. Moon using found Douglas Aircraft Company letterhead.48 As a company that was responsible for manufacturing missiles and aircrafts during the Cold War, Waheed’s series of drawings that are produced on top of the company’s paper of her own imagined apparatuses works to disrupt intent and bring the possibility of new narratives to light. As a series, Drone Studies destabilizes top-down structures of surveillance through the intent of the artist repurposing and fabricating objects and documents that are informed by her personal experience. Archive fever crosses borders. It is manifest in the demand for gaining the founding of new sorts of archives – archives that would no longer allow the dominant type of archive, the one founded by the sovereign state to go on determining what an archive is … Archive fever challenges the traditional protocols by which official archives have functioned and continued to do so.49

Though Waheed’s archives reveal only fragmented narratives of home and homeland as evident in the series Sea Change and Drone Studies, it is through an inevitable lack of completion resulting from conditions of diaspora and surveillance that resistance to the erasure of personal narratives is found. Her archival investigations are a means of exploring the notion of home as it is tied to the marginalized narratives of the individual, rather than state definitions of home, homeland and what it means to belong. In the artist’s words, ‘the displaced body is a mind and heart at exile from one another. It’s the fluctuating state of being – involuntarily shattered in two or three or four parts or more

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just to be temporarily relocated, only to later be entirely uprooted. We are only ever parts of ourselves, fragments of a whole.’50 The lives of the individuals that Waheed recounts, including her own, are reflected by her artistic practice and the methodologies she employs, both porous and borderless.51

Notes 1 We are following the artist’s preference by referring readers to images of her works online:  http://hajrawaheed.com/. 2 Hajra Waheed, Sea Change, Hajra Waheed [artist website]. Available online: http://hajrawaheed.com/works/sea-change/ (accessed 15 March 2017). 3 Hajra Waheed, Drone Studies: The Cyphers, Hajra Waheed [artist website]. Available online: http://hajrawaheed.com/works/drone-studies/cyphers-1-18/ (accessed 15 March 2017). 4 Terry Cook, ‘Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations of Old Concepts’, Archival Science 1 (2000): 14. 5 Ibid., p. 4. 6 Griselda Pollock, Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 12. 7 Ibid. 8 Sue Breakell, ‘Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive’, Tate Papers (Spring 2008): 3. 9 Allan Sekula, ‘Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labour and Capital’, in The Photography Reader, ed. L. Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 446. 10 Kristine Khouri, ‘Cut and Paste – Paper, Faces and Memories’, Hajra Waheed:  Field Notes and Other Backstories (Windsor: Art Gallery of Windsor, 2013), p. 14. 11 Anouchian’s photographs that were primarily used as pieces of government identification have been used by other contemporary archival-based artists such as Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad. This chapter will allow for Waheed’s work to be brought into dialogue with the established practices of these artists, while also introducing scholarship of Waheed’s body of work and its importance to postmodern archive theory and cultural race theory. 12 Khouri, ‘Cut and Paste – Paper, Faces and Memories’, p. 19. 13 Monika Kin Gagnon, Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000), p. 23. 14 Ibid., p. 21. 15 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 1.

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Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 90. Martin L. Davies, Imprisoned by History (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 11. Ariella Azoulay, ‘Archive’, Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, no. 1 (2012): 7. Available online: http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/archive/ (accessed 16 March 2018). 21 Ibid., p. 2. 22 Ibid., p. 3. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 4. 25 Ibid., p. 7. 26 Ibid., p. 4. 27 Waheed, Sea Change. 28 Exhibition text: Watermarks: Hajra Waheed’s ‘Asylum in the Sea’, Darling Foundry, 2015, Gabrielle Moser references: Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 8. 29 Rebecca Anne Proctor, ‘Finding Fragments’, Harper’s Bazaar Art (September/ October 2014): 69. 30 Azoulay, ‘Archive’, p. 4. 31 Hajra Waheed, Sea Change; Chapter 1: Character 1: In the Rough, Hajra Waheed [artist website]. Available online: http://hajrawaheed.com/works/sea-change/ character-1-in-the-rough/ (accessed 15 March 2017). 32 The work referred to here is Returned 11/24, 2014. 33 The work referred to here is Returned 23/24, 2014. 34 Exhibition text for Watermarks: Hajra Waheed’s ‘Asylum in the Sea’ by Gabrielle Moser, Darling Foundry, Montreal, 2015. 35 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographs and the Sound of History’, Visual Anthropology Review 21, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring and Summer 2005): 31. 36 Azoulay, ‘Archive’, p. 4. 37 Waheed, Sea Change; Chapter 1: Character 1: In the Rough. 38 Ibid. 39 This is in reference to the ways in which Derrida speaks about the classical storage mechanisms and functions of state archives within the arkheion. 40 Waheed, Drone Studies: The Cyphers. 41 Rebecca Travis, ‘Interview with Hajra Waheed’, The White Review, February 2017. Available online: http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interviewhajra-waheed/ (accessed 25 April 2017).

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42 Stephanie Bailey, ‘Systems of Fragments: Hajra Waheed in Conversation with Stephanie Bailey’, Ibrazz: Contemporary Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East, 31 March 2017. Available online: https://www.ibraaz.org/ interviews/217 (accessed 30 April 2017). 43 Waheed, Drone Studies: The Cyphers. 44 Ibid. 45 Azoulay, ‘Archive’, p. 7. 46 Hajra Waheed, Drone Studies: KH-21, Hajra Waheed [artist website]. Available online: http://hajrawaheed.com/works/drone-studies/kh-21/kh-21-notes-1-32/ (accessed 17 March 2017). 47 Ibid. 48 Hajra Waheed, Drone Studies: Signed R.E. Moon, Hajra Waheed [artist website]. Available online: http://hajrawaheed.com/works/drone-studies/signed-remoon-1-24/ (accessed 17 March 2017). 49 Azoulay, ‘Archive’, p. 3. 50 Bailey, ‘Systems of Fragments’. 51 Travis, ‘Interview with Hajra Waheed’.

 

4

Recreating the place of home in Remedios Varo’s La creación de las aves Nadia Garcia

La creación de las aves (1957) cannot help but remind the viewer of this ‘sitting at a table’ and of this ‘doing’ that Sara Ahmed refers to when she talks about transforming places into homes: ‘Making a place feel like home, or becoming at home in a space, is for me about being at my table.’1 The majority of studies on Remedios Varo (1908–1963) have given some consideration to the importance that space and architecture play in her paintings, as well as in her writings.2 The ways in which space is represented in Varo’s works, as agreed by many scholars, have to do with Varo’s exiled condition, both geographically and from a gender-inflected perspective.3 My investigations into her work do not refute these findings; nevertheless, my approach demands a greater focus on the processes by which that space is being constructed and the consequences that it has on its viewers. Varo had a particular agenda in mind when creating, either paintings, masks, furniture design or writing. In an interview, when prompted if she plans her painting before starting or if it is a spontaneous process, Varo responds, ‘Yes, I visualize it before I begin, and I try to adapt it to the image I have formed in my mind.’4 In this, Varo breaks with the surrealist process of art-making, in which exercises such as automatic writing tries to avoid the influence of the conscious mind to bring about the desires of the subconscious. To study a carefully and planned represented space can be utterly revealing for an artist like Varo, who deviated from her surrealist contemporaries. What is more, the places we inhabit – be that a house, apartment, office or the inside of our car – or that we construct – either fully or partially – are more than mere or casual reflection of who we are. In fact,

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architecture is our primary instrument of orientation in the world; our home determines the ultimate meaning of interiority and exteriority, familiarity and unfamiliarity, homeness and being away.5

Thus, the ‘house’ or the space we live in determines strikingly our place in the world and allows for us to feel either inside or outside. Studying the ways in which an artist consciously and repeatedly depicts his/her space  – that house – will hopefully open our eyes to the artist’s psyche together with his/ her cultural, social and ideological beliefs.6 In dialogue with existing scholarly work, this chapter sets out to perform an analysis of space and place in Varo’s La creación de las aves by taking a humanist and phenomenological approach to geography in order to show how Varo’s representation of the creative process is one that is simultaneously embodied and rooted in space and that at the same time contributes to modify/construct space as the place of home.7

Remedios Varo i Uranga (1908–1963) Born in the Catalan town of Anglès (Girona) to a middle-class family, Varo’s upbringing was within a household of contradictions: from a very early age she was involved with her father’s inventions and constructions of water devices and canals, and on the other side of the family, her mother and grandmother were to impose on her the typical household duties of women of early 1900s Spain as well as instill her with a dogmatic religious education. At the early age of 5, while travelling to Algeciras and North Africa with her family for work, Varo started expressing herself through drawing and usually came up with her own games and invented toys. Her life would be continuously marked by the act of travelling, moving several times as a child given her father’s job, and then later on, upon finishing her training at the prestigious Academia de San Fernando (1924–1929), she moved to France in 1929 and married artist Gerardo Lizarraga (1932). She lived in France for a short number of years and, while there, enrolled in the French art academy La Grande Chaumière.8 After this, she moved to Barcelona and took part in the first ‘exhibición logicofobista’ (exhibition for people with phobias about logic)9 (1936) organized by the Catalan organization known as ADLAN (Amics de l’Art Nou) with which Varo



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was actively involved.10 In 1937 Varo was to leave her native land for good and moved first to France, as a consequence of both the political unrest at the time with the onset of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), and her involvement with artist Benjamin Péret, who had Republican ties. In 1941, escaping from the Nazi occupation in France and thanks to the political agenda of Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas, she travelled to Mexico City where she was to remain for the rest of her life, only visiting Venezuela for a year at the end of 1947 and Paris on one occasion for work and to visit relatives and friends (1957).

La creación de las aves Varo’s cats and birds are important ‘actors in her narratives, and because of their roles, her paintings question what most people see as dualistic and impermeable boundaries between humans and animals.11 La creación de las aves belongs to the most prolific years of Varo’s life when she returned from Venezuela to settle in Mexico in the early 1950s in the house of Walter Gruen. This seems to have been of support to her productive artistic development as she finally concentrated on her work without further financial duress.12 As Luís-Martín Lozano explains, Together with Walter Gruen, Remedios built her own kingdom, where she was princess, witch, minstrel and juggler, or merely spectre as a presence. In Mexico she could be a painter, an almost scientist, giving free rein to all of her interests, dreams and fears; she could invent universes, imagine cosmos and discover new dimensions.13

It is for this particular reason that it is key to study space and her construction of place as home at this stage of her career by analysing a painting that can be considered to be a more stable reflection of her identity as an artist if we compare it to the previous years of her life.14 The focal point of La creación de las aves is a figure that has feminine features but also owl-like characteristics (Figure  4.1). It is situated at the centre of the composition. The creature’s qualities are challenging to read: the feathers seem to be part of her skin but around the arms, under the feathers,

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Figure 4.1  Remedios Varo, La Creación de las aves, 1957. Oil on masonite, 54 × 64. Source: Estate of Remedios Varo, VEGAP Madrid / IVARO Dublin, 2018.

we can see a white blouse and human hands. Her legs are, once again, covered with trousers that appear as feathers and bare human feet under the desk at which this woman is seated. This figure may be seen to transform while in the process of creation. On that note, in her book on Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed affirms that indeed, ‘when women write, when they take up space as writers, their bodies in turn acquire new shapes’.15 In Varo’s painting, this figure/woman’s body is creating birds and has taken a new shape  – namely, that of an owl – because she is taking up space as an inventor/creator. It may seem reasonable then to apply Ahmed’s words to all creative activities in which women actively engage. Taking space as writers, through this process of becoming, unlocks the potential for opening up new spaces where women can possess and author their own acts of creativity. Cultural geographer Theano Terkenli similarly explains how habitual acts of repetition play a key role in the construction of home:



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Humans occupy space and use symbols to transform it into place; they are creatures of habit who appropriate place and context as home. Every activity or experience in which people engage to some degree affects their geographical delineation of home. … These patterns become part of home because they represent current, familiar points of reference in time, space and society.16

Perhaps then, one may consider this transformation as not only a result of the space but also a combination of the activity that is performed and the objects depicted in that space. In a further attempt to connect body-space, ‘phenomenology reminds us that spaces are not exterior to the bodies, instead spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body’.17 In the painting, this bird-like figure that is creating birds in turn becomes them: the feathers in the birds that float around in that same space become her second skin.18 This can be considered the first part of the process that transforms space into place. Yet the artist/creator’s body is not the only thing that changes in this painting: from the figure’s neck, taking the shape of a necklace, hangs a violinshaped necklace: one of its cords extends further to finally become the brush with which she creates the birds. This object, which can be initially read as a garment of embellishment, is also shaped by the activity it performs, becoming an active part of that space. In this regard, Ahmed affirms that ‘objects not only are shaped by work, but they also take the shape of the work they do’.19 Hence, this necklace has taken the shape of a violin as it is giving the bird its voice. What is more, the fact then that this figure/object/space does not adhere to standard or expected forms could be seen as a sort of becoming-monster.20 Monsters represent the in between, the mixed, the ambivalent as implied in the ancient Greek root of the word monsters, teras, which means both horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration.21

The representation of a ‘hybrid monster’ that produces both ‘fascination and horror’,22 is also a type of feminist figuration and part of Rosi Braidotti’s notion of nomadic becoming. In this regard, this nomadic figuration might offer Varo the possibility to safely portray the ‘other’ as well as politically engender that space.

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Another salient element of the painting is the desk. Positioned at the very centre of the composition, this desk looks like one of those old desks to be found in a primary school or as used by medieval scribes:23 the seat is directly attached to the table.24 On top of it there is a piece of white material where the ‘creator’ undertakes its creation. It is indeed a writing table: ‘Different tables have different functions … if our object is a writing table, then our table is specifically adapted for convenience in writing.’25 Similar tables can be found in other paintings by Varo, as in, for example, Tres destinos (1956), Armonía (1956) and Papilla estelar (1958). They can also be found in her writings: in the dream narrative ‘Los cuadros de Paalen’, Varo, as the main character in the dream, sees how a group of people extract a writing desk from her house, along with other objects. The table itself is therefore presented as an interartistic object, where although designed for writing, any other creative activities can take place, as in this painting the creation of birds. Ultimately, as is the case with the necklace, the shape of the desk is also determined by the activity performed on it.26 Looking at the main figure in the painting, the viewer is stuck by its strangeness, the sense that somehow it does not belong to that space. This might have been Varo’s way of subverting the patriarchal society she inhabited: the way in which an unexpected figure occupies a space it is not intended to occupy, a woman creating/painting in a time when males held creative authority, creates something else than just a bird: it creates a subversion of realities, the possibility of the emergence of new possibilities, new perspectives. Josefina Ludmer is of the same opinion: From a given and accepted place, one can change not only said place’s meaning/sense but also that of what is established within it. It is as if a mother or housewife said: I accept my place, but I do politics or science as a mother or a housewife. It is always possible to inhabit a space where one can practice what is forbidden in others. It is always possible to connect other fields and set up other deterritorialised homes.27

Varo is then accepting her place within the domestic realm but also stating: I freely choose what I create. At the same time, the figure’s physiognomy can seem to be reminiscent of Varo’s own face. In this regard, Kaplan affirms that ‘Varo consistently used these self-portrait characters as a way to explore alternative



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identities, both personal and universal’.28 One possible reading of this can be the fact that as Alain de Botton comments, we are different people in different places.29 But most likely, given how often Varo used this likeness between figure/artist in her work, this technique is related with that interconnectedness of all things that was mentioned above, as the artist not only has merged with an owl but also has become the result of its own creation.30 On the right-hand side of the figure, a palette with the three primary colours is being automatically fueled by an egg-shaped artefact, which in turn is simultaneously connected to the exterior through a perfectly circular window.31 This artefact’s egg shape is reminiscent of the female reproductive organs. In this regard, objects not only take the shape of the activity they are intended to do, as mentioned earlier, but also may change shape depending on whom they are intended for: ‘Objects may even take the shape of the bodies for whom they are “intended”, in what it is that they allow a body to do.’32 By objects becoming an extension of this figure, one may say the painter is somewhat expanding her world, as Yi-Fu Tuan claims, ‘A tool or machine enlarges a person’s world when he feels it to be a direct extension of his corporeal powers.’33 This, together with the one-point perspective device and the checkerboard floor, creates a space that expands further than what the viewer initially expects to perceive: we are not only envisioning someone sitting at a table, doing, but a domestic familiar place that expands in such a way that it manages successfully to include the viewer in it. This entire process is ultimately controlled by space, as proposed by Henri Lefebvre: Activity in space is restricted by that space; space ‘decides’ what activity may occur, but even this ‘decision’ has limits placed upon it. Space lays down the law because it implies a certain order – and hence also a certain disorder. … Space commands bodies, prescribing or proscribing gestures, routes and distances.34

Although, as Ahmed explains, the objects in that space are as important as the bodies represented inside that space: ‘Objects and bodies “work together” as spaces of action.’35 This idea of inter-connectivity works simultaneously for the objects in the painting, the female-looking owl and the creative process in order to at once feed from and create that space in which it is all taking

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place. Following Lefebvre, ‘space – my space – … is first of all my body …: it is the shifting intersection between that what touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body’.36 What is more, Ahmed reminds us ‘how important it is, especially for women, to claim that space, to take space through what one does with one’s body’,37 and that is exactly what Varo achieves: her ‘doing’ is the process by which domestic space is created and converted into her home.38 In the far background two other objects can be distinguished; these are painted with the same brown and green of the walls: two ceramic vases connected by some type of liquid that appears to flow bidirectionally and is shared between them, and a trunk-like machine with a crank on the side and an opening on the top. Janet Kaplan, in Unexpected Journeys, mentions these vessels as reappearing symbols in Varo’s work and further explains that they function as ‘vessels in which the alchemical transformation takes place’.39 What is important to reveal about these seemingly unimportant pictorial additions is the fact that they appear to not only be connected with a nearly cosmological process but also are within the wall itself:  not a random addition but fully integrated and embodied within the architectural setting. As Kaplan explains, Here is the true interconnection of art, science, alchemy, each nurturing the other in a cycle symbolically represented by the two vases in the corner, which feed their golden contents back and forth to each other.40

This symbiosis between objects and spaces is as a recurrent element in Varo’s paintings. For example, in Mimetismo (1960), a lady is sitting at a chair and her skin takes on the patterned fabric of that chair producing a type of masking effect in the figure. The overall colour composition is heavily replete with earthy yellows, browns and greens, which offer a texture of richness, particularly evident in the feathers and the walls.41 The figure is mostly yellow, in tune with the brighter rays of light and the orange undertones of the desk. In fact, these colours may play an important role in the reading of space; María Zanetta describes it as ‘un espacio casi uterino’ (nearly a uterine space).42 Following Freudian theory, this painting represents ‘a haunted house, arousing a feeling associated with a place both familiar and unfamiliar, could be a metaphor of the womb as the former home of human beings’.43 In fact, any interior – domestic – space can easily be connected to the womb as a place for creation, if so those spaces by denomination will be of feminine nature.



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Another element that will evoke a familiar flair in the viewer is the way in which space is represented geometrically.44 The entire space is orderly represented thanks to the floor, which is tiled and painted in such a way that it comes to offer a linear perspective, evocative of Brunelleschi’s one-point perspective.45 In fact, most of Varo’s works are seen to contain ‘leftovers’ of Renaissance architecture.46 Estrella de Diego also comments on this reminiscent aspect of Varo’s painting, as seeing the architecture to contain ‘rastros arquitectónicos de la infancia – espacios del románico’ [architectonic leftovers from childhood  – Romanic spaces].47 Tuan sees this as a type of visual pleasure:  ‘The sensual delight of physical contact; the fondness for place because it is familiar, because it is home and incarnates the past, because it provokes pride of ownership or creation.’48 This is another way that Varo successfully manages to transform that lived space into place. Tuan refers to this process/phenomenon as ‘geometric personality’.49 Vives also mentions this placement of familiar settings/objects, but she relates it with the idea of after-image: a recreation of a space out of the memory of the real thing, which in turn produces that sense of déjà vu in the viewer. Although it is not our memory but Varo’s, she manages to transform that pictorial space in such a way that produces familiarity in the viewer. How has that personal domestic space become familiar to others? De Botton in his The Architecture of Happiness comments, Insofar as buildings speak to us, they also do so through quotation that is, by referring to, and triggering memories of the contexts in which we have previously seen them, their counterparts or their models. They communicate by prompting association. We seem incapable of looking at buildings or pieces of furniture without tying them to the historical and personal circumstances of our viewing; as a result, architectural and decorative styles become for us, emotional souvenirs of the moments and settings in which we came across them.50

In other words, by utilizing her own memories of the places that have imprinted on her and helped to construct her artistic identity, Varo is also recalling known history of art emblems or what is known in phenomenology as ‘historical consciousness’.51 This can be seen, for example, in the Romanesque style of the architecture, the shape of the windows and undoubtedly the strict use of perspective not only in this painting but also in all of her compositions. In

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this regard, Tuan claims that indeed ‘enchanted images of the past are evoked not so much by the entire building, … as by its components and furnishings’.52 And as seen in the painting, the viewer is not given a glimpse of the outside setting. This humanistic outlook will impact on a specific type of viewer, and perhaps that is one of the reasons why her work appeals differently to different audiences, as this artistic memory will vary depending on the context/cultural background. Certainly, one may think that those that inhabit/ed her hometown Anglès (Girona) or other places where Varo travelled with her father as a child would most likely have a stronger sense of familiarity than those Mexican viewers she encountered when in exile as well as other European expatriates with whom is known she spent most of her time.53 This is because if one visits Anglès one may find strong architectural similarities between many of Varo’s background settings and the buildings and landscapes of this small town of Girona.54 In fact, in tune with phenomenology, ‘familiarity is shaped by the “feel” of the space or by how spaces “impress” upon bodies’.55 In the painting, then, this domestic space has fully imprinted on the body’s figure by means of the creative process. In his The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture, Juhani Pallasmaa explains this process as follows: The most deeply existentially and experimentally rooted architectural experiences impact our minds through images which are condensations of distinct architectural essences. Lasting architectural experiences consist of lived and embodied images which have become an inseparable part of our lives.56

And he goes as far as stating that true architecture forces us to remember other buildings: by framing the present, they evoke past memories and allow us to entrust in the future.57 Varo in her paintings is effectively achieving this.58 Looking closely, the ceiling is not included in the composition, hence we cannot confirm if this is taking place in a fully enclosed space. Two windows appear on the left-hand side of the figure.59 Through them we might deduce that it is night time, although it is not entirely certain. If time is also an element of space,60 Varo does not seem to be interested in referencing a specific time; instead, she chooses to give the scene a dreamlike aura. By doing so, time is objectified into another aspect of space:  time is also shaped along with the objects and the activity that is being performed.61 Bordo, Klein and Silverman



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also attest, ‘Time can create a private space that becomes a place’.62 In his speech after Varo died, Octavio Paz said, ‘No pintó el tiempo sino los instantes en el que el tiempo reposa’ [She did not paint time, but the moments in which time pauses].63 This quote may refer to the static quality of place, in Tuan’s words: ‘If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.’64 Without a doubt, this ‘pause-movement-pause’ sequence that is suggested by the painter can also be seen as repetition of actions, and repetition, as Michael Dorris affirms, ‘is an essential element in the transformation of place into home’.65 Having considering both the timeless quality of the painting and that this figure may seem to be at a pause during her activity might be the final confirmation that this space has now become the place of home.

Conclusion To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.66 The space in this painting is clearly presented and geometrically ordered: the one-point perspective, the checkerboard floor and the window clearly function as delineators, bordering space for the viewer. In fact, ‘the theme of interdependency amongst objects (including animals and humans) is a theme that is explored in many of Varo’s paintings and writings’.67 Interconnectedness is also latent in La creación de las aves, achieved by blending and connecting all objects, including the main figure, and objectifying time itself, and integrating them in such a way to become one: object-activity-space.68 These objects have now become chronotopes that contribute to the construction of the place of home.69 In La creación de las aves, what is familiar for the viewer is the inclusion of known art history emblems such as one-point perspective and other features from the Renaissance and Romanesque periods: these strategically persuade the viewer to envision further than the eyes see. The interior space presented is further connected to the feminine by aesthetic means, the visually enriching ‘fertile’ textures and earthy browns, oranges and yellows. As a consequence, it might be possible to say that for Varo, the process of creation and feminine space is one and the same. To add, Varo disguises herself under the shape

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of an owl. Symbiosis, metamorphosis and teratology (becoming ‘monster’) are themes regularly connected to Varo and as it is known, these ‘skills’ allow animals to adapt and blend within the spaces they inhabit. Thus, Varo, through the process of mutation, is also transforming that space into her place, which is overtly feminine and powerfully connected to the place of creation. Varo in exile converted her existential outsiderness – the feeling one has when after returning home that all is changed – into an existential inwardness.70 In La creación de las aves, the interior space is engendered thanks to the fluidity by which all elements in the painting are interconnected. Further readings from a feminist/postmodern angle, in particular that of Braidotti’s concept of nomadism/philosophy of ‘As If ’, would be valuable and make for another interesting analysis to further explain this interconnectivity and border fluidity in the paintings discussed. The element of time takes a secondary role in La creación de las aves, given that the artist does not seem to be preoccupied to set the scene taking place within a timeframe. Varo has presented this space as inside a creative womb, connecting space/place/home with femininity and freeing the gender-bound notions of art under which female artists were, and still are, sentenced. Varo’s conception of home, given her exiled position, is of a place where femininity is at the centre of the creative process. Terkenli expresses that for those that are in exile, ‘people construct their geographies of home at the interface between their self and their world’.71 Therefore, Varo’s home is not a physical and palpable reality but a construct of her imagination where also she resides, and where we, the viewers, are invited to inhabit through the continued incorporation of order/geometric forms, boundaries, familiar objects and the interconnecting of all things but most of all where women are at the core of its inception.

Notes 1 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 11. 2 See e.g. Anna F. Vives, ‘Surrealismo, género y ciudad en la obra pictórica y poética de Remedios Varo’, Ángulo recto. Revista de estudios sobre la ciudad como espacio plural, 5, no. 1 (2013): 179–95, https://doi.org/10.5209/ rev_anre.2013.v5.n1.42075; Goretti Ramírez, ‘Arquitectura y movimiento en



3

4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11

12

13

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la pintura exiliada de Remedios Varo’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 87, no. 6 (2010): 815–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2010.513102. One must not forget the burden that leaving behind friends and especially family also brings to the exiled individual, as Michael Dorris puts it: ‘To be apart from extended family is an almost incomprehensible hardship,’ ‘Home’, The Threepenny Review 54 (1993): 16. Also, Kaplan affirms that Varo ‘was to dwell on the impact of this abrupt and painful break throughout the rest of her life, expressing deep remorse at having thus separated herself from her family’, Janet A. Kaplan, Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys (New York: Abbeville Press Inc., 2000), p. 53. ‘Sí, lo visualizo antes de comenzar y trato de ajustarlo a la imagen que me he formado’ Remedios Varo, ‘Una entrevista inédita’, op. cit., p. 67, as cited in Isabel Castells, Cartas, sueños y otros textos (Mexico D.F.: Ediciones Era, S.A., 2000).Translations are the author’s own. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture (West Sussex: Wiley, 2011), p. 121. Ibid., p. 158. ‘One of phenomenology’s great strengths is seeking out what is obvious but unquestioned and thereby questioning it,’ Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 2008), p. 43. For more on Varo’s childhood and travels, see Eva Cortès i Giner, Remedios Varo I Uranga: L’encontre Dels Seus Dibuixos Amb El Surrealisme Francès (Tarragona: Arola Editors, 2013), p. 29. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 41. Nancy Vosburg, ‘Strange yet “Familiar”: Cats and Birds in Remedios Varo’s Artistic Universe’, in Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Popular Culture, ed. M. Pollock and C. Rainwater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 93. It is important to note that this stability might be a result of not only economic security but also Varo’s age. Varo was in her forties and as can be expected she was no longer able – due to social constraints – to be the sexually liberated, free and playful Varo of previous periods. Luís-Martín Lozano, Ricardo Ovalle and Walter Gruen, Remedios Varo: Catálogo Razonado (México, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 2008), p. 68. However, she also seemed to have a pretty rich kingdom in the worlds she created prior to Gruen, with Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna. If we look at Varo’s trajectory and the interviews/documents on her, it seems to me that the art produced after coming back from Venezuela (1949) and deciding on settling in Mexico, as in her words – there was nothing to come back to in

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Spain – ought to be seen as some of Varo’s more mature works. Bolio is of the same opinion: ‘en 1952, Varo se reunió con Walter Gruen. … El año de 1955 marcó el inicio formal de la exposición de su obra pictórica, con la que originó una vertiginosa y exitosa carrera’ [in 1952, Varo met with Walter Gruen. … The year 1955 officially marked the beginning of the exhibition of her painted works and the start of a successful career], Edith Mendoza Bolio, “A Veces Escribo Como Si Trazase Un Boceto”: Los Escritos De Remedios Varo (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2010), p. 32. 15 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 61. 16 Theano S. Terkenli, ‘Home as a Region’, Geographical Review 85, no. 3 (1995): 324. 17 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 9. 18 For a close study of animal symbolism in Varo, see Vosburg, ‘Strange yet “Familiar”’. 19 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 44. 20 ‘Monsters are human beings that are born with congenital malformations of their bodily organism’, Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p. 77. 21 Ibid. ‘The association of women with monsters goes as far back as Aristotle who, in The Generation of Animals, posits the human norm in terms of bodily organization based on a male model’ (p. 79). 22 Ibid., p. 81. 23 ‘A scriptorium (plural scriptoria) is a room devoted to the hand-lettered copying of manuscripts. Before the invention of printing by moveable type, a scriptorium was a normal adjunct to a library,’ from http://cs-exhibitions.uni-klu.ac.at/ index. php?id=468. 24 The relationship between Medieval scriptorium / Medieval bestiaries and Varo’s work could indeed make for an interesting analysis (i.e. The owl of Athena, Ovid, etc.). 25 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 49. 26 Heidegger explains, The being-there-in-such-a-manner of this thing which is given ‘in the flesh’ provides the possibility of determining something about the meaning of the being of such objects and their being-real In the proper sense, such objects are stones and other similar things in nature. However, when seen more closely, the table is also something more – it is not only a material thing in space, but in addition is furnished with definite valuative predicates:  beautifully made, useful  – it is a piece of equipment, furniture, a part of the room’s decor. The total domain of what is real can accordingly be divided into two



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realms: things in nature and things of value – and the latter always contain the being of a natural thing as the basic stratum of their being. The authentic being of the table is: material thing in space. (Martin Heidegger, Ontology The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 68)   27  

Desde el lugar asignado y aceptado, se cambia no sólo el sentido de ese lugar sino el sentido mismo de lo que se instaura en él. Como si una madre o ama de casa dijera:  acepto mi lugar pero hago política o ciencia en tanto madre o ama de casa. Siempre es posible tomar un espacio desde donde se puede practicar lo vedado en otros; siempre es posible anexar otros campos e instaurar otras territorialidades. (Josefina Ludmer, ‘Tretas del del débil’, in La sartén por el mango, ed. Patricia E. González and E. Ortega (Puerto Rico: El Huracán, 1985), pp. 47–54)  

2 8 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, p. 147. 29 Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2008), p. 13. 30 Madrid y Gatell, Remedios Varo: Caminos del conocimiento, p. 116. The idea of characters fusioning with objects/space can also be seen in paintings such as El flautista (1955), El alquimista (1955) or Mimetismo (1960). 31 See Magnolia Rivera, Trampantojos: el círculo en la obra de Remedios Varo (Mexico D.F.: Siglo XXI ediciones, 2006). 32 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 51. 33 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space And Place: The Perspective Of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), p. 53. 34 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 143. 35 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 57. 36 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 184. 37 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 11. 38 Brett Mommersteeg in his ‘Space, Territory, Occupy: Towards a NonPhenomenological Dwelling’ furthers affirms that ‘space is not a neutral milieu, but rather has a constitutive power of its own’ (master’s thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2014). 39 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, p. 169. As Kaplan explains, alchemy has been seen as a predominant influence in Varo’s œuvre. See also Armonía (1956) and Tránsito en espiral (1962). 40 Ibid., p. 181.

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41 ‘It has been said that Varo learned new pictorial techniques such as frottage, fumage and decalcomania. It is remarkable how some of the plastic solutions to working the backgrounds, especially the foliage in many of the paintings in Mexico …, resemble the fantastic jungles and forests that Max Ernst painted using decalcomania around 1938.’ From Lozano in Ovalle and Gruen, Remedios Varo: Catálogo, pp. 61–2. 42 María Alejandra Zanetta, ‘Carmen Martín Gaite y Remedios Varo: trayecto hacia el interior a través de la literatura y la pintura’, Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 27, no. 2 (2002): 293–579. 43 Jui-Ch’i Liu, ‘Francesca Woodman’s Self-Images: Transforming Bodies in the Space of Femininity’, Woman’s Art Journal 25, no. 1 (2004): 27; ‘Hal Foster writes that the outmoded architecture or space in Surrealism “seems to evoke a maternal memory (or fantasy) of psychic intimacy and bodily unity”.’ As cited in ibid., p. 27. For more on Hal Foster, see Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 163. 44 In her study on the symbol of the circle in Varo’s work, Rivera affirms that for Varo, ‘La geometría es el principio de todas las cosas’ [Geometry is the origin of all things], Trampantojos, p. 36. 45 ‘Brunelleschi’s architecture aspired to make clear this one-to-one correspondence between space represented and space perceived,’ Lorens Holm, ‘Reading through the Mirror: Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: The Invention of Perspective and the Post-Freudian eye/I’, Assemblage 20 (1992): 22. 46 Salomon Grimberg also comments on this aspect of Varo’s paintings. See Salomon Grimberg, ‘Remedios Varo and the Juglar: Harmony, Balance and Unity’, in Ovalle and Gruen, Remedios Varo: Catálogo, p. 27. See also Rivera, Trampantojos, p. 36. 47 As cited in Vives, ‘Surrealismo, género y ciudad en la obra pictórica y poética de Remedios Varo’, p. 182. 48 Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 247. 49 ‘Places and objects define space, giving it a geometric personality.’ Tuan, Space and Place, p. 17. 50 de Botton, Architecture of Happiness, p. 95. 51   The term historical consciousness also is problematic, and I use this term as a neutral alternative to historicity and historicality. Historical consciousness generally refers to the reader’s awareness of the work as bound to a historical matrix, its interpretation therefore being subject to a historically informed preunderstanding. Moreover, historical consciousness implies the reader’s



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awareness of the distance separating current reception from earlier receptions. The sense of history which acts as a foundation for this historical consciousness is that outlined by Hegel: history is a continuous process of becoming, so no moment in history can be bracketed or treated as privileged. Indeed, the present must be seen simply as a temporary culmination of the still-evolving process. (Michael Eckeri, Hermeneutics and Phenomenology of Reception,  https://archive.org/stream/hermeneuticsphen00ecke/ hermeneuticsphen00ecke_djvu.txt)  52 Tuan, Space and Place, p. 144. 53 For example, Leonora Carrington, Juan Martin, Eva Sulzer, etc. In fact, her first exhibition was in a gallery run by Catalan exiles (Galería Diana). In this regard, Bolio explains, ‘Varo y Péret consideraban su estancia como un refugio temporal, de manera que, más que integrarse a los círculos sociales e intelectuales mexicanos de la época, procuraban la convivencia con los europeos con los que compartían un pasado común y con los que formaron un grupo muy cercano y solidario’ [Varo and Péret considered their stay in Mexico as a temporary one, hence, rather than adapting themselves into the new artistic and cultural circles in Mexico, they tried to stay with the Europeans with whom they had a common past and formed a closed group], Bolio, “A Veces Escribo Como Si Trazase Un Boceto”, p. 31. 54 The architecture of Varo’s childhood will remain in the artist’s memory and will resurface later on. José A. Gil and Magnolia Rivera, El hilo invisible (Mexico D.F.: Siglo XXI editores, 2015), pp. 53–4. 55 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 7. 56 Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image, p. 8. 57 ‘La verdadera arquitectura hace que recordemos otros edificios. … Al concretar el presente, evocan nuestra conciencia del pasado y nuestra confianza en el futuro’ [True architecture makes us remember other buildings. … By specifying our present, they evoke our conscience of the past and our trust in the future], ibid., p. 159. 58 Not only in La Creación but also other paintings such as Ruptura (1955), El Relojero (1955) and Tránsito en espiral (1962). 59 The window can also serve, according to Lorens Holm, as ‘the site, in architecture, of the subject-object relation’, ‘Reading through the Mirror’, p. 34. 60 ‘El tiempo es un elemento del espacio’ [Time is an element of space], Andrea Luquín Calvo, Remedios Varo: el espacio y el exilio (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, Centro de estudios sobre la mujer, 2008), p. 242. See also Vives, ‘Surrealismo, género y ciudad en la obra pictórica y poética de Remedios Varo’, p. 193.

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61 Susan Bordo, Binnie Klein and Marilyn Silverman, ‘Missing Kitchens’, in Places Through the Body, ed. H. Nast and S. Pile (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 76. 62 Ibid, p. 76. 63 Castells, Cartas, Sueños Y Otros Textos, p. 18. 64 Tuan, Space and Place, p. 6. 65 Dorris, ‘Home’, p. 326. 66 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 41. 67 Vosburg, ‘Strange yet “Familiar” ’, p. 86. 68 In fact, ‘room and subject are coextensive and superimposed, suggesting perversely that architecture and its occupant are the same’, Holm, ‘Reading through the Mirror’, p. 35. 69 Time-space, the ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’, in M. M Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 278. 70 ‘An authentic sense of place is a direct and genuine experience of the entire complex of the identity of places – not mediated and distorted through a series of quite arbitrary social and intellectual fashions about how that experience should be, nor following stereotyped conventions,’ Relph, Place and Placelessness, p. 64. 71 Terkenli, ‘Home as a Region’, p. 325.

5

Identity and (not) belonging: Art and the politics of British-ness in 1980s Britain Imogen Racz

This chapter will use the exhibition From Two Worlds (1986) as a starting point to consider notions of identity and belonging in Britain during the 1980s through the prism of art and related institutional structures at that time. This was a major exhibition that sought to show work by artists who revealed a fusion of European and non-European influences, and while it could be seen to open discussions about identity, it also revealed underlying tensions. By the 1980s there were increased numbers of first- and second-generation migrants from the Commonwealth who were working as artists, many of whom had graduated from British art schools, who wanted to address their experiences in their work. However, the institutional understanding and inclusion of those from non-Western backgrounds living and working in Britain was marginal. Britain in the 1980s was conservative. It was a time when many groups were questioning establishment values, when politicians, art critics and the public were generally not sympathetic to any contemporary art, and when the art market was only just beginning to develop around New British Sculpture (NBS) and later the Young British Artists (YBAs). Artists who did not fall into these groups or could not be judged ‘good’ using connoisseurship criteria were marginalized. Recently, when there has been increased divisions around notions of what it means to be British, there have been a number of major survey exhibitions of British Black Art that have looked back to the 1980s, including Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain (2011), which restaged Lubaina Himid’s Thin Black Line at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA, 1985), and The Place Is Here, which was organized by Nottingham Contemporary and toured Britain in

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2017. Concurrent with that exhibition was Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, which celebrated Black art in America during the two decades post 1963, as did a number of other exhibitions in America over the past few years.1 A review of The Place Is Here stated that it was a timely retrospective.2 It showed the work of about thirty artists and collectives associated with what is often referred to as the Black Arts Movement of 1980s Britain, who were questioning the meaning of British identity. As well as showing art, it also presented contextual ephemera and film footage, including the Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs (1986), which, among other material, showed some scenes of the Handsworth riots. What all these exhibitions did was to separate Black art from other cultural narratives. They created the perception that there was something intrinsic to the work of Black artists because they had a heritage and affiliations that were non-Western. As has been articulated by a number of critics, including Eddie Chambers, the separate spaces, cultural expressions and channels for Black creativity indicated ‘the extent to which Black Britain was a somewhat separate and different entity to the rest of Britain’.3 Chamber’s observations about the Soul of the Nation were about its ‘raced narrative that favours herding individual practitioners into a two-decade long cultural construction’.4 During the 1980s, there were few major exhibitions in Britain that included contemporary Black art. One was From Two Worlds (1986) that was initially held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The aim of the exhibition was to create a strong presentation of recent art that revealed a fusion of Western and nonWestern influences. Taking this exhibition as the starting point, this chapter will place it into the contexts of the day and explore notions of identity and belonging in 1980s Britain.

From Two Worlds From Two Worlds was a major exhibition held at the Whitechapel Gallery in the summer of 1986. It showed the work of fifteen artists and the Black Audio Film Collective, all of whom would have been termed at the time ‘ethnic minority’ artists in that their heritage was non-European.5 The selectors chose



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‘a wide diversity of art’ by artists who drew ‘on their background’ to reveal a fusion of Western and non-Western influences and cultures from fifty artists who had offered their work for selection.6 It was to be recent work by the emerging generation who explored, in different ways, ‘identity, both of the self and group; [and] social interaction, both within the communities and across cultural boundaries’. The overall aim was that it would ‘broaden cultural consciousness’ and ‘pose questions’ about how we ‘regard the world’ through ‘the way in which an artist with a plural cultural experience can give expression to his or her vision’.7 At a time when there were very real social divisions and the dialogues around imperialism and colonialism were not fully developed, this was a risky enterprise. The catalogue essay by Adeola Solanke began with the statement ‘To title an exhibition From Two Worlds is a provocative and serious act’, because it reminded one of the ‘economic, political, social, religious and cultural havoc systematically unleashed by European imperialists on Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and other parts of the globe’.8 The background to the exhibition was the legacy of ‘enforced human traffic and the imposition of European hegemony over large parts of the world’, which had led to there being Black people in Britain. Cultural imperialism, she argued, has many guises, but one is the reluctance to appreciate art that is motivated by ideas and aesthetic values unlike those of Europe.9 Clearly the organizers realized that this would be a sensitive exhibition, but the introduction placed it within what they saw as a growing tendency by artists, including Lygia Clark, Helio Oitica, David Medalla and Rasheed Araeen to use synthesis to augment the Eurocentric understanding of art and culture.10 The gallery itself could also be considered as representing power structures, as lodged within the spaces and organization are the apparently natural rules of the host that one needs to accept in order to be included.11 Although, as Richard Cork argued, the gallery was situated in an area with high immigration, which made it a good place to explore Britain’s multicultural identity, it was none the less part of the institutional establishment.12 To mitigate some of these issues, the selectors were Sonia Boyce, Gavin Jantjes and Veronica Ryan who were joined by Jenni Lomax, Rachel Kirby and Nicholas Serota from the Whitechapel Gallery. Chambers and Himid  – who also showed in the exhibition – were involved in the early, planning stages.13 While this exhibition

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was an early example of a large show of Black art in a major institution, the idea of showing work by marginalized artists who were grouped together as separate entities from those considered mainstream contemporary artists had been initiated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Against the backdrop of the majority of exhibitions that predominantly featured white male artists, for instance, there were some important shows that exclusively exhibited work by women artists, including three at the ICA: Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists, Women’s Images of Men and About Time:  Video, Performance and Installations by 21 Women Artists  – all in 1980. However, there were almost no artists in these shows with non-European backgrounds. Eight Artists:  Women:  1980 was another key exhibition, held at the Acme Gallery in Covent Garden, but again this did not include artists from non-European backgrounds. Birmingham had one of the largest Black populations in Britain during the 1980s, and Antonia Payne, who was then curator at the Ikon Gallery, saw her role as enabling artists and developing the local audience for contemporary art. As well as addressing the gender imbalance through exhibitions like Sculpture by Women (1983), she held group exhibitions such as the Pan Afrikan Connection (1982) curated by Chambers, that had first shown at the Africa Centre in London and toured to Nottingham and Coventry.14 Like the exhibitions of women-only artists, which again suggested that there was a ‘female’ sensibility regardless of background or ideas, From Two Worlds was contentious. Chambers, for instance, argued that the premise suggested something closer to a form of anthropology than to Black visual creativity, arguing that it suggested that Black and white people could merge as equals, whereas the world, he argued, is a global village that has been ‘conceived, dominated and controlled by the white West’.15 As has been argued elsewhere, to give art value is not just about the art itself but about the dynamics of competing interests and who shows mastery over the rules of the game.16 Writing in 1982, the cultural theorist Homi Bhabha considered the lack of nuance within the Western understanding of work from different cultures, and how countries had to be ‘delivered to the West in a form that is unfamiliar enough for the cognoscenti to discover it, and yet familiar enough for it to be inscribed within those paradigms of order, tradition and value with which the West makes sense of itself ’.17



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However, a few years later, Bhabha reviewed a new edited book where Kwesi Owusu drew together a range of writing from about forty contributors about different aspects of Black art in Storms of the Heart: An Anthology of Black Arts & Culture (1988). This was a positive review, where Bhabha considered that the conscious bringing together of diverse and disparate elements of Black creativity was a refusal to articulate a unitary concept of culture, perceiving the tensions and hybridity of cultural location as enriching the voices; the artists could ‘draw on new strengths and meanings which emerge from both within and without the “local” traditions of West and East’. He thought that this creativity by those who remembered that their people were once colonized erased the cultural priorities of ‘His Master’s Voice’.18 Like Rasheed Araeen’s later exhibition The Other Story (1989–90), From Two Worlds sought to demonstrate synthesis rather than fetishize difference.19 Also like The Other Story and those discussed in Storms of the Heart, the artists chosen had very different backgrounds, experiences and means of expression. Araeen’s criteria of selection for The Other Story was that the art was by artists of African, Caribbean or Asian descent who had lived in Britain for ten years or more, whose work spoke to modernism in the visual arts. One of Araeen’s concerns was to show the Eurocentric bias of much art history.20 Writing in 1994, Jean Fisher wrote of the ‘West’s failure to engage in a dialogue of equality with its neighbours and to relinquish its control over meaning production. The West … never ceases in its attempts to re-centre itself as the privileged subject of knowledge.’21 The artists in From Two Worlds had very varied life histories as well as artistic concerns, which the catalogue reveals. While three of the artists, Franklyn Beckford, Sonia Boyce and Keith Piper, were born in Britain, others migrated at different times in their lives, from different parts of the world and for very different reasons. Some entries, like those of Keith Piper, Tam Joseph and the Black Audio Collective, were quite open about the problems and disadvantages encountered by Black artists living and working in Britain.22 Piper, for instance, wrote that ‘for a Black artist living and working in this country, the issues which arise around the realities of existing at the interface between diverse cultural and creative traditions are complex and multifaceted’.23 Unlike the criteria Araeen set for The Other Story, there was less emphasis on formal or material factors that would unite the artists. Whereas Araeen’s

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works combined different media including photographic panels with cool and regular modernist elements, Beckford’s three-dimensional works included plaster, hay, sawdust and pulses.24 Denzil Forester exhibited two paintings and three/four charcoal and pastel drawings in which mark-making and semiabstracted forms combine into rhythmic images.25 Veronica Ryan exhibited three sculptures that combined smaller elements, using bronze, reinforced plaster and pigment that suggest containing pods.26 Through considering the works on display by Araeen and Ryan, as well as what was written in the catalogue entries, differences of approach to notions of identity and social interaction – the themes of the exhibition – can be identified. Rasheed Araeen was born and educated as an engineer in Karachi, Pakistan, before moving to London and developing his interest in questioning the established norms of modernist art. From initially making sculpture, he moved towards photoworks and performance with political symbolism, while retaining modernist formal elements.27 Look Mama … Macho is a triptych that shows him in the central panel as a person without identity, with a tethered goat depicted on the two panels on either side, waiting for its ritual slaughter for the festival of Eid-ul-Adha (Figure 5.1). As the introduction to the catalogue stated, at the core of Araeen’s work are politics and culture.28 Veronica Ryan was born in Montserrat and spent most of her childhood in Britain, apart from a year back in Montserrat. She did her foundation at St Albans College of Art and then studied art at the Bath Academy of Art and the Slade in London. The entry for Ryan stated that her art was concerned with questions of identity and place, with her sculptures developing formal

Figure 5.1  Rasheed Araeen, Look Mama… Macho, 1983–6. Source: Photo © Rasheed Araeen. All rights reserved. DACS 2019.



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Figure 5.2  Catalogue image of Attempts to Fill Vacant Spaces by Veronica Ryan in From Two Worlds at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 30 July–7 September 1986. Source: Whitechapel Gallery Archive.

vocabularies of pods, fruits, seeds and shells that she had seen in the West Indies and on a visit to Nigeria.29 The floor-bound elements in A Place in the Scheme of Things (1986), with its rounded pod forms containing separate elements, suggest metaphors for boats and migration (Figure 5.2). Ryan is interested in language and materials and draws upon literature and a broad range of art, artists and ideas.30 Her work is less overtly political than, for instance, that of Araeen, although her experiences as a Black artist inform all of her art. As suggested in Solanke’s essay, she is aware of the diverse traditions within African cultures that she is heir to.31 Like much of her work of the time, there were dialogues in her art between the organic and manmade, the interplay between displayed elements and between the sculptures and viewing audience. The works become metaphors of and allusions to levels of human experience, including difficult relations between people and continents, displacement and migration, and the possibility of reconciliation.32 The differences and overlaps between those who were born and brought up in Britain but had links and affinities with former colonies, and those who migrated from other countries and remained in Britain, were not fully on the

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British academic, institutional or establishment radar at that time. The cultural contribution of those of non-Western descent was also not understood. Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which surveyed Western attitudes towards those from non-European backgrounds and the ideologies underpinning the ‘otherness’ of those from different cultures, was published in 1978, just after Araeen’s journal Black Phoenix was first published.33 Stuart Hall, who was involved with the Black Art Movement and a major figure in Marxist cultural theory, and produced many important texts during the 1970s and 1980s, was another important voice. As suggested in Peterson’s article, ‘Identity Politics’, things were starting to change, but the understanding of the incursions into the accepted narrative of Western art was challenging to those still understanding ‘good’ art from the connoisseurship and modernist models that were prevalent within art history.34 From Two Worlds can be perceived to have been staged at a time when changes in attitudes by institutions and exposure of work by those with nonEuropean affiliations were just starting to change, which is, to an extent, supported by the chronology given in the catalogue of Araeen’s The Other Story (1989).35 Starting in 1941, this chronology maps a range of events related to those with roots in non-European countries concerning individual artists, emerging artist groups and key exhibitions, alongside social and political events. While there had been a number of key initiatives and developments earlier, from around 1982 there seems to have been an acceleration of activity in the light of the Scarman Report into the Brixton riots. These included the Festival of India in Britain (1982) that was opened at the Hayward Gallery by Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi.36 Into the Open – New Paintings, Prints and Sculpture by Contemporary Black Artists (1984), selected by Lubaina Himid and Pogus Caesar, opened at the Mappin Art Gallery Sheffield and was subsidized by the Arts Council.37 A Thin Black Line (1985), curated by Himid, was held at the ICA.38 Himid then opened her gallery the Elbow Room and exhibited Unrecorded Truths (1986), which brought to public attention her own generation of Black female artists. In the same year, there was a conference at the ICA that discussed the report related to the dissolution of the Greater London Council, and its effects on ‘ethnic art’. The South African artist Gavin Jantjes, who had been exiled from South Africa in 1982, not only helped organize From Two Worlds but also served as a member of the Arts Council



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between 1986 and 1990.39 Third Text started in 1987 with help from the Arts Council and, along with the New Art History, new ways of discussing art that lay outside the Western canon began to be considered. Araeen conceived Third Text as a journal that could view the dominant culture critically through being on the permeable and shifting margins.40 From Two Worlds can be considered as being part of these debates that challenged the collective invisibility of artists from non-European backgrounds whose work engaged with political, social and aesthetic issues of the time.

Division Sarat Maharaj was later to argue that Black art was not simply objects with ‘black causality’. It emerged during the 1980s through a ‘firestorm of protest marches, petitions, smash-ups, burn-outs and sit-downs’ as Black and Asian areas in English cities protested about the unacceptable conditions, racist violence and policing.41 Britain was a very divided country in the 1980s, socially, politically and economically. It was a time of tensions, when establishment structures that underpinned and reinforced notions about what it meant to be ‘British’ were being contested by many groups. Most prominent of these were manifested in the miners’ strike, protests about the Falklands War with the sinking of the Belgrano, the peace camp at Greenham Common, the protests against Section 28 (1988), the IRA bombings and serious racial tensions between the police and Black populations around the country, but most prominent in Brixton, Handsworth, Tottenham and Toxteth. These tensions had been ongoing for decades, with violence in Notting Hill in 1958 between the white and West Indian populations, and many other scenes of unrest over subsequent decades in different cities around Britain. However, the Brixton riots, which presaged other scenes of civil unrest around the country during the summer of 1981, led the then home secretary William Whitelaw to institute a wideranging investigation to be led by Lord Scarman that was published later that year. Although Scarman rejected the allegation that ‘society knowingly, as a matter of policy, discriminates against black people’, he went on to say that if practices adopted by public bodies as well as private individuals ‘unwittingly’

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discriminate against Black people, this deserves ‘serious consideration’ and ‘swift remedy’. He concluded that ‘all the evidence I have received suggests that racialism and discrimination against black people – often hidden, sometimes unconscious  – remain a major source of social tension and conflict’, citing examples in housing, education and employment.42 These findings echo Rasheed Araeen’s thoughts articulated in his autobiographical book Making Myself Visible (1984), where he wondered how he could as a ‘non-European relate to European society I find myself living in but do not belong to? How do I react to its assumptions of white superiority?’43 Guy Brett suggested that Britain as a multiracial society was only just beginning to enter the consciousness of even the most enlightened milieus.44 These aspects have huge implications for identity and belonging. Eddie Chambers wrote how history and identity were especially important for Black people, including artists, with identity being reinforced wherever one is; a constant ‘friction within our minds’. Racism informs identity.45 As Hall wrote, meaning – and identity – are constructed both through what is included but also through what is set outside those parameters. One can only be constituted through the creation of the ‘other’.46 This can take a number of forms, but one is through the establishment fixing someone’s identity through pigeonholing them into the ‘difference’ box and then treating them according to a policy or program of diversity. Maharaj called this ‘multicultural managerialism’.47 One of the outcomes of the disturbances of the early 1980s was the political view that the provision of social and cultural amenities would in some way address the issues. In this they paralleled some of the earlier developments from America, which drew on what was called ‘the culture of poverty’ theories that had been developed by social scientists during the 1960s.48 These saw the poor  – especially the Black poor  – as culturally deprived, and liberal bureaucrats developed therapeutic programs, including storefront community centres with arts components, which aimed to socialize these groups, overcome alienation and revitalize depressed neighbourhoods.49 In Britain during the 1980s, some of the worst hit areas gained multipurpose community centres, and Islington Borough Council provided for the Organisation for Black Arts Advancement and Leisure Activities (OBAALA) to establish and maintain The Black-Art Gallery in Finsbury Park that was originally conceived by Shakka Dedi and Eve-I Kadeena in 1981 as a response to the lack of opportunities and



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exhibiting spaces for Black artists, and which was then run by Shakka Dedi.50 This was to be a major venue throughout the 1980s for exhibiting solo shows of artists including Keith Piper, Donald Rodney and Sonia Boyce, as well as holding group shows that showcased both established and less well-known artists, including the inaugural show Heart in Exile (1983). This featured twenty-two artists of African-Caribbean backgrounds in various different mediums, some more established than others. As noted on Diaspora-Artists, this was similar to other large-scale exhibitions in the 1980s that showed lesser known artists, in that such exhibitions represented valuable opportunities for certain artists to have their work receive wider exposure, as much as such exhibitions represented equally valuable opportunities for gallery audiences to see a wide cross section of work produced by a range of artists.51

The catalogue for Heart in Exile wrote that ‘for too long Afrikan-Caribbean Lifestyles and traditions have been regarded merely as a subculture  – just another “exotic” commodity to be given spasmodic bouts of recognition and praise’. The gallery wanted to showcase Afrikan arts in all its forms, support and encourage Black artists, assist in the development of Black creative expression and be relevant for the Black and wider community. In terms of the criteria for inclusion, this was about not just the imagery but also the cultural identity born of the experience of ‘what it means to be an Afrikan descendant wherever in the world we are … “Art”, – the creative expression of the Black person or group based on historical and contemporary experience’.52 The Black-Art Gallery was one of a number of venues that catered exclusively for Black art. These included the Keskidee Theatre Workshop that opened in Islington during the 1970s and the 198 Gallery in Brixton which opened during the 1980s. These initiatives received funding from the Greater London Council (GLC), Greater London Arts Association (GLAA), Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) and local councils. Catalogues for the Black-Art Gallery and other exhibitions show the involvement and new structures that were being put in place within the GLC to cater for what was termed ‘ethnic minority arts’. There was an Ethnic Minority Unit, with a committee and a subcommittee.53 Videos of the exhibitions were made by Be-Honest Telefilms for ‘educational purposes for Non-European peoples’.54

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New Horizons:  An Exhibition of Arts (1985) was presented by the Arts Council, organized by the Caribbean Craft Circle and held at the Royal Festival Hall. It was a major exhibition that included the work of forty-four artists. Like From Two Worlds, it featured artists whose family backgrounds were very diverse, including from Taiwan, India, Africa, the Caribbean and Turkey. They had varied life experiences, with some being born in Britain, while others had come over at an early age with their parents or later to study or work as an adult. They also showed very different types of work. Louie Ramirez, for instance, was a batik artist who had studied art at Birmingham Polytechnic and Fashion and Textiles at North-East London Polytechnic.55 Brian Tai-Shen Wang, who studied calligraphy, was born in Taiwan and now worked as a Race Relations Adviser for the London Borough of Hackney.56 Horace Opio Donovan studied sculpture at the Jamaica School of Art, followed by Chelsea School of Art.57 Ken Little, the Chair of the Ethnic Arts Sub-Committee, and Deputy Chair of the Art and Recreation Committee, wrote in the foreword to the exhibition, ‘The Greater London Council is proud to present this important part of London’s artistic expression, it’s an expression which despite being often ignored, has flourished and grown.’58 Although there were benefits in having institutional structures around so-called ethnic arts, in that they gave money and enabled exhibitions and projects, it was also argued that this was a continuation of imperialist domination. The hierarchical structures that underpinned the notion of ‘ethnic art’ also perpetuated subservience within the dominant white society.59 Those who were termed ‘Black’ and treated structurally as being separate from identifying as ‘British’  – in social aspects and art  – were many. As a statement by the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) declared in 1985, the term ‘Black’ is political rather than descriptive of skin colour: ‘It defines our situation here in Britain. We’re here as a result of British Imperialism, and our continued oppression in Britain is the result of British racism.’60 This was also considered in Araeen’s introductory text to the journal he founded in 1987: Third Text.61 Considering the term ‘Third World’ – which is where the name of the journal originated – as being geographical, he argued about what this meant for who was included in this category. How could one assign an oil-rich culture like Saudi Arabia and an economically strong country like Japan the same designation as, for instance, Bangladesh?



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His argument was that the term was not about any cultural, economic or political affiliation. He argued against the binary system that fixed orders into ‘same’ or ‘other’. There was no understanding of differences within the categories, and without recognizing the hierarchical structures that determine cultural difference, it is impossible to account for the almost total exclusion of non-Western artists from the history of modern art.62 Chambers and Araeen held strong, political views on Black art and its reception. Black art, Chambers argued, had become a debased term.63 Rather than being anything that cannot be attributed to a white or European person, he argued that Black Art  – which included the capitalization  – could only be considered that when it ‘is seen and engaged by the audience for which it was created.’64 Araeen also thought that there was a specific way to use the term and placed it within historical contexts. He thought that it expressed the condition of Afro-Asian people living within a racist society that resulted from Western cultural imperialism.65 This discussion continued between Araeen and Chambers in Third Text, where Araeen argued for a more political stance while Chambers wanted to see the situation in broader, historical frameworks, where one could perceive the links between what happened in America and subsequently in Britain.66 In addition to these overtly political ideas about Black art, there were other voices, like that of Ryan, who became increasingly uncomfortable with the curatorial and critical focus of exhibitions exclusively showing the work of Black artists around this time.67 Sutapa Biswas raised similar issues in her review of Araeen’s The Other Story, because of the paucity of Black female artists and the implication that – like other overview exhibitions – it represented a ‘collective authority of narrative’.68 These discussions and differences relate to those that formed around From Two Worlds. They also speak to Kobena Mercer’s argument about ‘the burden of representation’. Writing in 1994, he argued about the impossible position of artists who were working on the margins of the institutional spaces of cultural production. They were seen, and saw themselves, as ‘representatives’ who spoke for the marginalized communities from which they came.69 He described an incident when he organized a day conference during the early 1990s at the ICA, on Black Film/British Cinema. It had a range of speakers, but although invited, none of the British Asian speakers were able to participate. This was

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interpreted as an exclusion of British Asian voices and viewpoints. Because it was the first event of its type, held in that institutional space, the expectation was that it should be completely representative and comprehensive.70 Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s writings from the end of the 1980s, Mercer wrote about the oversimplification of Black/white, and margin/centre, while also disputing the possibility of ‘postmodernism’ opening up an alternative historical understanding through challenging the centrality of nation and nationality in the history of the West.71 He argued that ethnic binaries assumes that identities are fixed. However, he thought that the transnational character of Black expressive culture had the ability to open up another way of conceiving culture.72

Institutional bias The idea of marginalization can be considered from many angles. As well as the assumptions and presumptions outlined above, there were galleries and institutions that gained traction in the international art market during the 1980s through creating and presenting groups of artists that could be promoted as being the dominant forces in British culture at the time. Jennifer Powell constructed a powerful argument about the construction of a new school of British Sculpture after the Second World War, through exhibiting practices that included promoting particular artists both at home and abroad, catalogue writing, display and reception.73 This argument was continued in the quantitative analysis undertaken by Nick Baker of the art markets in Britain during the early 1980s.74 He argued that the art world is organized around the need to select and promote certain artists as there is limited space in galleries, limited attention that influential commentators can give and limited funds.75 In order to underpin his argument, he analysed the three, principal, statefunded collections: the Arts Council, the British Council and the Tate Gallery, to see who was collected. He then considered reviews of exhibitions, and six artists clearly came out as being those who were most visible – Tony Cragg, Bill Woodrow, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Edward Allington and Julian Opie, all of whom were known as New British Sculptors and all of whom were represented by the Lisson Gallery run by Nicholas Logsdail.76



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At the beginning of the 1980s, the British art world was very small. There were few galleries for contemporary art, collectors tended not to come to London and the major institutions, like the Tate, were criticized by artists for not collecting contemporary art.77 As a result, many artists  – like those running the Black-Art Gallery – ran exhibition spaces themselves that were frequently linked to artist-run studios. They did not expect to sell work. These artists had frequently begun their associations at art school, and those who had not graduated from particular establishments like the Royal College of Art, Chelsea or the Slade found it harder. Many important Black artists studied outside London. As the decade progressed and money became more available, the market expanded, new galleries opened and some artists found they could sell work – but these tended to be either NBS or YBA artists. As is evident in the artist entries in the catalogue for From Two Worlds, there were fewer opportunities for British artists from non-European backgrounds to exhibit in the major shows. The British Art Show that toured Britain in 1984 and then went to Australia and New Zealand aimed to show the ‘best in British Art from 1979 to 1984’ while maintaining the element of the personal choices of the selectors – a method that had been utilized in previous Hayward Annuals.78 It exhibited the work of about eighty artists who lived and worked all over Britain, who worked with a variety of mediums and materials, and who represented many different strands of contemporary practice. However, it showed few works by women artists or those from non-Western backgrounds. Shirazeh Houshiary and Anish Kapoor were notable exceptions, but they did not exhibit either at From Two Worlds or in other exhibitions of exclusively Black art. Both were backed by the Lisson Gallery and had good exposure and careers. Both artists showed at Aperto ’82, alongside others from NBS, and Kapoor represented Britain in the Venice Biennale of 1990. Kapoor was frequently exhibited in exhibitions that presented ‘British’ sculpture abroad. For instance, his work was shown as part of the British Council’s exhibition Britannia (1987) in Stockholm and Tampere, and in Japan in 1989 as part of British Object Sculptors of the ’80s. His use of pure pigment colour was discussed early during the 1990s as part of a broader discussion about individual and cultural identities. The artist Allan deSouza argued that if one looks at ‘Indian-ness’ through an orientalist prism, then bright colour, dense patterning and mythological references would be considered. Kapoor’s use

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of bright colours has been considered by critics as representing his ‘Indian’ qualities.79 However, deSouza argued that this could also be an act of cultural defiance, in that rather than denying his cultural affinities and trying to merge with his peer group, Kapoor was taking back ownership.80 Kapoor was clear about his affinities, commenting when being chosen to represent Britain in 1990, ‘An Indian, representing Britain – that’s an odd notion.’81 Araeen was later to argue that art is not inherently valuable or just about selfexpression; it requires a market for its promotion, for only with exchange value does it gain traction. Practice and value are constituted by and constitutive of the respective discourse within which is it operating.82 At the opening of Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent Black Artists in Britain, Chambers discussed From Two Worlds.83 He wrote that it set out to be more than just another survey exhibition. The location, the apparently developed curatorial thesis and the showcasing of some of the best of Britain’s Black artists would make one think that these artists were destined to have long and prestigious careers.84 However, this was rarely the case, with the work being overshadowed by other artistic developments in the late 1980s and 1990s, although some of the artists included in the show, including Ryan and Himid, have recently received increased attention. From Two Worlds was an early attempt by a major institution to organize an exhibition with a broad range of art by those whose art showed a complexity of influences. It was a realization that by the 1980s there were many artists working in Britain from non-Western backgrounds who had fewer opportunities to exhibit. It was a time of real conflict and much racism, and there were no serious debates within white society or the establishment about the effects of imperialism and colonialism. While it could not rectify the broader social, political or institutional issues or gaps and was bound to be contentious, fifty artists put forward their work to be shown, and the selectors were a mixture of artists with non-European backgrounds and the curators at the gallery. Individual and cultural identities are mutable, contingent and complex. From Two Worlds was an attempt to consider these factors and ask what it meant to be British from the point of view of people from non-Western backgrounds who were living at the intersection of different cultural identities. In a democracy, the state attempts to manage the population and set up frameworks that draw people towards a consensus of national identity. The



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art market attempts to make a profit. Artists want their work to be shown. However, as was seen during the 1980s, these conflicting elements combined with lack of real debate meant that many artists fell outside the parameters and were seen as a generalized ‘other’. These are issues that are still relevant today.

 Notes 1 For a discussion of these, see Richard Hylton, ‘Black Art: UK/US’, Art Monthly (October 2017): 13–17. Soul of the Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London, 12 July–22 October 2017. Exhibition toured to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 3 February–23 April 2018, Brooklyn Museum, New York, 7 September 2018–3 February 2019. Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, curators. For an insightful review of this exhibition, see Eddie Chambers, ‘Soul of the Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, nos 2–3 (2018): 225–7. 2 Maria Walsh, ‘The Place Is Here’, Nottingham Contemporary, 4 February–30 April 2017, Art Monthly (March 2017): 18–20. 3 Ibid., p. 19, and Chambers, quoted in Hylton, ‘Black Art: UK/US’, p. 17. 4 Chambers, ‘Soul of the Nation’, p. 227. 5 Nicholas Serota and Gavin Jantjes, ‘Introduction’, in From Two Worlds (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1986), pp. 5–8, 5. The artists shown in the exhibition were Rasheed Araeen, Saleem Arif, Franklyn Beckford, Zadok BenDavid, Zarnina Bhimji, The Black Audio Film Collective, Sonia Boyce Sokari Douglas Camp, Denzil Forrester, Lubaina Himid, Gavin Jantjes, Tam Joseph, Houria Niati, Keith Piper, Veronica Ryan and Shafique Uddin. 6 Ibid., pp. 5 and 7. 7 Ibid., p. 8. 8 Adeola Solanke, ‘Juggling Worlds’, in From Two Worlds, pp. 9–13, 9. 9 Ibid., p. 9. 10 Serota and Jantjes, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 11 For an interesting discussion of ideas of hospitality, reciprocity and the foreigner, see M. Bal and H. de Vries, eds., Cultural Memory in the Present: Of Hospitality, Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 3–31 and 75–89. 12 Richard Cork, ‘From Two Worlds’, 28 August 1986, in Richard Cork, New Spirit, New Sculpture, New Money: Art in the 1980s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 80–3. 13 Nicholas Serota, ‘Acknowledgements’, in From Two Worlds, p. 4.

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14 Ikon Gallery, As Exciting as We Can Make It: Ikon in the 1980s (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 2014), pp. 148–50. See also the interview with Antonia Payne in Imogen Racz, British Art of the Long 1980s: Diverse Practices, Exhibitions and Infrastructures (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020), pp. 181–94, esp. pp. 188–91. 15 Eddie Chambers, ‘From Two Worlds’, a review in Race Today (1987): 28–30. Available online: http://www.eddiechambers.com/archive/two-worlds/ (accessed 29 July 2020). 16 For an interesting argument about this, albeit about Rasheed Araeen’s The Other Story, see Jean Fisher, ‘The Other Story and the Past Imperfect’, Tate Papers, no. 12 (2009). Available online: https://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7273 (accessed 29 July 2020). 17 Homi Bhabha, quoted in Allan deSouza, ‘An Imperial Legacy’, in Crossing Black Waters, ed. A. deSouza and S. Merali (London: Working Press, 1992), pp. 6–8. 18 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Storms of the Heart’, Art Monthly (November 1988): 5–7. This was a review of Kwesi Owusu, ed., Storms of the Heart, an Anthology of Black Arts and Culture (London: Camden Press, 1988). 19 The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, 1989–90, guest curated by Rasheed Araeen, Hayward Gallery London, and toured to Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Manchester City Art Gallery and the Cornerhouse. 20 See Fisher, ‘The Other Story and Past Imperfect’. See also the interview with Rasheed Araeen in Racz, British Art of the Long 1980s, pp. 25–34, esp. pp. 33–4. 21 Jean Fisher, ‘Editor’s Note’, in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. J. Fisher (London: Kala Press, 1994), pp. x–xiv, x–xi. See also the discussion in Anne Ring Petersen, ‘Identity Politics, Institutional Multiculturalism, and the Global Artworld’, Third Text (March 2012), 195–204. 22 Artist pages of Keith Piper, Tam Joseph and Black Audio Collective, in From Two Worlds, pp. 44, 40, 28. 23 Keith Piper, From Two Worlds, p. 44. 24 From Two Worlds, ‘catalogue’, pp. 14–15, and artist pages Rasheed Araeen, pp. 16–18, and Franklyn Beckford, pp. 21–2. 25 From Two Worlds, ‘catalogue’, p. 15, and Denzil Forester, pp. 33–4. 26 From Two Worlds, ‘catalogue’, p. 15. 27 From Two Worlds, ‘catalogue’, p. 16. 28 Serota and Jantjes, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 29 From Two Worlds, artist page Veronica Ryan, p. 45. 30 See interview with Veronica Ryan in Racz, British Art of the Long 1980s, pp. 207–17, esp. pp. 207–9, 210–13, 215. 31 Solanke, ‘Juggling Worlds’, p. 11.



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32 Monique Kerman, Contemporary British Artists of African Descent and the Unburdening of a Generation (Palgrave, 2017), p. 78. Solanke, ‘Juggling Worlds’, p. 11. 33 Black Phoenix: Journal of Contemporary Art in the Third World was published between 1978 and 1979 by Rasheed Araeen. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 34 Peterson, ‘Identity Politics’, pp. 195–204. See also the discussion in Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity?”’, in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. S. Hall and P. du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 1–17. See for instance the review of Araeen’s exhibition The Other Story: Brian Sewell, ‘Black Pride and Prejudice’, Evening Standard (Thursday 4t January 1990), p. 25. This diatribe, which included ‘that they should demand serious attention for their third-rate imitations of the white man’s cliché must seem outrageous to all who care to judge by quality’ was not alone. 35 Julia Engelhardt, ‘Chronology’, in Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989), pp. 128–41. See also interview with Rasheed Araeen in Racz, British Art of the Long 1980s, pp. 30–1. 36 Araeen, The Other Story, p. 138. 37 Ibid., 139. See also https://makinghistoriesvisible.com/portfolio/box-1-contentcatalogues-1983-1988/ (accessed 29 July 2020). 38 This exhibition showed the work of Sutupa Biswas, Veronica Ryan, Sonia Boyce, Jennifer Comrie, Marlene Smith, Claudette Johnson, Lubaina Himid and Chila Burman. This was the third exhibition that Himid curated, the other two being Five Black Women at the Africa Centre (1983) and Black Women Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre (1983–4). 39 Engelhardt, ‘Chronology’, p. 140. 40 Rasheed Araeen, ‘Why Third Text?’, Third Text 1 (Autumn 1987): 3–5, 5. 41 Sarat Maharaj, ‘Introduction’, in Annotations 5 Run through the Jungle: Selected Writings by Eddie Chambers, ed. G. Tawadros and V. Clarke (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999), pp. 4–9, 4. 42 Ben Bowling, ‘Facing the Ugly Facts’, The Guardian, 17 February 1999. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/society/1999/feb/17/ guardiansocietysupplement4 (accessed 29 July 2020). 43 Rasheed Araeen, Making Myself Visible (London: Kala Press, 1984), p. 5. 44 Guy Brett, ‘Introduction’, in Araeen, Making Myself Visible, pp. 7–15, 7. 45 Eddie Chambers, History and Identity (Norwich: Norwich Gallery, 1991), in Gilane Tawadros and Victorian Clarke, eds, Annotations 5 Run through the Jungle: Selected Writings by Eddie Chambers (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999), pp. 23–4.

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46 Stuart Hall and Sarat Maharaj, ‘Modernity and Difference, a Conversation between Stuart Hall and Sarat Maharaj’, in Modernity and Difference, ed. S. Hall and S. Maharaj (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001), pp. 36–56, 41–3. 47 Ibid., p. 46. 48 See e.g. Benjamin Looker, BAG “Point from which Creation Begins”: The Black Artists’ Group of St Louis (St Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2004), p. 52. 49 Ibid., pp. 52–3. 50 Eddie Chambers, Black Artists in British Art: A History since the 1950s (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), pp. 116–17. See also http://www.fowokan.com/ black-arts-uk/catalogues-and-registers-of-black-artists-and-exhibitions-1980s-/ (accessed 29 July 2020); OBAALA, The Heart in Exile (London: Black-Arts Gallery, 1983), catalogue, p. 5. 51 http://new.diaspora-artists.net/display_item. php?id=241&table=exhibitions&linkphrase=Heart+in+Exile (accessed 29 July 2020). The artists shown were Tyrone Bravo, Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Dee Casco, Eddie Chambers, Adrian Compton, Shakka Dedi, Olive Desnoes, Terry Dyer, Carl Gabriel, Funsani Gentiles, Anum Iyapo, George Kelly, Cherry Lawrence, Ossie Murray, Pitika Ntuli, Joseph Olubu, Keith Piper, Barry Simpson, Marlene Smith, Wayne Tenyue and someone going under the name ‘Woodpecker’. 52 OBAALA, Heart in Exile, pp. 2–4. 53 See the catalogues on http://www.fowokan.com/black-arts-uk/catalogues-andregisters-of-black-artists-and-exhibitions-1980s-/ (accessed 29 July 2020). 54 See e.g. ‘Acknowledgements’ in New Horizons: An Exhibition of Arts (London: GLC., 1985), n.p. 55 New Horizons, p. 12. 56 Ibid., p. 11. 57 Ibid., p. 25. 58 Ken Little, ‘Foreword’, in ibid., n.p. 59 Rasheed Araeen, ‘From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts’, Third Text (Autumn 1987): 6–25, 7. 60 OWAAD statement quoted in deSouza, ‘An Imperial Lecacy’, p. 7. 61 Araeen, ‘Why Third Text?’, pp. 3–4. 62 Ibid., p. 4. 63 Eddie Chambers, Black Art: Plotting the Course (Wolverhampton: Leisure Services, 1988), p. 7. 64 Ibid. Italics in original. 65 Ibid.



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66 Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chambers, ‘Black Art: A Discussion, Third Text 2, no. 5 (1988): 51–77. 67 Kerman, Contemporary British Artists, p. 20. 68 Sutapa Biswas, ‘The Wrong Story’, New Statesman, 15 December 1989: 40–2. See http://new.diaspora-artists.net/display_item.php?id=596&table=artefacts (accessed 29 July 2020). 69 Koben a Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 235. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., p. 237. 72 Ibid. 73 Jennifer Powell, ‘A Coherent, National “School” of Sculpture? Constructing PostWar New British Sculpture through Exhibiting Practices’, Sculpture Journal 21, no. 2 (2012): 37–50. 74 NickBaker, ‘Managing the Reputations of the New British Sculptors’, Sculpture Journal 21, no. 2 (2012): 75–84. See also the Introduction to Racz, British Art of the Long 1980s. 75 Baker, ‘Managing the Reputations’, p. 75. 76 Ibid., p. 77. 77 Pat Gilmour, ‘Page Two Talking the Tate Around’, Art Monthly (October 1979): 2–3. See also Nick Baker, ‘Expanding the Field: How the “New Sculpture” Put British Art on the Map in the 1980s’, British Art Studies, no. 3 (Summer 2016). 78 Joanna Drew and Nicola Bennett, ‘Preface’, in The British Art Show: Old Allegiances and New Directions, 1979–1984 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1984), p. 8. 79 DeSouza, ‘An Imperial Legacy’, p. 7. 80 Ibib. 81 ‘Anish Kapoor Interviewed by Douglas Maxwell’, Art Monthly 136 (May 1990): 6–11, 11. See Rackee Balaram, ‘With the Void, Full Powers: Anish Kapoor and the Venice Biennale of 1990’, British Art Studies 3 (2016). Available online: https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-3/kapoorvenice-1990 (accessed 29 July 2020). 82 Araeen, ‘Why Third Text?’, p. 4. 83 Eddie Chambers, Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent Black Artists in Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), p. xix. 84 Ibid., p. xx.

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Aftershocks and (un)belongings: Reflecting on Home Strike Alexandra Kokoli and Basia Sliwinska

In this dialogic chapter, we reflect on our collaborative curation of an exhibition that explored domesticity from feminist dissident perspectives. Featuring work protesting the  changes to policy concerning domestic violence  in Poland (Malgorzata Markiewicz), subverting, through craft, women’s maintenance of the home as both dwelling and ideal (Su Richardson), unpicking maternal subjectivities while staging a confrontation between feminist and modernist approaches to art history (CANAN), and unsettlingly recasting the home as a site of violence and resistance (Paula Chambers), Home Strike (l’étrangère, 2018) is revisited as both an unfinished intergenerational  and transnational  project critiquing and defamiliarizing the home, and an opportunity for reflection and exchange on the curators’ own lived experiences of migration and patriarchal regimes of space. Personal meditations on (un)belonging, temporary habitats and object attachments are interspersed with critical observations on migration, xenophobia and the neoliberal demand for mobility, particularly in the case of cultural workers. As well as (a)  correspondence and dialogic reflection on shared preoccupations, what follows is an exchange of letters working through the aftershocks of our co-curation of an exhibition and opening up new strands of thinking and research into projects yet unrealized. The epistolary form was adopted as a practical and equitable record-keeping of our exchange, but also for its rich tradition in feminist politics and thought: as Margaretta Jolly1 eloquently demonstrates, in the Women’s Liberation Movement, correspondence both charted the emergence of a new consciousness and sisterly alliances, and became a lab for the development of alternative ways of thinking and engaging with one

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another. Following recent feminist experimentation, we aspire to occupy the space between ‘letter-writing as a formal convention’2 and a dialogical critical feminist methodology of ‘engaged essay-making’.3 22 October 2018 Dear Alexandra, I am writing with and to you from my home or one of many homes I inhabit. When we collaborated on Home Strike, the exhibition in l’étrangère in London, we revisited the concept of home, its visual and material representations, and its social and cultural embodiments. We set out to explore the active disaffirmation of contended and nurturing domesticity reviewing the 1970s feminism and analysing its currency in contemporary art practice. This dialogue through curation concerned domesticity from feminist dissident perspectives but also our own lived experiences of migration and personal mediations of mobility. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Luce Irigaray4 talks about mucous subjectivity, a mediating substance for thinking about the female. Similarly, Hélène Cixous5 writes about the gendered body when discussing écriture feminine as a practice of ‘writing from and of the body’. Hilary Robinson6 suggests that a mucous-based subjectivity does not follow the rules of the solid, it defines someone with porous boundaries. This mucous subjectivity resonates with myself and my body with/in space. The moment I  left the country I was born in, Poland, my body and so subjectivity have been subjected to perpetual becoming with/in space. First I moved to the Netherlands, then went towards Poland and in 2007 towards the UK where I am at home at the moment of writing this letter. To quote the title of the edited collection of essays by Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller,7 since then I  have been ‘uprooted and reground’, inhabiting and moving across national and diasporic locations and experiencing migration in relation to home and belongings and these, in turn, being subject to change because of the conditions of movement, configurations of placement and an individual. I  am a subject of affect in my mobility. ‘Being grounded is not necessarily about being fixed; being mobile is not necessarily about being detached.’8 I enjoy this stage of liminal and transformative plasticity but also possibility. I am inserting myself in many spaces when I perform the ‘home’ seeking my place of origin or perhaps doing the ‘homing’, in the sense that



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I navigate a ship, an aircraft, a satellite or simply myself. Cixous would suggest a mode of and for production, ‘works of being’. I  am hoping our epistolary exchange in the form of this mobile letter, extending collaborative curation, between text and discussing techne (craftsmanship and art practice), will allow us to further explore the home and habitat in the context of mobility as an opportunity and an imperative but also precarity. Each of the women artists featured in the exhibition, Paula Chambers, CANAN, Małgorzata Markiewicz and Su Richardson approach home differently but usually as an embodied battleground. They subvert domesticities within aesthetics and politics. How do they defamiliarize the home? Today I sold my red bike I used to commute to the train station from where I take the train to get to work. I also used it to go to the local market to buy fresh fruit, flowers and sometimes cheese. On the one hand it upset me; on the other it uprooted me, which was quite liberating. I feel I am mobile again. I am not yet sure towards where or what. With love to you, Basia 26 October 2018 Dear Basia, Your ‘letter’ made me realize how much we took our shared migrant backgrounds for granted. We are two of many in academia, and of very many more in the so-called cultural industries, sustained as these are by countless hours of under- or unpaid labour that migrants often perform. The artworld’s ‘dark matter’9 is profoundly gendered and over-represented among social groups already primed for financial and professional insecurity. It was a privilege to work with you on Home Strike, in all senses of the word. I both enjoyed and learned lots from working together. We and the artists we invited were financially and infrastructurally supported by a commercial gallery with a very sympathetic and knowledgeable director, Joanna Gemes; if the burden of fundraising were added to the project it wouldn’t have materialized in the same timescale and may not have happened at all. The two of us were also enabled by our (relatively) secure academic employment:  it meant that we could cast our labour towards the exhibition as institutionally supported ‘research activity’; at the same time, increasingly unmanageable demands of

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institutional maintenance, in addition to normal teaching and administrative duties, has meant that Home Strike went the way of much of our research, pushed into evenings and weekends, including a particularly memorable long, cold Sunday in the gallery. I am intrigued by the notion of ‘uprooted and reground’. On the one hand I  tend to think of my  – and everyone else’s  – national provenance as a mere accident of birth:  of course our cultural context shapes us, as does the experience of life as an immigrant, but so do other factors that are not, or not necessarily, contingent upon these conditions. (By the way, when I  shared this view in a class  I  was teaching, a male student from Southern Europe was left speechless with rage; it was one of the few times I  worried that a verbal disagreement might escalate.) On the other, the phrase accurately captures neoliberal precarity, not as an event but a rhythm inflecting life in both the everyday and in macro-scale; I want to think about uprootings and regroundings in literal terms too, especially but not only in reference to the installations of Paula Chambers, but I’ll come back to this in my next letter. The epistolary form feels odd in its intimate formality (I haven’t written a letter in months and have one single friend left who prefers to communicate in this outdated medium) but also apposite in forging a special place for an exchange that otherwise may not have happened. We’ve been exchanging emails about plans to revisit and expand the show and have briefly discussed how we thought it went face to face, but otherwise there’s been little opportunity for reflection. Reflection with no immediate outcome feels like an indulgence. These days, letters seem to me to occupy a precarious place between the public and the private: although originally intended for the specified addressee, we are now more likely to come across them in museum collections or digitally archived online as historical documents rather than agents of exchange. Writing to one another in this way  – and for publication  – made me think of ‘public intimacy’ in all its connotations of inappropriateness but also as a challenge to the bubble of privacy as constitutive of bourgeois individualism. Giuliana Bruno10 proposes the term to describe the experience of art and museum collections as memory screens by bodies on the move, in public, but absorbed in private thought. The emergence of the sphere of domesticity has had everything to do with the division of the public and the private and its oppressive mapping onto gender roles as well as its weaponization in the



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social reproduction of sexual normativity. In this sense, our rule-breaking quasi-correspondence performs some of the aims of the exhibition, while also reflecting on it. Would it be self-aggrandizing to think of our correspondence device as an evocation of the Women’s Postal Art Event, aka Feministo, for which some of Su Richardson’s work that she showed in Home Strike was created? I vividly recall my first visit to Monica Ross’s studio in Brighton in 2000:  a core Feministo participant and co-instigator of its follow-up Phoenix, Monica was keen to stress the vibrancy of ‘correspondence’ as a shaping condition of the Women’s Postal Art Event beyond the exchange of small hand-made objects by post. After all, postal correspondence was motivated by the common recognition of many correspondences among the lives of the participants, not necessarily straightforward commonalities but opportunities for making connections and, ultimately, building networks of solidarity. As many others have noted, Feministo was borne out of consciousness-raising, a widespread if not defining activist practice of second-wave feminism, which was given visual and material form. Feministo was a labour of love, friendship and sisterhood, while also seeking to parse and dismantle the naturalized expectation of feminine nurturance and the casting of housework and care duties as ‘labours of love’. We’re still caught in the same tangles and I don’t know how this makes me feel. ‘Love’/love, Alexandra 29 October 2018 Dear Alexandra, I will start by saying I looked forward to this moment when I can reread your letter and respond to it. Not in haste, in between countless work emails, Excel spreadsheets with budgetary codes and too little time to prepare my teaching I so enjoy doing. The teaching and the ethos and ethics of education have now been eclipsed by bureaucratic and administrative labour required and expected by neoliberal and late-capitalist institutions we work for, which, paradoxically, are still called Universities. This is a topic for yet another exchange of letters. Here, I would like to start by responding to your observation regarding our correspondence device as an evocation of Feministo. This reciprocal exchange is indeed an opportunity to make connections and build networks of solidarity. I  would like to share a story with you. As you

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know, I was born in Poland which was at that time bordered off the ‘Western’ world by different ideological structures of division such as the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain. ‘Western’ consumer products were nearly impossible to obtain. However, they were often shared via postal correspondence by relatives or friends who fled the country towards the USA. One of my Mother’s friends was regularly receiving such correspondence including letters but also desirable goods. I remember one package that arrived shortly before pre-1989 Christmas. There was a deliciously fragrant bar of soap, which my Mother’s friend, while visiting us, put on our kitchen table and cut in four to share it with her three female friends, including my Mother. This gesture of sisterhood and friendship enacted through this gift was a labour of love and did not necessarily concern nurturance and care duties. Marcel Mauss11 conceptualized the gift as a free and obligatory phenomenon, which involves a triple obligation of giving, receiving and reciprocating. Economy of the gift is founded upon feminist principles of generosity and bonding but also hospitality. The soap wasn’t a necessity but an indulgence. It was also, in the eyes of a few-yearsold girl who I  was then, a celebration of womanhood and subjecthood and not the objectification of woman or her instrumentalization in the context of normalized domestic structures of maintenance, gendered violence and oppression. This quarter of a bar of soap left at our home embodied the denied and reclaimed self, and its celebration, the right to one’s body in every sense of the world. It was an act of self-care, an intimate gift oriented towards bodily well-being. Strangely, it makes me think of Małgorzata Markiewicz’s video shown at the exhibition, in which she unpicks the structure of ‘home’, the bourgeois expectation to nurture and subordinate, and deny one’s pleasure in favour of satisfying the needs of others. In the video The Resistance Kitchen (2017) (Figure 6.1), the home and the domestic become the country, Poland, entangled in national right-wing politics overpowering the female body and governing it by imposing the rights and limitations, often in violation of human rights. Markiewicz critiques the efforts of the Polish government to further restrict access to abortion, prenatal care and contraceptives in a country, in which the abortion law is already among Europe’s strictest. Ewa Ziarek12 explains the pathologies of Polish nationalism referring to the violence perpetrated against Jews in the Second World War. When my Mother and her friends were sharing the bar of soap, abortion in



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Figure 6.1  Małgorzata Markiewicz, The Resistance Kitchen, 2017, video 3 min 50 s. Video still. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Poland was, paradoxically, legal. Poland welcomed capitalism and neoliberal economy and women lost the right to their bodies. You are right in saying that this epistolary exchange gives us an opportunity to reflect and this reflection concerns looking back but also looking at ourselves, as though in a mirror, at our shared migrant backgrounds. Even though I am typing these words I would much rather prefer to write them on a piece of paper, feel and smell the paper, and hear the line drawing the letters rather than the sound of the keys of my keyboard. This electronic exchange furthers the notion of public intimacy, which you raise, and the division of the public and the private, and the reproduction of sexual normativity. It reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s13 observation that bodily experience in space makes the world accessible to all. In The Human Condition, Arendt also discusses the transition from the classic Greek understanding of the human condition based on three activities: labour, work and politics towards the modern condition, which she believes is based only on one activity:  labour. Such unequal distribution (or lack of) of activities conditioning humanity is a threat to all life as labour is no longer seen as a relationship one has with their body and the bodily functions of others.

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Being a migrant my bodily labour is embodied in the experiences of departing, arriving, being in transit and being here and there, and in between. I am sitting in my space (in fact it belongs to the bank with which I signed a Faustian pact giving me access to a place, provided I remain in my relatively secured employment and pay off the debt). It is a room but I do not consider it a physical place, rather space granted to me as my own which I carry with/ in me. This mobile space is grounded by objects although some of them are mobile enough to be uprooted with myself. Even though the objects that live with me ‘behave’ on the contrary to some of the objects inhabiting Paula Chambers’s works, there is one, which moves and migrates, or perhaps is uprooted and reground, and which reaffirms your observation which I share that we are shaped by factors not necessarily contingent upon our national provenance. Her name is Luna and she is a mannequin, a doll, an inanimate object, my other self? Today she sits under a fig tree, on an old Singer sewing machine which belonged to my grandmother and which I brought with me from Poland to the UK to feel more at home. Sometimes Luna enjoys being close to the bookshelves, sometimes she sits close to a sofa. She moves around my domestic space as she pleases, claiming it and reclaiming. She reminds me of Paula’s brides and women with guns, relocating themselves, context dependent. Luna and Paula’s female figures embody Ewa Ziarek’s concept of the ‘ethos of becoming’, ‘first, the task of resistance to power and, second, the transformation of the negative thought of resistance into a creation of new modes of being’.14 Paula’s makeshift feminist armaments resist and offer new figurations of femininity, which counter domestic ideologies and violence of maintenance labour. They have the agency and they subvert structure(s) of domestic oppressions. They reflect Ziarek’s ethics of becoming, which ‘poses and redefines the question of agency and freedom of historically constituted subjects: no longer seen as an attribute or a possession of the subject’.15 They are their own subjects and they claim the space of their own. Alexandra, thank you for this exchange and generous sharing of yourself. It has always been a pleasure and privilege to work with you. I learn so much and I  grow through this gift of reciprocity. I  feel a possibility of a different discovery of myself. Love outwards to you, Basia



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Oakland Park, Johannesburg, 10 November 2018 Dear Basia, I’m writing from Johannesburg, where I spoke at the conference Mistress Pieces (University of Johannesburg, 8–10 November) on the alternative domesticities of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp. Mobility (as freedom and as a neoliberal expectation of labourers) and claiming space are always on my mind but, from where I’m writing to you, they’ve become aggressively defamiliarized. Johannesburg is naturally gorgeous and yet also such an extreme example of what Rowland Atkinson and Sarah Blandy call ‘a securitised residential landscape’.16 The city’s middle-class neighbourhoods remain not just out of reach but out of sight, hidden behind high brick walls topped with lengths of razor wire or sometimes electrical fencing. From where I’m sitting, Atkinson and Blandy’s sociological study morphs into a gothic novel:  they identify ‘a more prickly outward appearance … intentionally intimidating to those with ill-intent, perhaps, but also generating a wider unease’17 in visitors like myself and even inhabitants who find themselves on the outside of these domestic fortifications. I am driven around in cars and vans with my fellow, mostly foreign, conference delegates, the conviviality of the inside contrasting uncomfortably with the imagined dangers lurking outside, from which we remain protected. The city opens itself up little by little, in fits and starts, and when it does it offers warmth, knowledge, hospitality and even friendship. But, in transit, I am almost overcome by the (sub)urban landscape, a jacaranda-lined ‘solidification … of fear’.18 Even the beauty of the purple jacarandas is marred by the realization that these non-indigenous trees are water-hoggers and exacerbate the dryness of the soil, killing off other plant species as a result.19 The problem, of course, is not fundamentally architectural, nor aesthetic: ‘Physical space and its structure is important in thinking through connections to a broader social politics which is increasingly antagonistic to shared forms of provision and insurance and more predisposed to private solutions and services.’20 Peaks in domestic securitization mark the spots where the social fabric has worn threadbare. On a positive note, the trip reminded me again of the smallness of the world I  notionally and physically occupy:  even my everyday understanding of globalization mostly relies on a mere handful of – admittedly influential – currents of mobility and (usually unequal) exchange. Trawling through the

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journal African Arts, I  found an article on Nollywood (the ever-expanding Nigerian film industry, including co-productions with its West-African neighbours) and the ways in which artists like Zina Sar-Wiwa have analysed its representation of domestic space as ‘not simply settings for melodramatic performances but … a microcosm for the “crisis” in social relations’.21 While Makhubu writes of social crises in Nigeria, popular culture inflected by the pseudo-democracy of social media brims with diverse stagings of ‘crises’ of different kinds at the intersection of the public and the private. Paula Chambers has identified the figure of the gun-toting woman as a real and imaginary visualization of such intersections, and makes objects out of their images sourced on the internet. Real and imaginary, grotesque and idealized, alone, in groups, and with their children, Paula’s women with guns are far from life-size, approximating instead the scales of mantle ornaments. Instead of decoration, they make up an infestation of sorts for her unsettling barricades, cobbled together out of fragments of found or occasionally stolen furniture (Figure 6.2). Domestic Front (2016) lurks in the gallery space carrying with it an unsettling out-of-place-ness and poses the even more disturbing question: under what circumstances would you build a barricade at home? It is interesting that the not quite random nor obviously systematic placement of the figures on the barricade appears to provide a model for Feminist Clutter (2018), another of Chambers’s disruptive interventions in and occupations of space. Clutter speaks of objects out of place and out or order, crossing boundaries, not knowing their place (Figure 6.3). Disruptive agency is shared and, in being shared, becomes augmented between revolting subjects and disobedient objects. Here, things are enlisted in feminist struggle, while the aggression against which the highly securitized homes I saw in Johannesburg are guarded is shown to emanate from within the domestic sphere, not (or not merely) spilling into it from the outside. If we were to revisit Home Strike I’d like to include some textile works by Senzeni Marasela:  something from her Theodorah Comes to Johannesburg series, a durational project led by performance and with manifestations across different media including photography and textiles. Marasela assumes the persona of Theodorah, a Lesotho woman married to Gebane, while also embodying the experience of many Black South African women who were



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Figure  6.2  Paula Chambers,  Domestic Front  (2016–), mixed media installation. Installation shot, l’étrangère, 2018. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

deprived of their husbands for indefinite lengths of time through political imprisonment, activism (which often led to imprisonment or exile) and labour migration. Inspired by Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela,22 a South African reworking of Penelope’s painful wait for Ulysses, Marasela invents the character of Theodorah who makes the long journey to Johannesburg in search for her husband, evoking all its implications: leaving children behind, loneliness, uncertainty, guilt and frustration. Such monstrous separations were borne out of Apartheid violence in its quieter but arguably more sustained and efficient manifestations than the widely broadcast murderous suppression of protests and uprisings. Apartheid divisions required more than highly securitized homes: by forcing so many into migrant labour, exile and prison, they put enormous strains on personal relationships and effectively gutted the family lives of whole communities. Theodorah and women like her found themselves on ‘journeys into strangeness’ by the apartheid migration system,23 forced into a state of perpetual homesickness. In one of the iterations

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Figure 6.3  Paula Chambers, Feminist Clutter (2018–), mixed media installation. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

of the Theodorah project, the photographic series Ijeremani Lam (2013), Marasela embodies Theodorah in the manic (in)activity and awkwardness of public waiting: she is looking for her husband, from whom she has long been separated, in an unfamiliar and hostile city. Other than subtle but noticeable changes in comportment, Marasela’s embodiment of Theodorah relies on a single and powerful prop, a dress that identifies her as a married woman from Lesotho, a ‘Seshoeshoe’, which she has committed to wear for a period of five years.24 The dress, a version of which is in the art collection of the Apartheid Museum, is recognizable to all South Africans as a material shorthand for marriage but also for these cruelly protracted, involuntary separations. Rather than a fictional character, Theodorah’s elusive husband Gebane is a ‘phantom’, who is keenly sought only so that Theodorah can finally liberate herself from him.25 At the ‘Mistress Pieces’ conference, Marasela spoke briefly about her decision to remain in the dress whose faded red colour evidenced



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the authenticity of her durational performance. Later, over drinks, she laughed over the discomfort that her insistence to wear this dress still causes at art world parties, to which she’s invited and celebrated as the art ‘mistress’ that she is and which she also partly spoils, like a true feminist killjoy.26 How could we best show Theodorah in Home Strike 2.0? The dress is powerful but its material code is not as easily readable outside South Africa. Marasela’s party anecdotes unpick the seams of complicity and contradiction upon which so many of our professional (and maybe not just professional) transactions rely. A commission rather than a loan might be the thing. Alexandra xx 12 December 2018 Dear Alexandra, In your letter you mention being a visitor in Johannesburg. I have just come back from Melbourne, where I  organized a conference session focused on feminist activism, social injustice and contemporary art. It made me rethink many issues in relation to space, domesticity and home, one of them being the context, which is often neglected and which makes art pieces, objects, rituals, values, body language and so on not easily readable, as you have noted, outside of country of origin or ‘birth’. This journey also reaffirmed my interest in the figure of the visitor in relation to the private and the public. Among many, arriving with me on the plane and those already in Australia settling in or having settled already, I was a visitor to a colonized country, in which the agency of indigenous people has been severely compromised also by practices of homemaking, yet another form of colonization. I  will come back to this point later in this letter. I  have realized I  am a visitor not only when I travel outside of the UK but also living in the UK, where, even though I am a permanent resident or have what is now called ‘settled status’, I am still considered a passing visitor. Would naturalization change this status? I doubt it. I often come across the expression ‘occupying space’, which in itself suggests violence in relation to space  – claiming space, taking space, making your own and rarely shared. Is homemaking about building fortresses? Is this yet another neoliberal and late-capitalist strategy to individualize what should be shared, appreciated and lived as common? This is not what we have discussed in this exchange of letters, but this brutal and often ignorant spatial possession

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disrespecting cultures and values is something that I wish to address in Home Strike 2.0. It seems to me the potential inclusion of Theodorah is a prelude to acknowledging the dispossession of others and the colonization of the private through the public or the indigenous through the occupant(s). Being European, I acknowledge that often I have been ignorant to my white privilege and I grew up admiring what was mythologized in Poland as ‘Western’ and yet blind to its culture damage to what is pejoratively termed as ‘other’, ‘different’, ‘exotic’ or ‘primitive’; so many names and terms to name ‘the enemy’ out of fear of difference. In my teenage and early adult years I arrogantly neglected dispossessed others and failed to always welcome the other with respect and partnership. An expanded Home Strike 2.0 would for me be a gesture of a heartfelt apology and a commitment to acknowledge intergenerational traumas caused by unequal (on what grounds?) divisions of space. You talk about alternative domesticities, boundaries and disruptive agency, which make me think of Sera Waters’s textile work, which I  came across when in Melbourne, focused on hauntings in settler colonial homes. Those ‘genealogical ghostscapes’, as she calls them, define the places of traumas and Australian condition of living in the aftermath of colonialization. What we often discuss in the context of the comforting tradition of homemaking might in fact be seen as a brutal violation of private space not appropriate or ‘correct’ if assessed from an imperial perspective. The cushions, curtains or blinds, imported interior design rituals aimed to beatify (if only) and gestures of homemaking, most often performed by women, serve to reinforce colonial structures precisely through the comforting traditions of homemaking, the quite particular aestheticization and culturalization of space. The ‘home’ and activities of the domestic space are significant when considering setting up a ‘new’ home. This transfer of homeland from centre to periphery and the recreation of space was a particular duty of women who were at the forefront of enforcing imperialist values, let alone in Australia. On the one hand this settling down is privatized and often accompanied by feelings of isolation and separation; on the other the work of domestication signifies the settling of land in which a new home appropriates intimate spaces and becomes a surrogate for the centre with claims for ownership. Rosemary Marangoly George in Politics of Home27 draws attention to relocations and domestic spaces becoming the centre of subjugation of ‘the natives’. This disposition of power



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and the oppressive practice of domestication and domestic management also demonstrates the self-affirmation of colonial women and further production of class and race distinctions. This multiple understanding of home, produced as what Avtah Brah called ‘multi-placedness’,28 is complicated in Waters’s works. The artist produced a series of camouflage cloaks, sewing and stitching a story of her female ancestor Wilhelmina, a homemaker and a hunter (Figures  6.4 and 6.5). She traced Wilhelmina’s photographs in The Nest family album, dated mid- to late 1920s. Referring to them through the cloaks complicates the gendering of settler colonialism by portraying Wilhelmina as a matriarch, protective mother and wallaby hunter.29 (Waters 2018) At that time hunting was not only a pastime but it served for clearing or extermination purposes particularly around pastoral properties and in the current Little Dip Conservation Park in South Australia. Waters’s ancestors used to camp in this area surrounding what formerly was known as Robe. Wilhelmina and her family, in Waters’s words, were hunters and hunted. They survived two world war periods and fought for their lives. The brutality of their survival made them prioritize themselves. Waters’s cloaks depict this dual status and the violence of their livelihoods. Boring Conversations #2: Cloak of Invisibility (2016) and Camouflage Cloaks for Invaders: Robe (2016) (Figure 6.6) raise issues around the political potential of domesticity through the lens of colonialism. Waters explores how colonial powers operate within the intimate space of home and how they disavow agency. The Camouflage Cloak for Invaders: Robe is child-size cloaks painstakingly hand-stitched from materials to which Wilhelmina would have had access:  kangaroo pelts, cotton, leather and heavy-duty army-issue canvas bags. They are ‘care-fully’ fabric lined to provide comfort and warmth, which references school robes made by mothers for their children during wartime. These cloaks act as protective wear which could be used as camouflage in the Australian bush to hide from predators. They are also ‘creations of sutured animal pelts, re-structured and re-purposed for family proportions and security’ (Waters 2018).  Those animal hides on the one hand protect the vulnerable, on the other make the colonizer invisible. The heavy fabrics used are juxtaposed against softer materials applied for the other cloaks, Boring Conversations #2: Cloak of Invisibility produced from towels, cotton, lycra and

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Figure 6.4  Sera Waters, Boring Conversations #2: Cloak of Invisibility (front), 2016. Towels, found long stitch, felt, lycra, cotton, variable dimensions. Source: Photograph by Grant Hancock.



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Figure 6.5  Sera Waters, Boring Conversations #2: Cloak of Invisibility (back), 2016. Towels, found long stitch, felt, lycra, cotton, variable dimensions. Source: Photograph by Grant Hancock.

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Figure  6.6  Sera Waters,  Camouflage Cloaks for Invaders:  Robe, 2016. Pelt, cotton, leather, heavy duty canvas, wallpaper, brass hooks. Wallpaper: 160 cm h × 170 cm w; Installation: 230 cm h × 170 cm w. Source: Photograph by Grant Hancock.

felt. Waters’s concept of ‘ghostscapes’ acknowledges the metaphorical haunting in settler colonial nations. The artist explains that ‘in Australian history “ghosts” are the repercussions of disavowal’, denying the ‘brutal truth(s)’ of colonization (Waters 2018). There is a lot to be said about those works, the



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historical presences and absences and homes as places where the denial of responsibility for unrecognized pasts is reproduced, and I hope we can expand on this in the exhibition. Through domestic materiality, stitching, embroidery and various textile practices Waters engages with inherited patterns of colonial homemaking, the gendered hand-made and home-craft practices passed through generations. Interestingly, the artist makes references to the concept of care, which allows her to expose and unsettle the comforting textile traditions as unhomely, ‘discomfiting’ and uncaring but also express hope for reconciliation and taking responsibility. Alexandra, I hope that Home Strike 2.0 will offer us an opportunity to take responsibility for domestic disruptions on many levels and acknowledge home making also as a pervasive form of colonization, violent domestic practice embodying fear through territory making and marking. The artists we brought together in Home Strike 1.0 act, often through repetitive crafting, sculpting, filming, making. This intense tactile labour exposes brutal constructs within the home (understood very broadly) but also identifies the need for ethics of care when expressing disobedience through unsettling eroded spectacle of feminine domesticity. Those gestures show incredible force and power behind anarcho-feminist sensibility and practice of dissent and disruption. Love to you, Basia x 18 December 2018 Dear Basia, I’m so excited by the idea of Home Strike 2.0 as an engine of self-reflection, recognition of privilege and acknowledgement of responsibility, as well as plans for the next, expanded iteration of the exhibition we curated together. Like yours, my position in relation to white privilege and Western colonialism is complicated. As a Greek, assuming that I  descend, in some way, from the inhabitants of the city-states of Athens and their influential frenemies, I must bear some responsibility for the idea and early practice of imperialist expansionism, and the foundations of cultural racism. On the other hand, growing up my relationship with the ‘West’ was almost as distanced and romanticized as yours in Poland; we still referred to ‘Europe’ as a faraway place (separated from Greece by Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania), substantially

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richer and more civilized than ‘us’. My whiteness is neither self-evident nor stable: some years ago in Los Angeles I requested a Spanish-language book in a branch of the biggest booksellers in the country and experienced, for a brief moment, what it feels to be classified as Hispanic on American land that until 1848 belonged to Mexico. In LA I did everything wrong: I walked where white people are expected to only drive, I took public transport, I talked with strangers (and the only strangers who would talk to me were people of colour). Walking around the Staples Centre past 9.00 pm, I  saw (mostly Chicano) families with small children and was reminded of my own childhood in Thessaloniki, where my peers and I were happily included in the social lives of grown-ups. I recalled feelings of amazement and pity at the exotic idea of a bedtime, which appeared to so strictly regulate children’s existence in American movies. At the end of each day in LA, of course, my privilege would be reconfirmed by my accommodation arrangements. I’m now here in Britain as a legal immigrant, as settled or unsettled as most of the parents I meet at the gates of my children’s school. I’ve been here for a very long time but my accent will never go away and it hurts whenever my utterances are met with narrowed eyes of (feigned, I imagine) incomprehension. This happens frequently in my exchanges with people I’ve never met before, although rarely in London. Is their surprise at my accent an indication that I otherwise fit in? Do I really? And what does it mean to fit in in a place as diverse as London? I am reminded of the Seinfeld episode ‘The Visa’ (season 4, episode 17), where George Costanza, haplessly punching above his weight, approaches a beautiful Chinese American who turns out to be a lawyer with a wide-ranging portfolio: ‘Divorce, patents, immigration and naturalization.’ Taking advantage of Jerry Seinfeld’s absence, George attempts to cast himself as the funny man of the group and quips: ‘What is that, immigrants come over, you show them how to act natural?’30 The episode ends with the deportation of Babu, a Pakistani restaurateur who loses his business following Jerry’s bad advice, and then also his US visa when Jerry fails to sponsor him as he had promised to do. Laughing through the tears … Another proposal for Home Strike 2.0: the artists’ book Cultural Tips for New Americans by Jeff and Alina Bliumis, a compilation of advice for new arrivals to the United States on how to ‘act natural’.31 Partly researched from a range of unofficial sources and partly crowdsourced from fellow foreigner



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friends, the book includes tips such as the interpretation of an offer of gum as a subtle hint that someone has bad breath, and thus the offer should always be accepted: the condition of ‘not fitting in’ is holistically and phenomenologically defined, spanning all senses and sensibilities by offending both. The project involved the installation of posters with tips on phone kiosks and stickers in various places on the Bowery and in Chinatown and Soho in May 2011, an exchange of the book for further tips by resident aliens, and led on to the exhibition Cultural Tips Takeaway  at Toomer Labzda Gallery, New  York. Executed at a time when the United States was less of a hostile environment for immigrants than it is at present, when babies and children are forcibly separated from their parents, held in unsuitable and traumatizing conditions and occasionally left to die,32 Cultural Tips captures the low-level hysteria of ‘what it means to be an American’ with humour and irreverence, while outsourcing the work of defining it to immigrant and transient populations. Like housekeeping, figuring out what it means to be an American is a dirty job so immigrants have to do it. In her solo work, Alina Bliumis delves deeper into the semiology of nationhood focusing particularly on how nature is co-opted in its service: Amateur Bird Watching at Passport Control (2016–17), a series of forty-three prints, features birds sourced from the passport covers from countries across the world. In his catalogue essay, Boris Groys reflects: The common characteristic of all these birds is the fact that they are local – be it a pelican from Barbados or a parrot from Dominica. All these birds are prisoners of their territories. Do they ever dream to become free, to migrate, to visit different countries – and not only to draw always the same circles over the same territory? We do not know it. But if the birds have these dreams it is the citizens of the states that have images of these birds in their passports who realize these dreams – at least in symbolic terms. Thus, even if a parrot remains on Dominica and a pelican – on the Barbados the passports with their images have a chance to be checked at the airports all around the world. Whatever can be said about the migrants one thing is sure: they realize their birds’ dream of flying.33

I find the image with which Groys ends beautifully poetic but also in need of much qualification. Some passports hinder rather than enable their holders’ lines of flight; and it is often, ironically, the dreams of the most exotic of birds that remain unrealized due to the political and economic status of the

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countries that have chosen them as their emblems. As Marina Warner34 noted in reference to female goddesses and other gendered archetypes, giving form to big ideas can be a very mixed blessing. I’m not sure if we’ll be in touch again before the holidays so I feel I should wish you a Merry Christmas. As a lapsed Greek Orthodox Christian and committed atheist since the tender age of six, I don’t give much credence to such holidays, though I remain curious about those of other religions. Nevertheless, it bears repeating that the main characters of the nativity narrative were all forced to travel away from home for a compulsory census ordered by a European empire and, as a result, found themselves homeless and vulnerable in a strange place. Rather than love, which seems to translate too seamlessly into a consumerist gift transaction, compassion in response to displacement should be recognized as the true spirit of this much exploited holiday. In compassion and solidarity, always, Alexandra xx

Notes 1 Margaretta Jolly, In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 2 Marsha Meskimmon, ‘Epistolary Essays, Exilic Emergence and Ephemeral Ellipses… Some Tentative Steps towards the Creation of a Shimmering Stage for Critical, Corporeal, Collaboration’, in Dance as Critical Heritage: Symposium Report 1, ed. M. Meskimmon, A. von Rosen and M. Sand (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg Press, 2014), pp. 27–48 (p. 31). 3 Ibid., p. 29. 4 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (London: Athlone Press, [1984] 2004). 5 Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, [1998] 2005). 6 Hilary Robinson, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 98. 7 Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller, Uprootings/Regroundings. Questions of Home and Migration (Oxford: Berg, 2003). 8 Ibid., p. 1. 9 Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto, 2011).



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10 Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007). 11 Marcel Mauss, Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archais Societies (New York: W W Norton, [1924] 1990). 12 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, ‘Melancholic Nationalism and the Pathologies of Commemorating the Holocaust in Poland’, in Imaginary Neighbours: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, ed. D. Glowacka (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2007). 13 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 57–8. 14 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 6. 15 Ibid., p. 15. 16 Rowland Atkinson and Sarah Blandy, Domestic Fortress: Fear and the New Home Front (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 156. 17 Ibid., p. 158. 18 Ibid. 19 Julia Denny-Dimitriou, ‘They’re Beautiful, but Jacarandas Can Do Harm, Warns Expert’, News 24: The Witness, 1 November 2010. Available online: https://www. news24.com/Archives/Witness/Theyre-beautiful-but-jacarandas-can-do-harmwarns-expert-20150430 (accessed 30 November 2018). 20 Atkinson and Blandy, Domestic Fortress, p. 157. 21 Nomusa Makhubu, ‘“This House Is Not for Sale”: Nollywood’s Spatial Politics and Concepts of “Home” in Zina Sar-Wiwa’s Art’, African Arts 49, no. 4 (2016): 58–69 (58). Available online: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ AFAR_a_00314 (accessed 30 November 2018). 22 Njabulo Ndebele, The Cry of Winnie Mandela: A Novel (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2004). 23 Koyo Kouoh, ‘Senzeni Mthwakazi Marasela: Profile of 2015 FutureGreat Artist’, ArtReview, March 2015. 24 Yvette Greslé, ‘Senzeni Marasela: “I Remind Them of Their Own Waiting”’, 14 September 2014. Available online: https://writinginrelation.wordpress. com/2014/09/14/senzeni-marasela-i-remind-them-of-their-own-waiting/ (accessed 1 March 2019). 25 Ibid. 26 Sara Ahmed, ‘Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)’, The Scholar and Feminist Online 8, no. 3 (2010). Available online: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ polyphonic/print_ahmed.htm (accessed 1 March 2019). 27 Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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28 Avtah Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996). 29 Sera Waters, Genealogical Ghostscapes: Unsettling Settler Colonial Home-Making Legacies in South Australia (PhD thesis: Visual Arts – Major studio project), University of South Australia, 2018. 30 Seinfeld Scripts, ‘The Visa’ (27 January 1993), written by Peter Mehlman and transcribed by Dave (ratboy), 1989–98. Available online: http://www. seinfeldscripts.com/TheVisa.html (accessed 18 December 2018). 31 Alina Bliumis and Jeff Bliumis, Cultural Tips for New Americans (New York: Toomer Labzda Gallery, 2011). 32 Emma Graham-Harrison, ‘Anger Grows after Death of Guatemalan Migrant Girl Held in US’, Guardian, 16 December 2018. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/15/anger-grows-death-guatemalan-migrantgirl-held-us (accessed 18 December 2018). 33 Boris Groys, ‘What Do the Birds Dream About?’, Political Animals (catalogue), Aperto Raum, Berlin, 2018. Available online: http://www.alinabliumis.com/ amateur-bird-watching-at-passport-control-1/ (accessed 18 December 2018). 34 Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1985] 2000).

 

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Crossing literal and conceptual borders: Nepantla practices of the borderlands in performance projects by Guillermo Gomez-Peña Eva Zetterman

Into the borderlands – nepantla – history In performance projects by Guillermo Gomez-Peña, conceptions of homeland, displacement and belonging are explored through politically informed enactments that relate the present with the past and thus brings forth connections between colonial pasts, present neocolonial conditions and US–Mexico border history. The US–Mexico border history goes back to the Mexican-American war in the mid-19th century when a new borderline was drawn on the map further south, stretching across the landscape from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean and thus incorporating almost half of the Mexican territory into US territory, what is now the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and California. As a consequence, Mexican communities and families situated on each side of the new US–Mexico border were separated, Mexicans living in what had been the northern parts of Mexico became US nationals, and the new minority group Mexican Americans and their descendants – as well as later border-crossers – became treated as second-class citizens in an expanding US nation state.1 The silence of this relatively recent period in US history, coupled with a continuous political polarization between the United States and Mexico as nation states, has grown into a political situation that today is displayed through the politics of President Donald Trump and his promises

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to materialize the border as a dividing barrier between the United States and Mexico by building a wall. In theorizing the US–Mexico border history, a central component is the concept the borderlands. Defined in Border Studies as a historical as well as spatial whole with cross-boundary economic ties and social interactions between diverse border communities, Chicana/o scholars often stress connections in the borderlands through people, memories, bodies and identities. In writings by Gloria Anzaldúa and Emma Pérez, for example, the borderlands is theorized as a zone from which to re-conceptualize history as a narration shaped by a multiplicity of voices and as a space for intellectual consciousness and psychological awareness from which to acknowledge differences, accept contradictions and construct identities that transgress singular identifications.2 Anzaldúa describes her own subject position in the borderlands as follows: To survive the borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.3 Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance practice is highly informed by his bicultural experiences of the borderlands in the US–Mexico border region. He was born in 1955 in Mexico City, where he studied linguistics and Latin American literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico). He then began performing as a street artist with acciones poeticas (poetic actions) in Mexico City. In 1978, he went to California to study visual art at Cal Arts (California Institute of the Arts), where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1981 and a Master of Arts in 1983. Since 1999, he has dual nationality. The performances Gómez-Peña has carried out since his relocation to California in the late 1970s are often collaborative projects with shifting constellations of participants in various artist collectives/ performance groups that he has co-organized, such as Poyesis Genética in Los Angeles, BAW/TAF (the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo) in San Diego and Pocha Nostra in San Francisco. In addition to working as a performance artist, Gómez-Peña is a prolific writer of various texts in which he comments on his performance practice. He



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defines himself as a ‘border artist’ that address ‘border issues’ by ‘experimenting with the fringes between art and society, legalidad and illegality, English and español, male and female, North and South, self and other, and subverting these relationships’.4 He has also stated that he applies an ‘ultra-baroque aesthetics’ from a methodological framework based in a ‘subjective perspective’ and that his performance projects are works-in-progress in dialogue with history.5 In this chapter, I examine a selection of Gómez-Peña’s performance projects by relating his performance practice of crossing literal and conceptual borders with his retrospective, memory-work accounts of the borderlands. The selected examples are two solo performances from the 1970s in Los Angeles (Mexican Homeless and Loneliness of the Immigrant), three performance projects from the 1980s with BAW/TAF (Border Actions, Border Realities and TijuanaNiagara), one performance project with performance artist Coco Fusco in the 1990s (Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West), one performance project with performance artist Roberto Sifuentes in the 1990s (Cruci/Fiction Project) and one performance project with Pocha Nostra starting in the 2000s (Mapa/Corpo). In these performances is a recurrent central theme addressing questions of homeland, displacement and belonging by crossing literal and conceptual borders. The selection of performances is covering a time period from the 1970s to the 2010s and can thus be considered a representative selection of Gómez-Peña’s performance practice of retrospective, memorywork accounts. Some concepts of history and memory that are relevant to relate to GómezPeña’s performance practice of retrospective memory-work accounts are postmemory, the repertoire / archive and nepantla. Postmemory is a concept that literature historian Marianne Hirsch coined for indirect memories of traumatic events inherited by or transmitted to subsequent generations, whom in relating to their past undergo processes of memory-work that include traumatic memories.6 The repertoire is a concept employed by performance scholar Diana Taylor for the transmission of cultural memories through embodied practices.7 Since the enactments of embodied memories in GómezPeña’s performance projects are analysed in this text through documenting photographs representing memories of live performances, the transmission of cultural memories through the embodied practices in Gómez-Peña’s performance projects shifts from the repertoire and enters into the archive.

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Nepantla, finally, is a concept that indicates a space of being-in-the-middle or an experience of in-between-ness. Nepantla is a Nahuatl term that has been traced back in time to the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs in the sixteenth century to describe their experience of ‘in-between’ by living within two different ‘worlds’ or ‘cultures’ being colonized by the Spaniards.8 The meaning of nepantla is thus not the same as hybridity or syncretism, which refer to a mixture or blending of two or more components or parts into something new and different, a third version. On the chicanoart webpage, nepantla is explained as follows: Sometimes, it is a reference to living in the borderlands or crossroads, and the process of creating alternative spaces in which to live, function or create. In other words, it is the process of developing political, cultural or psychological consciousness as a means of survival. For populations impacted by the historical trauma of colonialism and what some have termed spiritual conquest, one strategy of cultural survival, or decolonization is the process of transculturation, which in many ways is resisting the mainstream, while, reinterpreting and redefining cultural difference as a place of power.9

Anzaldúa describes her experience of the borderlands as being ‘cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems’ in ‘a constant state of mental nepantilism’.10 This constant state of mental nepantilism, according to Anzaldúa, gives rise to the capacity to see the world through multiple identifications and historical perspectives, a double vision: Living between cultures results in ‘seeing’ double, first from the perspective of one culture, then from the perspective of another. Seeing from two or more perspectives simultaneously renders those cultures transparent. Removed from that culture’s center, you glimpse the sea in which you’ve been immersed but to which you were oblivious, no longer seeing the world the way your were enculturated to see it. From the in-between place of nepantla, you see through the fiction of the monoculture … As you struggle to form a new identity, a demythologization of race occurs. You begin to see race as an experience of reality from a particular perspective and a specific time and place (history), not as a fixed feature of personality or identity.11

A third explanation of the concept nepantla is described by Lara Medina, who relates the concept to a place of meaning-making and processes of healing:



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Nepantla is not syncretism in the traditional sense, but an example of transculturation, or a continuous encounter of two or more divergent worldviews. Once the tensions of nepantla are understood and confronted, and the native Self is recovered and continuously healed, nepantla becomes a psychological, spiritual, and political space that Chicanas/os and Latinas/os and other marginalized peoples transform as a place of meaning-making.12

My guiding question in this chapter is how to understand the selected performances by Gómez-Peña addressing questions of homeland, displacement and belonging in light of the concept nepantla and as nepantla spaces. In the following are the performance projects by Gómez-Peña organized into four thematic clusters representing enactments of the body as migrant, as border-crosser, as caged and crucified, and as map for interactive rituals. In some of these clusters are Gómez-Peña’s enactments of bodies visually interpreted as bodyscapes, a concept explained by visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff as the visually represented body that together with its context, framing and style creates a complex of signs that transmits meanings.13 Following a timeline, I start with the earliest performances and end with the latest.

The migrant body When Gómez-Peña was an art student at Cal Arts, he began working in the medium performance as a strategy for ‘becoming visible’ as a Mexican migrant in the urban context of Los Angeles.14 In two interrelated solo performances staged as unannounced interventions in public spaces he addressed conditions of loneliness, being homeless and cultural displacement. In the Mexican Homeless (1978), he laid on the sidewalk of a street for twelve hours with his body wrapped in a zarape (a colourful Mexican clothing) and surrounded by various personal belongings and burning candles.15 This performance turned his body as bodyscape into a signifier of a Mexican (the Mexican zarape), a homeless (his various personal belongings), maybe even a deceased/dead person (the burning candles, the site and the length of time). During the hours he laid on the sidewalk, nobody tried to interact with him or help him. In one

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of his texts he later wrote that the Mexican Homeless was ‘an expression of the despair and loneliness felt by a newly arrived immigrant’ but ‘most people ignored me’ and ‘I discovered that as a Mexican (and a homeless person), I was literally invisible to the Anglo Californian population’.16 In the subsequent performance Loneliness of the Immigrant (1979), he laid on the floor in a public elevator for twenty-four hours with his body wrapped in a batik cloth and tied with ropes into a bundle. On the elevator wall was a cardboard posted with a handwritten text reading: ‘Moving to another country hurts more than moving to another house, another face, another lover … In one way or another we all are or will be immigrants. Surely one day we will be able to crack this shell open, this unbearable loneliness, and develop a transcontinental identity.’17 In this performance, his motionless body wrapped in cloth and tied with ropes into a bundle indicates that his body is a dead body that has been abandoned or even dumped on the floor in the compartmentalized space of an elevator for public transportation. The text posted on the wall might not, however, be interpreted by elevator users as directly related to the body on the floor. Loneliness was staged as a metaphor for his ‘painful birth into a new country, a new identity – Chicano – and a new language’.18 During the hours he laid on the elevator floor, no one tried to help him. Elevator users variably threatened, kicked and cursed him. He even overheard two adolescents discuss the possibility of setting him on fire.19 At one point, a dog peed on him. Finally, security guards threw him into an industrial trashcan, where he spent the last two hours of the day until fellow art students from Cal Arts finally released him.20 Gómez-Peña’s choice of performance as medium for becoming visible and addressing conditions of cultural displacement, loneliness and being homeless can from the perspective of the concept nepantla be interpreted as creating a space for meaning-making as a means of survival in straddling different value systems and encountering divergent worldviews. He later wrote that his ‘early solo performances in California reflected the pain of the departure [from Mexico] and the indescribable loneliness of the immigrant’ and that ‘this process found its most effective and organic format in performance’, saying, This abrupt confrontation with otherness triggered many processes inside of me, the most significant being the exploration of the conflictive relationship



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between my Mexican past and my U.S. present, my Latin American identity and my new Chicano reality. … I was desperately trying to find my place and my voice in a country with a long tradition of ‘Mexiphobia’. Performance gave me a vocabulary and a syntax to express the processes of loss, rupture and de-territorialization I was undergoing. And through my performance practice, I was able to begin connecting with others who were experiencing a similar drama.21

Gómez-Peña’s early solo performances in Los Angeles were staged as interventions in public spaces to unprepared and involuntary audiences. The dialogue that was opened up with its audiences did not, however, include reactions of kindness, empathy or compassion. Quite the opposite. The reaction in the open street to Homeless was indifference. The reaction to Loneliness in the compartmentalized space of the elevator was hostility. Neither did the strategy of performance make him become visible in the urban context of Los Angeles. The reaction to Homeless was as if he was a non-existing part of society. The reaction confirmed his status as an invisible Mexican immigrant in Los Angeles. As a bodyscape in Loneliness, he gave rise to strong xenophobic reactions and his body was transformed into waste material that could be expelled from the social body of Los Angeles as excrements after digestion. In one of his texts he reveals that in his next performance, he felt compelled to scream on top of his lungs over the Los Angeles skyscrapers, ‘Deal with me! I am here to stay! Fucking deal with me! See my people all around you! See yourself in me, in my people, in our collective pain! Deal with us! We are here to stay!’22

The border-crossing body When Gómez-Peña was a member of BAW/TAF, a binational collective with Anglo, Mexican and Chicana/o artists and activists, BAW/TAF enacted site-specific performances along the borderlines of the United States in both the south and the north. At the southern borderline, BAW/TAF declared the US–Mexico border region ‘a laboratory for social and aesthetic experimentation’ and staged several series of performances called Border Actions, Border Realities, Border Sutures, End of the Line and Documented/

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Undocumented.23 In Border Actions (1985), BAW/TAF staged various kinds of stereotypical symbols that represent the US–Mexico border through playful and ironic enactments of their bodies as large binoculars, big water bottles, artificial cactuses, Spanish inquisitors, cars packed with fictive border crossers and fictive US border patrols. The Border Actions at the US–Mexico border were staged at a site where Playas de Tijuana in Mexico meet the Border State Park in San Diego, which meant that BAW/TAF was ‘literally performing for audiences in both countries simultaneously’.24 In Border Realities, BAW/TAF staged performances that were enacted across the border through the fence and thus occurred simultaneously on US and Mexican soil. At that time, in the 1980s, there was a strip of sand of about ten metres at the end of the US–Mexico border at the Pacific Ocean where there was no fence.25 On this spot that is described by Gómez-Peña as ‘the beginning or end of the US/Mexico border, depending on the perspective’,26 BAW/TAF staged a ‘border reality’ through the fence called Border Wedding (1988). This performance was the actual marriage between Emily Hicks and Gómez-Peña. Their wedding ceremony was enacted through the fence and their wedding guests were situated on both sides of the border and standing in a half-circle on the strip of sand where the end of the fence met the Pacific Ocean (Figure 7.1). In the series of Border Realities, BAW/TAF also exchanged food and art through the fence and kissed and caressed through the fence ‘illegally’.27 According to Gómez-Peña, the intention with Border Realities was to challenge media conceptions of the border as a ‘war zone’ and instead create a sense of ‘no border’.28 A subsequent performance project during Gómez-Peña’s BAW/TAF period was Tijuana-Niagara (1988) together with Emily Hicks. In this project, he and Emily Hicks travelled for a month on a ‘performance pilgrimage’ along the US–Canada border between Ontario and New York State in a ‘mobile temple’ of kitsch made of pseudo-indigenous souvenirs and religious kitsch purchased in both Tijuana and Niagara Falls, carrying out fifteen ‘performance actions’ by which they commented ‘on the commodification of ethnicity by the tourist industries of border towns’.29 These performance actions included begging for money, border art auctions, photo session with Emily Hicks and Gómez-Peña as ‘authentic border shamans and witches’, spiritual consultations for tourists



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Figure  7.1  Emily Hicks and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Border Wedding (1988), the Border Field State Park / Playas de Tijuana. Source: Photo © BAW/TAF.

and the broadcasting of bilingual poetry from one shore of the Niagara River to the other with a huge megaphone.30 In the archives I  have found three photo-documentations representing memories of their live performance actions in Tijuana-Niagara. In these photos is Gómez-Peña seen wearing oversized black pants and a black jacket, no shirt, large earrings and long necklaces. Emily Hicks on the other hand is seen in changing outfits. In one photograph she is dressed in a black miniskirt and has a pink feather-shawl over her shoulders, wears a big wig with long blond hair and holds a large red fan in one of her hands. In a second photograph she is dressed in a black dress that reaches down to below her knees and has a black veil covering her head as a burka. In a third photograph she is wearing a black fur on top of the pink feather-shawl over her shoulders, has no visible clothes covering her legs apart from black nylon stockings and has her face covered by a wrestler’s mask similar to the mask of the Mexican community

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activist Superbarrio (with whom BAW/TAF collaborated in projects at the US–Mexico border). In the last two of these photographs is a large map of the American continent spread across the floor inside their mobile temple of kitsch. The map is situated so that the viewer of the photographs sees the map from an upside-down angle with South America in the north and Canada in the south. On the geographical territory of Canada that is closest to the viewer are placed three large red Mexican chilli fruits, while a statue of a large Mickey Mouse head is placed on the geographical area of the United States. In the photograph where Emily Hicks is wearing black nylon stockings and has her face covered by a wrestler’s mask, she is sitting on top of the map with her legs spread wide apart. Her pink feather-shawl is covering the geographical territory of the United States, and right in front of her crotch is the large head of Mickey Mouse rising in the air (Figure 7.2). These performative acts contribute to a symbolic transformation of the United States by which its geographical territory on the map becomes invisible by being covered by a pink cloud of feathers and its identity as a nation state is turned into a symbolic Disneyland by being represented by the Mickey Mouse head. With the title of the performance – Tijuana-Niagara – the United States as a nation state has completely disappeared from the northern part of the American continent. What is left is a hyphen into which the United States is transformed into a line representing a border-space connecting the nation states of Canada and Mexico. The signifying process these textual, visual and symbolic transformations cause turns the United States into an empty space by which it seems to have vanished. Where border-patrolled boundaries are crossed and where different worlds in the borderlands confront or meet each other, nepantla spaces are always present. The performance projects Border Actions and Border Realities at the US–Mexico border by BAW/TAF and the ‘border pilgrimage’ Tijuana-Niagara with Emily Hicks at the US–Canada border can from a nepantla perspective be understood as nepantla spaces of living at literal and metaphorical crossroads in the borderlands and a process of creating alternative spaces in which to live, function and create. The performance projects by BAW/TAF staged across the US–Mexico border and their ‘illegal’ exchanges through the fence of food, art and expressions of love can be interpreted as nepantla spaces in which to perform enactments of embodied memories/embodied practices of



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Figure  7.2  Emily Hicks and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Tijuana-Niagara (1988), Niagara, Canada. Source: Photo © BAW/TAF.

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transmission of cultural memories of homeland and belonging when there was no separating fence between two sides of a border moved south. As such, the projects discussed above are staged as in-between-spaces seeing time, place and history from several perspectives simultaneously and creating processes of transculturation.

The caged and crucified body The performance project Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–4) was written, directed and performed by Gómez-Peña in collaboration with the Cuban American performance artist Coco Fusco in protest to the global celebrations in 1992 of the 500-year-anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s so called discovery of the American continent (Figure 7.3).31

Figure 7.3  Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Madrid (1992), Columbus Plaza, Madrid. Source: Photo © Coco Fusco.



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With this project they recycled colonial practices with ‘human exhibits, pseudo-ethnographic tableaux vivants, and the living dioramas’ that toured in Europe and America from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries.32 As two undiscovered Amerindians in a cage they claimed to belong to a group of Guatinauis from the island Guatinau that had somehow been overlooked for five centuries in the Gulf of Mexico. Their outfits were a mixture of clothes and items that referred to both contemporary popular culture and to precolonial culture in the Americas, especially Gómez-Peña’s accessories and feathers connoting Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs. With this project, often called The Couple in the Cage, they toured internationally for two years and visited museums and public spaces in nine cities on three continents.33 As performance scholar Amelia Jones has noted on this piece, the final word of the project title was to be filled in with the name of each venue they visited.34 At each location, they lived in the cage for three days and performed various tasks that ranged from sewing voodoo dolls and lifting weights to reading books, watching television and working on a laptop computer.35 Two ‘zoo guards’ took them to the bathroom on leashes and hand-fed them sandwiches and fruit, and for a small fee in a donation box in front of the cage, Fusco would perform ‘authentic’ dances to rap music, Gómez-Peña would tell ‘authentic’ Amerindian stories in a made-up language and both would pose for Polaroids with visitors.36 During the whole tour they wore sunglasses reflecting the faces of the spectators and they never met the gaze of their spectators or spoke directly to anyone in the audience. Gomez-Peña and Fusco turned this project into ‘reversed anthropology’, a concept for redirecting their gaze as performers on the audience and studying the reactions by the audience and how individual spectators interacted with them.37 Both Gomez-Peña and Fusco later wrote about reactions by the audience of which a substantial portion believed in the authenticity of the couple in the cage. Fusco writes that ‘the cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we [were]’,38 and she notes that the range of individual reactions was largely divisible along lines of race, class and nationality.39 Performance scholar Diana Taylor has commented on this project that since their focus was on how people responded and interacted with them as a couple embodying the colonial ‘other’, the spectators ‘became the main player’ in the project.40 When Diana Taylor

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asked Gómez-Peña what his ideal spectator would have done, he replied that the ultimate reaction would have been that somebody ‘opened the cage and let us out’.41 Nobody ever tried and at some locations the audience reacted with aggression. Both Fusco and Gomez-Peña recall an incident in Buenos Aires when a man suddenly appeared in front of the cage and threw acid on GomezPeña burning his stomach and leg.42 The partially simultaneous performance project Cruci/Fiction Project (1994) was initiated and staged by Gomez-Peña in collaboration with performance artist Roberto Sifuentes to protest the US immigration politics when the 1994 Californian law number 187 limited the social rights of undocumented migrants and their children. One week after Easter Sunday they symbolically crucified themselves on sixteen-foot-high wooden crosses at Rodeo Beach in front of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. According to Gómez-Peña, in this project they were styled as ‘two contemporary public enemies of California’, Gómez-Peña dressed in a mariachi costume and symbolically crucified as an ‘undocumented bandido’ by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Sifuentes dressed as a generic ‘gang member’ and symbolically crucified by the Los Angeles Police Department.43 Gómez-Peña writes that the Cruci/Fiction Project was designed for the media and very photogenic, saying, We were reworking a highly charged traditional image to comment on the climate of xenophobia currently afflicting California, and the fact that Mexican immigrants and Latino youth in the US were being blamed for all social ills and publicly ‘crucified’ by nativist politicians and the mainstream media. A  flyer was distributed asking our audience ‘to free us from our martyrdom and bring us down from our crosses as an act of political commitment’.44

In describing the reactions to Cruci/Fiction Project from the audience, Gómez-Peña recounts that over three hundred people had received the flyers in which they were asked to ‘free’ them from their ‘martyrdom’.45 But as performers they had miscalculated the response. It took the audience over three hours to figure out how to get them down. By then, Gómez-Peña’s right shoulder had become dislocated and Roberto Sifuentes had passed out. Some people in the crowd even rebuked those who were trying to help them,



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shouting, ‘Let them die!’46 When examined the following day by a doctor, they were informed that their internal injuries were such that in another half an hour or so they would have died.47 Performances by Gómez-Peña cause strong reactions. Sometimes the audience even respond in ways that leave himself and his collaborators in dangerous situations, as in some of the performance projects discussed above. With The Loneliness of the Immigrant in a public elevator in Los Angeles he was threatened with being set on fire and was dumped in a trashcan, with Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West he got burned with acid in Buenos Aires and with the Cruci/Fiction Project on a beach in San Francisco he got a twisted arm, Sifuentes passed out and they both nearly died. Of risks taken by performance artists in various contexts, Gómez-Peña says, For politicized border artists experimenting with the tenuous and everfluctuating frontiers between art and life, there is always a real danger present; especially when the artwork occurs outside of the protected space of cultural institutions. In other words, it’s one thing to carry out iconoclastic actions in a theatre or museum for a public that is predisposed to tolerate radical behavior, and it’s quite another to bring the same work into the street and introduce it into the mined terrain of unpredictable social and political forces. In the street, the risks are far greater. Some of these are obvious, such as confronting the intolerance of the police, the army or extremist groups. Others are more random, like a surprise encounter with a lunatic who happens to cross your path. Performance artists are well aware of these risks, but every now and then we don’t accurately gauge the climate of the context of the symbolic weight of our actions.48

The performance projects Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West and Cruci/Fiction Project which both caused aggressive and violent reactions can from a nepantla perspective be interpreted as creative spaces for processing the impact of the historical trauma of colonialism and seeing race and ethnicity as an experience of reality from a particular perspective and a specific time and place in history. The recycling of colonial practices in Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West refers as the concept postmemory to indirect memories of traumatic events inherited by or transmitted to subsequent generations who undergo processes of relating to the past, and these indirect memories of colonial history are, through the embodied enactments by Fusco

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and Gómez-Peña, played out as embodied practices of the repertoire, Taylor’s concept for the transmission of memory through embodied practices. Their practice of reversed anthropology in Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West unfolds as a nepantla space that corresponds to how Lara Medina has described nepantla as a psychological, spiritual and political space that Chicanas/os and Latinas/os and other marginalized peoples transform into a place of meaning-making.49 As such, it represents a nepantla space for decolonization and redefining cultural difference as a place of power and as an in-between-space resisting the mainstream and seeing through the fiction of monoculture. In the final performance project discussed below, a different approach is taken that can be conceptualized as a nepantla space creating healing processes for the future.

The body as map for interactive rituals In 1993, Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes and Nola Marino founded the performance group and art organization Pocha Nostra in Los Angeles, which was relocated in 1995 to Mission District in San Francisco.50 Since then, Pocha Nostra has initiated, staged and performed numerous performance projects of which many can be found in the archives on Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s and Pocha Nostra’s webpages.51 One of Pocha Nocha’s performance projects is Mapa/Corpo: Interactive Rituals for the New Millennium (2003–13) that was initiated in 2003 as a reaction to the war in Iran.52 The intention with Mapa/ Corpo was exploring relationships between national borders, international conflicts and the human body in interactive rituals with the audience. In these rituals needles with flags were inserted into the skin of a performer’s body and the audience were invited to participate in symbolic rituals with acupuncturist shamans in the extraction of the needles from the performer’s body that was staged as a human map for ‘political acupuncture’.53 The needles were in some versions of the ritual with flags of nation states that are members of the United Nations, sometimes of the Latin American countries ‘afflicted by organized crime violence’ and sometimes with flags of ‘insidious corporations’.54 In a first version, Mapa/Corpo 1, male performers including Gomez-Peña performed as the human map and as acupuncturist shamans. This version



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Figure 7.4  La Pocha Nocha, Mapa/Corpo 3 (2013), Urban Shaman Gallery, Winnipeg, Canada. Source: Photo © Dr. Roewan Crowe.

was later developed into a second version, Mapa/Corpo 2, in which the rituals according to Gomez-Peña were staged ‘with female bodies because geography has been feminized’.55 This second version was then developed into a third version, Mapa/Corpo 3, in which the careful extractions of flags from the performer’s body by participants from the audience was supplemented with the ritually cleaning and shaving of the performer’s body by the acupuncturist priest and with writings of poems of hope on the performers body (Figure 7.4).56 In an interview, Gomez-Peña says that in comparison with Pocha Nocha’s previous performance projects, they shifted focus in Mapa/Corpo from the final piece to the actual process.57 He also says that compared to Pocha Nocha’s previous projects, the ‘character’ of Mapa/Corpo is different, not as playful and ironic, more ‘somber and melancholy’, and its ‘spirit’ sacral and ceremonial. With Mapa/Corpo, Pocha Nostra toured internationally for a decade. During its first two years they toured Europe, Latin America and Canada. In the United States Mapa/Corpo was not received until after two years referring to ‘museum restrictions’ and being not ‘audience friendly’ enough.58 In recalling the reactions from the audience, Gomez-Peña says that Mapa/Corpo has been received with tenderness, compassion and affection, and that ‘the catharsis power of the piece has made people cry’.59

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The interactive rituals of Mapa/Corpo can be understood as a nepantla space for psychological, spiritual and political meaning-making and healing. As a project that toured internationally for a decade with audiences all over the world participating in its interactive symbolic rituals, Mapa/Corpo is created as a nepantla space of meaning-making and healing processes that embraces multiple groups of peoples and identifications. As such, the symbolic interactive rituals of Mapa/Corpo unfold as a nepantla space for creative and healing processes crossing literal and conceptual borders globally, reaching beyond national borders.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have examined a selection of performance projects addressing homeland, displacement and belonging in Gómez-Peña’s retrospective, memory-work accounts of the borderlands. My guiding question was how to understand the selected performances in light of the concept nepantla and as nepantla spaces. The selected performances staged in different times and at different locations were organized into four clusters representing enactments of the body as migrant, as border-crosser, as caged and crucified, and as map for interactive rituals. In each cluster I interpreted the performances from the perspective of the nepantla concept and this perspective opened up for how various and simultaneous aspects of the nepantla concept were achieved. Key elements in the selected performances addressing homeland, displacement and belonging are politically informed enactments by crossing literal and conceptual borders that relate the present with the past from bicultural and in-between-perspectives of the borderlands. Gomez-Peña’s performance practice achieved from bicultural and in-between-perspectives of the borderlands is one dimension by which his performance projects can be understood as creative nepantla spaces. A second dimension by which his performance projects can be understood as creative nepantla spaces is his interactive practice with audiences and including the audience as an integral part of ongoing processes in his projects. And as these processes evolve along different directions and into different kinds of situations, further dimensions are opened up in Gómez-Peña’s performance projects as spaces of nepantla.



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Postscript: Involuntary activism – Make America … Mexico again At the beginning of the 1990s, Gómez-Peña lived for some time in New York City but then moved back to California. In an interview he explains why, saying, ‘I moved to California because I  thought that the work I  was doing would make more sense there because of the Mexican presence in that state, and because my work is based on the relationship between Mexico and the United States and on the border culture of northern Mexico and California.’60 In the same interview he explains why he finds the bicultural experiences of the borderlands, giving a capacity of negotiating two or more cultures and ‘being in transit’, so important in his life and for him producing art, saying, I do believe in a very valid Neo-Chicanismo, or Post-Chicanismo attitude towards life. For me, this attitude belongs to people capable of negotiating two or more cultures, capable of being in transit and handling several languages – a Neo-Chicano, or post-Chicano is a good border crosser and fluid and anti-essentialist attitude. That is why I find this a useful model and curiously that is why in Europe people are so interested in what we are doing here. We are cultures that are producing artforms with a hundred and forty year old process that began with the loss of half of the Mexican territory to the United States.61

Relating back to the US–Mexico border history with these words by GómezPeña, I close this chapter with a short quotation from a monologue he wrote in which he addressed President Trump and posted it as a letter on the Santa Fe Art Institute webpage. In his ironic and humorous manner of speech, he writes, Ex-timado Señor Trump, I want to thank you for so many things … I wish to thank you for awakening so many communities of difference around the world. … Thank you for initiating a new generation of young activists and for awakening millions of Americans from the sleep paralysis of our prior ‘consumer democracy’. … We thank you for providing us with so many ‘Trumpisms’ such as ‘Make America … Mexico again’ … You are a genius of involuntary activism.62

With President Trump as an inspiration to ‘involuntary activism’, GómezPeña and Pocha Nostra will hopefully continue creating activist performance

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projects that can evolve into new nepantla spaces of the borderlands in which future creative processes can emerge with reconceptualizations of history, demythologizations of race and ethnicity, and acknowledgments of a multiplicity of identities that transgress singular identifications.

 Notes 1 Rodolfo F. Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (Boston:  Longman, 2011). 2 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987); Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 3 Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, p. 195. 4 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts, and Poetry (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1993), pp. 44, 49. 5 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ‘A Photo-Performance Gallery & “Living Archive” in Progress’, Intercultural Poltergeist: The Living Art of Gómez Peña & Pocha Nostra; Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ‘Multiple Journeys: The Life of Gómez-Peña – 22 February 2010’, YouTube, 26 August 2015. Available online: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=B_J_j9CSLbc (accessed 12 May 2019). 6 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’, Poetics Today 4, no. 17 (1996): 659–86; Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today 1, no. 29 (2008): 103–28. 7 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 8 Miguel León-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963). 9 chicanoart.org, ‘Nepantla’. Available online: http://www.chicanoart.org/nepantla. html (accessed 12 May 2019). 10 Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, p. 78. 11 Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘Now Let Us Shift … the Path of Conocimiento … Inner Work, Public Acts’, in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. G. Anzaldúa and A. Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 540–78 (p. 549). 12 Lara Medina, ‘Days of the Dead (Días de los Muertos)’, in Religion and American Cultures: An Encyclopedia of Traditions, Diversity and Popular Expressions, vol. 1, ed. G. Laderman and L. León (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003), pp. 377–80 (p. 380).



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13 Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal (London:  Routledge, 1995). 14 Gómez-Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika, p. 20. 15 GuillermoGómez-Peña, The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the Century (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996), p. 82. 16 Ibid. 17 Gómez-Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika, p. 125. 18 Ibid., p. 82. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Gómez-Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika, p. 20. 22 Gómez-Peña, The New World Border, p. 82. 23 Ibid., p. 88. 24 Ibid. 25 Coco Fusco, ‘The Border Art Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo: An Interview with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Emily Hicks’, Third Text 3, no. 7 (1989): 53–76 (57). 26 Ibid. 27 Gómez-Peña, The New World Border, p. 88. 28 Fusco, ‘The Border Art Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo’, pp. 53–76. 29 Gómez-Peña, The New World Border, p. 91. 30 Ibid. 31 Ila N. Sheren, ‘Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Cage Performance and La Pocha Nostra’s Mapa Corpo: Art of the Portable Border’, Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas 3, no. 1 (2010): 58–79 (64). Available online: http:// repository.unm.edu/bitstream/handle/1928/11533/Sheren_Coco_Fusco. pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y (accessed 12 May 2019). 32 Gómez-Peña, The New World Border, p. 96. 33 In Europe, Australia and America they visited Madrid, London, Sydney, Irvine, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York City, Washington DC and Buenos Aires. Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: The New Press, 1995), pp. 39 and 62. 34 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 315, n. 21. 35 Fusco, ‘The Other History’, p. 39. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 38; Gómez-Peña, The New World Border, p. 96. 38 Fusco, ‘The Other History’, p. 47. 39 Ibid., p. 52. 40 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 69.

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41 Diana Taylor, ‘A Savage Performance: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s “Couple in the Cage”’, The Drama Review 42, no. 2 (1988): 160–75 (169). 42 Fusco, ‘The Other History’, p. 61; Gómez-Peña, The New World Border, p. 182. 43 Gómez-Peña, The New World Border, p. 102. 44 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 240. 45 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ‘The Cruci-Fiction Project’, The Drama Review 1, no. 41 (1997): 147–51 (149). 46 Gómez-Peña, The New World Border, p. 102. 47 Gómez-Peña, Dangerous Border Crossers, p. 64. 48 Gómez-Peña, The New World Border, pp. 182–3. 49 Medina, ‘Days of the Dead’, p. 380. 50 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 77. 51 See archives on the following homepages: http://interculturalpoltergeist.tumblr. com(accessed 12 May 2019) and https://www.guillermogomezpena.com/ la-pocha-nostra/ (accessed 10 December 2020). 52 Sheren, ‘Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Cage Performance and La Pocha Nostra’s Mapa Corpo’, p. 71. 53 Ibid., p. 70. 54 Gómez-Peña, ‘A Photo-Performance Gallery & “Living Archive” in Progress’. 55 Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, ‘Interview with Guillermo Gómez-Peña (2007)’, Hemispheric Institute. Available online: https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/ enc07-interviews/item/1793-interview-with-guillermo-gomez-pena.html (accessed 10 December 2020). 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ‘Disclaimer’, The Drama Review 50, no. 1 (2006): 149–58 (156–7); http://interculturalpoltergeist.tumblr.com (accessed 12 May 2019); https://www.guillermogomezpena.com/works/#the-mapa-corpo-series (accessed 10 December 2020). 59 Ibid. 60 Oscar León Bernal, ‘Interview with Guillermo Gómez-Peña by Oscar León Bernal (2008)’, Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library. Available online: https://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/hidvl-additional-performances/ item/1209/1209 (accessed 12 May 2019). 61 Ibid. 62 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ‘Ex-timado Señor Trump’, SFAI Blog: An Artist Talks Back to Power – by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Radical Performance Artist, Reverse Anthropologist, & Equal Justice Residence, 31 October 2017. Available online: https://sfai.org/blog_gomezpena/ (accessed 12 May 2019).

8

Boundaries and belonging in Kazakh art: A case study of Red Butterfly by Almagul Menlibayeva Aliya de Tiesenhausen

Introduction This chapter discusses the influence of travel  – into and out of Kazakhstan. It looks at artists and artworks throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day. It concentrates specifically on the art produced, the choice of themes, the media and the viewpoints – of the artists themselves and their viewers  – both within the country and outside it; outside Kazakhstan there is currently limited knowledge about the country. Some of the art produced in Kazakhstan is directed almost exclusively at the foreign viewer, while Kazakh artists working abroad look to address issues that relate back to their homeland. Boundaries and belonging both physically and metaphorically are central characteristics of some of the major works produced by Kazakh artists. In fact, due to Kazakhstan and Central Asia’s similar traditions, geographical proximity and shared history, during the Soviet period the experience of Kazakhs was strongly influenced by the Soviet Union in general and Central Asia in particular. Examples in this chapter are therefore drawn from Central Asian art and social history. This chapter was originally conceived as a presentation and centred on a striking image of Almagul Menlibayeva’s Red Butterfly (2012) (Figure 8.1). The work allows for discussion of the two major themes of this ­chapter – migration and gender. The two themes are interrelated: it is notable that the majority of Kazakhstani artists working abroad are women. Menlibayeva lives and works in Berlin. Other works illustrated and discussed further in this

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Figure  8.1  Almagul Menlibayeva, Red Butterfly, 2012, Duratrans print in lightbox, 91 cm × 120 cm, Ed. 3 + 2 A.P. Source: Courtesy of American Eurasian Art Advisors LLC, Almagul Menlibayeva © All rights reserved.

chapter are by Aziza Shadenova and Asel Kadyrkhanova, who both live in the UK. The fourth artist is Saule Suleimenova, who remained in Kazakhstan but has been widely exhibited abroad and in her recent works deals with questions of land and belonging. Kazakhstan’s defining characteristic is its position between East and West. The Eastern part lies in geographical Asia, while Western Kazakhstan is in Europe. Kazakhstan shares the longest overland border in the world with Russia. It also borders China in the East and Central Asia in the south. Russia and China are currently arguably the most significant political and economic entities to challenge the US–EU dominance in international relations and markets. The history of Kazakhstan is inextricably connected to that of Russia and China. The Silk Road, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union – all involved either an absence of, or creation of, artificial borders. These borders defined not only the legal status of Kazakhstan as a nation but also the multiple identities of its people. This multiplicity – and how it undergoes further transformations



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when real or imaginary borders are crossed  – attracts particular attention from Kazakh artists and is the main subject of this chapter. During the course of writing this chapter, I  curated an exhibition of Kazakh art in London. It was titled Post-nomadic Mind (2018) and included works by several artists mentioned in this chapter.1 The term ‘post-nomadic’ immediately suggests the subject of borders. On the one hand, any ‘postnomadic’ civilization is that which at some point previously led a nomadic lifestyle, a lifestyle associated with the absence of defined borders. Recently the word ‘post-nomadic’ also came to denote a contemporary return to traditional values, rather than a lifestyle defined by freedom of movement (including between countries) and a lack of physical possessions. Kazakh art draws on Kazakhstan’s nomadic heritage and on the constant reworking of this theme by both Soviet and contemporary artists. The Soviet period transformed Kazakhstan dramatically. It destroyed any remnants of the country’s ‘nomadism’ but simultaneously brought massive ethnic diversity into Kazakhstan. Travelling out of the Soviet Union was difficult, but there was more opportunity to travel between Soviet states. The post-Soviet period allowed artists greater scope for expression  – both thematically and in terms of media. It has also opened borders and allowed international travel and migration; artists can now live, work and exhibit abroad. Wider processes of globalization have created greater perceived freedoms in terms of travel: this is a new form of nomadism. However, this new nomadism has little to do with the traditional values or culture associated with historic nomadism. This tension further reveals very different views on issues such as gender and ecology in Kazakh society, which creates among Kazakh artists a renewed search for identity through active social and civic engagement. Kazakhstan was at the Soviet Union’s periphery, both geographically and culturally. The result of this status was twofold. On the one hand, the Soviet Union’s use of Kazakhstan’s land and its treatment of the people living there was colonial. On the other hand, Kazakhstan’s remoteness from the Soviet centre gave artists who worked in Kazakhstan certain artistic freedoms. The country was used for large-scale Soviet projects such as nuclear testing programmes, mining and intensive agriculture – all of which affected the environment. It was also used to relocate large numbers of people from the Soviet Union. Some

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of the relocated were ‘undesirables’ elsewhere, and included artists, who in turn influenced art production in Kazakhstan. While Kazakhstan was represented within the Soviet system by an artificial and invented image through Socialist Realist art, now it is represented by diverse and often conflicting official, unofficial, traditional and contemporary images created by the government, the media or artists. These artists’ presence on the international art scene, as well as at home, renders them influential social ambassadors beyond a purely cultural or artistic framework. Relentless border crossing and cross-cultural dialogues create a continuous search for belonging and a questioning of identity. In the last century, Kazakhstan’s identity has been called Soviet, Nomad and Colonial, with a multitude of suffixes: pre-, post-, de- and neo-, to name a few.2 While national identity is an ever-present interest for artists and the general public, there are new subdivisions in this interest: local, gendered and environmental identities. In a way the interaction with the international art scene moved Kazakhstani art towards an inevitable paradox: international issues are revealed as being local, while national memory is also recognizably universal. Kazakhstan emerged onto the international art scene most memorably within the first Central Asian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005.3 Since then, the group exhibitions (non-commercial) from the region have been a feature of up-and-coming art centres across Europe and Asia. These include ‘East of Nowhere: Contemporary Art from post-Soviet Asia’ at Foundation 107, Turin, in 2009; ‘Between Heaven and Earth: Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia’ at Calvert 22, London, in 2011; and ‘Lost to the Future: Contemporary Art from Central Asia’, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore, in 2013. Nowadays artists from Kazakhstan seek to establish their own individual profiles, working more closely with private galleries and institutions. While stepping out of the group exhibition format seems possible, stepping out of the group narrative and image that the country has gradually developed is problematic. Group exhibitions and a group mentality based on national origin create stereotypes and undermine individual perspectives; they also produce art steeped in search for identity, which becomes its language. My exploration of borders and Kazakh art takes inspiration from cultural historians such as Nizan Shaked and Amelia Jones. Shaked’s assertion that ‘the artwork … becomes a lens, bringing into focus the function of identity in social



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interaction within the art world as a public sphere’ can be applied to the role of Kazakh art as an alternative source of information and opinion that differs from official and dominant public discourse.4 In fact, Kazakh contemporary art’s desire to highlight social issues and links between identity and current conditions parallels Jones’s insistence on ‘the centrality of an understanding of these questions of identification to any comprehension of how art works in contemporary … society’.5 The search for international recognition drives the type of subjects that the artists from Kazakhstan address. One of the main challenges remains that of moving beyond the exotic, while remaining topical and relevant. The engagement with social issues inevitably requires personal involvement and physical presence  – meaning that artists must continue crossing back and forth over borders to keep their art relevant. Kazakhstani artists often find that their art is more in demand abroad rather than at home, which is a decisive factor in both where they choose to live and in their art-production processes. In the last five years, there has been a notable resurgence in positive attitudes to art exhibitions in Kazakhstan. There is a wider recognition and acceptance of contemporary art with its new (for the region) media and sharper thematic edges. While the origins of contemporary art in Kazakhstan lay in the 1990s,6 this recent interest created a new phenomenon of exported-then-imported art by artists who, although originally from Kazakhstan (and even still living there), were better known abroad until now.7 Even though this may seem a unique situation, looking at the history of art in Kazakhstan proves that its tendency to cross borders has been one of its defining characteristics for a while.

Red Butterfly Almagul Menlibayeva is one of the most prominent Kazakhstani artists working outside Kazakhstan. In 2018 she participated in nine group shows from Innsbruck (Austria) to Nurnberg (Germany) via Sharjah (UAE). She had a solo exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in late 2016 addressing environmental issues and using her homeland as a theme. Her videos  – documenting life (or lack of it) in the vicinity of the Soviet-era nuclear test

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sites  – are visually stunning and emotionally immersive. Menlibayeva is a master of her chosen medium, but she started as a painter in Kazakhstan. That is her homeland, but also predominantly the subject of her multifaceted video pieces. The artist lives in Germany, often works in Kazakhstan and exhibits all over the world. In 2018 she had her first major solo show in Astana, Kazakhstan, presenting works that deal with the transformation of urban landscape. This exhibition was an inaugural show at a new art gallery in Astana called TSE Art Destination. Here Menlibayeva also received the Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) from Phillip Martinet, the French ambassador in Kazakhstan.8 Menlibayeva’s Red Butterfly (2012, Figure 8.1) is a staged photograph – it juxtaposes the real and imaginary, bringing in a mixture of stereotypes and metaphors that some audiences may find obvious and culturally significant, while other viewers (of different nationalities) may find them harder to decipher. It allows us to take a look at several defining themes in Kazakhstani and Central Asian art from the nineteenth century up to the present day. The most notable characteristics of the work are the central character – a woman, who is enclosed in seemingly endless swathes of fabric, which is bright red; on her head she wears numerous traditional hats worn by Central Asian men, and due to contrasting colour and lighting is strikingly opposed to the background, which is a wall of a medieval Central Asian building. The three thematic leads in this work are gender and ethnicity, colour and history, and textiles and the environment. This chapter will look at each of them in further depth by using examples of other art works, bringing out cultural connotations, as well as existing internal and external stereotypes and expectations. These categories, or leads, are only starting points and are chosen as they open up other subjects, yet at the same time provide a tighter framework for this chapter. All will be shown to be interlinked and to influence the development of art creation both in Kazakhstan and outside its borders (by Kazakh artists working abroad, such as Menlibayeva herself). Red Butterfly demonstrates Nizan Shaked’s thesis that ‘the uses of identity as a political perspective drives a methodological investigation into art making’.9 Menlibayeva’s work can be examined as a critical and social practice but also allows us to examine the nature of art-making in Soviet and post-Soviet countries.



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Gender and ethnicity In her book Sexuality, Amelia Jones argues that ‘sex and sexuality, gender and gender identification are central to the making, interpretation, and display of art’.10 In Red Butterfly the dominant central character is female; her attire may suggest a certain modesty or constriction, associated with the clothes worn by Islamic women. However, on her head she has several traditionally male hats – possibly suggesting a mind dominated by a need to conform. At the same time, the swathed body together with the exaggerated head create a phallic silhouette, which is accentuated by the shape of the entrance arch to the Aisha Bibi mausoleum in the background. The mausoleum is dedicated to a medieval noblewoman. In this work there is therefore a play on gender boundaries and a questioning of gender roles. In public presentations involving this work – such as at the Central Asia forum at Warwick and the Art Institute in Astana, both in 2018 – audiences were quick to note gender as the main subject of the work. Menlibayeva’s work is rooted in Kazakh heritage; she likes to link herself to its pre-Soviet history. However, the impact of the Soviet period on the production and display of art in Central Asia cannot be ignored. This chapter draws parallels between Red Butterfly  – as a starting point  – and several works produced from the Soviet period up to the present day. These parallels or dialogues are drawn out to illustrate the main subject of the chapter: the influence of borders on both art production and on changing perceptions of issues such as gender, identity and history. The early Soviet period was rich in the variety of stylistic references the artists used and was also characterized by the desire of certain artists to escape their homes and resettle elsewhere, which in this case meant Central Asia. Being at the centre of the Soviet Union meant closer observation by the authorities and less freedom for artistic expression; being on the periphery – where Kazakhstan was located – allowed certain freedoms. The extent to which the Russia/Central Asian border defined art production and safekeeping of art works is demonstrable via an example of one museum in Nukus, Uzbekistan, which houses a collection of art that was not always seen as acceptable by official institutions. The museum bears the name of its creator Igor Savistky, who came from Russia as an artist with an archaeological and ethnographic expedition and stayed on to collect artefacts

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and art. He managed to create two collections: one of Karakalpak applied arts and another of Russian and Central Asian avant-garde of the twentieth century. Using his interpersonal skills, connections and any resources he could find, he brought works from Russia as well as from Central Asia and gave them a safe sanctuary away from the watchful Soviet Centre.11 In the official Socialist Realist art of the Soviet Union, the depiction of women shifted dramatically around the 1940s. The iconic image Daughter of Soviet Kyrgyzia (1948) is by ethnic Russian artist Semion Chuikov, who moved to and lived in what is now Kyrgyzstan.12 This painting was a wellknown example of a widely disseminated image that was printed in school textbooks and entered the visual vocabulary of most Soviet citizens. It is painted in a Realist manner and depicts a proud young girl in her red scarf marching towards her bright future while clutching a book in one arm. It is an image of progress and female emancipation and was widely disseminated around the Soviet Union at the time. The painting travelled across the Soviet Union and entered the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, then – as it still is today – the main museum of Russian and Soviet art in the USSR (now Russia). Such attention to one work of art – both from the museum and via the printed dissemination – suggest a strong emphasis on the role of art and on the role of peripheral Soviet states. Here two ideas jostle for space: an idea of progress in adjoined but culturally different territories, as opposed to a vision of one land and one people, a hope for multiculturalism in action. Examples of girls reading or learning also continued to appear throughout the Soviet period. Young Asian girls in systems of education were a potent image of the ‘enlightening’ effect that the Soviet authorities wanted to convey, as the image encompassed Soviet systems of governance, social organization and education systems. The young girl is a potent symbol of a young nation, feminine and fragile. We see this generic young girl resurfacing in the works of contemporary artists today. In Saule Suleimenova’s work Steppe Guard 1 (2016) (Figure 8.2), part of the cellophane series  – executed with plastic bags glued to polycarbonate  – the little girl seems to be a witness of another change and once again left to represent the ‘nation’, now a nation apparently sidelined. The work was created in response to popular protests that were sparked by proposed legislation,



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Figure  8.2  Saule Suleimenova, Steppe Guard 1, 2016. Plastic bags, polycarbonate. 105 cm × 115 cm. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

which would have allowed land in Kazakhstan to be owned by foreign citizens or organizations. The legislation did not go through. The young girl in the image is at the foreground, yet also somewhat marginalized. She remains the only barrier between the viewer and the background:  the lush and endless Kazakh land. She is the nation – a metaphor for the delicate and fragile balance between the government and the people, the outsiders and insiders, foreigners and natives. She is from the past but is also a symbol of future generations, for whom this land is now protected. The work revolves around the public protest in Kazakhstan, but it is also a symptom of the current worldwide situation, where the balance has been lost between nationalisms and protectionism on the one side and inclusiveness and openness on the other.

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In her conversation with Olya Sova, Suleimenova makes clear her interest in both researching and putting into action new ways of thinking and being, which transcend both geography and history:  ‘If we start to remove these layers of “colonization”, we can open ourselves to an entirely different status. We live in an interesting time, I  think. The time of “decolonization”, when we free ourselves from unnecessary layers, and no matter where we live, it is happening now, everywhere.’13 While young girls were and continue to be often used as metaphors in Kazakh art, the depiction of adult women centres around their physical attractiveness and expected positivity. One of the first Kazakhstani female artists, Gaisha Galimbayeva, develops the somewhat unexpected image of a confident Asian woman. In her A Guest from the Virgin Land (1961), the artist gives her subject both a link to the past and a contemporary profession.14 In the image we see two women chatting while drinking tea. One is wearing a traditional Kazakh dress with her head fully covered. The other – a younger woman  – is not wearing anything on her head and is dressed in a striking crimson shirt with a medal attached to it. The red colour is almost radiating out of the painting, with all the light directed at it. The redness seems to embody both youth, success and progress. This is a Soviet person involved in the massive agricultural and ethnic change that took place in Kazakhstan in the 1960s. The work speaks of a movement of people (within one larger country – the USSR – but also into the territory that is now Kazakhstan): the settlement of large numbers of collective farm workers, which completely changed the nature of ethnic diversity in the republic. People from Russia were relocated in order to transform massive swathes of steppe into wheat-producing land. Together with wartime resettlements, this agricultural experiment transformed the ethnic composition of the republic: by the 1970s Kazakhs were a minority in Kazakhstan. The subject of gender can arguably provide a lens through which to view other social issues in Kazakhstan. These issues reveal a disparity in attitudes between different members of society, but also between different currents of thought in the art sphere. While the Soviet art field is now traditionally viewed through the dichotomy of official and unofficial art, the situation in the post-Soviet society and market brought out two alternative strands of art:  ‘decorative’ and ‘contemporary’ (the latter is often referred to as ‘actual’



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or ‘current’ art). This dichotomy mirrors the way women were treated and depicted in the contemporary society: decorative and subservient on the one hand and active and vocal on the other. Decorative art is characterized by its use of the traditional techniques of Western art, as well as a closeness to Realism and other European art movements of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. There are often very clearly assigned conventional gender roles as well as a romanticized view of history and traditions. Common examples are a strong man on a horse and a pretty woman in fancy dress. This widely used self-stereotyping technique is applied not only in art but also for national celebrations both at home and abroad; it promotes a certain form of national identity. This is a kind of official image of the country, supported by embassies around the word. Examples include the use of decorative traditional dress by touring classical orchestras. This type of image incites a certain curiosity about the exotic, making Kazakhstan and its history attractive for outsiders. Contemporary artists seem to be less engaged with the image of the country and more with various social issues. At a 2017 exhibition in Almaty entitled Human Rights: 20 Years After, one saw another viewpoint  – one journalist called these artists ‘radical’. Certainly, a different opinion on both gender and society are taken by Erbolsyn Meldibekov in a now classic video work created for the first Central Asian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale: Pastan (2005). In it, one Asian man hits another Asian man in the face; this is played non-stop, on a loop. Displayed nearby was Zoya Falkova’s work Evermust (2017), which uses a modified version of the punchbag to address sexual violence and violence against women in general. The latter work participated in the Bread and Roses exhibition of women artists from Kazakhstan in Berlin in 2018. These are examples of artworks that move beyond the ethnic or the national. The ‘managainst-man’ idea of Meldibekov’s work draws on historical questioning of the nature of all wars, and in particular of civil wars. Violence against women and girls is an issue that touches all corners of the world and was one of the central social and political topics in 2017. The act of leaving a traditional society behind them (when emigrating) does not relieve female artists of the need to understand its influence on their work. Aziza Shadenova lives and works in the UK where she spends time alternating between new punk rock and her own take on video and photography. Her

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works move between documenting and irony. When she works with plaits, as in her painting Plait in Vase, she puts them into a vase with water, ‘so that it doesn’t wilt’. Elsewhere, the plait is the snake, offering forbidden fruit, or just offering conversation. In the photos we see more hair and the viewers end up having even more questions. Shadenova revealed that her series titled Girls of Kyrgyzstan (2011) was created mostly for a foreign audience (Figure 8.3).15 Shadenova is a performance artist:  her artistic persona depends a lot on her charisma and her works rely on it for their significance. On the cover of Less Common More Sense, N 15 – in the uncensored issues – she appears as a lady in a deep red coat, holding a drawing of a penis, behind her an empty tunnel. This is a new Daughter of Kyrgyzia, a humorous remark on the past. Her origins as well as her current country of residence are all part of her work. She describes herself as a Kazakh artist born in Uzbekistan and raised in Kyrgyzstan who moved to the UK in 2007. Exhibiting since 2013, she has presented her videos, photographs and paintings in various European cities and only once in Kyrgyzstan.

Figure  8.3  Aziza Shadenova, Aydan (From Girls of Kyrgyzstan series) Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, colour photograph, 2011. Source: Courtesy of the artist.



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Shadenova’s approach to message-making is significantly different from that of the already well-established Menlibayeva. Shadenova uses humour as a tool to engage audiences but also as a method for her work, which aims to engage with difficult issues through play, rather than with a direct metaphor supported by theoretical explanations. There are, however, similarities in the subjects raised by these two artists – such as femininity, social and economic conditions, and use of colour – women in red take many shapes.

Colour and history Several artists  – Saule Suleimenova, Galim Madanov and Zaureh Terekbay, and Almagul Menlibayeva – all use an artistic language to cross international boundaries. Their works, while shown in Kazakhstan, are all directed at the foreign viewer. They search for points of commonality with foreign audiences, for references that will allow an outsider in. In Suleimenova’s work it is the graffiti, for Madanov and Terekbay it is the repetitive language of conceptual art, while for Menlibayeva it is the extensive use of strikingly attractive visual images that draw viewers in and then pose questions. Menlibayeva’s Red Butterfly relies heavily on the use of colour, in this case red. The red fabric becomes the dominant force in the image. The colour is often associated with such disparate notions as love, life, blood, violence and danger. In post-Soviet territories it is also associated with Sovietness in general. Red was the colour of the USSR’s flag, and it features in the symbolic name of the ‘Red Army’ – as opposed to White Army, which, during the Civil War that followed the October Revolution, was made up of supporters of the Tsar. The name ‘White Army’ suggested the ‘white’ aristocracy – members of which were either killed or fled the country. Red therefore became a highly political colour, a symbol of a new dawn. Asel Kadyrkhanova’s The Machine (2013/2018) visualized  – through an extensive use of red thread – the blood and loss created by the proliferation of informants and the police state during the Soviet period. Kadyrkhanova is working on her PhD at the University of Leeds. She travelled to the United States for an art residency in 2018, and she exhibited her work The Machine in London as part of a Post-nomadic Mind show of Kazakh art. She is therefore

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Figure 8.4  Asel Kadyrkhanova, The Machine, installation, mixed media, 2018. Source: Courtesy of the artist.



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used to crossing borders and consequently with the effect this act has on her work. On the one hand, this makes her feel stronger about the need to examine her national past, as she realizes just how little is known about it outside (but also within) Kazakhstan. In The Machine, red threads connect a typewriter to arrest warrants. These are copies of original warrants with the names of victims erased while the signatures of the executioners were left visible. Each red line is also a reminder of individuals’ participation in the police state  – informants were often close to victims, who were their neighbours, colleagues or relatives. The artist notes that what little is known of Kazakhstan in the UK does not include its role in Stalin’s repression machine. For her, connecting the typewriter to arrest warrant papers revives the memory of Stalinist repression – not only for herself but also for her viewers. Stalinist repression and executions caused trauma, which affected all of the Soviet Union. However, Kazakhstan played an additional role. Not only were Kazakhs subjected to Stalinist repressions, but Kazakh land was also used for the largest Soviet labour camp, KarLag in Karaganda. Another infamous camp was also situated in Kazakhstan – it is known by its acronym ALZHIR; it was one of the most notorious Soviet labour camps, as it incarcerated wives of political prisoners. It was situated very close to Astana, the current capital of Kazakhstan. The typewriter in Kadyrkhanova’s work is also a monument to a linguistic shift. Created in Kazan, Russia (Tatarstan) in 1928 to utilize the Arabic alphabet, the typewriter (in the original version of the installation) was then transformed to use the Latin alphabet, as Kazakh and other Central Asian languages were Latinized.16 They were later moved into Cyrillic. In 2017 Kazakhstan decided to move the Kazakh written language back into the Latin alphabet, a move that has attracted a lot of public attention and widely varying opinions. Kazakh is a language that seems to have crossed through linguistic borders; in fact, some see the move to Latin script as a form of Westernization. Others view it as an attempt to make it easier for Kazakh speakers to use the internet and new technologies. While language is one marker of national identity, architecture and landscape are another. Menlibayeva’s works provide links to architectural heritage or the absence of it. Identity is searched by officialdoms, keen to create a stable national idea, and by contemporary artists, keen to reveal the alternative

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or overlooked strands in national histories and these strands’ links to everyday life in the present. In Menlibayeva’s works we see women interacting with historical buildings. In Suleimenova’s Kazakh Chronicle series (2008) we see photographs of graffiti, which are overpainted with images of Kazakh people based on historical photographs and contemporary observations. The face of the city as it is now is intertwined with the faces of people from the past. A recognizable image of modernity – a wall covered in graffiti – is revealed as the carrier of the current identity. Actual art utilizes the traditional  – costumes of some characters painted on top of graffiti. In Suleimenova’s work the traditional is revealed as historical fact, rather than fictional decorative present – as seen in some more decorative and official art, concerts and so on, as discussed above. The repetitiveness of Suleimenova’s photography series, and its repeated reliance on the recognition of the effect of the modern and historical mix, are also part of the exercise. National identity is shown to be not one unique characteristic but a multitude of characteristics. Madanov and Terekbay use repetition and pattern in their work Mamyr Dreams (1999–2000) as an image of the link between housing and the transformation of identity. Instead of yurts in the steppe, we see rows and columns of apartment block windows, each with its own story scribbled carefully on top. Elsewhere, in The Defragmentation of History (2010), the artist duo made works arranged in regular patterns, which evoked various claims and related discourse about Central Asia made in previous centuries, including those made during the Great Game.17 The messy, constantly changing notions of ownership and belonging are ‘defragmented’ into a semblance of order. Central Asia is seen as an invented, theorized entity, onto which different foreign players were drawing borders to suit their own interests, often at the expense of regional unity and the possibility of peace. Decolonization is an often-used term in Kazakhstani contemporary art theory and discourse. It involves at times the desire to deal with the postcolonial legacy and mindset, while at others it includes issues such as gay rights and feminism. One of the pressing topics is the relationship between society, the state and religion. Menlibayeva is one of the artists who draw attention not only to Kazakhstan’s pre-Soviet past but also to its pre-Islamic period. Her enthralling video work Apa (2003) is a visualization of an escape to origins. In the video we witness a seemingly shamanistic ritual set in an awe-inspiring



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snowy landscape where naked women – visible from the waist up – rise up from the snow hills and chant the word ‘Apa’, meaning ‘female ancestor’. It is a return to the motherland and a link to ancient female ancestry. While Menlibayeva’s work echoes (or criticizes) orientalist, utopian visions of the golden age, Suleimenova’s Winter Steppe (2017) offers a cold, barren, plastic landscape.18 In her recent series Suleimenova uses plastic bags, calling the project ‘cellophane painting’. The sharp edges of the cut-out bags accentuate the bleakness offered by this work. Whites and greys are cut through by remnants of text, a reminder of the consumerist economy that leads to environmental as well as social downfall.

Textiles and the environment Menlibayeva sets her videos among medieval Central Asian architecture and often swathes women in very recognizable Ikat fabric. Ikat has become popular with various fashion brands recently, but it has been a sort of cultural ambassador for the Central Asian region for much longer. Both ornamentation and textiles are perceived as feminine areas of expertise and feminine forms of attire in the region. Menlibayeva’s characters are often portrayed either wrapped in, or in interaction with, fabric. In her video Butterflies of Aisha Bibi (2010), colourful folds of fabric form butterflylooking wings for women.19 Central Asia played a crucial role in fabric production during Soviet times. While the Ikat design is associated with silk, there is another fabric with strong Central Asian roots – cotton. The massive production of cotton in the region required enormous environmental changes and sacrifices to ensure stable supply during peaceful times and during the war (cotton was used for weapon manufacture). Central Asia was the supplier of cotton in the Soviet Union, which according to official accounts was the most extensive supplier of cotton in the world. The fact that the material moved across the USSR’s internal borders, as well as the prominent global geopolitical position, largescale cotton production and distribution gave the USSR, makes cotton a highly political subject. Cotton production is often cited as the reason for the disappearance of the Aral Sea  – an environmental catastrophe. In The Aral

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Figure 8.5  Almagul Menlibayeva, Aral Beach 2, 2011. Duratrans print in light box, 91 cm × 122 cm. Source: Courtesy of American Eurasian Art Advisors LLC, Almagul Menlibayeva © All rights reserved.

Beach 2 (2011) Menlibayeva places a nude model covered with military hats in front of a rusted boat surrounded by a desolate landscape.20 The emptiness of the landscape is striking. This perceived emptiness has often been cited as one of the reasons Kazakhstan was chosen as the location for Soviet nuclear tests. Regular explosions and other tests were carried out over a period of almost fifty years. For her exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2016, which was organized in conjunction with Expo 2017, Menlibayeva chose several video works including Kurchatov 22 (2012).21 The work mixed performative elements with interviews with residents who were affected by the testing. Mixing the imaginary with the real gives an eerie sense of presence: inescapable reality is replaced with inescapable fiction. This nuclear ‘heritage’ also becomes part of the nation’s past, with a profound effect on the present. These are some of the many examples of the environmental sacrifices Kazakhstan has made for consumption, industrialization and militarization.



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The idea of sacrificial gesture is explored in Menlibayeva’s work Madonna of the Great Steppes (2010).22 The photograph shows a young woman dressed in white with horns on her head, holding a young sheep in her hands. The background is a barren steppe. The artist specifically evokes the emptiness of space – the vastness of the land – itself a charged topic. Emptiness in Russian and Soviet historiography was associated with nomadism, a culture seen as inferior when compared with settled civilizations. In fact, the same artist utilizes historical buildings as backdrops for her work precisely in order to dispute the perceived absence of history. Central Asia was famous for its agricultural produce; Kazakhstan was wellknown for producing lamb meat. In Menlibayeva’s Gennogramma (2009), the sheep flock occupies the foreground of a scene set in a derelict, unfinished building site; the artist is on horseback inside a yurt that is missing its felt covering.23 The yurt’s skeleton, the artist’s revealing dress, the aimless sheep – all remind viewers of nomadic history once again, but this time as farce – as the past is emptied, reimagined, sacrificed. Menlibayeva’s life in Europe, and travelling across the world for exhibitions, made her acutely aware of the gaps in the visual and emotional histories being built for Kazakhstan. In official and propagated histories and art there is a repetitive return to the nomadic, and to the traditional; however, there is lack of engagement with the loss of the two and a desire for an artificial resurrection of both.

Concluding remark This chapter has shown the many intricately connected ways in which crossing borders was not only one of the characteristics of art in, from and about Kazakhstan, but was and continues to be its foundation. Kazakhstan has a history of being on the border  – between East and West, between nomadic and settled, between Russia and China, between traditional values and efforts at rapid modernization. Possibly this history will continue to allow individual artists from Kazakhstan to explore and exploit this borderline status in order to bridge divides and reveal opportunities for dialogue both within the country and outside it.

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 Notes 1 The exhibition was part of the Focus Kazakhstan project initiated by the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, within the framework of the national programme supporting culture and arts – Ruhani Zhangyru. 2 See e.g. Madina Tlostanova, Postcolonialism & Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-existance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 3 The exhibition was curated by Victor Misiano and accompanied by a catalogue. Ulan Djaparov and Victor Misiano, eds., Art from Central Asia: a Contemporary Archive (Bishkek: Kurama Art Gallery, 2005). 4 Nizan Shaked, ‘Critical Identity Politics’, X-TRA 11, no. 1 (Fall 2008). Available online: http://x-traonline.org/article/critical-identity-politics/ (accessed 26 September 2018). 5 Amelia Jones, ‘Sex and the (Art History) Academy’, Perspective 2 (7 December 2015). Available online: http://journals.openedition.org/ perspective/6033 (accessed 26 September 2018); doi: 10.4000/perspective.6033. 6 In-depth discussion of the post-Soviet art scene in Kazakhstan can be found in Valeria Ibrayeva, Art of Kazakhstan: Post-Soviet Period (in Russian) (Almaty: Tonkaya Gran’, 2014). 7 Retrospective exhibitions by Aspan Gallery (some at the Kasteev State Museum of Arts) covering the careers of established contemporary artists Erbossyn Meldibekov, Elena and Victor Vorobiev, Said Atabekov, Gulnara Kasmaliyeva and Muratbek Djumaliev (Kyrgyz artists), and Alexander Ugai. The Contemporary Art Centre at the National Museum in Astana under the leadership of Rosa Abenova also held exhibitions of Askhat Ahmediarov, Sergey Maslov and Moldakul Narymbetov. 8 Information available at www.almagulmenlibayeva.com. The exhibition ‘Green, Yellow, Red and Green Again’ took place at TSE Art Destination, Astana, Kazakhstan, February 2018. 9 Shaked, ‘Critical Identity Politics’. 10 Jones, ‘Sex and the (Art History) Academy’. 11 Marinika Babanazarova, Igor Savitsky: Artist, Collector, Museum Founder (London: Silk Road Publishing House, 2011). 12 Semion Chuikov, A Daughter of Soviet Kyrgyzia, 1948. Oil on canvas, 119 cm × 94 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 13 Olya Sova, ‘Ordinary People Are Important: Notes from a Conversation with Saule Suleimenova’, in Focus Kazakhstan: Post-Nomadic Mind, exhibition catalogue, ed. Aliya de Tiesenhausen (Astana: The National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 2018).



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14 Aisha Galimbaeva, A Guest from the Virgin Land, 1961. Oil on canvas, 100 cm × 150 cm, State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Kazakhstan named after A. Kasteev, Almaty. 15 Aziza Shadenova, Aydan, Girls of Kyrgyzstan series, 2011. Available online: https://azizashadenova.com/. 16 Galina Ryzhkina, ‘Art Project. 1937: Territory of Memory/Zhaktau. Anger, Shame, Fear’. Buro247, 16 November 2013. Available online: https://www. buro247.kz/culture/art/art-proekt-1937-territoriya-pamyati-zho-tau.html (accessed 11 December 2020). 17 Between Heaven & Earth: Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia, exhibition catalogue, curated by David Elliott, Calvert 22, London, 2011. 18 Saule Suleimenova, Winter Steppe, 2017. Plastic bags, polycarbonate, 110 cm × 110 cm. 19 Almagul Menlibayeva, Video stills from ‘Butterflies of Aisha Bibi’, 2010, HD single-channel DVD. 20 Almagul Menlibayeva, The Aral Beach 2, 2011. Duratrans print in lightbox, 91 cm × 122 cm× 10 cm. 21 Almagul Menlibayeva, Kurchatov 22, 2012. Five-channel video installation, HD video, 29 mins. 22 Almagul Menlibayeva, Madonna of the Great Steppes, 2010. Lambda print on alu dibond. 70 cm × 100 cm, Ed. 5 + 2 A.P. 23 Almagul Menlibayeva, Genogramma, 2009. Lambda print, 100 cm × 150 cm.

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‘Arrival city’ versus ‘dysfunctional nation’: Exhibiting the ‘migration crisis’ at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale Joel Robinson

The 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, titled Reporting from the Front (28 May–27 November), dealt with some of the most pressing social issues in the built environment. The so-called refugee crisis, whose escalation shocked the world during the previous year, appeared unavoidably central to several of its exhibits.1 Many of these were found inside the main grounds of the Giardini, which is dominated by the pavilions of Europe’s bygone colonial superpowers – a few of whom carry economic or military responsibility for the conflicts and devastations that are being fled. Some exhibits sought to address, from an urban architectural point of view of course, what philosopher Etienne Balibar has called ‘Borderland Europe and the challenge of migration’.2 But not all of them rose above the exploitative and superficial, or came together in a coherent and meaningful way. The pavilion for Greece, for instance, confronted the crisis in one section of an ambitious exhibition called #ThisIsACo-Op. For a nation so tragically on the frontline of the movement of asylum seekers, some treatment of this crisis was nearly inevitable. Curated as more of a series of participatory events going well beyond the time frame of the Biennale, it unluckily lacked an overarching framework or conceptual anchor and generated more of a disjointed mélange. By contrast, the pavilion for Finland (one of the northernmost and final destinations for migrants) offered a much clearer presentation in From Border to Home. Yet, this exhibition came across as merely the passive record of a competition for refugee housing that had already occurred – inspirational to be sure, but too anaesthetized and conventional to be that noteworthy.

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Arguably, the German and Austrian pavilions were a more provocative and thoughtful reply to ‘the challenge of migration’ – which is, of course, as much a challenge for the architecture of the city as it is for the governance of nations. Here, in these two architecture exhibitions, there was a measure of ‘institutional critique’ that is more familiar to installations seen at biennials or triennials of art. Instead of something merely retrospective, these two exhibitions actively leveraged the institution of the Biennale (including its privilege and publicity), with a view to having a longer-term impact on the city back home. Both pavilions took emphasis off or away from the ‘dysfunctional nations’ that they represent.3 Instead, they channelled attention to the promise of the city, showing how a more compassionate city might challenge the divisiveness of national borders. This chapter questions the degree to which these exhibitions  – in the wake of the 2015  ‘refugee crisis’  – used the Biennale (its spatial, political and financial infrastructure) to mobilize architecture for civic, social and indeed humanitarian ends. It asks to what extent they fostered a discursive space, defying the global (not just European) rise of nationalist fascism with a utopian image of the open, democratic, hospitable city – a new ‘city of refuge’.4 While Germany’s exhibition took the notion of the ‘arrival city’ as its impetus, using this to frame a consideration of the new refugee housing being built in its urban centres, Austria’s exhibition generated actual ‘places for people’, specifically refugees, in three interventions in the city of Vienna. Not without antagonism towards their nations, these pavilions pedestalized the city of refuge as a rebuttal to the cruelty of ‘Fortress Europe’. Yet, the larger question looming in the background here is whether these events have indeed done more than exploited topical news or aestheticized the suffering of others. Have they indeed gone beyond this in such a way as to engage more responsibly with ‘the challenge of migration’? Were they adequately informative about and sensitive to how architecture and urban life are affected by all the difficulties around integration, or were they merely sentimentalizing the need for shelter caused by large numbers of outsiders entering Europe’s cities? To what extent did they reveal how this ‘refugee crisis’ has in turn galvanized urbanism and architectural design, prodding a more genuine search for answers to the question of an equally dismal global housing crisis, in the face of which architects had formerly seen themselves as helpless?



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The ‘arrival city’ The exhibitions Making Heimat and Places for People, for the German and Austrian pavilions, respectively, did not just showcase the ‘arrival city’. They were not so much about shining the light on such places as they already exist in German and Austrian urban centres. Rather, they actively sought to employ the Biennale to shape, direct or incentivize a more architecturally welcoming ‘arrival city’ back home, or at least suggest that this can be done. One proof of this intention is that the Austrian pavilion rerouted its funding into making asylum facilities back in Vienna. Another indication is that the German pavilion enlisted Canadian journalist Doug Saunders  – author of Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World (2010) – as an adviser on refugee integration in cities from Reutlingen in the south to Hamburg in the north. That these exhibitions were seeking, in some degree, to affect the city back home, to make or remake it as more inclusive, was perhaps more obvious in Making Heimat. For this show, Saunders had not only penned a catalogue essay titled ‘Arriving on the Edge: Migrant Districts and the Architecture of Inclusion’. With inclusivity as a chief objective, he also came up with ‘eight theses’, which were then stencilled in large, bold, capital letters on the interior walls. These theses were like prescriptive guidelines for nurturing Heimat (a sense of homeland and belonging) in urban areas witnessing an influx of refugees. They were as follows: ‘The arrival city is a city within a city,’ ‘… is affordable,’ ‘… is close to business,’ ‘… is informal,’ ‘… is self-built,’ ‘… is on the ground floor,’ ‘… is a network of immigrants’ and ‘needs the best schools.’ ‘Arrival cities’ are the pockets within or on the edge of the city, where rural villagers arrive, form communities and seek to integrate themselves, establish a livelihood and make a new home. In Europe and the West, they tend to be the ethnic neighbourhoods, the Banglatowns and Chinatowns, but also the ghettoes or banlieues; in the ‘Global South’, they are – more desperately – the favelas and barrios of Latin America, not to mention the bustees in India or the chengzhongcun of China, the ashwa’iyyat in Cairo or the gecekondular of Istanbul. In urban studies, they are usually referred to as the ‘informal city’, a largely unplanned and unregulated area attached to the official city. Anything but chaotic though, these are self-organizing ecosystems or micro-economies

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without which the officially sanctioned city might suffocate from overregulation and stagnation. Authorities usually represent these ‘immigrant gateways’ as wretched, delinquent and unsightly slums, harbouring illness and crime. They are said to be in need of clearance and regeneration. To be sure, this is really about making way for profit-driven real estate development (i.e. ‘creative destruction’), which will replace their largely low-rise fabric with towers that maximize property value. Against their pejorative misrepresentation, architects and activists often point to the lessons of the ‘informal city’. This is an emergent and organic form of urbanism, which often functions better than the core city, inasmuch as it nurtures community and commerce, and lessens the effects of alienation. It should not necessarily be cleared but augmented through sensitive design. Here, home is belonging (Heimat), rather than just shelter between the drudgery of the waking hours. Contra the negative stereotypes, Saunders’s term ‘arrival city’ stresses the dynamic nature of such places, their economic and cultural vitality. These are ‘fascinating, bustling, unattractive, improvised, difficult places’, he asserts, ‘full of new people and big plans’.5 ‘The arrival city is both populated with people in transition – for it turns outsiders into central, “core” urbanites with sustainable social, economic and political futures in the city – and is itself a place in transition, for its streets, homes and established families will either someday become part of the core city itself or will fail.’6 Whilst there is much variation across the different ‘arrival cities’ of the world, then, what is constant is their fundamental role in integrating migrants and determining the future shape and survival of the cities to which they are attached. However, since these are urban areas that usually take time to build and evolve over generations, ‘arrival cities’ may not already exist in all the places where refugees (‘irregular migrants’ rather than economically motivated ones) end up. Moreover, as Saunders writes, ‘emergency migrations, caused by war or famine, lack careful investment and planning … and the tightly woven networks of support and linkage that characterize normal village-arrival patterns’.7 It is here that architecture might find an opportunity. Since the urban conditions of the ‘arrival city’ are not fully formed, have not yet been put in place for settling refugees, architecture can be marshalled to expedite the process, to help build a new sense of home (Heimat). To varying degrees, both



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the German and Austrian exhibitions appear to have made the assumption that architecture has the power to do this. For Saunders, successful ‘arrival cities’ do not spontaneously take shape wherever migrants gravitate. They need assistance, financially as well as in terms of policies that are favourable, sensitive and adequately informed. Yet, the nation state (European or otherwise) is not always so accommodating and is more often than not hostile. Fortunately though, as the EUROCITIES migration policy advisor Thomas Jezequel reminds us, ‘major cities talk and act very differently from their national governments’.8 Even so, officials at various levels might distrust the involvement of architects or other creative professionals in providing this assistance; they might fear them getting in the way of social workers or property developers, even whilst they recognize that there is a role for designers to play – a role that goes beyond the humdrum task of physical construction.9 It was the role of architecture in the building of a more desperate kind of ‘arrival city’ (i.e. a city accommodating the relatively new phenomenon of ‘urban refugees’, as opposed to both economically driven rural-to-urban migrants and refugees that are stuck in camps far removed from city centres) that the German and Austrian pavilions explored, albeit very differently.10 Having briefly defined what ‘arrival cities’ are, this chapter will now move on to examine each exhibition in turn, reflecting on how Heimat figures in their presentation of an emergency architecture that aspires to creating the supportive conditions of the ‘arrival city’. It will conclude with a broader consideration of exhibiting the ‘arrival city’ at the Biennale and some reflection on the use of such events to influence policy and shape the city back home into a model of something more welcoming.

Making Heimat in the German pavilion Not merely using the building as an exhibition receptacle, the curators of the 2016 German pavilion drew attention to its disturbing architectural heritage. As such, any account of Making Heimat (Figure 9.1) should begin here. This National Socialist folly of 1938 was designed by the Nazi architect Ernst Haiger. It had replaced an earlier and more ornate pavilion whose Baroque style would

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Figure 9.1  Opening in the wall forming the entrance to the exhibition in the German pavilion (Making Heimat:  Germany, Arrival Country), curated by Peter Cachola Schmal, Anna Scheuermann and Oliver Elser, Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2016. Source: Courtesy of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum. © Joel Robinson.

almost certainly have been scorned as impure, effeminate and degenerate. In its place, the new pavilion employed the favoured style of monumental classicism and was definitely meant as a built form of propaganda, within the international setting of Venice’s exposition grounds. Since 1976, when Joseph Beuys’s installation Tram Stop forced a recollection of its Nazi legacy, this pavilion has been a thorn in the side of the Biennale, and participating exhibitors have sought to remedy this in different ways. The Making Heimat curators (Peter Cachola Schmal, Anna Scheuermann and Oliver Elser of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum) sought to do no less. They cut four large ingresses into each of the walls and dubbed it the ‘open pavilion’. This was a tribute to artist Hans Haacke’s Germania at the 1993 Venice Biennale of Art, which had angrily smashed up the pavilion’s marble floor plates, exposing the inseparability of built form and national ideology here. This ‘open pavilion’, inadvertently or otherwise, mocked the idea of ‘Borderland Europe’ – an idea that is in fact reinforced in these grounds, made



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up as the Giardini are almost exclusively of ‘temples’ to European culture.11 The ‘open pavilion’ became an architectural metaphor for the open-border policy that Chancellor Angela Merkel ostensibly promoted early on, if only briefly, partly to secure much-needed cheap labour and partly to amend the country’s image after financially terrorizing Greece. Just across from the pavilions for Britain and France (which are exemplary models for other European countries of how best to abuse the outdated and vague rules of the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees in order to shirk responsibility), this architectural intervention was undeniably a bold statement against the xenophobia of closure. In contrast to the cagey formality of other pavilions, moreover, this exhibition (designed by the collective Something Fantastic) sought to generate the lively and casual atmosphere of ‘arrival city’ street fronts and shops, and encourage visitors to linger and mingle. To this end, Wi-Fi was advertized as free and plastic chairs were scattered in and around the pavilion. This was an attempt to democratize the otherwise forbidding fortress that is this pavilion (in a way that vehemently signalled a rejection of Nazi spatiality and resistance to the erosion of public space in our increasingly commoditized cities). On the inside (Figure 9.2), the exhibition probed how architecture could learn from existing ‘arrival cities’, particularly with a view to serving vulnerable asylum seekers and others in need. Alongside Saunders’s above-listed ‘eight theses’ were photographs of the types of ground-floor family-run commercial enterprises that assure ‘arrival cities’ a foothold, as well as wall-size diagrams and pie graphs, maps or charts presenting statistical information about migrant communities throughout Germany. Catalogues and books, as well as free postcards colourfully promoting the ‘arrival city’, were displayed on plinths and benches. The latter were made of repurposed materials (namely, the brick that had been extracted from the pavilion’s walls when the four openings were made), as if to underscore the creative resourcefulness of the ‘arrival city’. One room presented enlarged photographs (Figure 9.3) of new projects for refugee housing, complete with specifications. These were selected from an online database of nearly one hundred projects, compiled for the exhibition website and a publication called Atlas of Refugee Housing.12 Although some of these were indefinitely suspended or still in progress at the time, they attested to the present-day scale of this work in Germany, instigated by municipalities

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Figure 9.2  View of the exhibition in the German pavilion (Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country), curated by Peter Cachola Schmal, Anna Scheuermann and Oliver Elser, Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2016. Source: Courtesy of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum. © Kirsten Bucher.

together with developers and construction companies. Equally important, and proving that exhibitions have consequences, the federal government would follow suit. After presiding over the committee that reviewed the curators’ proposal and commissioned Making Heimat, the minister of building Barbara Hendricks ‘announced that her government will fund the construction of 300,000 to 400,000 new units of social housing each year (for both refugees and established Germans)’.13 Not being able to wait, though, Germany’s cities had needed to address the housing shortage as a matter of urgency right now. As emergency housing relies on cheap creative solutions and quick assembly, many of the projects that were included in the Making Heimat refugee housing database employed the structural logic of tents (e.g. the light-frame Recreational Hall on Tempelhofer Feld by Gorenflos Architects), or utilized prefabricated modular units. An example of the latter was the grouping of steel Container Villages for Bremen, designed by Tobias Kister. Other projects sought permanence, either through their construction techniques or by programming long-term adaptability and



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Figure  9.3  Documentation of housing and recreational projects for München and Berlin-Tempelhof at the exhibition in the German pavilion (Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country), curated by Peter Cachola Schmal, Anna Scheuermann and Oliver Elser, Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2016. Source: Courtesy of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum. © Kirsten Bucher.

mixed use into their design. Ticking both of these boxes were the timberframe Apartments for Refugees and the Homeless in Ostfildern, constructed by u3ba Architects. For all their inventiveness, though, it was actually hard to see how these projects were going to catalyse an ‘arrival city’. A few of them were inner-city conversions of older structures (e.g. Ladleif Architects’ Residential Building Renovation for Solingen), but most were new builds on the outskirts, in areas not particularly dense or commercially vibrant, and thus less likely to lead to integration than isolation. Some factored in communal areas (e.g. retail and recreational spaces, workshops and kitchens) and linked up with public transport or other services. Only a couple of these projects went beyond perfunctory consultation with prospective inhabitants to become more participatory in their design (e.g. Die Heimatwerker’s Building with and for Refugees project in Nieheim).

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Overall, it has to be said that there was little affinity between these new housing projects and the photographs of ‘arrival city’ communities affixed to the walls in other rooms of the pavilion. Consider, for instance, the series Learning from Neukölln (2013) by Florian Thein, or the sequence called Offenbach Portraits (2016) by Denise Peikert. These and other images included in the exhibition catalogue portrayed urban areas that had clearly evolved over time, which had gotten around building and planning regulations, and which were more ruled by an informal economy, for example, the Dong Xuan Vietnamese Market in Berlin-Lichtenberg, or the commercial bustle around the Mevlana Mosque in Offenbach. Noble intentions aside, then, there was a disjuncture between these pristine new housing solutions and the messy reality of the ‘arrival city’. Moreover, the exhibition hardly dealt with the matter of how existing ‘arrival cities’ in Germany would support incoming refugees. It just seemed to assume that this would happen as a matter of course and that these people would want to be integrated on the terms of the European host. This was surprising, given that its curators should have been aware of cases of failure in German cities, to which Saunders’s book had pointed. Most relevant here was the case of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district as it existed through the 1990s. This was a popular point of entry into Germany (if not Europe more generally) for Turkish migrants who had left their village homes. Kreuzberg was in fact used to write censoriously about ‘arrival cities’ in Germany more generally, and to illustrate the perils of denying migrants basic rights and of over-policing what they can or cannot do. In his book, Saunders had noted that ‘German policy seemed almost hardwired to produce a failed arrival city, one whose residents can neither establish themselves in a meaningful way nor realistically expect to move permanently back to their villages’.14 Although quite different now, there had historically been a failure of integration here because migrants were barred citizenship and thus denied Heimat, or the possibility of remaking Heimat here; instead, they were treated as aliens or even stateless subjects (Heimatlosen), for whom there was no incentive to improve or invest in their newly adopted neighbourhoods. Without civic rights or rights to citizenship for its inhabitants, it is the city itself that suffers and fails.



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Places for People in the Austrian pavilion Place-making and social integration, not just nuts-and-bolts housing, were explored more roundly by the Austrian pavilion’s curators (Elke DeluganMeissl with Sabine Dreher and Christian Muhr of Liquid Frontiers). This exhibition documented three reception centres for refugees in the centre of Vienna, which were commissioned by the curators and inhabited just prior to the Biennale opening. The premise of Places for People was that architecture has a role, beyond the basic provision of shelter, in the creation of social settings that augment life, in the design of coexistence and communality. Although it was not rhetorically explicit about the ‘arrival city’, and although the urban context for these three projects remained largely in the background, it was perhaps more effective in demonstrating how architectural interventions could begin to help engender an ‘arrival city’. Here, there was no grand claim that Heimat could be made or remade for those whose exile was the relinquishment of all sense of home, belonging and identity. Even if the term can be denationalized (or de-Nazified and distanced from the racially discriminatory Blut und Boden (‘blood and soil’) mentality that persists today in Europe’s populist movements) and construed more as a work-in-progress than a fixed state, Heimat is not a ‘pop-up’ phenomenon. It is not something that can be prefabricated and imposed on refugees overnight, no matter what materials or typologies are employed and no matter what locations in the city are used. Nor can Heimat be feasibly cultivated in such a precarious climate, when the very safety of such peoples cannot be guaranteed amidst the anxiety and hate stirred up by extremists, politicians and other sociopaths. There was not a lot to see in the Austrian pavilion because, as noted above, its funding largely went to commission the three interventions that took place back in Vienna. The curators had decided that the Biennale could not ignore the ‘refugee crisis’ and that Austria’s participation here should actually take place back home, ‘even at the risk that we would not have anything to display at the Biennale’.15 The three urban projects were to be test sites and models of a more socially integrative approach to the basic care and housing of refugees, all the while knowing that it was only temporary accommodation where

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occupants could wait out decisions about their asylum applications. What was on display was the record of that, though arguably more valuable was the spirited discussion and dialogue that this fostered. Already before visitors entered the exhibition, the Austrian pavilion was encouraging a kind of ‘cultural public sphere’ to coagulate around it, in the area of the entrance.16 Out front, it had retained a concrete platform that had been used in an art installation by Heimo Zobernig the previous year. This served variously as a table, bench or podium for talks. In the foyer were stacked posters, free for visitors to roll up and take away. These were chosen from a series of photographs by Paul Kranzler, taken while the three projects were being carried out. In the other room was a long workshop table (Figure 9.4) displaying books and items related to the three interventions that took place in Vienna, as well as stacks of the free newspaper Places for People (printed in lieu of a catalogue).

Figure  9.4  EOOS,  Social Furniture:  Living, Cooking, Working, documentation of the project on a workshop table at the exhibition in the Austrian Pavilion (Places for People), curated by Elke Delugan-Meissl with Sabine Dreher and Christian Muhr of Liquid Frontiers, Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2016. Source: Courtesy of Liquid Frontiers. © Matthias Cremer.



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In large part, the exhibition took its cue from and paid homage to Austrian author Bernard Rudofsky’s Streets for People, a text of 1969 that had argued ‘in favour of humanizing the street’, reclaiming it from the disaster of the private automobile.17 What Places for People sought to reclaim was unused private real estate, in a city (like every other) where housing is unaffordable and scarce. Noting that over 10 per cent of Vienna’s office space is vacant, the curators sought to reveal how this could be turned into an opportunity and made available to people in need. Hence, the Austrian pavilion utilized the so-called refugee crisis to cast light on a no less global housing crisis and even endorse squatting as one way of dealing with this emergency. Or rather, it pointed to the fact that it is at bottom Europe’s housing crisis that is exacerbating what the media labels a ‘refugee crisis’.18 To this end, the curators collaborated with three design practices that have politicized the built environment and embraced a more participatory if not anarchistic manner of working. Together with these practices, they identified three office spaces – one on Pfeiffergasse (Vienna XV), another on Kempelengasse (Vienna X), the last on Edbergstrasse (Vienna III) – for the interventions. They then negotiated the terms of a contract (e.g. length of lease and what building features could be altered) with their owners. Naturally, it was crucial that the locations facilitate ‘arrival’ and integration beyond the duration of the Biennale, and through proximity to green spaces, shops and leisure, public transport and other services; unfortunately, however, these aspects of the projects were not dealt with very substantially in the exhibition. The next step was to design facilities promoting livability and sociability inside and out, engendering meaningful links with the urban surroundings through the creation of gardens and play areas. Unlike in the housing examples in the German pavilion, refugees were given some agency in this process, to buoy up a sense of collective ownership. On the inside, the architects had to respect the need for privacy while also providing communal areas. To this end, Caramel Architects (Günter Katherl, Martin Haller and Ulrich Aspetsberger) and Next ENTERprise Architects (Marie-Therese Harnoncourt and Ernst J. Fuchs) employed the ‘room within a room’ concept (Figure 9.5). They took their cue from other emergency shelters, like those rapidly built in Berlin’s Tempelhof aircraft hangar in 2015; but they brought a greater measure of humanity and imagination to the task.

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Figure  9.5  next ENTERprise Architects, ‘HAWI  –Experimental Living’ prototype, UN/COMMON SPACE - UN/DEFINED LIVING, exhibition in the Austrian pavilion (Places for People), curated by Elke Delugan-Meissl with Sabine Dreher and Christian Muhr of Liquid Frontiers, Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2016. Source: Courtesy of Liquid Frontiers. © Paul Kranzler.

These projects were not just about cost or time of assembly then (as they often were in the projects documented over in the German pavilion) but about making their ‘squatters’ feel more at home and by softening the corporate brutality of these ‘non-places’.19 Adaptability as an aesthetic principle was fundamental. Caramel’s colourful parasol tents or the ‘compact private modules’ of Alexander Hagner (leader of the ‘Home not Shelter’ project at the Vienna University of Technology), for instance, could be closed or opened, modified for different occasions and times of day. They could be erected individually or combined for communal functions. They could be altered and used to unstiffen transitional zones, or to activate ‘dead space’ between the building and the urban neighbourhood outdoors. In the office building that was used by EOOS (Martin Bergmann, Gernot Bohmann and Harald Gründl), basic sleeping quarters were already resolved, but there was no meaningful infrastructure to support everyday life. Social



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Furniture:  Living, Cooking, Working  – the Beuysian name of this project  – aimed to be much more than the making of architectural furnishings. It sought to become an experiment in other ways of being together, and even laying the basis for an alternative community.20 Inspired by Thomas More’s moneyless economy and Victor Papanek’s ‘nomadic furniture’, it set up an on-site workshop for the DIT (‘do-it-together’) assembly of such items as SF03 (a workbench), SF10 (a kitchen), SF12 (a computing desk) or SF16 (a reception counter). With an open-source manual offering step-by-step instructions for the assembly of these bright-yellow low-budget furnishings, EOOS made work opportunities feasible for refugees. It thereby promoted self-empowerment, self-organization and self-sufficiency  – the very things that Saunders had identified as lacking in the failed ‘arrival city’ of Berlin-Kreuzberg. Its ‘Social Furniture Manifesto’ states that the work of EOOS is ‘manufactured in a collective self-building process’ and ‘creates scenarios for interpersonal encounters, for cooperation and exchange’.21 This was especially evident in the bland courtyard that was converted into a raised bed (SF18) for growing vegetables, the friendly and colourful signage that was designed, and the holes that were cut into walls to ease communication.

City of refuge Where the new housing projects in the German exhibition appeared to fall short of Saunders’s checklist for facilitating the ‘arrival city’, and even seemed alien to the eventful streets, ground-floor shops and public spaces seen in the photographs mounted on nearby walls, the Austrian exhibition demonstrated more vividly how architects might advance the ideas of refuge, hospitality or sanctuary beyond mere shelter, through praxis and participation, and the idea of ‘work as an engine of integration’.22 However, the latter did not make entirely clear how the three interventions related more specifically to the urban districts in which they occurred, whether they tapped into existing immigrant networks or not. As such, it has to be admitted that it too fell short of presenting Vienna as an ‘arrival city’ that might be reshaped with inclusivity in mind.

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Nonetheless, notwithstanding whatever shortcomings there were in these two exhibitions, what Places for People and Making Heimat did quite unequivocally was foreground how crucial are processes of integration and citizenship to the successful ‘arrival city’. Together they indicated how a Biennale, whose national pavilions mimic those pavilions of the previous century’s world’s fairs and point to an exhibition structure that is still stuck in a Westphalian model of the world, might ironically turn attention away from the nation state and towards the city. They revealed how attention might be cast instead on cities whose leaders take action to address the very global crises that ‘dysfunctional nations’ tend to ignore or even exacerbate.23 If dangerously crude notions like territoriality or sovereignty compel nations to be ever fixated on borders (and continue to ignore Balibar’s realization that Europe has become ‘itself a complex “border”:  at once one and many, fixed and mobile, internal and external’24), cities are innately cosmopolitan and seeking interconnectivity. Cities, as the political scientist Benjamin Barber believes, cannot afford to be anything but pragmatic and progressive. One should certainly be wary of the romantic idealism of which he may be guilty in If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (2013). Yet, cities can indeed be contrary or agonistic towards a status quo and have in fact long been recognized as spaces of hope, justice, coexistence and refuge, in a way that nations never have been. Notably, the urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre spoke of the ‘right to the city’, not the right to the nation. Since then, the debate about rights and citizenship has hinged on cities as much as (if not more than) nations, with Arjun Appadurai and James Holston noting how ‘cities remain the strategic arena for the development of citizenship’.25 It should be recalled, too, that Lefebvre was not talking about a ‘simple visiting right’, and that the ‘right to the city’ meant nothing at all if the hospitality implied by it was not extended to arrivals and inhabitants alike, all of whom should be seen as citadins (urban dwellers), not citizens (nationals).26 That Lefebvre’s notion has spurred urban rights movements across the globe in recent years is no coincidence, given how migration (increasingly, forced migration) to cities is now affecting millions of lives. It cannot be taken for granted, though, that hospitality or the extension of asylum is always benign. In ‘Hostipitality’ (2000), the philosopher Jacques



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Derrida offered a critique of the notion of ‘universal hospitality’, a principle elaborated long before the Geneva Convention of 1951 in Immanuel Kant’s ‘Third Definitive Article of a Perpetual Peace’ (1795). Derrida noted how the very word hospitality ‘carries its own contradiction’ and ‘allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, “hostility”, the undesirable guest [hôte]’.27 Only thinly veiling a power dynamic of master and slave, hospitality is not just the grandstanding of nations seeking to parade their Enlightenment to the world, but a case of the host policing the hôte on its own terms, often with violence and impunity.28 What kind of integration can take place here? In his lecture ‘On Cosmopolitanism’ (2001), though, Derrida speaks less pessimistically of what he calls ‘cities of refuge’. There, he pleads for ‘another set of rights for the city, of another politics of the city’.29 He asks whether the city could, ‘when dealing with the related questions of hospitality and refuge, elevate itself above nation-states or at least free itself from them (s’affranchir), in order to become, to coin a phrase in a new and novel way, a free city (une ville franche)?’30 Offering sanctuary without restraint or threat is of course one of the principal conditions of any flourishing ‘arrival city’, as was revealed by Saunders’s account of how Berlin-Kreuzberg had failed itself no less than Turkish migrants in the 1990s.

Conclusion Exhibitions of architecture responding to ‘the challenge of migration’, homing in on the ‘arrival city’ and spotlighting the need for hospitality in the urban sphere, are not entirely without precedent. In fact, a decade earlier, the tenth edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, Cities: People, Society, Architecture (2006), had broached the need for cities to be ‘centres of tolerance and justice for people rather than sites of conflict and exclusion’.31 Taking its cue from the massive scale of urbanization and mass migration to cities then underway, this earlier edition put the spotlight on sixteen cities coming to terms with such radical change, albeit long prior to Saunders’s coining of the expression ‘arrival city’ or the enormity of the ‘refugee crisis’ facing cities today. In his ‘Introduction’ to the catalogue for the 2006 Biennale, the chief curator Richard Burdett (director of the Urban Age program at the London

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School of Economics) had observed, ‘How we choose to shape our cities, buildings and public spaces … will determine how we respond to the challenges of climate change as well as addressing human rights, justice and dignity for the billions of people who move to cities in search of work and opportunity.’32 Only a decade on, it has become painfully clear that the needs of millions of urban refugees who have fled from warfare, calamity and persecution must also be planned for, as is now finally being stressed in several of the articles of the New Urban Agenda recently agreed at the 2016 Habitat III summit. The 2016 Biennale was not alone in seeking to confront the implications of an escalated ‘refugee crisis’ for architecture and urbanism. The 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennial – After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (8 September–27 November) – dealt with the subject concurrently. Yet, it aimed more broadly ‘to locate the challenges that migration to Europe poses within a larger context from which it cannot be untangled’.33 It had a wider thematic concern but demonstrated just as well how the transnational remit of such large-scale events is ideal for addressing such challenges. Not just the ‘avant-garde circuses’ that urban theorist Saskia Sassen jibed about in her catalogue essay for Burdett’s exhibition, biennials not only open up a sphere for global debate but can actually set changes of a more concrete and positive kind into motion.34 According to the 2016 Venice Biennale organizer, Alejandro Aravena of ELEMENTAL Architects, Reporting from the Front was intended to showcase how recent architecture and urbanism have concretely tackled issues (e.g. migration, segregation, the housing shortage, peripheries, insecurity, inequality, informality) ‘where basic needs and human rights are at stake’.35 The German and Austrian pavilions certainly fulfilled that brief. However, objections might still be raised that their exhibitions were not moving far beyond the representation of someone else’s reality, or the short-lived imagination of a better reality. It might be protested that their visitors were too far removed from a first-hand experience of the projects and their occupants, too insulated themselves from the trauma compounded by ‘Borderland Europe’ and the violence for which this stands. More seriously, it might be questioned – with historian Felicity D. Scott in her catalogue essay for the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennial – whether such



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presentations have ‘effectively institutionalised “the architecture of emergency” as a new norm’.36 Indeed, to what extent do these exhibitions normalize and aestheticize the plight of refugees?37 An even less sympathetic reception might expose refugee housing as yet another ‘technology of regulatory provision’.38 Indeed, architect and historian Andrew Herscher has investigated how the corporate partnerships that enable this provision have now given rise to ‘voucher humanitarianism’.39 Not least, there is the danger that visitors will leave with an unproblematic sense of these national pavilions revelling in a beneficent image of the nation, whose people stand unified in upholding the Kantian virtue of ‘universal hospitality’. Conversely, though, one could see the German and Austrian pavilions in a more generous light and offer the more balanced assessment for which this chapter has opted. One might see their exhibitions not as a celebration of a benevolent openness to refugees (which would come with all sorts of conditions even if it were remotely true) but as polemically confronting the populist bigotry within the nation and the new forms of apartheid that its policies are responsible for. These exhibitions imagine the city otherwise  – if not as Derrida’s quasi-mystical ‘city of refuge’ then in terms of Saunders’s ‘arrival city’, or the ethnically diverse and democratic ‘open city’ theorized by urban sociologist Richard Sennett.40 In this respect, they are undeniably utopian, not in an idealist sense but in terms of critiquing Europe’s failure not only to resolve its ‘housing crisis’ but also the ‘refugee crisis’ that throws into relief just how grave that failure is. The view that cultural institutions can respond meaningfully to the ‘challenge of migration’ is not without apologists. With the ‘migration crisis’ uppermost in mind, anthropologist William Westerman has argued that exhibitions (and the institutions that stage them) can indeed serve vulnerable groups like refugees. They can garner the critical autonomy needed to challenge the inherently conservative work of museums and their ‘master narratives’: ‘By collaborating with refugees in particular, as well as advocates for human rights, museums can reposition themselves relative to the structures of power and knowledge, disseminating alternative social realities and other forms of knowledge.’41 (In restaging Making Heimat over eight months in 2017, and adding ‘arrival city’ tours and talks to the exhibition, Frankfurt’s Deutsches Architekturmuseum was doing just that.)

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The German and Austrian exhibitions at the 2016 edition showed how the institution of the Biennale might similarly be harnessed to resist hidebound ‘structures of power and knowledge’. They showed how this kind of international and recurring mega-exhibition might even be made to impact or intervene in urban situations. Just as the ‘arrival city’ has always offered economic benefits that assist the places and peoples that migrants have left behind, so too might the Venice Biennale be leveraged to create more hospitable urban scenarios back home. The Biennale, which turns Venice into a city of arriving tourists, might be made to show up the spinelessness of the ‘dysfunctional nations’ participating there, and instead help create the foundations for ‘arrival cities’ within those nations and the foundations for a sense of home and belonging.

 Notes 1 Colin Martin, ‘Designing Homes to Welcome Refugees’, Lancet 388, no. 17 (September 2016): 1150; Amy Frearson, ‘Seven Key Topics for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016’, Dezeen, 18 May 2016. Available online: www.dezeen. com/2016/05/18/venice-architecture-biennale-2016-preview-hottest-topics/ (accessed 30 January 2017); Oliver Wainwright, ‘Venice Architecture Biennale Pavilions – a Souped-Up Preschool Playground’, The Guardian, 30 May 2016. Available online: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/30/venicearchitecture-biennale-2016-national-pavilions-review (accessed 30 January 2017. 2 Etienne Balibar, ‘Borderland Europe and the Challenge of Migration’, openDemocracy, 8 September 2015. Available online: www.opendemocracy. net/can-europe-make-it/etienne-balibar/borderland-europe-and-challenge-ofmigration (accessed 25 January 2017). 3 Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 4 Jacques Derrida, ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, trans. Mark Dooley, in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, ed. S. Critchley and R. Kearney (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 3–23. 5 Doug Saunders, Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World (London: Windmill Books, 2010), p. 2. 6 Ibid., p. 11; italics added. 7 Ibid., p. 25. 8 Thomas Jezequel, ‘Interview with CARTHA’, in On Making Heimat, ed. CARTHA (Zurich: Park Books, 2017), p. 83.



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9 Stephen Cairns, ‘Drifting: Architecture/Migrancy’, in Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy, ed. S. Cairns (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 24. 10 On the topic of ‘urban refugees’, see Jonathan Darling, ‘Forced Migration and the City: Irregularity, Informality, and the Politics of Presence’, Progress in Human Geography 41, no. 2 (2017): 178–98. See also the New Urban Agenda drafted at Habitat III (the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development), and particularly the second issue paper that preceded this document: United Nations Task Team on Habitat III, ‘Migration and Refugees in Urban Areas’, Habitat III Issue Papers, 2016. Available online: www.unhabitat. org/issue-papers-and-policy-units/ (accessed 30 January 2018). 11 Peter Cachola Schmall, Oliver Elser and Anna Scheuermann, ‘The Open Pavilion’, in Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country (La Biennale di Venezia, 15. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura), exhibition catalogue, ed. P. C. Schmal, O. Elser and A. Scheuermann (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2016), pp. 288–95. 12 German pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, Making Heimat – Germany, Arrival Country, 2016. Available online: www. makingheimat.de/en (accessed 30 January 2017). 13 Doug Saunders, ‘How My Book on Immigration Became the Voice of Germany at the Venice Biennale’, The Globe and Mail, 10 June 2016. Available online: www. theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/my-journalism-became-thevoice-of-germany-at-an-architecture-exhibition/article30394040/ (accessed 30 January 2017), unpaginated. 14 Saunders, Arrival City, p. 247. 15 Quoted in Juho Haavisto, ‘From Border to Home Revisited: European Housing Solutions for Asylum Seekers’, From Border to Home, 21 March 2017. Available online: www.frombordertohome.fi/from-border-to-home-revisited-europeanhousing-solutions-for-asylum-seekers/ (accessed 25 January 2018). 16 Monica Sassatelli, ‘Urban Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere:  Cosmopolitanism between Ethics and Aesthetics’, in Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, ed. L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli and G. Delanty (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 12–28; Nikos Papastergiadis and MeredithMartin, ‘Art Biennales and Cities as Platforms for Global Dialogue’, in Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, ed. L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli and G. Delanty (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 45–62. 17 Bernard Rudofsky, Streets for People: A Primer for Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 21. 18 Eleanor Penny, ‘We Don’t Have a Refugee Crisis, We Have a Housing Crisis’, openDemocracy, 5 November 2016. Available online: www.opendemocracy. net/can-europe-make-it/eleanor-penny/we-don-t-have-refugee-crisis-we-havehousing-crisis (accessed 29 May 2018).

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19 Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). 20 Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (London: Allen Lane, 2012). 21 EOOS, Social Furniture (London: Koenig Books, 2016), p. 3. 22 Amber Sayah, ‘Work as an engine of integration’, in Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country (La Biennale di Venezia, 15. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura), ed. P. C. Schmal, O. Elser and A. Scheuermann (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2016), pp. 110–15. 23 Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World, p. 3. 24 Balibar, ‘Borderland Europe and the Challenge of Migration’; italics in original. 25 James Holston and ArjunAppadurai, ‘Cities and Citizenship’, Public Culture 8 (1996): 188. 26 Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Right to the City’, in Writings on Cities, ed. E. Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, [1969] 1996), p. 158. 27 JacquesDerrida, ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3 (December 2000): 3. 28 Ibid., p. 14. 29 Derrida, ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, p. 8. 30 Ibid., p. 9. 31 Richard Burdett and Miguel Kanai, ‘City-Building in an Age of Global Urban Transformation’, in Cities: Architecture and Society (La Biennale di Venezia, 10. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura), exhibition catalogue, ed. Richard Burdett (Venice: Marsilio, 2006), p. 23. 32 Richard Burdett, ‘Introduction’, in Cities: Architecture and Society (La Biennale di Venezia, 10. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura), exhibition catalogue), ed. Richard Burdett (Venice: Marsilio, 2006), p. xiv. 33 Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Ignacio G. Galán, Carlos MínguezCarrasco, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis and Marina Otero Vezier, eds, After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016), exhibition catalogue (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016), p. 14. 34 Saskia Sassen, ‘Why Cities Matter?’, in Cities: Architecture and Society (La Biennale di Venezia, 10. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura), exhibition catalogue, ed. Richard Burdett (Venice: Marsilio, 2006), p. 32. 35 Alejandro Aravena, Reporting from the Front – Biennale Architettura 2016 (Exhibition Catalogue) (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 2016), p. 24. 36 Felicity D. Scott, ‘Taking Stock of Our Belongings: Preface to After Belonging: A Triennale In Residence, On Residence and the Ways We Stay in Transit’, in After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016), exhibition catalogue, ed. L. A. C. Blanco, I.



3 7 38 39 40

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G. Galán, C. M. Carrasco, A. N. Llopis and M. O. Vezier (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016), p. 29. Cairns, ‘Drifting: Architecture/Migrancy’, p. 24. Darling, ‘Forced Migration and the City’, p. 179. Andrew Herscher, ‘Humanitarianism’s Housing Question: From Slum Reform to Digital Shelter’, E-flux Journal 66 (October 2015): 1. Sennett, ‘The Open City’, Urban Age (November 2006). Available online: www. downloads.lsecities.net/0_downloads/Berlin_Richard_Sennett_2006-The_Open_ City.pdf (accessed 11 February 2017); see also Kees Christiaanse and Sigler Rienets, Open City: Designing Coexistence (Rotterdam: IABR, 2009). William Westerman, ‘Museums, Refugees, and Collaborative Social Transformation’, in Global Mobilities: Refugees, Exiles and Immigrants in Museums and Archives, ed. A. K. Levin (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 32.

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Note: Page numbers which refer only to figures are indicated by italics. abortion: Poland 118–19 Ackermann, Andreas 45 Acme Gallery (Covent Garden) 94 acupuncture, political: Mapa/Corpo 152–4 ADLAN (Amics de l’Art Nou) 74–5 African Arts (journal) 121–2 After Belonging (Oslo Architecture Triennal (2016)) 198–9 Ahmed, Sara 73, 76, 77, 79, 80 All That Remains (Khalidi) 23, 24 Amateur Bird Watching at Passport Control (Bliumis) 133 animals, interconnectedness of: Remedios Varo 75, 83–4 Anouchian, Antranik 55, 70 n.11 Anouchian Passport Portrait Series (Waheed) 55–6, 66 Anzaldúa, Gloria 138–9, 140 Apa (Menlibayeva) 174–5 Apartheid 122–4 appliqué: Parastou Forouhar 44, 45, 50 Arab Image Foundation 55 Araeen, Rasheed 98, 99, 100, 106 Black Phoenix (journal) 98 From Two Worlds (exhibition) 93, 95–6 The Other Story (exhibition) 95, 98, 103 political views on Black art 103 Third Text (journal) 99, 102–3 Aral Beach 2 (Menlibayeva) 175–6 Aravena, Alejandro 198 architecture Almagul Menlibayeva 173–4, 175 Remedios Varo 73–4, 80, 81–2 Venice Architecture Biennale 181–96, 197, 198, 199, 200 archive fever 56–7, 58–9, 65, 69 Archive Fever (Derrida) 53–4, 55, 56–8

archive theory, postmodern 53, 54–5, 56–7 archives fragmented nature of 53, 54, 58, 60, 62, 66–7 incompleteness 53–5, 56–9, 62, 64, 65, 66 ‘Archives’ (Azoulay) 53–4, 58–9, 65 Arendt, Hannah 119 arkheion 57, 66 ‘arrival city’, the 182, 183–90, 191, 195–6, 197, 199, 200 art market: marginalization 104–5 Arts Council 102 Ashura 45–9 Asia, Central 159, 160, 164, 165–6, 174, 175–6, 177 Association for Art History (AAH) 4, 5 Athens: documenta 14 (exhibition) 12–13 Atkinson, Rowland 121 Atlas of Refugee Housing 186 audience interaction Emily Jacir 25, 27, 28, 29 Guillermo Gomez-Peña 143, 149–51, 152, 153–4 Vassia Vanezi 28, 29 Australia 125, 126–31 Austrian pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) 182, 183, 184–5, 191–6, 198, 199, 200 authorship, question of: Hajra Waheed 56, 59, 62, 66, 68 Avow 1–38 (Waheed) 65 Azoulay, Ariella 53–4, 55, 58–9, 59–60, 62, 65 Baker, Nick 104 Barber, Benjamin 196 BAW/TAF 138, 139, 143–8

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beauty and harm: Parastou Forouhar 37–8, 39, 41, 44 Beckford, Franklyn 95–6 becoming, ethos of 120 Be-Honest Telefilms 101 belonging 28 Guillermo Gomez-Peña 137, 139, 141, 147–8, 154 as process 3–4 sense of Cyprus 11–12, 15–19, 20, 28, 29 Palestine 11–12, 26, 28, 29 Berlin: migrants’ facilities 188, 189, 190, 193, 195, 197 Bhabha, Homi 94–5 Biswas, Sutapa 103 ‘Black’: as political term 102 Black art: Britain (1980s) 91–107 Black-Art Gallery, The (Finsbury Park) 100–1, 105 Black Arts Movement 92 Black Audio Film Collective 92, 95 Black Phoenix (journal) 98 Blandy, Sarah 121 Bliumis, Alina 132–3 Bliumis, Jeff, 132–3 body Almagul Menlibayeva 165 displaced 69–70 gendered 114, 118, 119 Guillermo Gomez-Peña 137, 138–56 Hajra Waheed 69–70 Remedios Varo 76–7, 79–80, 82 bodyscapes 141, 143 border Canada-United States 144–8 Mexico-United States 137–8, 143–4, 145, 146, 155 Border Actions (BAW/TAF) 139, 144, 146–8 border crossing: Kazakh artists 160–1, 162–3, 171–3, 177 Border Realities (BAW/TAF) 139, 144, 146–8 Border Wedding (BAW/TAF) 144, 145 ‘Borderland Europe’ 181, 186–7, 198 borderlands, the 138–9, 140, 146, 154–6 Boring Conversations #2: Cloak of Invisibility (Waters) 127–9, 130–1

Boyce, Sonia 95, 101 Braidotti, Rosi 77, 84, 86 n.20 Bread and Roses (exhibition) 169 Breakell, Sue 54–5 Breinig, Helmbrecht 41, 43 Britain (1980s): Black identity 91–107 British Art Show, The 105 ‘Britishness’ contested 99 Brixton riots 99 Bruno, Giuliana 116 Bryant, Rebecca 16 Burdett, Richard 197–8 Butterflies of Aisha Bibi (Menlibayeva) 175 butterflies: Parastou Forouhar 37–8 calligraphy: Parastou Forouhar 43, 47–8 Camouflage Cloaks for Invaders: Robe (Waters) 127, 130–1 Canada-United States border 144–8 Caramel Architects 193, 194 care, ethics of 131 Caribbean Craft Circle 102 Central Asia 159, 160, 164, 165–6, 174, 175–6, 177 Chambers, Eddie 92, 93, 94, 100, 103, 106 Chambers, Paula 120, 122, 123, 124 Character 1: In the Rough (Waheed) 62–3 Chicano identity 142–3, 152, 155 chicanoart 140 China, Kazakhstan and 160 Chuikov, Semion 166 Cities: People, Society, Architecture (Venice Architecture Biennale (2006)) 197–8 citizenship, processes of: ‘arrival cities’ 196 city, the: architecture and migration 182–200 Cixous, Hélène 114, 115 Clifford, James 20 collective experience 13 collective remembrance: Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages 24 colonialism Alexandra Kokoli 131–2 domesticity and 126–31 From Two Worlds (exhibition) 93, 106 Hajra Waheed 55, 64–5 Sera Waters 127

Index colour: Kazakh art 164, 171; see also red: Kazakh art commemoration: Parastou Forouhar 45, 47 commencement, archives and 57–8 ‘contact zone’ 45, 50 contemporary art: Kazakhstan 163, 166, 168–9, 174 cotton: Central Asia 175 Couple in the Cage, The (Gomez-Peña and Fusco) 149 Creación de las aves, La (Varo) 73–84 creativity of women: Remedios Varo 76, 78, 80, 83–4 Cruci/Fiction Project (Gomez-Peña and Sifuentes) 139, 150–1 Cry of Winnie Mandela, The (Ndebele) 123 cultural deprivation: therapeutic programs 100–1 cultural memories: Guillermo Gomez-Peña 139, 147–8 Cultural Tips for New Americans (Bliumis and Bliumis) 132–3 Cyphers, The, 1–18 (Waheed) 60, 67–9 Cyprus 11–12, 13–21, 27–9 Daneshwari, Abbas 35 Daughter of Soviet Kyrgyzia (Chuikov) 166 Davies, Martin L. 58 De Botton, Alain 79, 81 decalcomania: Remedios Varo 88 n.41 decolonization: Khazak art 168, 174 decorative art: Kazakhstan 168–9, 174 Dedi, Shakka 100–1 Defragmentation of History, The (Madanov and Terekbay) 174 degeneracy, decoration and 36–7 De Kock, Leon 44 Delugan-Meissl, Elke 191, 192, 194 Demos, T. J. 8, 23 Derrida, Jacques 53–4, 55, 56–8, 60, 66, 196–7 deSouza, Allan 105–6 Deutsches Architekturmuseum (Frankfurt) 199 Diego, Estrella de 81 digital technologies: Parastou Forouhar 43 displacement 1, 2, 4, 134 Cyprus 11, 13, 15, 29

207

Guillermo Gomez-Peña 137, 139, 141, 142, 154 Hajra Waheed 55, 64, 65, 66 Palestine 11, 21, 26, 27, 29 documenta 14 (exhibition) 12–22, 25–9 Domestic Front (Chambers) 122, 123 domestic space: representation in Nollywood 121–2 domesticity and colonialism 126–31 female dissident perspectives 113, 114, 115, 131 gift of soap 118–19 public/private division 116–17, 121–2, 125–6 Sera Waters 127 Donovan, Horace Opio 102 dowry system: Cyprus 17 Dreher, Sabine 191, 192, 194 Drone Studies (Waheed) 53, 56–7, 59, 60, 67–9 Edwards, Elizabeth 64 Elbow Room (Bristol) 98 Elser, Oliver 186 embroidery 25–6 Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages 12, 21–7 Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory 12, 13–21 emptiness: Almagul Menlibayeva 176, 177 encounters, transcultural entanglement 36–7, 38, 49 Parastou Forouhar 36–7, 38, 41, 43–4, 47–8, 49, 50 postcolonialism 41, 43–4 entanglement: Parastou Forouhar 35–7, 38, 49 ENTERprise Architects 193, 194 environment: Kazakh art 161, 162, 163, 164, 175–7 EOOS 192, 194–5 epistolary exchange 116–17, 119 Eslimi (Forouhar) 34–5, 49 ethnicity: Kazakh art 164 Eurocentrism 2, 39, 45, 93, 95 Evermust (Falkova) 169 exile and displacement, narratives of 26

208

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internal 12 (see also Cyprus; Palestine) nationalism and 28 Falkova, Zoya 169 Farzin, Media 47 feminist art theory: scholarship 3 Feminist Clutter (Chambers) 122, 124 Feministo (art event) 117 Festival of India in Britain (exhibition) 98 50 Years of Artistic Creation (exhibition) 17–19 film: Hajra Waheed 64 Finnish pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) 181 Fisher, Jean 95 Forester, Denzil 96 Forouhar, Parastou 33–50 fragment, the: Jacques Derrida and Ariella Azoulay 64 fragmentation: Hajra Waheed 64, 65–6, 66–7 From Two Worlds (exhibition) 91, 92–9, 103, 105, 106 Fumagalli, Corrado 45 Fusco, Coco 139, 148–50, 151–2 Gagnon, Monika Kin 56–7, 59 Galimbayeva, Gaisha 168 Gem Studies 1–25 (Waheed) 63 gender: Kazakh art 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 168–71, 174–5 Gennogramma (Menlibayeva) 177 geometry: Remedios Varo 81, 83, 84, 88 n.44 George, Rosemary Marangoly 126 German pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) 182, 183–90, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200 Germania (Haacke) 186 Germany: Parastou Forouhar 33–4, 36–8, 39, 42–3, 49 gift, the 118–19 Girls of Kyrgyzstan (Shadenova) 170 Glissant, Édouard 36, 48 globalization, impacts of, on women 2 Gomez-Peña, Guillermo 137, 138–56 graffiti: Saule Suleimenova 171, 174 Greater London Council (GLC) 98, 101, 102

Greek pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) 181 Groys, Boris 133 Gruen, Walter 75, 86 n.14 Guest from the Virgin Land, A (Galimbayeva) 168 Haacke, Hans 186 Hagner, Alexander 194 Hall, Stuart 44, 98, 100 Harris, Russell 35 Hayward Gallery 98 healing: nepantla spaces 152–4 Heart in Exile (exhibition) 101 Heidegger, Martin: on the table 86 n.26 Heimat, concept of 183, 184, 185, 190, 191 Hendricks, Barbara 187 Herscher, Andrew 199 Hicks, Emily 144–6 Himid, Lubiana 91, 93, 98, 106 Hirsch, Marianne 139 historical consciousness: Remedios Varo 81 history, reconceptualization of: Guillermo Gomez-Peña 138, 139, 140, 148, 155–6 home Cyprus 14–15, 16–19, 20 and homeland, state narratives on 53–4, 59, 69 Palestine 24, 26–7 space as place of: Remedios Varo 73–4, 75, 76–7, 78, 80–1, 83, 84 Home Strike (exhibition) 113–34 homeland Cyprus 11–12, 15, 19, 20–1, 28 Guillermo Gomez-Peña 137, 139, 141, 147–8, 154 Kazakhstan 159, 163–4 Palestine 11–12, 20–1, 26, 27, 28 see also Heimat, concept of homemaking 1, 125, 126, 131 Homer 42 hospitality, concept of 196–7 ‘Hostipality’ (Derrida) 196–7 Houshiary, Shirazeh 105 housing crisis, global 193 housing projects, social: Germany 186–90

Index Human Rights: 20 Years After (exhibition) 169 hunting: Sera Waters 127–31 identities multiple Kazakh 160–1, 162, 174 Remedios Varo 78–9 identity Black in Britain (1980s) 91–107 Palestinian women’s sense of 27 If Mayors Ruled the World (Barber) 196 Ijeremani Lam (Ndebele) 123–5 Ikat fabric 175 Ikon Gallery (Birmingham) 94 Iliad (Homer) 42 Imprisoned by History (Davies) 58 in-between-ness see nepantla ‘Indian-ness’: Anish Kapoor 105–6 individual, the: Hajra Waheed 55–7, 58–63, 64–6, 67, 68, 69–70 inkblots: Parastou Forouhar 38, 39, 42, 43 Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) 91, 94, 98, 103–4 integration, processes of: ‘arrival cities’ 196 interconnectedness: Remedios Varo 79–80, 83, 84 intimacy, public 116, 119 Into the Open (exhibition) 98 Introduction, An (Waheed) 61, 64 Iran: Parastou Forouhar 33–7, 38, 39, 42–3, 45–9 Iran War (2003): Mapa/Corpo 152–4 Irigaray, Luce 114 Islington Borough Council 100–1 Israel: occupation of Palestine (1948) 21–7 Jacir, Emily 12, 21–9 Jantjes, Gavin 98–9 Jenkinson, Hilary 54 Johannesburg 121, 122 Jones, Amelia 149, 162, 165 Kadeena, Eve-I 100–1 Kadyrkhanova, Asel 159–60, 171–3 Kaplan, Janet 78–9, 80, 85 n.3, 87 n.39 Kapoor, Anish 104, 105–6 Kazakh artists: group exhibitions 161, 162, 163, 171 Kazakh Chronicle (Suleimenova) 174

209

Kazakh language 173 Kazakhstan 159–77 Kerner, Justinus 38 Keskidee Theatre Workshop (Islington) 101 Khalidi, Walid 23, 24 Khatibi, Abdelkebir 41 KH-21 (Waheed) 60, 68–9 Kiss Me (Forouhar) 34, 44, 45–9, 50 kitsch: Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Emily Hicks 144, 146 Kranzler, Paul 192 Kreuzberg (Berlin) 190, 195, 197 Kurchatov 22 (Menlibayeva) 176 labour and the body 119–20 labour camps: Kazakhstan 173 land, exile and: Cyprus 16 language: Kazakh 173 learning: documenta 14 (exhibition) 13 Learning from Neukölln (Thein) 190 Lefebvre, Henri 79, 80, 196 Less Common More Sense, N 15 (Shadenova) 170 letters: epistolary form 116–17, 119 Lionnet, Françoise 41 Lisson Gallery (London) 104, 105 Little, Ken 102 Loneliness of the Immigrant (Gomez-Peña) 139, 142–3, 151 Look Mama … Macho (Araeen) 96 Loos, Adolf 36 Los Angeles 132, 141–3 Lösch, Klaus 41, 43 loss, experience of 28 Hajra Waheed 62 Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages 26–7, 28 Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory 17, 19, 20, 28 women 17, 20, 27 Lowe, Rick 13 Lozano, Luís-Martín 75, 88 n.41 Ludmer, Josefina 78 Machine, The (Kadyrkhanova) 171–3 Madanov, Galim 171, 174 Madonna of the Great Steppes (Menlibayeva) 177 Magi, Jill 44

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Index

Maharaj, Sarat 99 Makhubu, Nomusa 122 Making Heimat (pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2016)); see German pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) Making Myself Visible (Araeen) 100 Mamyr Dreams (Madanov and Terekbay) 174 Manual of Archive Administration, A (Jenkinson) 54 Mapa/Corpo (Pocha Nostra) 139, 152–4 Mappin Art Gallery (Sheffield) 98 Mara Beboos (song) 47 Marasela, Senzeni 122–5 Marino, Nola 152 Markiewicz, Małgorzata 118, 119 Mauss, Marcel 118 Medina, Lara 140–1, 152 Meldibekov, Erbolsyn 169 Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages (Jacir) 12, 21–9 memories, cultural: Guillermo GomezPeña 139, 147–8 memory 1974 19 Remedios Varo 81–2 Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory 13–15, 18, 19–21, 28 Menlibayeva, Almagul 159, 160, 163–5, 171, 174–7 Mercer, Kobena 103–4 Meskimmon, Marsha: academic work 4–5 Mexican Homeless (Gomez-Peña) 139, 141–2 Mexico-United States border 137–8, 143–4, 145, 146, 155 migrant experience, Greek: Alexandra Kokoli 131–2 Migrant Image, The (Demos) 8 migration and architecture at Venice Architecture Biennale 181–96, 197, 198, 199, 200 contemporary art, study of 1–2 Mimetismo (Varo) 80 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 141 Missed, The, 1–9 (Waheed) 61, 64 Missing, The, 1–20 (Waheed) 61–2, 64 Mitchell, Victoria 20

mobility: home and habitat 114–15, 120, 121 modernism, challenges to: Britain (1980s) 96, 98 modernity and tradition: Parastou Forouhar 34, 41, 43, 48 monsters: Remedios Varo 77, 84 Moser, Gabrielle 64 mourning: Parastou Forouhar 34, 42, 45–7 Muhr, Christian 191, 192, 194 multicultural society as patchwork 44–5 names, power of: Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages 22–4, 25, 26 nation states: hostility to migrants 185, 196 nationalism, exile and 28 naufrage 63, 64 Nazi architecture 185–7 Ndebele, Njabulo 123 nepantla 139, 140–1, 142, 154 nepantla spaces 141, 142, 146–7, 151–2, 155–6 New Horizons: An Exhibition of Arts 102 1974 (Vanezi) 19 Nollywood 121–2 nomadic becoming: Remedios Varo 77, 84 nomadism: Kazakhstan 161, 177 Nottingham Contemporary 91–2 objects and spaces: Remedios Varo 77, 79–80, 82, 83 Odyssey, The (Homer) 42 Offenbach Portraits (Peikert) 190 ‘On Cosmopolitanism’ (Derrida) 197 198 Gallery (Brixton) 101 one-point perspective: Remedios Varo 79, 81, 83 opacity, difference and 48 Organisation for Black Arts Advancement and Leisure Activities (OBAALA) 100–1 Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) 102 Orientalism (Said) 98 Ornament and Crime (Loos) 36 ornamentation: Parastou Forouhar 34–7, 43, 47, 49–50 Oslo Architecture Triennal (2016) 198–9 Other Story, The (exhibition) 95, 98

Index othering 126 ‘otherness’ 98, 100, 103, 107, 142–3 Our Naufrage 1–10 (Waheed) 63 Owusu, Kwesi 95 pain: Parastou Forouhar 34, 42, 44, 49–50 Palestine 11–12, 20–9 Pallasmaa, Juhani 82 Papillon Collection (Forouhar) 37–8 Parker, Rozsika 20, 25–6 passports 133–4 Pastan (Meldibekov) 169 patchwork, multicultural society as 44–5, 49 patriarchal society, subversion of: Remedios Varo 78 Payne, Antonia 94 Paz, Octavio 83 Peikert, Denise 190 performance: Guillermo Gomez-Peña 138–56 Persian decorative techniques: Parastou Forouhar 34–5, 36, 43, 47, 49 perspective, one-point: Remedios Varo 79, 81, 83 Peter, John 26 Petersen, Anne Ring 39–41 Photiou, Maria: academic work 4–5 photography Almagul Menlibayeva 164, 175–6, 177 Aziza Shadenova 169–71 Hajra Waheed 55–6, 61–2, 63–70 Parastou Forouhar 38 Saule Suleimenova 174 Senzeni Marasela 122–4 Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) 187, 190, 192, 195 Piper, Keith 95, 101 place, space and 120 Remedios Varo 73–4, 75, 77, 78–80, 81, 83, 84 Place in the Scheme of Things, A (Ryan) 97 Place Is Here, The (exhibition) 91–2 Places for People (pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2016)) see Austrian pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) plaits: Aziza Shadenova 170 Plato 39

211

Pocha Nostra 138, 139, 152–4, 155–6 Poland: gift of soap 117–19 Pollock, Griselda 27, 54 positivism: archive theory 54, 66–7 postcolonialism entanglement 36 transcultural encounters 41 weaving 39 postmemory 139, 151–2 postmigration and postcolonialism 39 postmodern archive theory 53, 54–5, 56–7 ‘post-nomadic’ civilization 161 Post-nomadic Mind (exhibition) 161, 171 Powell, Jennifer 104 power, abuse of: Parastou Forouhar 42–3 Pratt, Marie Louise 45, 50 precarity 115, 116, 191 P.S.1 (exhibition) 22–5 public intimacy 116, 119 public/private division 116–17, 119, 121–2, 125–6 Quell This, Swallow Me 1–5 (Waheed) 63 Ramirez, Louie 102 red: Kazakh art 164, 166, 168, 170, 171, 173 Red Butterfly (Menlibayeva) 159, 160, 164–5, 171 Red Is My Name, Green Is My Name (Forouhar) 35–6 ‘refugee crisis’ 181, 182, 191, 193, 197, 198, 199 refugee identity: Cyprus 15–16 regrounding, uprooting and 5, 114, 116, 120 religion: Parastou Forouhar 35, 41, 45–7 repertoire 139, 152 repetition: Remedios Varo 76–7, 83 Reporting from the Front (Venice Architecture Biennale (2016)) 181–200 resistance and transformation 120 return, myth of: Cyprus 19, 20–1 Returned 1–24 (Waheed) 63 Richardson, Su 117 Robinson, Hilary 114 Rock Densities 1–6 (Waheed) 63 Rorschach: Behnam (Forouhar) 38

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Index

Ross, Monica 117 Roussou, Maria 16, 17 Royal Festival Hall (London) 102 Rudofsky, Bernard 193 Russia, Kazakhstan and 159, 160; see also Soviet Union, Kazakhstan and Ryan, Veronica 96–7, 103, 106 Safran, William 21 Said, Edward 28, 98 Saudi Arabia: Hajra Waheed 53, 61, 67 Saunders, Doug 183, 184, 185, 190, 195 Savitsky, Igor 165–6 Savvides, Irene 19–20 Scarman Report 98, 99–100 Scheuermann, Anna 186 Schmal, Peter Cachola 186 Scott, Felicity D. 198–9 sculpture: art market 104 Sea Change (Waheed) 53, 56–7, 59, 60–7, 69 seam, the: joining together 44–5 securitization 121, 122 Sekula, Allan 55 ‘Seshoeshoes’ 124–5 sexuality and torture: Parastou Forouhar 34–5, 36 Shadenova, Aziza 159–60, 169–71 Shaked, Nizan 162–3, 164 Short Film, A, 1–321 (Waheed) 64 Sifuentes, Roberto 139, 150–1, 152 Signed R.E. Moon (Waheed) 60, 68–9 Social Furniture (EOOS) 192, 194–5 Socialist Realism: Kazakhstan 162, 166 Solanke, Adeola 93, 97 Soul of a Nation (exhibition) 92 Soviet Union, Kazakhstan and 159, 161–2, 165–6, 168, 171–3, 176; see also Russia, Kazakhstan and space: Remedios Varo 73–4, 75, 76–7, 78, 79–81, 82–3, 84 Stalinism: Kazakhstan 173 state narratives: Hajra Waheed 53–4, 55–6, 59, 64, 65, 66–7, 68, 69 State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow) 166 Steppe Guard I (Suleimenova) 166–7 stitching: Parastou Forouhar 44, 49, 50 Storms of the Heart (Owusu) 95 storytelling as survival tool 15

Streets for People (Rudofsky) 193 subjectivity mucous 114 suture as metaphor 44 Suleimenova, Saule 160, 166–8, 171, 174, 175 surveillance: Hajra Waheed 53, 59, 60, 64, 67, 68–9 tables: Remedios Varo 78 Tate Modern 92 Taylor, Diana 139, 149–50, 152 tent as visual reminder: Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages 26, 28 Terekbay, Zaureh 171, 174 Terkenli, Theano 76–7, 84 text and textile Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages 22–4, 25, 26, 28 Parastou Forouhar 33 Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory 13, 20, 28 textiles Kazakh art 164, 175–7 Parastou Forouhar 33–50 Senzeni Marasela 122–5 Sera Waters 127–31 Thein, Florian 190 Theodorah Comes to Johannesburg (Marasela) 122–5, 126 Thin Black Line (exhibition) 91, 98 Things Done Change (Chambers) 106 Third Text (journal) 99, 102–3 ‘Third World’: implications of term 102–3 Tijuana-Niagara (BAW/TAF) 139, 144–8 time and space: Remedios Varo 82–3 Toomer Labzda Gallery (New York) 133 torture: Parastou Forouhar 34–5, 36, 39, 42–3 tradition and modernity: Parastou Forouhar 34, 41, 43, 48 transcultural encounters; see encounters, transcultural transculturation 41, 49, 140, 141, 148 transdifference 41, 43 transnational feminisms 2–3 trauma, indirect memories of: postmemory 139, 151–2 Trump, Donald 137–8, 155–6

Index TSE Art Destination (Astana) 164 Tuan, Yi-Fu 79, 81–2 Turkey: invasion of Cyprus (1974) 14–16, 17–20 Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (Gomez-Peña and Fusco) 139, 148–50, 151–2 United States border with Canada 144–8 border with Mexico 137–8, 143–4, 145, 146, 155 immigration policies: Cruci/Fiction Project 150–1 migrant experience 132–3 Unrecorded Truths (exhibition) 98 uprooting and regrounding 5, 114, 116, 120 Vanezi, Vassia 12, 13–21, 27–9 Varo, Remedios 73–84 Venice Architecture Biennale (2006) 197–8 Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) 181–96, 198, 199, 200 Venice Biennale (2005): Kazakhstan 162, 169 Venice Bienniale (2017) 65 Victoria Square Project (Lowe) 13 video Almagul Menlibayeva 174–5, 176 Małgorzata Markiewicz 118, 119 Vienna: facilities for migrants 183, 191–6 violence: Parastou Forouhar 34, 35, 36 Virtual Feminist Museum (Pollock) 54 Waheed, Hajra 53–70

213

Wang, Brian Tai-Shen 102 Waters, Sera 126–31 weaving as metaphor 39, 41–4, 49 Weaving Pain (Forouhar) 34, 39, 40, 42–4, 49–50 Weaving Together – The Grid of Memory (Vanezi) 12, 13–21, 27–9 Westerman, William 199 Whitechapel Art Gallery (London) 92, 93 white privilege 126, 131 Winter Steppe (Suleimenova) 175 Witness 1–17 (Waheed) 62, 63, 64 womb, the: Remedios Varo 80, 84 women creative activities 76, 78, 80, 83–4 impact of Israeli occupation of Palestine 27 impact of Turkish invasion 17, 19–20 impacts of globalization 2 violence against 169 see also body, gendered; gender: Kazakh art women artists: exhibitions in 1980s Britain 94 Women’s Postal Art Event 117 xenophobia in United States: Guillermo Gomez-Peña 143, 150 Yuval-Davis, Nira: belonging 16, 28 Zegher, Catherine de 26, 43 Ziarek, Ewa 118, 120

214