Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts 9781501358753, 9781501358722, 9781501358739

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Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts

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Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts Edited by

Catherine Dormor and Basia Sliwinska

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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 2023 Selection and editorial material © Catherine Dormor and Basia Sliwinska, 2023 Individual chapters © their authors, 2023 Catherine Dormor and Basia Sliwinska have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images (2018), general installation view (detail), ink and colored pencils on transparent Mylar, polyethylene ponds full of water with ink, vinyl covers the windows, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill. Photographer: Stefan Hagen 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. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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978-1-5013-5875-3 978-1-5013-5873-9 978-1-5013-5874-6

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Contents List of Plates List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1

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Frayed and Fraying: Textile Actions and the Edges of Belonging Catherine Dormor

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Species of Space: Marisol, Marta Minujín and Nicola L on Party-Going, Domestic Mayhem and Nomadism Flavia Frigeri

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‘with my portapak on my back’: Identity and Belonging in Shigeko Kubota’s Broken Diary Helena Shaskevich

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Patty Chang: Body, Performance and Transnational Border Crossings Jane Chin Davidson

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Borderless and Undocumented: Day by Day in Southeast Asia Cristina Nualart

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Suspended: Bahar Behbahani’s Displacement and Longing in the Persian Garden Aliza Edelman

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Through Walls and Windows: Irene Buarque’s Work in the 1970s Margarida Brito Alves and Giulia Lamoni

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Disrupting Subaltern Geographies: The Artistic Intersections of Belkis Ayón Samantha A. Noël

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Keren Anavy’s Garden of Living Images: Transnational Landscapes as Spaces of Ecological Order Ketzia Alon and Aliza Edelman

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10 Collective Agency: Creative Communities in Australian Feminist Art Rachael Haynes and Courtney Pedersen

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11 ‘Woman Writing’ as a Curatorial Method: Narratives of Belonging in the Art Practices of Chantal Peñalosa and Bridget Smith Caroline Stevenson

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12 A Smuggler, a Butcher and a Fairy: Doing Things with One’s Body Jana Kukaine and Jānis Taurens

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13 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes): A Collective Walk Reclaiming Female Bodily Agency through Transnational Solidarity Basia Sliwinska

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Notes on Contributors Index

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Plates 1 Billie Zangewa, Cold Shower, 2019. Hand-stitched silk collage. 42.13 × 39.76 inches / 107 × 101 cm. 2 Marta Minujín, La Menesunda, 1965, General view of the Neon Tunnel. 3 Stills from Shigeko Kubota’s Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky, 1973, 31:56 min, b&w and colour, sound. 4 Patty Chang and David Kelley, Shangri-La, video project, 2005. 5 Nguyê n Thi· Thanh Mai, ID Card, 2014. Heat transfer prints on recycled fabric, 348 pieces, 5.7 × 8.1 cm. Installation view of the exhibition Skylines with Flying People 3 at The Japan Foundation for Cultural Exchange in Vietnam, Hanoi 2016. 6 Bahar Behbahani, still from Suspended, 2007, single-channel video (7 minutes), Tehran, Iran. 7 Irene Buarque, As Muralhas, 1975 (The City Walls). View of the installation in the gardens of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon. 110 cm each (diameter), acrylic on platex. 8 Belkis Ayón, La Cena (The Supper), 1988. Collograph, 1370 × 3000 mm. Photography by: José A. Figueroa. 9 Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images, 2018, installation view (detail), ink and coloured pencils on transparent Mylar, polyethylene basins, water, vinyl, dimensions variable. Photo: Stefan Hagen. 10 Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, 2017. Installation view at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis. 11 Chantal Peñalosa, Untitled, 2017, Diptych of inkjet prints on photographic paper. 12 Ingrīda Pičukāne, from Three Sisters, 2016. 13 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), 10 November 2020, Warsaw, Poland.

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Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2

3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2

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Billie Zangewa, Cold Shower, 2019. Hand-stitched silk collage. 42.13 × 39.76 inches / 107 × 101 cm. Billie Zangewa, Heart of the Home, 2020. Hand-stitched silk collage. 45 × 55 inches / 114 × 140 cm. Billie Zangewa, An Angel at My Bedside, 2020. Hand-stitched silk collage. 28 × 46.06 inches / 71 × 117 cm. Zina Katz, 164 Nights, 2018 (installation images). Hand-stitched on found fabrics. Dimensions variable. Image: the artist. Zina Katz, 164 Nights, 2018 (installation detail). Hand-stitched on found fabrics. Dimensions variable. Image: the artist. Nicola L, Red Coat, Same Skin for Everybody, 1973. Performance in Amsterdam. Marta Minujín, La Menesunda, 1965. General view of the Neon Tunnel. Marta Minujín, La Menesunda, 1965. View of the Octagonal Mirror Room. Marta Minujín, La Menesunda, 1965. View of the Bedroom. Marta Minujín, La Menesunda, 1965. View of the Woman’s Head. Still from Shigeko Kubota’s Europe on ½ Inch a Day, 1972, 30:48 min, b&w and colour, sound. Poster for Red, White, Yellow, and Black’s first multimedia concert at The Kitchen in New York City, December 1972. Poster by Red, White, Yellow, and Black Collective (Cecilia Sandoval, Mary Lucier, Shigeko Kubota, Charlotte Warren). Drawing from Shigeko Kubota’s Chinle, Arizona notebooks titled ‘Indian Woman Myself ’. Stills from Shigeko Kubota’s Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky, 1973, 31:56 min, b&w and colour, sound. Patty Chang and David Kelley, Shangri-La, 2005. Video project. Patty Chang, The Product Love (Die Ware Liebe), 2009. Stills of actors from video installation, Hu Huaizhong as Walter Benjamin and Yi Ping as Anna May Wong.

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List of Figures

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6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2

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Patty Chang, The Product Love (Die Ware Liebe), 2009. Sex scene taken from video installation, Hu Huaizhong as Walter Benjamin and Yi Ping as Anna May Wong. Nguyê n Thi· Thanh Mai, ID Card, 2014. Heat transfer prints on recycled fabric, 348 pieces, 5.7 × 8.1 cm. Installation view of the exhibition Skylines with Flying People 3 at The Japan Foundation for Cultural Exchange in Vietnam, Hanoi, 2016. Nguyê n Thi· Thanh Mai, Shadow, 2014. Ink on digital C print, mounted on plywood, 13 × 18 cm. Lêna Bùi, Borderless, 2016. Fabric and poles, dimensions variable. Installation view of the exhibition Skylines with Flying People 3 at MAM Art Projects, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2016. Lêna Bùi, Vô biên, 2015–2016. Fabric patchwork, wire and freestanding supporting poles, dimensions variable. Installation view of the exhibition Skylines with Flying People 3 at MAM Art Projects, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2016. Bahar Behbahani, The Bagh-I-Fin (after Donald Wilber, 1979), 2013–2014. Mixed media on canvas, 70.9 × 53.9 in. (180 × 137 cm). Bahar Behbahani, Apparent Failure, 2015–2016. Mixed media on canvas, 72 × 54 in. (183 × 137 cm). Bahar Behbahani, still from Suspended, 2007. Single-channel video (7 minutes), Tehran, Iran. Bahar Behbahani, still from Saffron Tea, 2009. Single-channel video (12:40 minutes), Tehran, Iran. Bahar Behbahani, still from Behind the Mirrors, 2015. Singlechannel video (18 minutes), Cappadocia, Turkey and United States. Irene Buarque, Sujeito III (Subject III), 1971. 120 cm (diameter), acrylic on platex. The artist’s collection. Irene Buarque, As Muralhas (The City Walls), 1975. Front view of the installation in the gardens of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon. 110 cm each (diameter), acrylic on platex. Irene Buarque, As Muralhas (The City Walls), 1975. Side view of the installation in the gardens of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon. 110 cm each (diameter), acrylic on platex. Irene Buarque at her exhibition Leitura e Contra-Leitura de um Espaço Limite: Janela (Reading and Counter-Reading of a Space

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List of Figures

Limit: The Window), Galeria Quadrum, Lisbon, 1978. Photograph by Nuno Teotónio Pereira. 7.5 View of Irene Buarque’s exhibition Leitura e Contra-Leitura de um Espaço Limite: Janela (Reading and Counter-Reading of a Space Limit: The Window), Galeria Quadrum, Lisbon, 1978. Detail: Ozalite prints (dark blue on white), 100 × 400 cm. 8.1 Belkis Ayón, Perfidia (Treachery), 1998. Collograph, 2080 × 2520 mm. Photography by: José A. Figueroa. 8.2 Belkis Ayón, Resurrección (Resurrection), 1998. Collograph, 2630 × 2120 mm. Photography by: José A. Figueroa. 8.3 Belkis Ayón, La Cena (The Supper), 1988. Collograph, 1370 × 3000 mm. Photography by: José A. Figueroa. 9.1 Keren Anavy, Untitled, 2014. General installation view, metal cutout, 180 × 90 cm, and soil drawing floor installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Meidad Suchowolski. 9.2 Keren Anavy, Hothouse (detail), 2012. Ink on paper, 150 × 450 cm. Photo: Yigal Pardo. 9.3 Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images, 2018. Installation view (detail), ink and coloured pencils on transparent Mylar, polyethylene basins, water, vinyl, dimensions variable. Photo: Stefan Hagen. 9.4 Keren Anavy, House & Garden, 2014–2015. Installation view (detail), wood and paper cutouts, dimensions variable, The Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Israel. Photo: Yigal Pardo. 9.5 Keren Anavy in collaboration with Valerie Green/Dance Entropy, Utopia, 2018. Performance at Danspace Project, New York. Photo: Stephen Delas Heras. 10.1 Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, 2017. Installation view at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis. 10.2 Sadie Chandler, The Weight of Images, 2017. Ink on paper, paste, 1120 × 420 cm.. LEVEL, Right Now! 2017. Mixed media, 130 × 100 × 40 cm. Installation view at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis. 11.1 Chantal Peñalosa, Untitled, 2017. Diptych of inkjet prints on photographic paper.

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11.2 Chantal Peñalosa, Unfinished Business Garage I/V, 2019. Ceramic objects, metallic bookshelf, storage objects. 11.3 Bridget Smith, Blueprint for a Curtain, 2015. Fifteen cyanotype prints. 11.4 Bridget Smith, Blueprint for a Sea (rising), 2015. Cyanotype print on aluminium. 11.5 Bridget Smith, Mechanical Wave, 2015. Still from video installation. 12.1 Diāna Tamane, from the series ‘Flower Smuggler’, 2019. 12.2 Rasa Jansone, Ritual Place, 2018. Fragment of installation. Collection of Latvian Museum of Photography. Ash-tree chopping boards, digital print, iron hooks. Images from Elmārs Heniņš, archive of Latvian Museum of Photography, 1950s. Dimensions variable. Photo: Kristīne Madjare. 12.3 Rasa Jansone. Ritual Place, 2018. Fragment of installation. Oak chopping boards, digital print, iron hooks. Images from Riga antique shop and the internet, authors unknown. Dimensions variable. Photo: Gvido Kajons. 12.4 Ingrīda Pičukāne, from Three Sisters [Oh là là scene], 2016. 12.5 Ingrīda Pičukāne, from Three Sisters [Bon Voyage! scene], 2016. 13.1 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), collective walk in front of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland, 10 November 2020, Warsaw, Poland. 13.2 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), floral wreaths crowning the heads of women who participated in the collective walk, 10 November 2020, Warsaw, Poland. 13.3 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), spraying mechanism designed to stain the robes of women who participated in the collective walk, 10 November 2020, Warsaw, Poland. 13.4 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), 10 November 2020, Warsaw, Poland. 13.5 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), by Elles sans Frontières, 25 November 2020, Brussels, Belgium.

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Acknowledgements The present volume is an outcome of a collaborative labour of generosity, dedication, patience and support. We would like to thank our fellow collaborators who have contributed to this book offering remarkable and critical insights that enabled the project to grow. An initial conference panel we co-convened at the 2018 conference, ‘Celebrating Female Agency in the Arts’, organised by Christie’s Education in New York, and some enthusiastic conversations turned into a rewarding journey with you all. Thank you to Aliza Edelman, Caroline Stevenson, Courtney Pedersen, Cristina Nualart, Flavia Frigeri, Giulia Lamoni, Helena Shaskevich, Jana Kukaine, Jane Chin Davidson, Jānis Taurens, Keren Anavy, Ketzia Alon, Margarida Brito Alves, Rachael Haynes and Samantha A. Noël. We would also like to thank the artists whose work inspired this volume and whose practices engage with the notion of belonging beyond borders towards spatialisation and recognition of female agency. Their generosity in allowing us to share their work and images with you is deeply appreciated. We would like to thank Bloomsbury for offering us the opportunity to publish with them. In particular we would like to thank Frances Arnold, Yvonne Thouroude and April Peake for guiding us and this book into publication; we appreciate your support. We thank the insightful reviewers of the initial proposal and their generous critical comments, which enabled the project to grow. We are grateful to our community of friends and colleagues who encouraged us to think about female agency beyond the scope of this book and practise attention via our own embodied positionalities. We also thank all individuals and institutions that generously provided images for this book and to the Royal College of Art for generously supporting the wonderful colour plates. Our heartfelt thanks go to Keren Anavy for allowing us to use a photograph of her installation, Garden of Living Images (2018), on the cover of the volume. When we (Catherine and Basia) went for a walk in June 2018 in New York after the conference panel we co-convened, we discussed many things. I (Basia) remember walking down the High Line towards the 9/11 Memorial, talking about spaces and ways in which we belong, as womxn. Our bodies in movement, walking past the artworks intervening into the space of the High Line, contemplating ways in which memory is narrativised via space; this experience xii

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of taking the walk together mobilised our thinking about invisibilised and/or marginalised subjects and their agentic belonging with/in multiple spaces. As we sat in our hotel’s café, immediately after returning from the walk, we began to write our initial ideas that shaped this volume. We have found in the act of co-creating this volume new respect and admiration for each other; it has deepened our friendship, our individual scholarship and the urgency for this work. This book is dedicated to womxn’s strength; we wholeheartedly thank womxn from Poland and beyond who keep protesting the continuous violation of women’s reproductive rights instituted by their governments and communities. We thank each of you for your courage, commitment, solidarity and active resistance to heteropatriarchal politics. We have both found the strength and courage to bring this volume together from different sources and these must not go unmentioned:

Basia Special thanks to Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes) for your collective walk in November 2020 in Warsaw that galvanised transnational alliances; and in particular to Chi-Chi Ude from Nieme Szaty Królowej for her anger that motivated a collective of bodies to join the walk – manifesting how the ‘I’ and ‘you’ become a ‘we’. Thanks go to Agata Araszkiewicz and Elles sans Frontières for re-enacting the walk in Brussels in front of the European Parliament building later in the month on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Agata, I also thank you for your friendship and generous conversations that always expand my thinking and inspire and enable my ideas to grow. A very special thank you goes to Dr Michal Fornalczyk for accompanying me during many walks that allow me to balance not only my thoughts but also the being and the doing. I thank you in particular for walking with me in the protests in response to the 2020 Polish Tribunal ruling undermining democratic freedoms and assaulting women’s bodily autonomy. Last but not least, I wholeheartedly thank my Mother, Helena Śliwińska, to whom I dedicate this book, who taught me to walk and keeps walking with me. You are the most generous and caring companion whom I love dearly. Thank you for teaching me spatial curiosity, perseverance and commitment to act and walk multiple itineraries, recognising the agency of human and non-human beings. Thank you for teaching me to practise attention and to care.

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Acknowledgements

Catherine I want to give special thanks to the two women artists who so generously allowed me to feature them in my essay, Billie Zangewa and Zina Katz. You have inspired so much of my thinking and writing and I am indebted to you. A special thank you goes to Duncan Dormor, with whom I have spent 32 years of marriage and 16 months of lockdown during the Covid pandemic; without your support, energy and belief, I would not have had the courage I have. Finally, I want to dedicate this book to two remarkable young women who I have had the privilege of being mother to: Hannah and Naomi. Over this year they have showed tenacity, resilience and commitment; they are an inspiration. They have taught me more lessons than I will ever fully know. I wish them much love in their marriages this year and look forward to being able to hold them close very soon.

Introduction

This book interrogates the politics of space expressed via womxn’s artistic practices, which prioritise solidarity and collaboration across borders, imagining attentive geographies of difference. It considers belonging as a manifestation of processes of becoming that traverse borders and generate new spaces and forms of difference. The book aims to catalyse mutual social relations founded upon responsibility and response-ability to each other. The transnational framework activates concerns around belonging at a time of intensified divisions, partitioning global narratives, unequal trajectories and increasing violence against bodies of the most vulnerable, largely founded on Eurocentric paradigms of political, economic and cultural superiority. Contributors to the volume engage in a conversation signalling transversal thinking and artmaking in order to articulate and activate ‘in-between’ spaces. This is to welcome co-affective models of belonging that question versatile embodiments of subjectivity as both agentic and as interrelational. The book is organised around the triangulation of modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, overarched by a transnational lens that acknowledges non-hierarchical, local and socially relevant genealogies against universalising politics of globalisation. In June 2018 we both travelled to New York to attend the conference ‘Celebrating Female Agency in the Arts’ organised by Christie’s Education.1 Our panel focused on transnational belonging and subjectivity-in-process within artistic practices of contemporary women artists. Taking as a cue Luce Irigaray’s (1982: 47) words expressed in Elemental Passions, ‘You grant me space, you grant me my space. But in so doing you have always already taken me away from my expanding space’ (emphasis added) we were interested in interrogating the politics of space and access to space(s) narrativised via artistic practices that prioritise solidarity and collaboration across borders. Irigaray addresses spatial exclusions produced by patriarchy, which render women passive and remove them from participation with/in the community. Marsha Meskimmon’s (2010: 6) concept of ‘be(long)ing’ as a form of 1

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Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts

cosmopolitanism suggests novel ways of thinking about dislocated subjects, private spaces and citizenship as agentic. It is this context that initiated the debate expressed in this volume that strategically destabilises the politics of space to consider ways in which female agency, as expressed in womxn’s artistic practice, has the capacity to disrupt hegemonic boundaries and thus to activate concerns around what it might mean to belong within transnational frameworks. This is a beginning of a set of conversations that signal transversal thinking and artmaking, and a reframing of belonging at times of increasing violence and authoritarism, conflicts and deepening multiple crises endangering democratic rights. The aim is to articulate ‘in-between’ and establish co-affective models of belonging that question versatile embodiments of subjectivity as both agentic and as interrelational. Fifteen months after the conference, when this volume was already emerging beyond the conversations we had during and after the panel, the world ‘stopped’. This pause, as Paul B. Preciado (2020) observes, occurred just at the point in March 2020 when France was on the verge of a new transfeminist and decolonial revolution. The global Covid-19 pandemic broke the rhythm of late capitalist and neoliberal predatory spatial expansion, intensive extraction, oppression and ecological precariousness. What is more important, it activated emancipatory thinking that questions existing infrastructures and a spatial politics in which Earth is produced to be more habitable to some bodies (and species) than others. As a gesture of rupture, the Covid-19 crisis visibilised and materialised vast inequalities in belonging and the lack of agency afforded to some bodies. All of our bodies, but most specifically those considered in heteropatriarchal frameworks to be at the edges of belonging, became regulated by state apparatuses and subjected to increasingly ethno-nationalist narratives. Under the guise of a global pandemic, womxn, immigrant, migrant, human and non-human and other excluded bodies became tools for government power structures. Preciado (2020) sees hope in intersectional feminist discourse surpassing the reductive oppositions and inviting us to reimagine the world towards spaces that are founded on interconnectedness. Such spaces would offer sovereignty to vulnerable bodies across imposed divisions with regard to gender, race, sex, class, nationality and ability that ‘do not oppose one another but are rather intertwined and amplified’. Emancipation would arise, Preciado (2020) proposes, from ‘a radical multiplicity of living bodies and organisms out of which energy is extracted through a variety of different governmental techniques becoming a new political force (and yet not a single subject or identity) for planetary

Introduction

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transformation’. This addresses the present challenges that Meskimmon’s concept of be(long)ing as a form of cosmopolitanism introduced a decade ago. Preciado engages with the rising xenophobia, separatism, populism and nationalism, emergent fascism and anti-migrant rhetoric which frames Meskimmon’s thinking within the current tumultuous and turbulent global field and points to the necessity of a radical collectivity and its limits. Contributors to this volume interrogate ways in which we might be able to rediscover how each body, human and non-human, belongs to a planetary system bound by common infrastructures. How can we belong and approach belonging in ways that acknowledge we are part of a universal community of earthly citizens? We are at a breaking point built upon partitioning violent global narratives and spaces, neocolonial domination and authoritarian capitalism that suggest quite the opposite of belonging. This intensifies divisions, making difference more entrenched, all the while concealing violence against the bodies of the most vulnerable. This volume asks what happens when we stop thinking in terms of a politics of distancing, building walls and marking borders. The collective of authors here offers a transfiguration, paradoxically a radical cut, that holds the capacity to generate spaces of inclusive belonging, spaces that traverse cultural and national borders, spaces that are actively agentic. Contributing to ongoing conversations on belonging in the current violent climate, they engage with artistic practices that foreground feminist strategies of transnational sisterhood and solidarity. Embracing Mohanty’s (2003: 223) critique of global sisterhood and cosmopolitanism in danger of erasing differences, authors in this volume explore how focusing on local, place-based and situated struggles and challenges, rather than the homogenised category of the global as dichotomous from the local, reaches across differences without undermining them. Paying attention to specificity and particularity resists liberal cosmopolitan articulations of solidarity and sensibility, and emphasises the spaces in-between. Negating the global as a shared condition, contributors to this volume frame solidarity through relationality, negotiating place-based practices and actions that highlight interdependence and rootedness in communities. It is not the intention of this volume to critique global feminism as there are already a number of excellent and pertinent discussions, such as Mohanty’s (2003) articulation distinguishing feminism without borders from ‘borderless feminism’ or ‘global sisterhood’. Mohanty (2003: 2) highlights that ‘lines between and through nations, races, classes, sexualities, religions and disabilities are real – and that a feminism without borders must envision change

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Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts

and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and division’. Feminist solidarity across these lines and understanding the contradictions particular to women’s location can lead to effective practice of solidarity across difference. The overarching theme of this volume is guided by feminist intersectional ethics illuminating connections generative of linkages and acknowledging that crises are not uniform. The threats we face across communities are multiple and context-specific. What they hold in common is that they are subject to structures of power that are rooted in histories of oppression and exacerbate existing inequalities, discriminatory practices and unequal trajectories. An intersectional transnational feminist lens enables us to cast light and practise attention in ways in which issues that are interconnected and which demand female agency are acknowledged and made visible. This allows for close consideration of asymmetries and inequalities that arise from globalisation structures, largely founded on Eurocentric paradigms of political, economic and cultural superiority. Meskimmon (2019) pays attention to doing things differently via engagement with the transformative potential of feminist aesthetics. Exploring a range of artistic practices she argues for ‘making meanings otherwise’ through creative figurations affirmed in women’s art (Meskimmon 2019: 354). Meskimmon (2019: 353) proposes: modes of thought that link bodies and matter to the production of knowledge and the affective acquisition and articulation of meaning. A feminist corporealmaterialist aesthetics challenges conventional concepts of subjectivity, moves away from representation and helps to rethink agency, potentially beyond the limits of a human-centred system. Such an aesthetics posits the work of art as a mode of experimental and material thought. emphasis in original

Such an approach suggests that agency is an action beyond binary power relationships not only in terms of heteropatriarchal gender politics but also subject-object oppositions. Human and non-human agency opens potentialities to think, make and write otherwise and anew. Material production co-exists and intra-acts with knowledge production and formation of subjects and objects. Meskimmon (2020: 1) argues that art matters and that visual arts has critical significance to transnational feminist thought and activism, and ‘effecting transformative and lasting socio-political change’. Intersecting art, transnational feminism and transversal politics, Meskimmon emphasises the need for

Introduction

5

responsible and response-able approaches that acknowledge situated and local contexts and embodiments. This volume offers such, termed by Meskimmon, ‘dialogues in difference’ (2020: 1). Each of the contributors to this volume has taken their own reference points and contextual positioning, and as a curated collection we aim to be in dialogue with and alongside existing texts that consider ‘new nationalism’ and transnationalism from the perspective of womxn’s practices. Meskimmon has written a number of texts including, among others, Contemporary Arts and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (2010) and, co-edited with Dorothy C. Rowe, Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (2013) in which she takes the concept of transnationalist feminist practices as a means by which to both understand and challenge what identity might mean in a globalised context. Meskimmon and Rowe (2013: 1) address the specificity of women’s encounters with the global attending to the notion of transnational movement and exchanges located at the edges and the borders. The multifaceted and multilayered connections that emerge articulate the distinctive localised subject positions occupied by women. They are concerned with ‘women’s art practices as a location through which subjects-in-process make and re-make the world’ (2013: 3). What this offers is a reading of contemporary art that foregrounds the ways in which it is both embedded in, and set apart from, prevailing socio-political structures. Meskimmon and Rowe’s publication is pertinent here in establishing the role of dialogue and plurality and we are particularly minded to draw attention to the conversational chapter between artist Lubaina Himid and Jane Beckett (Beckett and Himid 2013: 190–222) in which the concept of visibility, picturing and being pictured becomes a dominant theme in relation to cultural contributions and belonging. Written over ten years ago, this conversation resonates with today’s discussions and those within this volume, specifically colonial behaviours and practices and postcolonial and decolonising activisms. Himid speaks of new ways of visualising history to counteract assumptions concerning Black subjects. She emphasises the importance of textile design as a visible language between women. As we write she has installed 400 m of Dutch Wax fabric through the structure of Gawthorpe Hall’s Great Barn in Burnley, UK as part of the British Textile Biennial (2021) which develops this conversation with Beckett through physical and material means. The installation, entitled Lost Threads (2021), engages with histories of colonisation, migration and female labour through textiles. The fabric, reflective of the movement of water, alludes to the waterways carrying textiles as well as enslaved people across the world. The installation

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addresses the global nature of textiles and the unequal and violent relationships that emerge, visibilising the hegemony of labour in the production spaces of contemporary capital. In contrast to Meskimmon, Mica Nava’s Visceral Cosmopolitanism (2007) layers up a series of narratives and snapshots to reveal ways in which women, through being set outside of key structures and systems, complicate analyses of racism and belonging by taking seriously what the experiences are for those who are not simply different. In this it could be said that she champions many of the same preoccupations we do here: co-residence, mutual acknowledgement and desire for interdependence, participation, political mobilisation and what she terms the performance of ‘mutuality’ (2007: 13). It is interesting that she situates her thinking within the context of London, together with its very particular cultural provenance, highlighting specifically the practices of interdependence this throws up and the ways in which this simultaneously embraces and suffocates difference and otherness. This offers a nexus for exploring belonging as a transnational performance of interdependent self. Transnational belonging, as both Meskimmon and Nava set out, necessarily involves the concept of migration, something most of the authors in this volume address directly or obliquely engaging with spatial movement(s). What it might mean to migrate, be a migrant or be engaged in the performance of migration and thus separation from what might be framed as homeland is inextricably linked to borders and border crossing. Anne Ring Petersen in Migration into Art (2018) takes up these themes, focusing around identity and belonging, institutional visibility and recognition of migrant artists. She is specifically interested in the power dynamics and politics that are at play, but often manifested through aesthetics and ethics and thus the ways in which representations of forced migration are presented. Unusually for discussions on these themes, this is a single-authored text, which speaks of the necessity of speaking plurally. She draws in a wide range of voices to this text, to enable her to map ways in which the priorities in visual art practices have shifted with migratory patterns and how migrants and migration are perceived. She particularly focuses on diasporic and nomadic migration rather than forced displacements and as such speaks across and between notions of singular and plural borders and belonging(s). Petersen positions artmaking as ‘a performative process of engagement and critical reflection which is undertaken by artists and audiences alike’ (2018: 8). This is particularly important here, where the authors contributing are also art practitioners, curators and political activists. In solidarity with

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Petersen, and as Chantal Mouffe argues (2007), they do not take for granted that artworks are somehow outside of political regimes and as such are no more neutral or trustworthy, but they offer the possibility for making visible what dominant discourses (seek to) obscure. Petersen’s work is relevant to this volume in the way that she speaks into political positioning of the concept of migration and transnational belonging, paying close attention to the mobility or migration of images and stereotypes, templates and patterns. The life of images. These are themes that are picked up from the dialogues across a number of edited collections, but particularly Crossing Borders: Transition and Nostalgia in Contemporary Art (Turner and Remes 2015), Transnational, Activism, Art (Dobson and McGlynn 2012), Transnational Borderlands in Women’s Global Networks (Sierra and Román-Odio 2011) and Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions (Svašek 2012). These are important and vital companions for this volume in establishing a field of study that positions women’s art practices as layered, multifaceted spaces for production of meaning in which articulation and understanding are established as potently complicated. These sidestep a prevailing preoccupation with explaining how we describe ourselves, in favour of ambivalence and close attention to the socio-political. A transnational lens enables us to recognise interconnections and alliances, attentive to how place and space matters and how it frames narratives of belonging(s) and accounts of the agentic self. Which subjects have been invisibilised and how can we de-centre the heteropatriarchal discourse empowering some bodies, including human and non-human, over others? This volume explores material and metaphorical ways in which the legitimacy of nation-state structures can be challenged to acknowledge violating global processes affecting bodies and embodied selves. Access to and visibility in space matters. And within spaces womxn’s lived experiences matter, in particular with regard to how gender is linked to localised and global social networks and belonging(s). How do we approach spatial entanglements beyond divisions such as here and there or elsewhere? How can we imagine geographies that are attentive to the complexities of communities, sometimes transcending the national state? The transnational is juxtaposed in this volume with belonging as a manifestation of processes of becoming that traverse borders and generate new spaces and forms of difference catalysing mutual social relations founded upon responsibility and response-ability to each other. Transnational belonging affirms the synergies and points of tension within spaces that pay attention to

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privileges of individual positionalities to acknowledge non-hierarchical, local and socially relevant genealogies against universalising politics of globalisation. It opens up alternative stories, linkages and relationalities destabilising borders to recognise a multitude of subject positions. Navigating geographies of difference accounts for power relationships that speak to interacting forces impacting gender relationships and experiences in a geopolitical context. Belonging or to belong is to be involved in forms of spatial alignment; these might be physical, virtual, psychic or affective; and thus to be excluded is also a specifically spatial activity. Collaborators in this volume have written of transnationality, female agency and women’s art practices from a range of contexts and perspectives. They have also demonstrated huge generosity in terms of their willingness and capacity to create spatial thinking. Making alignments and sharing their own art practices and those of others, they brought together ways of thinking that are capacious, open and empathetic. We have all, since the beginning of 2020, been ordered at times to stay at home, or shelter in place. This raises questions of spatial proximity and spatial belonging in terms of being quarantined with others, alone or some other alternative. Catherine Malabou (2021) pondered this through the lens of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe and herself, considering a form of self-confinement possible within a spatial proximity with others, or the alternative of creating spatial proximity from isolation. Whilst Malabou sets this out in terms of an ethics of self, there is also the associated ethics of the other(s). This involves care with those others, the technologies with others and government with others. Spatial belonging could be conceived of in terms of building community within and outside oneself, with and without others. This is to build a politics that envelopes the spatial other, a politics that functions beyond individualism, but also celebrates the individual as an autonomous citizen within the transnational whole. To belong implies a form of inhabiting that demands affective agency between bodies, together with an imaginative leap into co-presence. Lauren Berlant (2000: 1) writes of intimacy in terms of communication ‘with the sparest of signs and gestures’, but she then proceeds to discuss intimacy in terms of its ‘aspiration for a narrative about something shared’. There is something important here in terms of transnational belonging, that is to do with balancing private notions of intimacy and the public sense of a narrative. In this balancing act, affective belonging acts as a fulcrum, the pivotal element that allows the whole to hold together in active tension. Affective agency between bodies poses questions of

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scale and linking together the instability of individual lives. It is into this narrative that the imaginative leap of co-presence must be made. Intimacy and affective agency emerge from this to operate as portable, unattached to material notions of spatiality and a set of drives that co-create spaces through their practices. These are spaces, or concepts of spaces, that allow us to reimagine collective lives that make more sense together than a collection of individuated lives. To belong is to be in community with one another, to form a connection or a set of connections. This is to build capacity for shared agency that is contingent and precarious. It is both fragile and weak, but also robust and strong. It is a form of belonging that foregrounds, the ‘we’ and the ‘with’ rather than models of insider/outsider, belonging and unbelonging. Writing from distinctly pre-Covid times, Jennifer Spiegel (2015: 786) focuses upon the city of Montreal banning mask-wearing at protests, which later that year became a federal ban. The protests in question were about the privatisation of higher education, fees and research funding and the discussions of mask-wearing and its ban were a measure to divide, order and control collective fronts motivated by a more general fight against austerity measures. Spiegel (2015: 795) notes that maskwearing creates an anonymous protester, asserting ‘the protesting body as collective and depersonalised’. Collective belonging can offer a perspective of pressure that resists the individuated in favour of a tactics of pervasiveness: one body can be ignored, brutalised or restrained, but the collective body announces that the spirit of that protest remains inclusive and embodied by others. This runs counter to neoliberal politics of the self. Collective belonging threatens the governing principles, offering a political voice that evades, a body that cannot be disciplined. These three modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, form the organising principles for this volume. The spatial considers different modalities of transnationalism interrogating what new spatialities emerge under transnational frames. In what ways are nomadic subjectivities circumscribed by their national origins? How are processes of deterritorialisation and dislocation articulated in artistic practices navigating issues of geographical or national identifications? In the section articulating spatial belonging, Catherine Dormor speaks of textile and specifically fraying textile as means by which to consider the materiality of the edge. She brings to this discussion the artworks of Billie Zangewa (Malawian) and Zina Katz (Argentine) to suggest fraying as a form of material and visual activism that strategically puts pressure on structures of belonging and the intimate edges of

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the global communities. Terming this spatial logic, she considers the textual as well as structural behaviours of fraying textile, building metaphors that counter hegemonic notions of belonging. In the following essay, Flavia Frigeri picks up these spatial themes as she considers artworks of three artists – Marisol (Venezuelan-American), Marta Minujín (Argentine) and Nicola L (French) – introducing a narrative of space, public spaces and placelessness as intertwined with identity. In this she offers a reading of these artists that, in their spatiality, rejects fixity in favour of transience and change. Like Dormor she uses material metaphors to unpick existing structural norms, finding in the metaphor a richer language for imagining difference and alterity. She considers the fluidity of space, toying with the ways in which this re-categorisation allows for slippage and shapeshifting. In this way, the trio of artists she focuses on offers a ‘species of space’ that coalesces around the works’ viewers. These viewers, with their presence, constantly reframe the works’ belonging. From fluidity, in Frigeri’s essay, water becomes the key motif for Helena Shaskevich as she focuses on the early videos of Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota and Vietnamese artist Naim June Paik. As with the previous essays, water features both metaphorically and materially, signalling a fluidity of belonging that resists normative forces of global commodification of image production and presenting a form of connective tissue. In this play between notions of water as cleansing and flowing and as a life-giving connecting mechanism, there is an assertion of agency in these works, founded through embodied presence and an insistence on the prevailing material conditions. Shaskevich invites us to examine the role of electronic media in shaping cultural understanding as a form of spatial belonging, drawing us into dramatic formal shifts in the practice to develop intermingled dialogue that is taken up in the final essay in the section by Jane Chin Davidson. Where the previous essays have taken a material turn, here we see Davidson address material and spatial practices through performance and performativity. In this she foregrounds the kind of feminist questions that have become urgent in this second decade of the twenty-first century. In opening out the politics of identification, nations and borders she offers us ways in which conceptions of the ‘transnational’ make meaning and relevancy in the expressive efficacy of the visual art. Drawing on the performative video work of the Chinese-American artist Patty Chang, Davidson conceptualises space and spatial belonging, relocating the notion of the citizen as problematised and set in direct and unequivocal relationship with the stranger. In a play between what happens in front of and behind the camera, Chang’s performative work disrupts

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heteronormative language that denotes citizenship, repositioning the immigrant whose lot is to symbolically become adopted or naturalised, thus displacing birthplace to allow a new life in a new country. That this process is one that ordains the change of nationality for each and every émigré speaks into the concepts behind this book, transnational belonging and female agency. Davidson, in addressing this in terms of spatial performance, toys with the paradoxes that make up what we think of as global, creating capacity to include the hopeful possibility of unlimited, inclusive communities of democratic citizenship. In grouping these four essays we wanted to locate spatial belonging not so much in terms of fixedness or even homeland, but more in terms of precarity. Dormor and Davidson deep dive into the intimate structures of belonging at the (self-)edge, unravelling what that edge offers as a space of and for productive meaning-making, not only for itself but for the fuller fabric of community. This is not to set edge against centre, but to allow edge and centre to function symbiotically and collectively undoing dichotomous thinking about spaces and vertical power relationships that follow. From here Frigeri and Shaskevich continue the dialogue, building outwards into a global discourse of commodification and material particularity, collectively framing a spatial encounter as nomadic but agential, located but transnational. Taking a trajectory that refuses demarcation in favour of a more fluid understanding of what it might mean to belong in a spatial sense, they foreground connectivity and communication. Davidson’s essay rounds up this section using performativity as a means to draw together the fluid and the material, creating a spatial structuring that holds without binding, speaks to the global and the intimate bodies in space. Affective belonging thought of in terms of affective agency between bodies forms the second section and features essays that form a topography of social, familiar and migratory relationships. They speak of ways in which inside/outside of belonging is constructed and maintained across histories and nations. Cristina Nualart takes a journey through two projects of the Vietnamese artists Lena Bui and Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai, drawing out mechanisms by which social exclusion is set within legal frameworks that essentialise place and locatedness. Themes of borderlessness, erasure and silencing become focal points alongside the metonymical relations within the artworks. Nualart explores what womanhood might be possible if it took the form wherein women have ownership or access to the social space that is not patriarchally proscribed for them or indeed restricted. This is to focus on decentred belonging and thus decentred historytelling. In this it is a call to affective belonging and ownership that does not

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deprive another and that acknowledges the lived embodied experience of all bodies, accounting for vulnerable and precarious conditions affecting everyday experiences of being in space(s) and accessing them. These affective modes make connections that are taken up by Aliza Edelman who chronicles the paintings and videos of Iranian artist Bahar Behbahani. Here, she foregrounds the Persian garden, taking it as a motif and relational socio-historical material encounter. She calls for a meditation upon habitual or conventional connections between sign and signified. This forms the lens by which Edelman approaches the collective hybridisation of documents, borders, bodies and communities; an approach that draws out the ways which speak of situated knowledge as mediated and affective locatedness. Taken together, Nualart and Edelman allow us to navigate into a concept of affective belonging founded upon bodies that confound being boundaried and that interweave the local and the global through intimate and sensitive co-habiting. Where the seductive beauty of Iran’s landscape carries with it metaphors of loss and longing through the Persian garden, Nualart speaks of the agony of rootlessness and placelessness. The final two essays in this section focus upon artists from Brazil and Cuba respectively. Margarida Brito Alves and Guilia Lamoni consider work of the Brazilian artist Irene Buarque, specifically her 1978 exhibition in Lisbon. Alves and Lamoni pick up on her use of the figure of the window and its capacity to oppose conceptions of space and location as univocal and self-contained. Taking the associated and material language of transparency and opening to connect the here and there, Alves and Lamoni think about hybridity and the specific language of migration. They are interested to understand how this is shaped, affectively, through the combination of encounters and divergences. In this sense the window then functions as a vanishing point, drawing a line of continuity between bodies, states and histories. Collectively, these three essays form a triangulation of thinking that foregrounds the agency between bodies, privileging their connectivity over their own individualised materiality. This suggests that affective belonging has the capacity to transcend without erasing, to be both with(in) and with(out) simultaneously, but equally sidestepping ambiguity and the neutralising forces that are often drawn up to oppose binarisms. In a similar vein, Samantha Noël takes as her focus the work of Cuban artist Belkis Ayón. In this essay the notion of power in relation to the secret society is explored and its capacity to secure and protect knowledge and knowledge production across and between (male) generations. Ayón’s practice is a bodily insertion in which she takes on the role of servant, intermediary and revealer of knowledge. She draws

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on her imaginary and as such becomes a transgressor. Vulnerable, with a commanding and beautiful practice, she makes her presence visible within spaces that cast her as invisible. For Ayón, as with the other artists featured in this section, the affective body is one which speaks with and through itself to and with other affective bodies, creating a shimmering space of collectivity. The final section of this volume is given over to the notion that belonging is a collective endeavour and one that cannot be undertaken either unilaterally or individually. To belong is to be in a communal relationship. These five essays approach the concept of collectivity as an a priori to belonging exemplified through generosity, ambiguity, vulnerability and persistence. The work of the diasporic artist Keren Anavy (Israel/US) is itself a collective endeavour, co-written with Aliza Edelman and Ketzia Alon in collaboration with the artist herself. This essay sets out the toxic crises of the landscape through the creation of ecological orders drawing on the metaphor of the garden in terms of geography and place. The artworks chronicle both bereavement and the laying of new roots, setting out ways in which belonging as a transnational act is a precarious ecology of loss, growth and expanding capacity. Like the garden, these material metaphors reveal underlying social and political complexities that the transnational citizen must both navigate and nurture in order to thrive. In a similar vein, Rachel Haynes and Courteny Pedersen explore unacknowledged Indigenous art practices and voices from the narrative of Australia’s contribution to second wave feminist discourses. Framed in terms of friendship, generosity and care, Haynes and Pedersen record and interpret the ebbs and flows of convergence in feminist art. They again turn to language of growth and nurture in a call to action: to actively recognise, respect and listen to diffusions or differences inherent in any understanding of feminist practice. Where Anavy’s work is deeply poetic and Haynes and Pedersen strike up a call to revisit narratives of progress, Caroline Stevenson deploys the activities of the curator in her essay to speak of vulnerable listening. When another speaks, we listen; we must listen closely and attentively to the overt and implicit language. A call to action may not necessarily be loud. Stevenson brings together the work of the Mexican artist Chantal Peñalosa and British artist Bridget Smith, utilising correspondence as the agent for a conversation between three. In this she offers a spatial figuration in which to think through what it means to be at home and where this ‘home’ is. Stevenson frames her discussion through two sets of art practice, both photographic and both focused upon blue. In creating such a space for collective renegotiation of curating, she ignites a form of listening to another that does not

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name, bound or frame, but rather connects to the horizon where sky, land and sea never really meet, where home is formed outside of pre-existing fields of knowledge. Its legacy is generous and vulnerable. At this point, the final section moves from mediation into messy materiality and the final two essays speak into the hostile body politics of post-Soviet nations: Latvia and Poland. Where Jana Kukaine and Jānis Taurens’s playfully titled essay takes us into the messy rags of everyday material life, Basia Sliwinska responds with the persistence of walking as an activist and politically charged practice. Kukaine and Taurens turn to social bonding and affective labour, speaking into corporeal-affective acts of doing things with one’s gendered body, taking into account its corporeal vulnerabilities and in this making present its material messiness. Through this they explore the legacies of Latvia’s multicultural heritage and its entangled history as spoken through the female lens. The troubling question of women as agential bodies opens up themes of hostility and marginalisation, repeating the point that whilst to belong is a collective action, so is to exclude and to erase. They conclude by noting that commitment to transnational belonging is always and necessarily both embodied and affective. It is undeniably gendered, aged and sexualised, always situated and inscribed in a body’s particular vernacular settings. It is local, global and personal. Local, global and personal are key ways of approaching the final essay here, by Basia Sliwinska. In addressing the hostile body politics of the post-Soviet condition in Poland, as well as articulating intimate family histories, feminist kinships and solidarities, she draws to our attention the bodily danger of being womxn in the present. This powerful testament to the politics of collective persistence she addresses via the activist walk by Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes) that took place in Warsaw, Poland in November 2020. The walk was a response to Poland’s criminalisation of abortions even in the case of foetal abnormality, effectively removing bodily agency from Polish womxn. The simple and yet persistent act of walking enacts political and personal agency through bodily movement. In the collective walk the ‘we’ emerges out of the ‘I’ and ‘you’, bringing the collective and the individual together. Queen’s Silent Robes’ action imagines a transnational solidarity towards communal becoming and belonging demonstrating how bodies excluded from hegemonic narratives hold the capacity to articulate agency. It is this agency that makes the personal not only political, but also transnationally agential. We offer this book in the spirit of solidarity to womxn agential artists, practitioners, makers and thinkers. We call our readers to join us in the collective,

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spatial and affective community, to be generous and vulnerable with us, to act and to listen, to embody and to be mindful. In this persistence, we can return to Luce Irigaray, and grant space to one another and for the collective ‘we’. In so doing, we are able to expand space in which it is possible to belong.

Note 1 More on the conference and individual panels can be found here: www.christies. com/exhibitions/christies-education-conference-celebrating-female-agencyarts#cedu_Nav

References Beckett, J. and Himid, L. (2013) ‘Diasporic Unwrappings – Lubaina Himid in conversation with Jane Beckett’, in M. Meskimmon and D.C. Rowe (eds.), Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Berlant, L.G., ed. (2000) Intimacy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dobson, K. and McGlynn, A., eds. (2012) Transnationalism, Activism, Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Irigaray, L. (1982) Elemental Passions. 2nd edn. London: Athlone Press. Malabou, C. (2021) ‘To Quarantine from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, and “I” ’. Critical Inquiry 47 (S2): 13–16. Available at https://doi.org/10.1086/711426 (Accessed 11 November 2021). Meskimmon, M. (2010) Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. 1st edn. London and New York: Routledge. Meskimmon, M. (2019) ‘Art Matters: Feminist Corporeal-Materialist Aesthetics’, in M.E. Buszek and H. Robinson (eds.), A Companion to Feminist Art. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Meskimmon, M. (2020) Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections. Abingdon: Routledge. Meskimmon, M. and Rowe, D.C., eds. (2013) Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mohanty, C.T. (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mouffe, C. (2007) ‘Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces’. Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1 (2). Available at www.studio55.org.uk/anr/v1n2/ mouffe.html (Accessed 11 November 2021).

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Nava, M. (2007) Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference. Oxford: Berg. Petersen, A.R. (2018) Migration Into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-Making in a Globalised World. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Preciado, P.B. (2020) ‘On the Verge: Paul B. Preciado on Revolution’, Artforum International 58 (10). Available at www.artforum.com/print/202006/paul-bpreciado-on-revolution-83286 (Accessed 21 April 2021). Sierra, M. and Román-Odio, C., eds. (2011) Transnational Borderlands in Women’s Global Networks: The Making of Cultural Resistance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Spiegel, J.B. (2015) ‘Masked Protest in the Age of Austerity: State Violence, Anonymous Bodies, and Resistance “In the Red” ’. Critical Inquiry 41 (4): 786–810. https://doi. org/10.1086/681786. Svašek, M., ed. (2012) Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Turner, M. and Remes, O., eds. (2015) Crossing Borders: Transition and Nostalgia in Contemporary Art. Taipei: Artouch Publications.

1

Frayed and Fraying: Textile Actions and the Edges of Belonging Catherine Dormor

To think of transnational belonging in terms of female agency is to think of the capacity of feminist practices or the practices of feminism to function across geopolitical boundaries and structures. To approach this through a spatial logic of the frayed and fraying is to consider edges and worn centres as spaces beyond the rectilinear warp-weft structures, where the structure is both endangered and liberated. Gyatri Spivak refers to this as a dangerous space where ‘spacey emptiness’ allows meaning to be made, or to ‘hop in’ (1993: 202). In her book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017), Julia Bryan-Wilson notes that textile and textile practices have a history of operating ‘in the fray’ of heated debates and controversies about the materiality, and thus the value, of gendered labour (2017: 4). The debates speak repeatedly and necessarily to boundaries: high-low, use value-commodity, industrialisation-leisure, political action-domestic beautification. In this chapter, the woven textile is considered not only in its material form as cloth, but through an explicit complication of textile practices as a transnational set of products and practices. Textile thus operates as a dense, multivalent material, rooted in such industrialised and globalised systems, together with and in combination with the corporeal and domestic. In this essay I want to take the notion of frayed and fraying edges and centres as a form of spatial logic by which to renegotiate a gendered performance of these boundaries starting from Hannah Arendt’s ‘enlarged mentality’ (1982: 43), a form of thinking that is bound up with visiting with. Such a logic, like the woven textile, privileges relationship, Arendt’s ‘visiting with’, and thus sets the performance of self within the space of the other not in place of that other. The fray and fraying as form and action offer scope by which to think through the concepts at the heart of this book: female agency and transnational belonging. 17

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Here I want to think of agency as a decisive act or set of actions which involve the taking up of space, whether physical or psychic. How and by whom that space is taken up becomes a political and intimate act of power transfer, sometimes momentary and at other times longer lived. What is important in such agential action is the ways in which it traverses the affective landscape, how it speaks with another and outwards of itself. In the same way, transnational belonging is used here to think at the edges, to think with the intimate acts and activities of women within, between and at the margins of nation-states. To this extent, the frayed and fraying edge is about border work, what it means to break down that border, to explore its structures and potential and then to approach what it might mean for global woman to address its repair. To open out the concept of textile as a spatial logic of frayed and fraying, this essay winds itself around the practice of two artists: Billie Zangewa and Zina Katz. Both artists work figuratively with found fabrics and stitch, taking a patching and piecing set of techniques as a means by which to articulate themes of belonging and self-identity. Zangewa was born in Malawi, grew up in Botswana and studied at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her background training in printmaking makes itself evident in her layered and pieced artworks, in which she redeploys raw silk offcuts, transforming them into rich and vibrant expressions of personal social and cultural meditations. Her subject matter draws together themes of domesticity, femininity and solidarity, expanding personal lived experiences and histories outwards through a combination of materiality and imagery. Whilst it may be supposed that she is trying to reconcile the ongoing relationship between domesticity and femininity through the use of textile, she manages to cast a lens on feminine labour as a globally unrecognised workforce. ‘Domestic labour is taken for granted and not even thought about, even though it is what keeps societies going’ (Zangewa in Jareh 2021). Zangewa speaks from and into woman’s marginalisation: ‘through this sharing of her everyday intimate life, perhaps someone will finally see and hear her’ (2021). Zangewa’s practice is figurative and expressionistic, filled with female figures sometimes seemingly engaged in everyday activities and at others caught in moments of suspended concentration. While many of her works focus on the singular woman caught up in her daily work, Zangewa’s broader oeuvre speaks of an agency built upon communal care and mutual support, forming a system of symbiotic relationships that follow through into her working practices. She has two women who support her when she needs it: they help her, and she

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provides employment. Through the careful work they undertake they become agential partners in the production of these expressive artworks. Katz’s practice, by contrast, is concerned with a spatial logic that brings together textile, form and the space surrounding it as a three-dimensional site for articulation. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Katz is the daughter of twentieth century European exiles from the textiles industry, which means that her textile work becomes a doubly imbued or interwoven expression of social, political and private concerns. Currently working with themes of exile and migration, Katz ‘returns’ to Paris to work with migrants there. She takes up the concept of the passport and its role in granting entry; she questions notions of human migration being considered in terms of utility and asks starkly: ‘What freedom do we have when hospitality depends on utility?’ (2017). Using passportlike imagery and ID card formatting, Katz stitches the faces of the migrants at L’atelier des Artists en Exil, artists awaiting the outcome of their asylum requests. She stitches onto found and pieced textile fragments, rendering their faces through a process akin to drawing, building layers of stitchery to create depth and form. Unlike drawing, however, the stitching has a verso to its recto image and here the tangled, crossing and re-crossing threads form an alter-image, part reversal, part negative, part record of the journeying needle and threads. Katz displays these stitched portraits unframed, suspended with both sides viewable. In this she exposes the transnational space of the migrant seeking asylum, its messiness, confusion, displacement and loss of agency. The array of domestic materials, some patterned, some stitched, some plain, all partial, articulate homes and families left and lost, and the hope of new homes and neighbourhoods to come. Hamid Naficy writes of journeying: ‘Every journey entails a return, or the thought of return. Therefore, home and travel, placement and displacement are always already intertwined. Return occupies a primary place in the minds of the [traveller]’ (2001: 229). For an asylum-seeking migrant, however, travelling becomes complicated in that return may or may not be possible, but it cannot be assumed or presumed and may in fact be feared. This does not mean that home, travel, placement and displacement become less intertwined. Katz’s threads and portraits articulate this intertwining and displacement. She says ‘I cross the fabric with the needle. I sew the photo. On the other side the thread is released. To embroider what is hidden’ (2017). It is impossible to trace the passage of the threads across the back of the work as they articulate transnational existence, making real and psychological connections between home and location, place and context.

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What Katz and Zangewa offer here is a dialogue between two different and yet interrelated notions of transnational belonging. Where Zangewa demands recognition of feminine labour through a focus upon the intimate daily work of Black women in Southern Africa, Katz speaks from the intimate perspective of portrait-making outwards to the ways in which value is appointed to the human in terms of their capacity to perform certain kinds of labour. Both artists deploy found and frayed fabrics, detritus from other contexts, together with patching, piecing and stitch, to articulate and express vital truths. It is in the frayed edges and displaced threads that a spatial logic for thinking with and through notions of female agency and transnational belonging emerges; it is a spatial logic that offers scope for how these might be understood and reconceived. In this sense, the frayed edges and spatiality created through those edges become a critical tool. Thinking of the woven cloth in this way reconsiders textile as a structure in which warp threads are held together by the weft threads that in turn wrap themselves around the edge to form the selvedge (or self-edge). Fraying challenges and champions borders through its own spatial logic.

In the Fray Frayed and fraying fabric, as a metaphor for transnational belonging, can offer a number of lenses by which to reconceive how agency and belonging might be constructed. These can be grouped in terms of chaos, geopsychic matter and motion. These three taken together draw on N. Katherine Hayles (1990), Giuliana Bruno (2014), Elaine Scarry (1999) and Gyatri Spivak (1993). Where Hayles turns to an a priori relationship between order and chaos, in which order is baked into the structures within chaos (1990: 143–174), Bruno speaks into the logic of the cloth and its systems of form, formation and unforming, something she refers to as ‘geopsychic matter’ (2014: 22). This builds on the temporality of fraying and the fray that motivates a form of pre-affective reciprocity. Hayles’s suggestion that chaos can be conceived of as the engine that drives a system towards a more complex kind of order (1990: 23) gives way to Bruno’s encoding held within cloth’s woven structures. This allows for its own expansion through the fray. In fraying, the structure and coding enable remarkable complexity, an architecturality that traces from worn edge to intact centre and back again. The fray thus conveys a form of psychic leap, together with scope for re-inhabiting

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the affective landscape. In this affective landscape of the fray, everything remains in flux, even when everything seems to be out of motion. In the stayed fray, the possibility of the mend or repair or further destruction can be allowed full scope. For Spivak (1993: 180), the frayed edges of language offer ‘spacey emptiness’ where meaning can ‘hop in’, but the frayed edges of cloth offer a spatial topology that hovers between order and chaos, each encoded into the other through the weaving process. In terms of giving agency through the fray, what this spacey emptiness and geopsychic space offers is a subversion of wholeness as an end goal. In the potential of its undoing, of the weave being permanently dismantled, Scarry’s (de)composing in slow motion can be fast forwarded or held in apparent stasis, but always holding that undoing energy. It is the verso of kinetic energy; it is arrived at through the weaving, whole cloth, wear and friction. In the following sections I want to hold this concept of the subversion of wholeness in mind as this offers a means by which to meditate upon what fraying at the edge of language and cloth reveals about their formative processes, but also how these become ways for thinking through the transnational self and its belonging.

The Spatial Logic of the Fray The geopsychic space of the frayed cloth extends its structure from the flat rectilinear plane into an architectural form(s). It involves overlappings, doubling up, peaks and troughs. Unlike the fold or pleat, however, it is the individual thread coming loose and slipping and sliding away from one another that causes these formations and it is this shifting of alignment that I want to explore here in terms of a spatial logic. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari write about faciality and surface, but Deleuze goes on to develop that further and discuss potential space or ‘any-space-whatever’ (1980: 111) which he defines as a space that ‘has lost its homogeneity, that is, the principles of its metric relations or the connections of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways’ (1980: 109). It may seem strange in a volume that is focused upon transnational belonging to focus upon a spatiality that is predicated on a loss of metrics and connections, but what I want to suggest here is that the fray offers a way for thinking speculatively or in terms of potentiality, a space beyond the confines of existing structures and metrics. I want to suggest that the space

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of the fray, with its spatial logic of slippage, allows for such speculation and potentiality through and with a reframing of female agency. The spatial arrangement of the fray starts with the edge, or centre, of the cloth becoming worn and individual threads breaking and these broken ends becoming released from the warp-weft structure. Spivak talks about this space as risky, but also champions ‘juggling the disruptive reciprocity that breaks the surface in not necessarily connected ways’ (1993: 202). This rhetoricity allows for the possibility of an illogic or the not-meaningful, much like the frayed fabric threatening to disintegrate the whole cloth. Both disrupt logic through a form of violence against the whole, slipping and sliding around the structure, folding over and under. In this way the fray offers itself as a space for agential expression, rather than a disintegration or fragmenting of the whole to nothing. It offers an expansion and a reaching out towards another. This is what I want to call the spatial logic of the fray. To begin to unpack some of the themes and ideas here, I first want to consider the work of Malawi-born artist Billie Zangewa. Zangewa’s practice, which most commonly depicts everyday moments from her life, is carried out in layered silk compositions. The fabrics selected and stitched, cut and layered are largely waste silk offcuts. Their lustre shimmers, exuding a sense of vibrancy and emanating energy from within the domesticity and femininity portrayed. Zangewa does not romanticise the domestic and motherhood, although the works carry a tenderness and careful attention to domestic labour, but neither do they rail against a patriarchal system. In an interview for Art Basel, Zangewa comments on circumventing and empowerment: ‘I tell my personal story, how it’s happening on the home front, and show the intimate life of a woman, which usually we’re not encouraged to do’ (McDermott 2018). What interests me here is the way in which she uses the woven structure of the silk, together with its frayed edges, as a vital and potent structuring element within her compositions. In Cold Shower (2019) (Figure 1.1) for example, the background silks are turquoise shot with peach and light turquoise shot with a darker shade. Where Zangewa has used the frayed edges to fragment the composition, these two-coloured silks reveal bands of each colour in the different planes of the work, lending energy and texture to the stitched works. To think of Zangewa’s frayed edges as they shimmer within her compositions in terms of spatial logic is to think in terms of these edges and how they extend the architecture of the layered surfaces. In Zangewa’s work the rectilinear form is disrupted multiple times along with the pictorial space. Edges are raw and

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Figure 1.1 Billie Zangewa, Cold Shower, 2019. Hand-stitched silk collage. 42.13 × 39.76 inches / 107 × 101 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and London.

fraying, jagged and apparently roughly pieces. The compositions are at once carefully stitched, form created through line, shading and thread, but at the same time sections look hacked away, leaving the viewer to reconstruct that which might be missing or perhaps never constructed. In Cold Shower the composition’s ragged bottom edge cuts off the torso at the navel, tracking upwards to the left. In Heart of the Home (2020) (Figure 1.2) the bottom left corner has been cut away. In these and other pieces, it is akin to a photograph which has had a protagonist cut out to render them no longer in existence. It is at once an act of aggression and negation, but also offers a sense of protection and redaction. We see a woman in the moment of enjoying a refreshing shower, but she is not completely exposed to the viewer. Likewise, as the viewer is given entrance upon

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Figure 1.2 Billie Zangewa, Heart of the Home, 2020. Hand-stitched silk collage. 45 × 55 inches / 114 × 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and London.

the woman and child caught up in the drawing/writing in the kitchen, they are denied access to some element in the foreground. In both works the use of the frayed edge, with its logic of extending beyond, its architecture of increased dimensionality, guides the viewer to the centre. Zangewa’s work demonstrates at least two points about the fray. Firstly, in deploying the fray at the site of the compositional rupture she is pointing both to and away from this edge. As the frayed edges reveal the structure of the cloth they were once firmly complicated in, in their slipping and sliding away from one another they expand its reach. The frayed threads create a space between whole cloth and non-cloth, a space of encounter and, potentially, the space where the friction or fraying was brought into play. This makes the space of the fray risky for the whole cloth, but a place of exploration and expansion from the perspective of the threads that have broken free. They fold and shift over, under and around the intact cloth, retaining anchorage in the whole. The viewer is able

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to trace these threads into the composition and then back out again and the frayed threads become sightlines within the spatial logic of the fray. What is notable, secondly, in Zangewa’s work (Figure 1.3) is that the fray takes place at the site of the cut edge. Where scissors have broken through the selvedge that holds warp and weft in place, so a raw edge is created, one which allows bands of either warp or weft to be completely removed or to slip away, leaving another band of unattached weft or warp threads. In Zangewa’s works, the shot silk marks this frayed edge more starkly as shimmering blue gives way to bold peach threads. The fray in these works offers a disorderly edge, a framing that redefines the spatiality of the composition and, by extension, women as depicted. In this the spatial logic also emphasises and accentuates spatial politics of the home and femininity, expanding both cloth and image’s psychic reach. Zangewa’s work reframes these politics through her silk compositions and carefully articulated forms in stitch and thread. She develops a depth of field that moves the viewer beyond the luxurious surface, beyond the intertwined threads and into Hayles’s order-cum-chaos spatial order. Here, Zangewa is suggesting that an attentiveness to the intimate offers an agentive space from which woman can speak. As fraying cloth misbehaves, and it resists narrative experiences of whole cloth, so too do

Figure 1.3 Billie Zangewa, An Angel at My Bedside, 2020. Hand-stitched silk collage. 28 × 46.06 inches / 71 × 117 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and London.

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these narratives of everyday life and labour; they misbehave in their combination of expensive materials and quotidian activities, woman’s labour and its human cost. In these works, the frame is the space of the fray; it presents a partially fragmented image, disrupted and loose edged. It risks its own demise in the activity of framing the composition.

Fraying the Self As cloth frays, warp and weft slip and slide away from one another, establishing new spatial alignments. At the edge of the fabric, this involves the selvedge, a literal and material ‘self-edging’. This is the point in the process of production, weaving, that the weft threads exit the warp, turn and return, binding the structure together as they do. The selvedge functions to form and hold the cloth as whole. In the seemingly simple action of exiting the warps and returning, the integrity of that cloth is formed. The selvedge draws etymologically from the Dutch ‘selfegghe’ (OED) or selfedge, and in this sense it is both a structure and a performative action of folding back on itself. This self-same space is created inter-subjectively and it is the selfself-interplay that not only holds cloth’s integrity, but also becomes the site of its weakness. It is at the selvedge that incursions by friction and wear cause the structure to weaken and break down. At the cloth’s edge an intense and integral relationship between warp and weft is necessary to bind the cloth as a whole. This can be relaxed or intensified within the body of the cloth. The warp-weft relationship of the selvedge established, or coded, on the loom makes all performative behaviours of the cloth possible. As a means by which to think about female agency and transnational belonging, the coding set in place through and by the selvedge is particularly interesting. At this site of exit and re-entry, where the self-same binding of warp by weft takes place, the whole and centre of the cloth are held in performative agency. When cloth frays there are a number of reparative actions that can be performed to either delay, halt or mend the fraying edge. All of these involve a mediating set of actions into that self-same space of the selvedge. In this sense it is about extending and expanding the spatial logic through and with the fray. When fleeing Europe for Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, Zina Katz’s parents and grandparents had all been deeply involved in the textile industry as had their families for generations. There were drawn from Russia, Italy and

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Germany and were, collectively, escaping regimes of oppression and segregation. The deep-seated understanding of textile practices and production comes from close observation during Katz’s upbringing and then from college studio visits across the 1970s and 1980s, including that of Kenneth Kemble, who ran a collective inquiry into the principles of destruction. Looking at the work of this collective alongside Katz’s it is easy to note the shared language. Like Kemble, there is an interplay between an intuitive drive to break apart, deconstruct and the pleasure of construction and creation which functions like an agential dialectic. Katz draws largely figurative works with wool, cotton and silk. She embroiders on different grounds, but most commonly on sheeting and found cloths. She purposefully leaves the edges raw, allowing them to fray at the site of their cut edges. Working in 2018 at L’atelier des Artists en Exil, Katz collaborated with a series of artists awaiting an outcome to their application for asylum in France. She notes ‘Some may stay, others, the undesirable, will have to leave. They come from Senegal, Mauritania, Somalia, Afghanistan, Guinea, Sudan, Congo, Iran and Burkina Faso’ (2020). The stitched images in 164 Nuits (2018) (Figures 1.4 and 1.5) are of passport photos rendered on small fragments of found cloths. On some the selvedge is present, on others a decorative edge speaks of its former purpose as sheet or tablecloth, on others pattern and print sits behind the stitched image. All have frayed edges, all of these cloths are fragments and fragmenting at the cut edges, none are stable. All are at risk. The selvedge, the self-edge, offers a space of inter-subjectivity. Once breached, it functions in agentive dialectic with both its frayed self and its speculative repaired self. In this sense, the frayed edge operates as a function of an extended performance of self-subjectivity. In the spatial logic of the fray, the loosened threads shift and slide away from one another, whilst still holding anchorage within the whole cloth. Katz’s stitched cloths, with their frayed and fraying edges, wind themselves between subject, matter, former lives, potential futures and the risky business of that edge. Katz develops these themes further by presenting the works viewable from both front and back. In fact, most commonly, it is the reverse that appears first. Thus, the viewer must encounter knots, supporting stitches and loose threads that hang to and fro across the image. The messiness of their formation is laid bare; it is not neatened or hidden away. What is interesting here in terms of the fray is the doubling, layering and criss-crossing of the warp-weft structure that Katz initiates at the edges of these works and then repeats and expands within the stitched portraits. Each piece

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Figure 1.4 Zina Katz, 164 Nights, 2018 (installation images). Hand-stitched on found fabrics. Dimensions variable. Image: the artist.

that makes up the whole installation is held in a moment of transition between repatriation and disintegration. Nothing about these works is stabilised; everything is at risk. Those seeking asylum in another country or whose family fled regimes to restart their lives elsewhere know that sense of un-belonging. It travels down the generations and Katz carries her familial memory into her work in France. She was influenced in this work by Didier Fassin’s La Raison Humanitarian: Une Histoire Morale du Temps Present (Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present Times) (2011) in which Fassin rejects processes of

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Figure 1.5 Zina Katz, 164 Nights, 2018 (installation detail). Hand-stitched on found fabrics. Dimensions variable. Image: the artist.

selective immigration based on skill shortages and perceived internal needs. Katz comments ‘What kind of freedom is it when hospitality depends on one’s usefulness?’ and ‘What are we talking about when we talk about art in such a precarious situation?’ (in Vannier 2019: 216). Fassin extends Hannah Arendt’s distinction between compassion and pity, the first conceived of as direct attention to the human condition and the latter as an abstraction related to the masses (in Bornstein and Redfield 2011: 37). What he proposes is a long-distance form of compassion where the masses become

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real, either through technological information or narratives of those who have experienced their circumstances first hand. To some extent this long-distance compassion requires and references Arendt’s politics of ‘enlarged mentality’, itself a spatial concept that takes the self beyond its own context and imagines from the other’s point of view. As Arendt writes, ‘To think with an enlarged mentality means to train one’s imagination to go visiting’ (1982: 180). Katz goes visiting back to her familial roots in Paris, spending time with asylum-seeking migrants, hearing their stories, rendering their images in entangled stitching on frayed and found cloth. This perspective, she continues, ‘is closely connected with particulars, with the particular conditions of the standpoints one has to go through in order to arrive at one’s own “general standpoint” ’ (1982: 44). Fassin talks about this in terms of Plato’s cave, and the need to stand at its threshold to produce a discourse that ‘critically analyses what those in the cave are doing while remaining “audible” to them. Both points are important’ (2011: 42). For Fassin and Arendt, putting oneself in the vicinity of others provokes an expanded syntax, but it follows that it also brings into play simultaneously recognition and betrayal, loyalty and displacement. This is about examining closely where there is division and separation; what is fraying? ‘In the interstices of disagreement, a certain truth gets told that would not be told otherwise’ (2011: 42). To ‘visit with’ another functions in a similar way but I want to suggest here that Arendt’s concept is framed around multiplicity and polyvocality. She does not promote conformity but rather to think from multiple standpoints, to appreciate multiple standpoints before arriving at a viewpoint. A politics of enlarged mentality expands our own perspectives so that we remain alert to our own interests within a search for those of others. It is not about forfeiting the self. To think in terms of the self-same space of the frayed selvedge as a form of enlarged mentality is to focus upon ways in which the whole, when brought under pressure, thins, breaks and the elements start to slip and slide away from one another. The revealed structures offer scope for refreshed understanding of their encoding and formation, but also a space to consider how to move beyond the space of disruption. When deciding how, or if, to mend a cloth’s broken edge, a space is opened up for thinking from a liminal critical position. It is a risky space where the self becomes exposed, and it is through that process of exposure that visiting with becomes a possibility in the truths that are told there. This is a possibility that allows elements within the whole topology of experience to be anchored to one another, but free to shift and slide over, around and away from one another. A

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politics of enlarged mentality does not seek unity, but revels in plurality and mutual exploration of the space afforded by each other’s standpoint. Katz’s portraits, like her extended oeuvre, are tangled, messy and disruptive; their edges fray and fragment, the whole is repeatedly threatened. These works are not made with longevity in mind, but to mark the precarity of their subjects. 164 Nights marks the number of nights Katz spent working with the asylum seekers in Paris; it also marks the number of days the 2018 asylum law aimed to reduce the process to (from 14 months). The work formed part of the Visions D’Exil 2018 Festival, marking Paris as a transitional city, a city of conviviality and an ephemeral staging post. Asylum granted in France (as with other countries) gives the seeker refugee status or status as a beneficiary of subsidiary protection. If not granted, they are repatriated. Whilst awaiting the outcome seekers are housed in funded accommodation and administrative and social support is provided. Once status is granted, this aid is no longer available. What this means for the asylum seeker is that the granting of status to remain does not guarantee security or safety, but potentially entry to another precarious way of living. Katz’s own background in a family of refugees gives particular valency to her engagement; she says, ‘I am interested in society and the relations between individuals within society’ (in Vannier 2019: 216). What these works draw out is the specific societal relationship with asylum seekers and the ways in which their presence within a country frays and fragments that society to enable an expanded sense of belonging; it also frays the society which they have left. Asylum seekers are not simply immigrants nor are they conquerors of new lands, but rather in their plea for entry they interrupt the self-same societal selvedge, drawing attention to the structures of its formation. In this they are taking a form of agency that is not afforded them but speaks from and into intimate experience across transnational boundaries. In expanding given notions of the civic self, the tangled threads of their arrival, their waiting upon entry, and notions of return draw the societal contexts together temporarily across time and space, evoking Arendt’s space for an enlarged mentality and generous thinking.

Mending Agency Laura Price and Harriet Hawkins note that making ‘appears to be firmly part of the zeitgeist’ (2018: 1) and as such re-making or repairing worn and broken

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elements takes on a shifted currency culturally and economically. I want here to think about mending through a lens of absent bodies and thus speak into the frayed space of transnational culture. To think with textiles or ‘textile thinking’ is an approach and terminology established in the 1990s by a number of textile scholars1 and more recently taken up afresh by Alexandra Kokoli and Elaine Igoe and me (Dormor 2020). Kokoli adopts an approach of ‘thinking with’, suggesting a form of knowledge creation that emerges through material engagement and embodied activity. In this she situates textiles as ‘thoughtful allies’ (in Kokoli 2017: 2). Igoe also turns to textile as a means by which to think beyond the conceptual and abstract but builds a tensional relation between its material and representational forms, using New Aesthetics and New Materialisms of the post-digital spheres by way of a framework. What is interesting here about this approach is its focus upon bringing together networks and convergences of people, practices and processes alongside its sociological systems of meaning-making. Igoe questions where the interface for such engagement begins and ends: the screen, eyes, fingertips, skin, inside our heads? This forms a crucial aspect of what these authors are calling ‘textile thinking’ in the sense that this negotiated interface becomes an intersubjective boundary-space. This interface or intersubjective boundary-space can be conceived of as the space of the fray; it is a space in which agency is plural and disorderly. The space of the fray also opens up the possibility of mending and repair at the site of this disruption. To repair could be conceived of as a means by which to negate the fray or to eradicate its damaging affect, but it also offers scope for re-inhabiting an affective landscape in which everything remains in flux, even when everything seems to be out of motion. Fraying cloth misbehaves and even in mending or darning the need to accommodate each thread’s newfound independence is always at play. In the act of repair, a set of skills and dispositions needs to be cultivated that are built out of the not-yet-become, harnessing the agential nature of the materials involved. Unlike the activity of weaving the cloth in the first place, the repair is never the same as the original; it cannot trace through the original movements of production, but it has the capacity to extend and evolve itself. It can bring new texture and resistance to transactional notions of obsolescence, but also in the mend and the repair a logic of becoming-more is set in place. To take care of the fray through mending or embracing its disorderly realignment is to engage in close observation of what might have been present

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and new material alliances emerging. Following Mariam Motamedi Fraser and other feminist positionings of new materials as mattering of methods, these new alliances become ‘a “natural” place to begin to think through “materiality”, especially given its historical interest and investment in bodies, nature and ontology’ (2002: 621). Such close observation, or intimate engagement, involves precision and close looking to track each thread’s passage into and out from the intact cloth, through the thinned and worn ends as they slip and slide around, over and away from one another. This is a special kind of attentiveness that at first appears to be in contradiction to the technical and technological activities of weaving, but their focus lies in the elemental and successive relationships between each warp and each weft. This builds a new speculative space that is both independent of, and contingent upon, that which went before. To think of the fray and mending that fray in terms of Zangewa and Katz’s artwork presents a particularly interesting train of thought. Both artists utilise the fray and its language of disorderly behaviour and disruptive alliances to explore and express human experience at the boundaries of culture. They question what it might mean to be included as a citizen, what belonging to a given society might involve. They utilise frayed and fragmenting cloths specifically to speak into this ambivalent space of not-yet. So, what does repair or mending the fray mean in these works? Does it have a place? When something breaks or wears then there is a cultural drive to either discard or to make a repair that hides the weakness. It is as if the disorderliness of the fray holds no or negative value. I beg to differ and want to speak here about the potential of the repair or mend as a space of agency. Bryan-Wilson, in the conclusion to Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017), notes that ‘textiles live at the edges of crisis, often creating conflicts or tensions as much as assuaging them’ (2017: 272). It is this potency, political and cultural, of cloth (and here I am discussing specifically woven cloth) that is at play within the mend or repair at the fray. To mend the fray is to deploy a methodology of close looking, of tracking and tracing loose and worn threads. It is about revealing and working with underlying structures; it is about understanding what has gone before. However, the mend is also speculative; it offers scope for rethinking, reimagining and creating new trajectories. It is also about enlisting hand-worked techniques beyond their simple expediency, but because of their capacity to practice attention to the past and through this repair the present for attentive futures. This could be conceived of as the persistence of the textile.

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If we can think of female agency as a frayed and fraying space, then to conceive of repairing and mending that fray is to enter a fraught space, but also one that champions the potential of rupture and resilience. It holds within it an assumption that the fray is in need of repair. I would argue that mending the fray is simply one option, to which I will return, but here I want to focus upon what it might mean and achieve to mend the fray. Byran-Wilson closes her book with a warning against ‘syrupy crafts’ (2017: 254), which serves as a warning against thinking of crafts without recognising the class, race and gender prejudices and privileges caught up in their practices. Glenn Adamson in Thinking through Craft (2007) opens up these discussions well. I don’t want to be diverted down this path here but want to recognise the significance of these discussions that can polarise art and craft, commodification and neoliberal economics. Textile and textile practices occupy vital space and give texture to these politics. What is at stake here is the valency of craft techniques of mending and repairing as a site for female agency and a set of practices through which to consider what transnational belonging can mean within a frayed and fraying global context. Marsha Meskimmon, writing in 2010, asks ‘What kind of subjects are produced through the present conditions of transnational, transcultural and transmedial exchange?’ (2010: 6). She addresses these questions through the concepts of hospitality, imaginative engagement, inclusion, conversation and dialogue. In short, multilateral generous encounter with one another, not as an other, but as self-same-different. I would suggest that the site of the fray offers such an agential space, and it is into this that I want to offer some thinking about what it might mean to mend or repair. In the act of repairing a frayed edge it is important to be reminded of how that site came to be frayed in the first instance. Is it a space under particular pressure or stress? Where does that pressure, friction or stress arise from? What does this edge need to do in order to function as before? These questions open up a space of enquiry and discourse of purpose and use. Whilst these arise, in terms of textile and cloth, as utilitarian, function-oriented questions, they also offer scope for thinking conceptually and in terms of female agency within the transnational, global context. I thus want to track to and fro, like the shuttle and then the needle, between the materiality of the frayed cloth and frayed space of female agency. To think of mending the frayed edge is to expose mending as a creative set of practices. These are practices that are easily relegated to the periphery of production systems, forced into the margins by the sheer scale and dominance

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of mass culture and built-in obsolescence. To mend is to invest time and care into that which is marginal and broken. Over the last two decades social movements and trends have initiated ‘upcycling’, although these movements are very often dominated by relatively privileged socio-economic groups as hobby or leisure activities. Whilst, like craft practices, mending practices can become fetishised, I want here to focus upon mending the fray as a site of care in terms of Donna Haraway’s making with and care at the periphery (2016). She talks of ‘promiscuously plucking out fibers. . . follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places and times’ (2016: 3). To make with frayed cloth, frayed bodies or frayed culture, following Haraway, is to de-emphasise human power relations and exceptionalism. It is to foreground vulnerability and discomfort. The mender’s tools at play here are both the same and different to those of the creator and often they are best described as appropriate technologies pressed in a different service. In mending frayed and worn edges those edges of the material are re-worked and re-aligned. This then becomes a creative space for maker, inventor and creator who specialises in the skilful manipulation of materials, tools and space. As a syntax of care at the edge, mending speaks of communities and values that refuse to be reduced to commodities and metrics in the performance of creating a new edge and a new material presence at that edge. In this sense the spatial logic of the mend extends further the spatial logic of the fray and enables a re-evaluation of the whole from a newly created vantage point. It is about the skilful understanding and reframing of the frayed threads, to choose to preserve the integrity of the whole, whilst recognising and coming to know its constituent parts and what their refreshed interplay might imply. The spatial logic of the fray, together with its mended counterpart, becomes part of a larger, highly textured topology at and of the edge.

Conclusion This essay starts and ends at the edges of woven cloth, privileging Haraway’s care at the periphery. Haraway comments on Arendt’s ‘enlarged mentality’ that ‘visiting is not an easy practice; it demands the ability to find others actively interesting. . . to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one’s ability to sense and respond. . .’ (2016: 127). This curiosity, and activated interest in another, sits at the heart of a frayed and fraying transnational belonging. When

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cloth frays it reveals the processes of its formation; so too do we in the fray of belonging. In thinking of female agency in terms of a site of frayed and fraying cloth it becomes important to focus upon what might be the implications and outcomes of mending that fray. Fraying emerges from friction, pressure and tension on the threads and cloth and as such becomes a way to approach what questions might be invoked between structuring elements, between warp and weft. Zangewa’s fragmented compositions are both partial and complete; her layering and stitched figurative forms propose, compose and respond to the possibility of what lies beyond the fray. She makes a fuss of the potentiality of her subjects. She uses the fray as a space of possibility and curiosity, the two coming together in creative enterprise. These are departure points, but also arrivals. They speak into the absent bodies of the producers of the silks, the other absent bodies wearing or using the larger pieces of silk from which these are offcuts, the absent bodies in the images themselves. These bodies form a collaborative dialogue with the frayed edges of the silks, calling attention to the risk they pose to the whole and renegotiating the privilege of the centre from the edge. Katz on the other hand deploys frayed and loosened threads across the whole cloth and the forms depicted. This is a disruptive, unruly, messy and badly behaved practice. The question about what the textural form mending at this site might mean and look like is particularly pertinent in thinking about what female agency in the fray might entail. The site of the fray, the self-same edge or the selvedge is both a material and metaphorical means by which to consider transnational belonging. Textile forms an integral part of transglobal industrialised systems. This includes production, consumption and wealth creation. Most of this is carried out on the backs of absent bodies. To think in terms of transnational belonging at the selvedge, the self-edge, is to reintroduce those absent bodies into the discourse, to mend not as a leisure activity, but to mend because to have agency is to have responsibility. To act in and with the fray is to activate that agency across the broken edges and to create textural form at and in that site.

Note 1 For example: Victoria Mitchell (2000), Claire Pajaczkowska (2007), Janis Jefferies (2001), Pennina Barnett (1999).

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References Arendt, H. (1982) Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. R. Beiner (ed.). New edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Barnett, P., ed. (1999) Textures of Memory: The Poetics of Cloth. Nottingham: Angel Row Gallery. Bornstein, E. and Redfield, P., eds. (2011) Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics. Illustrated edn. Santa Fe: SAR Press. Bruno, G. (2014) Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Bryan-Wilson, J. (2017) Fray: Art and Textile Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cité Internationale des Arts (2017) ‘The Recipients – Zina Katz’. Available at www. citedesartsparis.net/en/zina-katz (Accessed 5 July 2021). Das, J. (2021) ‘Billie Zangewa: Soldier of Love’. Available at https://ocula.com/magazine/ conversations/billie-zangewa/ (Accessed 5 July 2021). Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1980) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 4th edn. London: Continuum. Dormor, C. (2020) A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice and Theory. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Fassin, D. (2011) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fraser, M. (2002) ‘What Is the Matter of Feminist Criticism?’ Economy and Society 31 (4): 606–625. Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/0308514022000020715 (Accessed 5 July 2021). Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble (Experimental Futures): Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Illustrated edn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hayles, K. (1990) Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science / N. Katherine Hayles. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jefferies, J., ed. (2001) Reinventing Textiles. Winchester: Telos. Katz, Z. (2017) The Recipients – Zina Katz, Cité internationale des arts. Available at: www.citedesartsparis.net/en/zina-katz (Accessed 9 May 2021). Katz, Z. (2020) 164 nuits – Zina Katz. Available at: https://zinakatz.com/164-nuits/ (Accessed 7 April 2021). Kokoli, A. (2017) ‘Do Textiles Think?’ Weaving Europe. E. Kyprianidou (ed.). Nisos Publications. Available at www.academia.edu/35354669/Do_Textiles_Think (Accessed 5 July 2021). McDermott, E. (2018) ‘Billie Zangewa – the Fierce Feminine’. Art Basel, 7 December. Available at www.artbasel.com/stories/billie-zangewa-the-fierce-feminine-art-baselmiami-beach-2018 (Accessed 5 July 2021).

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Meskimmon, M. (2010) Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. 1st edn. London and New York: Routledge. Mitchell, V. (2000) Selvedges: Janis Jefferies – Works Since 1980. Norwich: Norwich School of Art & Design. Naficy, H. (2001) An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pajaczkowska, C. (2007) ‘Thread of Attachment’. Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 5 (2): 140–153. Price, L. and Hawkins, H. (2018) Geographies of Making, Craft and Creativity. London: Routledge. Scarry, E. (1999) Dreaming by the Book / Elaine Scarry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Spivak, G.C. (1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine. London: Routledge. Vannier, C. (2019) Threads: Contemporary Embroidery Art. 1st edn. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

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Species of Space: Marisol, Marta Minujín and Nicola L on Party-Going, Domestic Mayhem and Nomadism Flavia Frigeri

In 1967 the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso wrote and performed one of his most well-known songs Alegria, Alegria (Joy, Joy). Widely regarded as a hymn to freedom, Veloso’s tune together with the beats of his fellow singer Gilberto Gil propelled the French-Moroccan-American artist Nicola L (1937–2018) to fabricate a communal raincoat for eleven people that came to be known as The Red Coat (1970). In 1965 the Argentinean artist Marta Minujín (b. 1943) conceived (in collaboration with Rubèn Santantonín, Pablo Suárez, Floreal Amor, Rodolfo Prayon, Leopoldo Maler, David Lamelas and others) La Menesunda (Mayhem) a playful environment made of sixteen spaces, seeking to challenge the boundaries of a gallery space, as well as the trappings of domesticity. That same year, the FrenchVenezuelan-American Marisol (1930–2016) created one of her largest sculptural tableaux, The Party.1 Consisting of fifteen stiff-lipped and fashionably dressed wooden figures The Party ironically portrayed an upper-middle-class social gathering. Marisol’s face was omnipresent as she impersonated most of the women on view, lavishly attired and richly bejewelled with real and fictional props. No direct link is to be found between these three works and yet they coalesce around Georges Perec’s ‘species of spaces’ (Perec 2008 [1974]). In his words: In short, spaces have multiplied, been broken up and have diversified. There are spaces today of every kind and every size, for every use and every function. To live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself. Perec 2008 [1974]: 1

Perec’s treatment of space as a fluid category, charged with the ability to make the familiar unfamiliar, speaks to the way in which Marisol, Minujìn and Nicola L 39

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Figure 2.1 Nicola L, Red Coat, Same Skin for Everybody, 1973. Performance in Amsterdam. © Nicola L. Collection and Archive. Courtesy of Alison Jacques, London.

appropriated space in their works. For the three artists, space is intertwined with identity, experienced both collectively and individually, as notions of belonging are challenged by the works discussed in this chapter which reject fixity in favour of transience and change. While the nature of Marisol’s sculptures, combining direct carving, painting, photographs and found objects, would enforce the rootedness of her oeuvre, the concurrent subversion of self in relation to society that her sculptures engender uproots them, turning them into agents of a fluid transnational identity. By contrast The Red Coat’s (Figure 2.1) very nature eschews permanence, making it an active promoter of transnational engagement.2 This wearable mobile vestment is, in fact, premised on the constant renewal of its inhabitants and surroundings. Since its creation Nicola L carried The Red Coat in a medium-sized suitcase and travelled with it to different parts of the globe. Each location entailed a discrete socio-political context and every place attracted eleven different people. Change and placelessness were thus integral to The Red Coat’s existence. With La Menesunda, Minujín straddled The Party’s transnational identity and The Red Coat’s transnational engagement. A taxonomy of spaces, La Menesunda was designed to challenge the visitors’ perception of what art is and how you engage with it (Figure 2.2). The work counted on a labyrinthine itinerary

Species of Space: Marisol, Marta Minujín and Nicola L

Figure 2.2 Marta Minujín, La Menesunda, 1965. General view of the Neon Tunnel. Courtesy Marta Minujín Archive.

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made of sixteen environments: these included a beauty salon offering an express make-up service, a bedroom with a real couple sitting in bed, a walk-in freezer, a room with mirrors and electric fans, and neon corridors. The experience was at once riveting and wildly unconventional, drawing thousands of curious visitors to the Instituto Torquato di Tella in Buenos Aires where La Menesunda was housed. Across Marisol’s, Minujín’s and Nicola L’s works ‘space’ assumes distinct conceptual and formal meanings, with context defining them further. Space is also charged with a further meaning, in that it contextually situates female agency. An ambiguous concept, agency is understood here not as a characteristic of individuals, but rather as a form of relationality. Marisol, Minujín and Nicola L deploy ‘material things’ in space in order to mediate and reassert female agency in the public sphere. The party-goers, the coat wearers and the mayhem adventurers all partake in species of space that place female agency at the centre of the artistic picture. In what follows, I will unpack how normative artistic and social values are troubled by these alternative spatial orders that are at once situated and transnational in scope.

Marisol: On Party-Going Traditionally the understanding of Marisol’s oeuvre has been plagued by two distinct and yet deeply embroiled concepts. On the one hand, as Grace Glueck suggested: ‘It’s Not Op, It’s Not Pop – It’s Marisol’ (Glueck 1965: 34). Indeed, the categorisation or lack thereof has proved vexed when trying to make sense of Marisol’s output. The artist’s penchant for stereotypically Pop subjects, like the Kennedy family or the actor John Wayne, would firmly place her in that realm – a notion supported by her close friendship with Pop leader Andy Warhol and furthered by the inclusion of her work in exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery, a space closely associated with the emergence of Pop on the New York art scene. On the other hand, the ‘Marisol Mystique’ (Dreishpoon 2014: 113–132) enveloped the artist’s personal and professional identity, acting as a hyperbolic shorthand for difference. Born in Paris to Venezuelan parents, Marisol spent much of her childhood travelling the world. A diary entry from 1956 eloquently speaks to her cosmopolitan upbringing and transnational attitude: ‘I am the Venezuelan, born in France, living in Italy – that has an English car with North American plates and Swiss insurance – and they want to ask me what nationality I am. . .’ (Marisol,

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qtd. in Cullen 2014: 99). In critical accounts of Marisol’s work her reluctance to subscribe to any definite nationality has been too easily conflated with the quest for identity supposedly purported by the many self-portraits appearing in her compositions. Variously described as ‘The Latin Garbo’ (Boime 1993: 8) with ‘Audrey Hepburnesque sophistication’ (Pacini 2014: 31), Marisol’s identity as an artist was conflated with her femininity and glamour. Indeed, the artist was popular for her beauty and fashionable looks, but her work transcended the socialite sphere in which she was too often cornered. Her sculptural tableaux, as will be evinced by The Party, explored gender and the place of women in society from a transnational perspective; even though this might not be apparent at first sight. Spatially, the public realm with its social conventions acted as a foil for Marisol’s work and allowed her to reclaim a space for female agency even where it appeared to be non-extant. The Party, with its fifteen life-size characters, remains rooted in a very specific context and time, New York’s 1960s stiff-lipped Upper East Side. Beautifully dressed and richly accessorised, Marisol’s women represent a social trope, which the artist, like an anthropologist, studied carefully and went on to recreate. The female cohort presented here exist in space and yet appear to be completely abstracted from it. Solid and static, the party-going women are no more than glorified mannequins, acting on society’s fictitious stage. The suggestion is that these women are emptied of all willpower, just dolls ready to be manipulated by their male counterparts. Marisol is both the choreographer of this show and its lead actress. Her face, like a leitmotif, appears over and over again throughout The Party. Covered in nails, set in a television, printed on paper and carved in wood, Marisol is omnipresent. Her dark eyes ominously follow the viewer as he/she moves between the still characters. On the surface, the repeated portrayal of self lends valence to the suggestion that Marisol is seeking to reassert her identity through sculpture. Such a reading, however, fails to account for the type of identity that the artist is exploring and to a certain extent camouflaging amongst this glamorous cohort. This is where Marisol’s transnational purview comes into play. At the back of the room stands a man with a tray of glasses in his hands. The outfit and the props suggest that he is attending to the party’s guests. His face is, so to speak, on repeat. Not one, but three faces don this man’s body. Neither strictly masculine, nor feminine, the facial traits sit somewhere in-between genders, offering what looks like a prescient exploration of gender fluidity on Marisol’s part. More pointedly, however, the three faces, each rendered in a

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different material, suggest the co-existence of multiple races and backgrounds, overtly speaking to Marisol’s own understanding of self as a French-AmericanVenezuelan woman. The women attending the party, despite their one-dimensional stance, are further iterations of a multifaceted self, not rooted in one culture, but straddling multiple ones. The individualised treatment of each face, be it a photograph or a sculpted self-portrait of Marisol, errs from the seriality of Pop to focus on the material exploration of identity, as both a social and a biological construct. Significantly though, the triple-headed identity is attached to one of the subservient characters; the servant lingering in the background. This, perhaps, holds the key to Marisol’s self-perceived role as an anthropological onlooker, scrutinising the shallow party-going women. At once embedded and detached, Marisol projects her transnational standing in the construction of identity from a further standpoint; that of making. Speaking of Eva Hesse’s work, the artist Mary Weatherford claimed that making rather than sculpting offers a more constructive framework for the understanding of the German artist’s work (Weatherford 2019). Marisol’s choreographed tableaux call for a similar reading, as the act of making is at the forefront of The Party. Each figure is meticulously constructed by the artist. Precious textiles are rendered through painting, while faces are variably carved, drawn or photographed. The distinction between media is discarded as found objects find a place alongside carved and manufactured ones. Details such as a white bow on the top of a maid’s head or a glove set against a painted silk dress enhance the material layering of Marisol’s work. Wood acts as a chief unifying element, even though the richly decorated accoutrements are perhaps more visually enticing. This melting pot of media eschews categorisation, and has traditionally triggered a range of responses, including Lucy Lippard’s description of Marisol in ‘theatrical folk’ (Lippard 1966: 101) terms and Hilton Kramer’s categorical confinement of the artist as ‘a permanent casualty of the Pop movement’ (Kramer, qtd. in Pacini 2014: 43). While Marisol has remained elusive with regards to Pop, she has staunchly disavowed a connection to folk art, claiming that: ‘I’m not really a folk artist – that’s ridiculous’ (Marisol, qtd. in Pacini 2014: 55). Folk as a marker of otherness was profoundly upsetting to Marisol the person, and not germane to Marisol the artist.3 The connection to craft, which all too often undermined the work’s artistic standing, was equally troubling. T’ai Smith has cautioned against what she understands as the ‘slippery concept’ of craft, highlighting the opaqueness and unstable nature of such a

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category, despite its underlying presence in all that is manu-factured (Smith 2016: 80). With its accent on making, the term manu-factured most fittingly speaks to Marisol’s working method, as well as to her conceptual standpoint. To manu-facture, in her case, is to manually construct a character by drawing on multiple sources. Ultimately, Marisol’s cross-cultural heritage comes to the fore in The Party as she forges her characters’ transnational identity through manufactured layering. The legacy of the Indigenous arts of Venezuela and pre-Columbian tradition are seamlessly merged here with a bold reframing of Pop’s media-savvy and hard-edged aesthetic. Similarly, the junk-assemblage strategy of the French Nouveau Réalistes is paired with the memory of carved votive statuettes from a prehistoric tradition. And finally, the burgeoning feminist discourse underlies Marisol’s research into female agency and subjectivity. In other words, the artist is manu-facturing characters and lexicon, both rooted in a transnational dialogue. All of this finds an expression in space, which brings us back to Perec. In his taxonomy of spaces, Perec had eloquently captured the place of memory in the definition of space, positing: ‘space as inventory, space as invention’ (Perec 2008 [1974]: 13). At the heart of Marisol’s eclectic tableaux is a similar standpoint. The Party, in fact, rests on the conjunction between space as a coded social marker, and space as a site of manu-facturing. In The Party space takes on a heightened connotation, as it memorialises the experience of a party by halting it. The drinks are about to be served, but never will. The women are silenced and there are no dancing queens to be crowned. Marisol is invoking an isolated and isolating experience for all of the party-goers and the careful distribution of characters in space enforces their hermetic stance. For all its theatrical posturing, this is a party stuck in time and only the visitor with his/her presence can reclaim this space of invention and bring it back to life.

Nicola L: Nomadism While Marisol’s work materialises Perec’s memory of space as a creative trigger, Nicola L’s The Red Coat brings to the fore the vexed connection between ‘inhabitation’ and ‘possession’ (Perec 2008 [1974]: 24). Perec questions the very meaning of inhabitation by asking: What does it mean, to live in a room? Is to live in a place to take possession of it? What does taking possession of a place mean? As from when does somewhere

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Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts become truly yours? Is it when you’ve put your three pairs of socks to soak in a pink plastic bowl? Perec 2008 [1974]: 24

As a mobile and transnationally prone artwork able to generate new meanings every time it is presented, The Red Coat appears to run counter to the perils of inhabitation invoked by Perec. And yet this anomalous coat, as a make-shift nomadic home for eleven souls, reframes both ‘inhabitation’ and ‘possession’ by turning them into collectively held spaces. Never at a standstill, The Red Coat has been on the go ever since its fortuitous conception in 1970. By that point, Nicola had established herself as a practitioner treading the line between art and design with her ‘functional pieces’, consisting of anthropomorphic sofas and cabinets, exploring the female body as an instrument and object (Nicola L, in Benaym and Jones 2005: 24). These playful assemblages made out of vinyl and wood challenged the construction of female identity and her role within the domestic space, while also undermining the very function of sculpture. As Nicola later explained: ‘I refused to create sculptures that were not going to be used for something. I did not want to make décor’ (Nicola L, in Benaym and Jones 2005: 29). Indeed in her exaggerations of the human body Nicola sought to overcome the notional understanding of sculpture as a static form meant for observation alone. A stance which mirrored the concerns expressed by her first body of work, the Pénétrables (1964). A hybrid between painting and make-shift epidermis, the Pénétrables consisted of rectangular fabric loosely hanging from the wall, into which the spectator was invited to introduce his or her body by taking over the protruding spaces for arms, legs and head. As an invitation to enter a single extended social skin, the Pénétrables set out the performative parameters of Nicola’s practice, while also establishing the body as a communication device. The Pénétrables’ evocation of a shared corporality combined with the artist’s motto-like statement ‘I wanted to oblige people to participate’ laid the conceptual foundations for The Red Coat (Nicola L, in Benaym and Jones 2005: 21). The story goes that during a summer holiday on the island of Ibiza, Nicola was introduced by friends to the music of the Brazilians Gil and Veloso, who were due to perform at the Isle of Wight later that summer. As she subsequently observed, ‘islands elicit many dreams’, and in this case the Balearic Island was instrumental in prompting the dream of a ‘communal coat’ (Nicola L 2008: 1). With an attendance of over 600,000 people the Isle of Wight festival (26–31 August 1970) rivalled in importance and success its American counterpart Woodstock. The line-up included Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Joan Baez, as well as

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Gil and Veloso. It was the very prospect of this musical gathering that triggered Nicola’s vision for a communal coat providing shelter from potential showers and keeping her group of friends united amidst the rowdy festival-goers. Consisting of eleven hoods, twenty-two arm slits and one single skirt uniting them all, The Red Coat was deemed the perfect festival outfit. As it turned out the sunny and extremely hot weather proved ideal for an open-air festival, but less so for The Red Coat which quickly turned into an ambulating oven. The ‘unbearable’ heat forced Nicola and her friends to leave the Coat’s communal premises and parade their nakedness while Veloso and Gil were playing on stage. In the meantime, mauve gloves were distributed among the audience with the motto ‘SAME SKIN FOR EVERYBODY’ written on them. Like a prayer the excited recipients chanted ‘same skin for everybody’ blending their voices and skin into one single unit. The joint success of The Red Coat’s festival outing and the symbolic ‘Same Skin for Everybody’ ritual led the multinational beverage company Pepsi to approach Nicola L and ask for the rights to do an advertisement based on the same theme. The artist promptly rejected the offer: ‘I am horrified. That unique experiment in communication for an advertisement? No’ (Nicola L 2008: 2). Indeed, the artist had other aspirations for her coat – which by that point had acquired the subtitle ‘Same Skin for Everybody’ – and following this social experiment of countercultural living The Red Coat shifted from quirky ready-to-wear festival vestment into a portable and penetrable performative work of art. On a mission to take The Red Coat to as many different contexts and locations as possible, Nicola L travelled the world with her coat squeezed into a suitcase. Asking intrigued, puzzled and sceptical passers-by to step into the coat and temporarily take charge of its whereabouts, the coat was emblazoned with a distinct sense of transience, flux and relationality. From the sandy beaches of Ibiza to the slopes of Flaynes, passing through the streets of Barcelona, New York and Ghent, The Red Coat was turned into the quintessential nomadic global citizen. Its criticality lay in the desire to break down gender and social barriers by enforcing a spatial situatedness that transcended national and cultural contexts, making the coat truly transnational in spirit and make-up. As part of this the coat reframed the very idea of belonging, as its ownership was collectively held, undermining the notion of individual possession questioned by Perec in his reflection on inhabitation. In fact, the coat’s existence was entirely dependent on the coming together of eleven souls, each ready to forego their individuality in the name of a collective beat, even though – as Nicola L once admitted – there

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was always a natural leader who took charge of the group’s rhythm. Learning how to walk together was the first step in the establishment of a prototype for collective nomadism with the bright red vinyl uniting all the participants under this ‘Coat of Transformation’ (Nicola L 2008: 1). Each stop on the coat’s impromptu journey endowed it with a different meaning. In Las Salinas, a beach in Ibiza, the coat like an inflatable toy was treated as pure entertainment by its hippy inhabitants who took it for a dip in the sea. In Barcelona, where it travelled next, the coat was welcomed with far less playfulness and, as Nicola L recalled: In August of 1970, having arrived in Barcelona, the city that I love so much, I cannot resist the desire to attempt a performance on Las Ramblas. I open my suitcase and invite passers-by to enter my Coat. They stare at me in surprise, but seem to resist. Finally, I find two or three, and Carlos [Rodiguez] takes pictures. But then the police arrive, brutally demanding that we follow them to the police station. We are in the Spain of Franco where any gathering of over three people is prohibited. And the Coat is red! Are we Communists? Nicola L 2008: 2

In Barcelona the coat was subject to censorship. Local authorities saw it as a tool of political subversion because of its colour red and the association this engendered with communism – a political stance at odds with Francisco Franco’s military rule.4 Passers-by were intimidated by this communal act and the few who braved it were punished with suspicious questions by local authorities. The coat was eventually freed from any charge, but its activist valence was now in the open and could no longer be silenced. From Barcelona the coat travelled to London and then on to the Isle of Wight, where it had its breakthrough moment. Throughout the 1970s, the coat appeared in Amsterdam, Cologne, Brussels, Paris and Ghent, where Nicola L’s random recruits took charge of the coat and ran off with it. The artist, amused and worried, chased after them and a puzzled bus driver ended their flight not knowing whether the coat should be charged for a single ticket or eleven individual ones. In Flaynes again, a more playful attitude prevailed, when a cohort of professional skiers were entrusted with the coat’s first experience en piste. A traditionally individualist sport was turned into a group activity under the coat’s collective banner. Collaboration and coordination were at the heart of this endeavour, which turned sport and possession into a shared effort. Besides the varying degrees of playfulness that these different situations elicited, they reveal how the coat operated as a unifying penetrable skin. The

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moment the different constituencies accepted the challenge, be it skiing, swimming or controversially breaking out of the regimented rules of Franco’s repressive dictatorship, The Red Coat provided its inhabitants with an alternative community; temporary in nature and nomadic in spatial terms. Figures and tropes of mobility have been the subject of extensive discussion, from Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s poststructural figuration of the nomadic thought (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]), to Rosi Braidotti’s trans-mobile theory of feminist subjectivity (Braidotti 1994) and Spradley’s urban nomads; evocations of rootlessness, counter-territoriality and movement abound (Spradley 1999). In connection to artistic expressions the appropriation of peripatetic modes offered the possibility of escaping confining spatial and hierarchical structures. Exemplary in this sense are Carla Accardi’s Tenda (1965) and Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev (1973), both discussing narrative mobility under the sign of gender. In Nicola L’s case, the matrix of nomadism is redeployed as a way of overcoming the limitations of normative agency and nationalism, enforcing a transnational perspective not too dissimilar from Marisol’s. In the flight from domesticity and rootedness, powerful regimes of gender, cultural and social difference are destabilised by The Red Coat, which exists only insofar as eleven bodies lend themselves to it. The human factor is central here, as much as the spatial dislocation on which the coat thrives and subsists. Mobility discharged the coat from the traditional constraints of rarefied exhibition spaces. A position reasserted by the fact that throughout the 1970s, ‘the Coat remain[ed] outside of cultural institutions’ projecting a sense of social and cultural freedom (Nicola L 2008: 3). As a penetrable and peripatetic structure, Nicola L’s coat offered a hybrid model, merging sculptural functionality with performative practice. And by operating in this interstitial realm, The Red Coat intentionally eschewed categorisation, finding in the fluid concept of nomadism a more comfortable placelessness. As a species of space devoid of tangible connections and susceptible to constant change, placelessness informed The Red Coat’s transnational engagement.

Minujín: Domestic Mayhem With her choreographed party Marisol challenged spatiality from within the gallery space, and The Red Coat overtly neglected spatial situatedness, opting instead for a nomadic placelessness, while Minujín’s La Menesunda troubled

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space from within space, touching on what Perec described as ‘a space without use’ (Perec 2008 [1974]: 33). The Argentine artist promoted the radical reconfiguration of space by exposing her audience to the possibilities of an alternative way of living. Spatially situated and yet subversively so, La Menesunda forced upon its viewers an experience which like Marisol’s was highly choreographed, while also projecting a sense of playful dislocation not too dissimilar from Nicola L’s work. Minujín’s work can therefore be said to occupy a space in-between the stillness of Marisol’s party-goers and the excessive mobility of Nicola L’s ready-to-wear collective coat. On a social level, Minujín is the linchpin uniting the three women, having crossed paths with Nicola L in Paris and Marisol in New York. While these were mostly brief encounters, they nevertheless speak to Minujín’s network of exchange, which was far reaching and made itself manifest in a series of collective projects, including the transnational collaboration with Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell on Three Country Happening (1966) to which she contributed the timebased event Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity). Central to this happening, was Minujín’s interest in the reach of contemporary mass media and the way in which it impinged on social interactions and creativity more generally. Fast-paced technological development was something that she had already mapped onto La Menesunda’s labyrinthine structure, which presciently and perhaps unconsciously revealed the trappings of surveillance. But taking a step back, it is useful to consider the genesis of La Menesunda as well as its constitutive elements. As Sofía Dourron has observed,‘La Menesunda was since its initial conception, the sum of infinite parts’ (Dourron 2015: 51). Indeed, the very premise of the work was to craft a rocambolesque itinerary, which put the spectator to the test by blurring the line between artwork and experience. Minujín in dialogue with her collaborators (and especially Santonín) achieved this by quite literally besieging the Istituto Torcuato Di Torcuato di Tella (ITDT) in Buenos Aires across its 1,614 square feet. The distinct yet interconnected environments were distributed over two floors and viewers were asked to follow a prescriptive path that led them through an exhilarating range of spaces, each activating different senses (Figure 2.3). Spectators entered the work through a neon tunnel blasting luminous acrylic signs lifted from the city’s urban texture and enriched by sound recordings of a busy street in Buenos Aires. From the street, so to speak, viewers were catapulted into the TV tunnel, a space filled with TV sets screening advertisements on a

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Figure 2.3 Marta Minujín, La Menesunda, 1965. View of the Octagonal Mirror Room. Courtesy Marta Minujín Archive.

loop. This in turn led to the bedroom, where on a rotating basis couples shared the intimacy of a double bed (Figure 2.4). Viewers were taken completely aback by the situation, as stepping into someone’s bedroom and especially while they were lying there seemed both voyeuristic and ungainly. People thus appeared to rush to the following room only to find more humans awaiting them. In this case, an express make-up service was on offer in a space modelled after a woman’s head. Here an ‘unnatural blonde’ make-up artist and a ‘provocative masseuse’ lent their services to willing customers (Dourron 2015: 179). A selection of popular boleros accompanied this kitsch scenario, made even more so by the Miss Yang packaged cosmetics covering the bright pink inside of the woman’s head together with sponges and other make-up tools (Figure 2.5). From there an enfilade of materially evocative spaces unfolded, from the PVC sheeting of the revolving basket, to the polyethylene tubing used to create an overblown intestinal space and on to the swamp, a corridor covered in brightly coloured foam. Acetates and brightly coloured plastics took the lead in these spaces, reinforcing the work’s connection to contemporary materiality. The itinerary carried on with the most technologically savvy and sensory-laden room: the telephone. Accessible only by punching in a secret code, this space was premised on disorientation, achieved

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Figure 2.4 Marta Minujín, La Menesunda, 1965. View of the Bedroom. Courtesy Marta Minujín Archive.

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Figure 2.5 Marta Minujín, La Menesunda, 1965. View of the Woman’s Head. Courtesy Marta Minujín Archive.

through an audio recording reading the time in real time and a pungent smell reminiscent of a medical laboratory. The icebox was next and with it came sub-zero temperatures and two appropriated refrigerator doors framing the room on both ends. From there spectators were thrust into a forest of hanging textures and forms made out of artificial grass, metal, sandpaper, and much more. Last came the octagonal mirror room, where the fragrance of fried food welcomed viewers and air fans threw confetti at them. Dazed and confused the audience was then reinjected into the stream of daily existence carrying with them the memory of this maze of multisensory living. All along, like Big Brother, glimpses of the spectators’ behaviour were captured on screens, lending to the work a controlling overtone that seemed at odds with its light-hearted spirit. And yet, upon closer observation it becomes apparent how La Menesunda was premised on careful instructions and pre-planned routes. This radically liberating and supposedly transformative experience was, in fact, all but free flowing. The path was carefully mapped, but behaviours were not, and it is precisely in the observation of viewers’ reactions that La Menesunda

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trod the line between sociological experiment and artistic vision. As the statement in the accompanying brochure claimed: ‘La Menesunda isn’t like exhibitions of paintings or sculptures of all kinds of things, IMAGES-SYMBOLS that are limited to “existing” even under the profound “gaze” of the spectator TO THE DETRIMENT of time’ (Minujín et al. 1965). Through a novel form of participation viewers were activated and asked to commit time to the unwieldy mix of far-fetched stimuli. Like a prism, La Menesunda explored the materiality of contemporary consumer culture, experienced both in Argentina and abroad and symbolised through household appliances and plastics alike. At the same time, it turned domesticity on its head. A private affair became a public one. The bedroom was, in fact, no longer treated as the inner sanctum of domesticity but was turned into a performative site for public perusal. Detractors of La Menesunda readily criticised this stance for its affront to Christian morality and more general ‘attempt to shock “the respectable bourgeoisie” ’ (Dourron 2015: 55). Certainly shocking in comparison to what the experience of art had been up to that point, La Menesunda was arguably wildly popular but also prone to moral judgements, because of its radical intervention in space. Not only was the entire space of the ITDT taken over by the work, but each section constituted a micro-space of its own. The macro-structure embraced the self-contained elements, while lending to the overarching spatiality a disconcerting quality, as expressed by the mayhem in the title. Mayhem, in Minujìn’s vocabulary, can be understood as a metaphor for spatial dislocation and dysfunctionality, with the latter notion relating specifically to Perec’s musings on ‘the apartment’. As a quintessentially functional space, Perec asks whether it is even possible to conceive of an apartment as ‘a space without use’. La Menesunda spoke to this impossibility by stripping the rooms of its hyperbolic dwelling of any functional purpose. Even the bedroom, which looked like a real bedroom was, in fact, a fiction without function. A charade in the life of an imaginary couple, the bedroom was intended to shock viewers and disrupt the traditional distinction that separated the private realm of the home from the public space of the street. Again, Perec’s words offer a theoretical grounding for this undoing of conventional spatial regimens. The ‘door’, in particular, is a symbol, which Perec eloquently dissects in relation to the private/public dichotomy. In his words: ‘On one side, me and my place, the private, the domestic. . . on the other side, other people, the world, the public, politics. You can’t simply let yourself slide from one into the other, can’t pass from one to the

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other, neither in one direction, nor in the other’ (Perec 2008 [1974]: 37). As an enclosed space, which acts as an outdoor one, La Menesunda breaks down both real and imaginary doors, making possible what seems impossible to Perec. By seamlessly moving from a private bedroom to a make-up salon, La Menesunda allowed its viewers to ‘slide’ from the ‘domestic’ to the ‘world’ and back again. In the process, the subversive nature of Minujìn’s exhilarating space came to the fore. Minujìn was not alone in taking down the domestic realm and the close association this held to a patriarchal society, which relegated women to the private sphere and men to the public one. With its radical way of living, La Menesunda entertained a transnational dialogue with contemporary works that were: performative in scope, subverted hegemonic spaces and increasingly reclaimed female agency from the depths of well-trodden societal tropes. Exemplary are Evelyne Axell’s unrealised Project for an Archaeological Museum of the 20th Century. Department: The Age of Plastic (2000 AD) (1970), an alternative realm dedicated to the feminist cause through the empowerment of plastics, and Niki de Saint Phalle’s Hon – en Katedral (SHE – a Cathedral, 1966), an environment conceived as a non-denominational cathedral in the shape of a woman’s body. Collectively, these environments were orchestrated as a rite of passage, with viewers leaving the traditional spatial order behind and entering a dimension that was counter-functional, riveting and shambolic. In other words, space was no longer a given, it was ridden with uncertainty. In his characterisation of space as a multifaceted entity, Perec had suggested that ‘space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it’ (Perec 2008 [1974]: 91). Indeed, Minujìn demanded of her audience an activation that was previously unheard of. She invited them to ‘conquer’ the space of mayhem and in the process to challenge the status quo. While La Menesunda was rooted in Buenos Aires’ post-war avantgarde scene, it was nevertheless imbued with the counter-cultural spirit that was inflaming many of Minujìn’s European peers, including de Saint-Phalle, with whom the artist had been in close contact during her Parisian sojourn at the start of the 1960s. Her outlook remained international, and even though La Menesunda is static by comparison to the peripatetic The Red Coat, it shares with it a fluid understanding of space and an engagement with viewers that is transnational in scope. By a similar account, the affirmation of a transnational identity through a feminist awakening of sorts channelled by Marisol’s The Party speaks to La Menesunda’s subversion of patriarchal norms, by turning the

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domestic realm into a space of mayhem. The women entering Minujìn’s environment may have been for the most part Argentinean, and yet the themes they were confronted with belonged to an international sphere of concern, which reclaimed for women a newfound agency outside of the home’s constricting parameters.

Conclusion Marisol, Minujìn and Nicola L’s agency is reaffirmed in the species of space they questioned, challenged, rejected and revised in manifold ways. From within the traditional gallery space, Marisol offered a view on society that was situated and yet transnational in scope, mirroring the artist’s own cross-cultural background. As I have shown, speaking of Marisol in terms of simply ‘Pop’ or ‘folk’ does not account for the broader legacies established by her practice and the dialogues it engendered with her contemporaries. In Nicola L’s case the peripatetic nature of The Red Coat has been supported by a nomadic existence outside of an institutional context. Space is thus constantly reconfigured and with it the work’s meaning, which thrives on the establishment of a transnational network of collaboration. Finally, La Menesunda destabilises the fixity of the art object by reframing it in a performative space. While the project was situated in Buenos Aires, its alignment to other international projects of a similar kind demonstrated its connection to a shared network of concerns. Ultimately, the three ‘species of space’ coalesce around viewers who with their presence constantly reframe the works’ belonging.

Notes 1 Marisol’s The Party is available to watch in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art here: http://emuseum.toledomuseum.org/objects/61754/ the-party;jsessionid=BEB33499AF5B26248F1CA935C852D1E2 2 See Nicola L official website: https://nicolal.com/. 3 For Marisol, folk always proved to be a troubling label, which she resisted as it jettisoned the scope of her practice and cast her as a minority artist. Deborah Cullen eloquently draws attention to the Latin American context as a way of productively complicating Marisol’s transnational ties beyond folk (Cullen 2014: 99–110).

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4 Francisco Franco was the general and leader of the Nationalist forces responsible for overthrowing the Spanish democratic republic at the time of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Thereafter, he was head of the Spanish government until 1973 and head of state until his death in 1975. His institutionalised authoritarian regime was marked by rigorous control enforced by the military and the police.

References Benaym, D. and Jones, A. (2005) Profile: Nicola L. New York: E-maprod. Boime, A. (1993) ‘The Postwar Redefinition of Self: Marisol’s Yearbook Illustrations for the Class of 49’, American Art 7 (2): 6–21. Braidotti, R. (1994) Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Cullen, D. (2014) ‘Reframing Marisol: Latin American Contexts’, in M. Pacini (ed.), Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper. Memphis, LA, New Haven, CT and London: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and Yale University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987 [1980]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. B. Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dourron, S. (2015) ‘La Menesunda’, in La Menesunda Ségun Marta Minujín. Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. Dreishpoon, D. (2014) ‘The Voice Behind the Silence’, in M. Pacini (ed.), Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper. Memphis, LA, New Haven, CT and London: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and Yale University Press. Glueck, G. (1965) ‘It’s Not Pop, It’s Not Op – It’s Marisol’, New York Times Magazine, March, Issue 7: 34. Lippard, L. (1966) Pop Art. New York and London: Frederick A. Praeger, Thames and Hudson. Minujín, M., Santonin, R. and Romero Brest, J. (1965) La Menesunda. Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato Di Tella. Nicola, L. (2008) ‘My History and Journey with the Red Coat for 11 People “Same Skin for Everybody” ’. New York, unpublished document. Pacini, M. (2014) ‘Marisol: A Biographical Sketch’, in M. Pacini (ed.), Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper. Memphis, LA, New Haven, CT and London: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and Yale University Press. Perec, G. (2008 [1974]) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. J. Sturrock (trans.). London: Penguin Classics. Smith, T. (2016) ‘The Problem with Craft’, Art Journal 75 (1): 80–84. Spradley, J.P. (1999) You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads. Long Grove, IL: Waneland Press. Weatherford, M. (2019) Eva Hesse: Oh More Absurdity. Getty : Recording Artists.

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‘with my portapak on my back’: Identity and Belonging in Shigeko Kubota’s Broken Diary Helena Shaskevich

Behind the Video Door I travel alone with my portapak on my back, as Vietnamese women do with their baby. I like Video, because it’s heavy. Portapak and I traveled all over Europe, Navajo land and Japan without male accompany. Portapak tears down my shoulder, backbone and waist. I felt like a Soviet woman, working at the Siberian Railway. I made a videotape called, ‘Europe on a half-inch a Day’, instead of a popular travel book, ‘Europe on 5 dollars a Day’. I had one summer with Navajo family in Chinle, Arizona, I made a videotape called, ‘An American Family’. Behind the Video Life Man thinks, ‘I think, therefore I am’. I, a woman, feel, ‘I Bleed, therefore I am’. Recently I bled in half-inch . . . 3M or SONY . . . ten thousand feet ever month. Man shoots me every night . . . I can’t resist. I shoot him back at broad daylight with vidicon or tivicon flaming in overexposure. Video is Vengeance of Vagina. Video is Victory of Vagina. Video is Venereal Disease of Intellectuals. Video is Vacant Apartment. Video is Vacation of Art. Viva Video . . . Shigeko Kubota (1968–1976)

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With its tempestuous rhythms veering between soft, sentimental soliloquies and bold declarations, ‘Video Poem’ marks the decisive emergence of Shigeko Kubota’s (1937–2015) powerful artistic voice.1 First composed in 1972, shown in 1975 as part of a video sculpture, also titled Video Poem (1970-75) at her one-person exhibition at The Kitchen art centre in New York, and then finally reprinted the following year in Ira Schneider’s and Beryl Korot’s groundbreaking anthology of early video art (1976), the poem’s second half has evolved into an oft-cited make-shift manifesto for Kubota’s work.2 Its bold definitions of video, with an undeniable avant-gardist sex appeal, readily lend themselves to the kind of rhetorical fashioning popular amongst critics and scholars (Jacob 1991; Kedmey 2018), who often employ its statements as proxies for Kubota’s practice. Kubota herself reinforced this reading, frequently recycling the poem’s emphatic statements throughout her early videos and writing.3 The poem’s more contemplative first half, however, has suffered a very different fate. Generally neglected by critics, Kubota’s redolent musings on video and travel have all but disappeared from discussions of her early work. In their focus on the second half of the poem, critics have eagerly accepted Kubota’s feminist statements at face value, despite her own overt protestations, whilst neglecting her insightful meditations on video’s complex relationship to geopolitical borders.4 Even when critics did address the question of transnational belonging in Kubota’s oeuvre, it was typically only within the context of her later work (Roth 1991). As a result, the political stakes of Kubota’s early video art have been oversimplified, haphazardly bound to an idealised construct of 1970s ‘feminism’ with little parsing of the second wave’s internal contradictions and Kubota’s own strained relationship with its politics. As Video Poem clearly demonstrates, Kubota’s notion of an embodied video practice was multifaceted, manifesting her identity as a female artist but also as an immigrant forced to navigate cultural and geographic borders whilst forming multicultural bonds. Moreover, Video Poem’s evocative suggestions reveal the specific political urgency of this kind of intersectional feminist framing. Written at the end of the Vietnam War (1955–1975), the poem alludes to the conflict between video’s discursive promises of a global telecommunications transculturalism and the very real physical precarity of being an Asian woman whilst working and travelling in the United States and Europe. Using Video Poem as a guide, this essay examines the development of an intersectional feminist political sentiment in Kubota’s early video art, arguing that the artist developed this political framework as a critical response to the

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increasingly ‘globalising’ discourse of video. By emphasising an embodied video-making practice, with a particular insistence on the specific material conditions of her subjects and the ways in which those conditions structure belonging and access, Kubota’s early videos resist the emerging paradigm of the ‘global village’, with its idealised, technophilic discursive erasure of borders. First coined by media theorist Marshall McLuhan in the mid-1960s, the notion of the ‘global village’ conceptualised the ways in which new media technologies cultivated multinational interconnectivity. In Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan argues that the increasing electronic speed of communication would dissolve national sovereignties and reassemble society into a new organic whole, a world order he designated ‘the global village’. Whilst numerous early video artists embraced McLuhan’s theories, often positioning their own work as critical to the construction of an electronically mediated global community, none did so more famously than Kubota’s fellow Fluxus artist and soon-to-be husband, Nam June Paik. Between 1971 and the mid-1980s, Paik’s conception of video’s role in globalisation expanded from a theory manifested in single-channel works like Global Groove (1973) to a nearly totalising vision emphasised in satellite projects like Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984) (Paulsen 2017).5 As they began to work closely alongside one another, Paik’s growing enchantment with globalised video networks not only underscores Kubota’s initial reticence and scepticism but it also reveals a different concept of the ‘global’ which would ultimately emerge in their works. Pheng Cheah’s (2008) writings on the cosmopolitan optic are especially useful in unpacking this difference between Kubota and Paik’s early works. Cheah outlines two contrasting senses of the world manifested in the differences between the ‘global’ and the ‘world’. The ‘global’, according to Cheah, is a false notion of totality engendered by the global media marketplace aligned with McLuhan’s developing idea of the ‘global village’, whilst the ‘world’ is a phenomenology, a turning-towards and being-with. ‘The globe is not the world’, Cheah warns, as he cautions readers against conflating worldliness with globalisation (2008: 30). Naturally, the question of the ‘world’ as both manifested in and shaped by video technology’s globalising effects emerges with a palpable sense of urgency in both Kubota’s and Paik’s works at this moment. This essay compares Paik’s and Kubota’s early video projects in order to map the way in which Kubota would realise a concept of the ‘world’ within video, shaped by an intersectional, materialist feminist politics. Whilst both Kubota and Paik initially embraced the ‘global village’ as a conceptually compelling and

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even ethically productive schema for their video projects, I argue that Kubota quickly realised its inadequacies. Parting ways with Paik’s market-oriented vision, she instead developed an embodied, phenomenological video practice to enact a sense of transnational and transcultural identity and belonging in an increasingly technologically mediated global world. Moreover, it is through this intersectional framework that Kubota asserted her own agency whilst resisting the normative force of the global commodity circuits of image production.

Transnational Videoscapes: Kubota’s Portapak Groove Kubota realised the significant impact of national identity on an artist’s career very early in life. Born in Niigata, a small city in northeast Japan, her first encounter with avant-garde artists occurred after she moved to Tokyo to study sculpture at the Tokyo University of Education. Shortly after graduating from the university, she attended a performance by the avant-garde musician John Cage, in whom she instantly recognised a kindred artistic spirit. Describing this event as transformative, Kubota quickly realised that New York offered a more apropos setting for her own artistic practices (Yoshimoto 2005; Bui 2007). Shortly thereafter, she arrived in New York, where she quickly became an important member of the international avant-garde group Fluxus and was even playfully nicknamed the group’s ‘vice president’ (Yoshimoto 2005: 8). Whilst maintaining one foot in New York’s artistic avant-garde as an active member of Fluxus, Kubota continued to correspond with artists in Tokyo, including Takehisa Kosugi and Genpei Akasegawa (Yoshimoto 2005: 10). Her desire to maintain connections with an international avant-garde was further reinforced after rekindling her friendship with Paik, with whom she would begin a lifelong collaborative partnership.6 A native of Korea, Paik, like Kubota, had just recently moved to the United States following several years in West Germany. Over the next few decades, Paik’s increasingly larger and more elaborate experiments with telecommunications technologies would not only lead to the nickname ‘the father of video art’, but also reify his central role in the emerging paradigm of an interconnected global telecommunications landscape (Hanhardt and Hkuta 2004; Mehring 2008). When he met Kubota again in New York, however, Paik was just beginning to theorise the conceptual framework for a truly global video network. Following his arrival in the United States, Paik became increasingly interested in the

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writings of McLuhan and began to shift his artistic practice away from the televisual sculptures and performances which had first brought him acclaim, focusing instead on single-channel video compilations.7 These changes coalesced in February 1970 when he wrote ‘Global Groove and Video Common Market’, an essay which articulates a bold new communications theory for the information age (Paik 1973).8 Modelled on the newly implemented European Economic Community, an agreement which lifted trade barriers between member states and gradually implemented common social policies, Paik’s ‘Video Common Market’ envisions a similar unfettered exchange of electronic images. Liberated from the shackles of privatised corporate ownership, Paik imagines that a global televisual commons will democratise electronic media, broadening public access whilst encouraging greater circulation of distinct images. In doing so, the Video Common Market, according to Paik, will aid in eliminating cultural barriers, promoting social understanding and, ultimately, eradicating nationalism. ‘How can we teach about peace’, he asks, while blocking out one of the few existing examples from the screen? Most Asian faces we encounter on the American TV screen are either miserable refugees, wretched prisoners or hated dictators. But most middle-class Asians are seeing essentially the same kind of clean-cut entertainment shows on their home screens as most American Nielsen families. Paik 1973

In a clear reference to Vietnam War imagery, Paik argues for the distinctly racialising context of American television and distinguishes it from the common ground of pop culture. Moreover, he alleges that it is the failure to enact a televisual commons that has led to devastating global conflicts like the Vietnam War (Paik 1973). Alternatively, Paik emphasises transnational alliances centred on economic and class similarities; if only the soldiers had seen the ‘normalcy’ of middle-class Vietnamese citizens watching television in their comfortable living rooms, he suggests, they would have been less likely to have felt hatred and disgust. Whilst ‘Global Groove and Video Common Market’ reveals the palpable urgency and ethical imperatives of Paik’s project, illustrating the intimate connections between televisual images and Paik’s own desires for a kind of transnational camaraderie, it likewise exposes the necessary political censorship for the project to come to fruition. Images of ‘wretched prisoners’ and ‘miserable refugees’ – clear references to the ubiquity of the Vietnam War on American

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television screens – reinforce the differences between East and West and must therefore be omitted. Instead, he suggests that a weekly television festival comprised of music and dance videos from every nation be disseminated to the whole world freely via the Video Common Market. This ‘global groove’, a manifestation of McLuhan’s ‘global village’ in video and what Cheah refers to as the ‘globe’ rather than the ‘world’, stages a transnational politics in the form of a hippy, feel-good universality firmly rooted in pop culture and a globalcommodity image circuit. ‘Peace’, Paik remarks, ‘can be as exciting as a John Wayne movie’ (Paik 1973).9 It would take another three years for Paik to fully conceptualise the Video Common Market in his eponymously titled Global Groove. Before doing so, however, Kubota released Europe on ½ Inch a Day, offering a captivating personal reflection on both the possibilities and failures of Paik’s Video Common Market. Amongst the reverberant rhythms of Video Poem’s opening lines, Kubota names two specific early video projects – Europe on a ½ Inch a Day from 1972 and An American Family, a clear reference to Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky from 1973.10 Both works, long known to scholars and available through Electronic Arts Intermix’s distribution services, are part of a twelve-part series Kubota titled Broken Diary. Begun in 1970 and continuing sporadically throughout the 1980s, Broken Diary consists of twelve distinct autobiographical video ‘chapters’, each of which documents a specific moment in Kubota’s life (Zippay 2019). Made less than a year apart, Europe on ½ Inch a Day and Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky are nevertheless radically distinct from a formal perspective. Within the year that separates these two works, Kubota’s work shifted from a relatively traditional mode of black-and-white montage to a glowing, technicolour dreamscape of dissolving and merging superimposed imagery. Whilst both videos examine the role of electronic media in shaping cultural understanding and communal belonging, the dramatic formal shifts between them point to the emergence of an intermingled dialogue. Paik visually and conceptually borrows from Europe on ½ Inch a Day to create Global Groove, but by the time he released it in 1973 Kubota had already abandoned his idea of the Video Common Market. Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky signals this critical transformation in Kubota’s work and offers a tender rebuttal to Paik’s Global Groove and a firm resistance to the homogenising effects of the ‘global village’. Two years after Paik first wrote ‘Global Groove and Video Common Market’, Kubota set out to travel across Europe. With a portapak on her back as her only

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companion, she crossed both geographic and bureaucratic barriers between the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Documenting her brief, often distant encounters with artists and performers, Europe on ½ Inch a Day offers a restrained response to Paik’s notion of a Video Common Market and a deeply personal philosophical meditation on the role of new media in the emerging ‘global village’. Opening with the image of a street performer in Amsterdam, the video quickly cuts to a title page which establishes its philosophical tone. Handwritten and off-centre, evoking an amateurish, DIY aesthetic which continues throughout the entire video, the title page provides a clue to the work’s origin. Crossed out at the centre, the words ‘5 Dollars’ are displaced by the phrase, ‘½ inch’ – a clear nod to the popular travel guide Europe on 5 Dollars a Day. Kubota’s substitution playfully signals the impending replacement of print by electronic media and highlights video’s role in bridging geographic divides. Cutting back to the street performer, Kubota captures casual observations of city life and avant-garde performances during her travels, depicting performers in a Parisian sex club, a queer theatre troupe in Brussels and a sadomasochistic work of performance art. Mirroring the turning of the page in a travel guide, each video cut signals the crossing of a geographic boundary and a mediated encounter with an artistic subculture. Kubota’s joyous explorative convocations and the tape’s non-linear form echo McLuhan’s conception of the televisual image as a ‘discontinuous’ yet ‘seamless web of experience’ which restructures social relations (McLuhan 1964: 313, 334–335). For Paik, following McLuhan, the mosaic form of television demands the viewer’s participation (McLuhan 1964: 334). As a result of its expedient and urgent presentation of a collapsed global landscape, TV not only places political realities fully on display, but it also denies the viewer the capacity for non-participation. As the infamous anti-Vietnam War protest slogan proclaims, ‘the whole world is watching’. Despite the ethical imperatives of McLuhan’s global village, not everyone was quite as optimistic about its political efficacy. Michael Arlen, The New Yorker’s TV critic, frequently voiced his scepticism, particularly as it related to news coverage of the Vietnam War. One of the first authors to adopt the term ‘livingroom war’ in reference to Vietnam’s pervasive presence on American television, Arlen repeatedly took McLuhan’s theories to task in his essays. In his extensive writings he consistently criticised the networks’ ‘mosaic’-like coverage of the war, chastising their continuous failure to rigorously analyse distinct events within the context of the war’s larger animating forces (Arlen 1969: 108–109). In direct contrast to McLuhan, he proclaims that images of the war on television

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screens are made less real, ‘trivialized, or at least tamed, by the enveloping cozy alarums of the household’ (Arlen 1969: 7–8). In a near perfect echo of Martha Rosler’s series Bringing the War Home (1967–1972), Arlen emphasises the extreme disjuncture between images of the war-ravaged Vietnamese landscape and the blissful comfort of American domesticity. Deflating the ‘reality effect’ of the televisual, he emphasises that with the click of a button the viewer can not only change the channel, turning off the news in favour of daytime soap operas and game shows, but they can also turn the TV off entirely and go for a leisurely walk in the park. The Vietnam War similarly serves as a point of disruption to the otherwise relative ‘groove’ of Europe on ½ Inch a Day. In line with both McLuhan and Paik, Kubota initially appears to have created an electronic ‘global village’ centred around artistic performances, a strategy Paik would adopt less than a year later in Global Groove. The spontaneous encounters and quick cuts between differing geographic locales collapse space and time, and evoke an intimacy born through electronic media. The cultural differences between street musicians in Amsterdam and cabaret performers in Paris and Brussels are smoothed over within the imaginary of televisual space. Read in its totality, Europe on ½ Inch a Day stages a transnational space of electronic media, devoid of geographic barriers and cultural distinctions, with its rhythms determined by the ‘global groove’ of artists and performers. But there is a glitch in the seemingly flattened homogeneity of McLuhan’s global village. Images of the national body – Paris’s Arc de Triomphe and French-language protest posters – unsettle the video’s tempo of artistic performances. Kubota splices shaky and unsteady shots of the Arc de Triomphe in-between footage of raunchy dance performances inside a Parisian sex club. Despite the latent aura of dissatisfaction engendered by Kubota’s failure to capture a clear image of the arch, this particular disruption of the national body to the video’s groove remains joyful and light-hearted. The second disruption, on the other hand, is far more ominous. In a longer and slower series of shots, Kubota inserts street scenes featuring Vietnam War protest posters (Figure 3.1) in-between artistic performances. Like Barthes’s punctum, these jarring images mark both a site of identification and refusal. On the one hand, as an avant-garde artist herself, Kubota identifies with these subcultural groups. On the other, she is a Japanese woman living in and travelling through the West, and these protest images mark the very real violence enacted upon bodies like hers.11 Kubota powerfully reminds viewers of this fact in Video Poem when she equates the image of herself travelling with a portapak on her

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Figure 3.1 Still from Shigeko Kubota’s Europe on ½ Inch a Day, 1972, 30:48 min, b&w and colour, sound. Courtesy of Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation © Estate of Shigeko Kubota.

back to that of a Vietnamese woman carrying a child. Alluding to her own feelings of tenderness towards the video camera, Kubota nevertheless makes it clear that her body is always marked as Asian, and not just televisually.12 Whilst problematically effacing the distinct economic and class differences between them, Kubota’s reference to the Vietnamese woman carrying her child is a twofold point of identity – a reminder that Kubota herself identifies in this way, forging her own cultural bonds and transnational modes of belonging as a woman of colour and Asian descent, but it is also a reminder that her body, whether or not she carries a passport from the United States, is inherently deemed Asian and, therefore, like the Vietnamese woman carrying her child, it is subject to violence from the West. ‘Man shoots me every night’, she writes in Video Poem, ‘I can’t resist. I shoot him back at broad daylight with vidicon or tivicon flaming in overexposure’ (Kubota 1968–1976). In Europe on ½ Inch a Day, the image of the Vietnam War protest poster – latent with the violence which emerges from bureaucratised geopolitical manoeuvring – disrupts the smooth flow of the global groove. Formally as well

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as conceptually, the image also acts as a point of collision, an inevitable encounter between the artist’s body and the national body. Rather than allowing for its erasure and disappearance within the electronic global groove, an erasure hinted at in Paik’s Video Common Market, Kubota’s forceful reminder of her own embodied video practice, of the very real violence enacted upon Asian women, serves as a powerful mode of resistance.13 The final artistic performance in Europe on ½ Inch a Day similarly intercuts libidinal desire with questions of political participation.14 Kubota documents a sadomasochistic performance in which a male figure lies completely nude on the ground whilst a splayed pig carcass hangs above him. In a symbolic gesture of resemblance, the pig is tied to the man’s body and drips blood all over him. Marking the man’s body as meat, the performance evokes the violence of the Vietnam War, the images of thousands of slaughtered Vietnamese casually featured in newspapers and television broadcasts. The video, however, barely registers the performance. Kubota instead focuses on the audience, becoming particularly enraptured with the face of a young woman standing across from her. As the video zooms in on her features, we watch the woman survey the performance, stepping closer to see the violent convulsions of the nude male figure. As she looks up, directly facing Kubota’s camera, the look of complete apathy on her face appears shockingly out of touch with the violence around her. Unfazed by the violence she is witnessing, the audience member’s apathy becomes a symbolic overture for Western audiences’ indifference towards the violence enacted against Black and Brown bodies as it is mediated through the televisual screen. Finally, the video culminates in Kubota’s visit to the grave of Marcel Duchamp, who was not only a friend and confidant but would also prove to be a critical source of inspiration throughout her life. The scene evokes both death and mourning, but also a final flicker of hope. Despite having to traverse numerous geographic boundaries due to conflict, Duchamp remained an ardent pacifist. More importantly, his Dada legacy served as a resounding testament to the artist’s libidinal and creative capacity to resist the rationalising violence of the national body.

Red, White and Video: Kubota’s Feminist Transculturalism in the US of A Following her return from Europe, Kubota’s experiences with a burgeoning intersectional feminism inspired her to shift away from Paik’s pop-cultural

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model of a video commons and towards a more fully embodied materialist practice instead. In 1972, alongside artists Mary Lucier, Cecilia Sandoval and Charlotte Warren, Kubota established a short-lived multicultural artist collective called Red, White, Yellow, and Black.15 Loosely formed through friendship, the group’s name exposed the artists’ implicit concerns over identity and hinted at their response to these questions at a moment of intense racial divide in the United States. Red, White, Yellow, and Black served not only to identify each individual member – an explicit reference to the artists’ racial make-up – but it was also meant to serve as a catchy name for the group. Inspired by the ‘red, white and blue’ of the American flag, the name implied community and belonging; a collective formed from individual parts which became stronger together (Lucier, personal communication, 2019). Whilst the collective only lasted about a year, performing three ‘multimedia concerts’ at The Kitchen in New York between December 1972 and April 1973, it was instrumental to the evolution of Kubota’s thinking on intersectional identity and her own outsider status. As Melinda Barlow points out, the collective’s first poster (Figure 3.2), which features close-ups of each of the four women in profile, recasts standard mug shots and ‘boldly reclaims outlaw status on behalf of the four women in the group’ (2000: 299). For her part in the collective’s multimedia concerts, Kubota showed Riverrun – Video Water Poem, a five-channel video installation which she described as a ‘live colorized water fountain’ with a ‘video water poem’ (Barlow 2000: 299). This piece picks up where Europe on ½ Inch a Day had left off, combining footage of her travels in Europe with images of her newly adopted home of New York. The differences between these geographic locales are subsumed by the typology of the images; Kubota displaces geographic distance by depicting Europe and New York through their waterways. Establishing a symbolic equivalence between the electronic flow of video as a medium and the flow of water – a trope in her later work – she depicts the Seine and Rhine rivers streaming into the Amsterdam and Venice canals before finally spilling into the Hudson.16 The notion of video, like water, as a fluid, mutable, and connective entity is echoed in the physical arrangements of Riverrun which features five monitors positioned in a contiguous, horizontal series, conjointly mimicking a river. Lastly, in a kind of electronic communion between herself and the viewer and as a reminder of their embodiment, the sixth and final monitor features synthesised images of viewers drinking from the orange juice fountain which Kubota had placed in front of the piece (Barlow 2000: 309). Riverrun is both

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Figure 3.2 Poster for Red, White, Yellow, and Black’s first multimedia concert at The Kitchen in New York City, December 1972. Poster by Red, White, Yellow, and Black Collective (Cecilia Sandoval, Mary Lucier, Shigeko Kubota, Charlotte Warren).

searching and suggestive, positioning video, like water, as both placeless and place making. The summer after Red, White, Yellow, and Black’s final performance, Kubota travelled alongside Lucier to visit Sandoval at the Navajo reservation in Chinle, Arizona, where she taped the footage for Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky (Barlow 2000: 297). In a clear display of her flourishing technological mastery, Video Girls features a densely layered collage of documentary shots from Chinle intercut and overlaid with zooming and jittering technicolour

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images. A neon-rendered negative of Kubota’s face and Sandoval’s dancing body slowly zooms in and out over black-and-white shots of Chinle’s residents swimming, cooking, singing and pumping water from the town well. What ultimately emerges in the work is a seeming resolution to the melancholic search for belonging in Europe on ½ Inch a Day and Riverrun, rooted in a materialist intersectional feminism. Video Girls depicts the blossoming familial bond between Kubota and Sandoval, whom she refers to elsewhere as an ‘ancient cousin’, cemented by their status as outsiders and female artists of colour. Moreover, the work illustrates Kubota’s refusal to allow for the specificity of Sandoval’s life on the reservation – its beauty, its complexity, but especially its material hardships – to be tokenised within a sea of swirling televisual electrons. It is again water which guides Kubota’s meditation. ‘Let’s hitchhike to Japan’, Sandoval’s niece proposes at the outset of the video to which Kubota responds, ‘Don’t you know it’s over the sea?’ This casual and disarming conversation sets the stage for the work’s philosophical enterprise, Kubota’s search for intimacy, which is repeatedly confounded by physical and material difference. The text and notebooks which accompany the work emphasise this search for connection between herself, as a Japanese woman, and the Navajo people. The accompanying text begins with an epigraph borrowed from John Cage’s Silence (1961) that not only insists on ‘Asia’ as a place of origin, a historic site of ancient migrations of peoples West to Europe as well as East across the Bering Strait to the Americas, but also claims that unlike Europeans, Native Americans maintain a peaceful and equitable relationship with nature (Cage 1961, cited in Kubota n.d.).17 Cage’s quote is followed by an anecdotal story which relates this ancestral relation as part anthropology, part myth. ‘An elder of the village told me’, Kubota recounts, ‘ “Oh, poor Japanese, you travelled so long to [this] small island, you should have stayed here in America”. I chuckled. This old man thinks that the American Indian emigrated to China and originated Chinese civilization in 4000 B.C.’ (Kubota n.d.). A similar idea emerges in Kubota’s notebooks, which contain quick sketches of faces labelled with generic terms, such as ‘Indian’, ‘American Indian’ or ‘Indian woman’.18 In one of the only individualised drawings, Kubota labels her quickly sketched self-portrait ‘Indian woman, myself ’ (Figure 3.3). Emphasising her physical resemblance with the Navajo women, Kubota appropriates the generic anthropological typology of ‘Indian’ and reimagines it as a site of entry towards communion. These notions coalesce in Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky, which utilises a collage of transparent, layered imagery to depict Kubota’s emerging kinship with the

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Figure 3.3 Drawing from Shigeko Kubota’s Chinle, Arizona notebooks titled ‘Indian Woman Myself ’. Courtesy of Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation © Estate of Shigeko Kubota.

Sandoval family. Like waves, Kubota’s face floats above shots of everyday life on the Navajo reservation, announcing her presence in the scene as the camerawoman and merging her own image with those of the Navajo people, before dissolving away (Figure 3.4). Water again serves as a connective tissue, signalling a sense of communal belonging between Kubota and the Navajo people. Unlike in Riverrun, however, where it is predominantly used symbolically, in Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky Kubota tackles the question of water as a material resource marked by inequity. For the Navajo people, Chinle is deeply tied to water. Named for the water which streams from the Canyon de Chelly, Chinle translates to ‘flowing out’ and marks a site of sacred crossing. Yet, despite this divine connection, the people of Chinle do not even have access to running water and often experience a dire scarcity of this natural resource. Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky reveals these material inequities and, in an echo of Cage’s quote, juxtaposes them with moments of consumer excess. Whilst the Navajo are exhaustively

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Figure 3.4 Stills from Shigeko Kubota’s Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky, 1973, 31:56 min, b&w and colour, sound. Courtesy of Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation © Estate of Shigeko Kubota.

depicted straining at the well and exuberantly dancing, beseeching the heavens for water, Kubota’s New York friends casually stop by the deli to purchase mineral water. Kubota visually and auditorily merges these occurrences within the videospace, depicting Sandoval’s performances whilst narrating the story of her friends in New York. Highlighting the intertwined reality of geographic dislocation and economic precarity, she asserts a materialist critique within the electronic field of the videospace. Even as the images of Sandoval’s performances in Chinle appear to merge with disparate moments occurring in New York, the

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work disrupts the notion of actual semblance by calling attention to the vast disparities between their material realities. In doing so, Kubota undermines utopian concepts of video as an electronic space defined by equity and unrestricted movement, a notion linked to globalising efforts, and instead illustrates a transcultural media politics manifested in equitable representation. Video, for Kubota, engendered the emergence of a global community through its capacity to mindfully illustrate localised differences – the lived realities of people’s lives – to global audiences. Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky illustrates this political framework, with video as the medium through which Kubota attempted to redress the inequities. ‘The American Indian culture and its earthbound lifestyle is an integral part of American heritage. However, Video/TV treatises on this important subject are still in limbo’, Kubota writes in the accompanying text (Kubota, n.d.). ‘I feel I am destined to devote myself to this information gap’, she concludes, remarking on the guiding principles of the work. Video, like water, according to Kubota, represented a globally distributed, yet vastly inaccessible resource at the beginning of the information age. What ultimately emerges in the work is a gift to Sandoval’s family and all the people of Chinle with whom Kubota had spent the summer. Synthesised and stratified images of the Navajo people’s struggles to find water cascade and pulse to the rhythms of the Navajo drums, emerging out of and sinking into the watery surfaces of the screen. With this formal manipulation, Kubota transforms the video itself into a rain dance, fashioning Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky as an offering to confer blessings on the Navajo people, her ‘ancestral cousins’. Whilst Kubota was in Chinle taping the footage for Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky, Paik began working on Global Groove, his response to McLuhan’s concept of the global village. The two pieces reveal the extent to which, despite their increasingly close working relationship, Paik’s and Kubota’s visions of video’s role in bridging transcultural understanding had, by 1973, already begun to diverge. As Paik accelerated his project to create an unregulated global fusion of imagery in the form of a Video Common Market, Kubota withdrew from globalising efforts, focusing on far more immediate and local modes of transcultural understanding. The resemblance between Paik’s Global Groove and Kubota’s Europe on ½ Inch a Day, a piece she had completed two years before Global Groove was released, notably demonstrates their ideological divergence. Whilst aesthetically Global Groove displays the hallmarks of Paik’s oeuvre – a swish, techno collage of performances and pop culture from all over

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the world – its structural mechanics and even some of its imagery are heavily indebted to Kubota’s Europe on ½ Inch a Day.19 Like Kubota, Paik frames his vision of a transcultural video network through the form of a populist and readily accessible ‘guide’ book – the TV Guide. ‘This is a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow’, Paik proclaims at the onset of Global Groove, ‘When you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth, and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book’. As he says this, the cover of the TV Guide begins to sway, and its electronic signals languidly roll down the screen until the image recrystallises, transformed into the cover of the Japanese TV Guide. In a McLuhan-inspired promise of an ‘East-meets-West’ electronic global village, Paik transports the viewer across borders and across cultures, from the United States to Japan without the need to even change the channel. What follows echoes the structure of Europe on ½ Inch a Day – a half-hour-long montage of crosscultural, avant-garde performances by artists and subcultural luminaries, including Allen Ginsberg, Cage and Charlotte Moorman. Instead of documenting these performances in real time and in specific locations, Paik positions them to float in the abstracted nullity of the green screen, refashioned as a jivey, neon dance floor. This lack of specificity and situatedness occurs even with the traditional non-Western performances that Paik intertwines throughout the video, including the Mudang dance, the fan dance performed by Sun-Ock Lee in a classic Korean costume, and finally, with Sandoval, who is depicted singing a traditional Navajo song with accompanying drums. Even though Sandoval performs in both Kubota’s and Paik’s 1973 videos, her appearance in the two could hardly be more antithetical. In Global Groove she is little more than a tokenised televisual fragment, a cut-and-pasted segment wafting in electronic space. Like a TV show interrupted by commercials, her concert is sporadically punctured by the electronic flow of pop media. In an interesting nod towards the complexity of American identity, Paik intercuts Sandoval’s Navajo performances with excerpts of Mitch Ryder’s rock and roll song, ‘Devil with a Blue Dress On’. Whilst Paik marries this unexpected imagery in an effort to counter the dominance of commercial broadcast networks and their attendant nationalist tendencies, he effaces the specificity of Sandoval’s identity as a Navajo woman and enters her performance into a commoditised global-image circuit divorced from the material realities of her life. Her body and connection to the specific landscape of Chinle, a sanctity so powerfully and evocatively mapped in Kubota’s Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky, is entirely absent in the abstracted, electronic space of the

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Global Groove. Transformed into buzzing, jittery, electronic signals, Sandoval’s body is presumed to attain a sense of seamless mobility within the borderless space of the video commons, a fantasy of mobility out of sync with the reality of Sandoval’s life. Although both Kubota and Paik explored a similar democratised notion of video and its capacity to engender transcultural understanding amidst an increasingly globalised media environment in the early 1970s, their conceptions quickly diverged. Whereas Paik would attempt to realise his vision of a borderless world with more grandiose projects like his international satellite broadcast, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, Kubota’s early exploration of the video commons left her wanting. Instead, what we see emerge in Europe on ½ Inch a Day is a search for identity and belonging attuned to the specificity of her being a Japanese American female artist travelling alone ‘with her portapak on her back’. Kubota’s seeming failure to find this sense of belonging, manifested in the spectre of the violence of the Vietnam War, actually signals her refusal to accede to the fantasy of a market-oriented global telecommunications public. Conceptually void of a false notion of totality in the form of the ‘globe’, Kubota arrived at Chinle ready to embrace video as a medium for connection and community building. As she spent time with Sandoval and her ‘ancestral cousins’ on the Navajo reservation, her detached observations of artistic performances were replaced by an embodied, phenomenological conception of video. ‘Turning-towards’ and ‘being with’ Sandoval’s family, Kubota recognised that homogeneity does not signal belonging. With this realization, she reimagined Paik’s televisual commons in Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky as a site of fellowship based on the acknowledgment of difference within the circuits of global capital. Moreover, it was her growing friendship with Sandoval and sense of kinship with the Navajo people that allowed Kubota to assert her own agency most forcefully. As Cheah (2008) eloquently argues, ‘Agency is not a feature of subject or objects, since these do not pre-exist their active entanglement. Instead, agency is about making change through intra-activity’. Utilising her own privileged access to video as an informational tool, Kubota represented not only her own connections to the Sandovals but also the ways in which the material realities of life at Chinle were ‘actively entangled’ with those of complete strangers in faraway places like New York. This recognition of the networked realities of material and cultural life is what ultimately allowed for Kubota’s communion, her sense of belonging with the Navajo people, to emerge in the form of a telecommunications transculturalism ‘under the Navajo Sky’.

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Notes 1 By ‘Video Poem’ I am referring only to the poem portion of the piece reprinted in Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot’s Anthology of Video Art and not the entire video sculpture of the same name. Both the poem and video sculpture titled Video Poem have a convoluted history with regard to their naming conventions. For additional references to Video Poem’s history, see Wiegand (1975) and Jacob (1991). 2 Typical of Kubota’s practice, ‘Video Poem’ appears in several different forms throughout her oeuvre. First composed as an accompaniment to a video for an event held at Anthology Film Archives in 1972, portions of the poem were later incorporated into her video sculpture, also titled Video Poem (1970–75) before being reprinted in Ira Schneider’s and Beryl Korot’s groundbreaking anthology of early video art (1976). For a longer history of Video Poem and its relationship to Kubota’s early video art see: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (2021) ‘Shigeko Kubota’s Self-Portrait’. Available at: www.moma.org/magazine/articles/646 3 In 1975, Kubota sent an invitation to her exhibition at The Kitchen, which featured the poem’s second half, to Howard Wise, founder of the Howard Wise Gallery and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), the latter of which currently distributes Kubota’s video work. A digital copy of the postcard can be found on EAI’s website at www.eai. org/user_files/supporting_documents/Video%20Poem%20by%20Kubota_The%20 Kitchen_1975.pdf. 4 Kubota is explicit about her own resistance to being categorised as a ‘feminist artist’. In an interview for the Brooklyn Rail, Phong Bui asks Kubota if she was involved with feminism, to which she replies, ‘I didn’t. Male or female, art is art. People can put me in the Feminist category all they want, but I didn’t think I can make any real contribution other than my work as an artist’ (Phong 2007). 5 Paik initiated several satellite projects, including his 1977 performance at documenta, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell in 1984 and Bye, Bye Kipling in 1986. Many of Paik’s videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). Global Groove can be found here: www.eai.org/titles/global-groove; Good Morning, Mr. Orwell can be found here: www.eai.org/titles/good-morning-mr-orwell. 6 Yoshimoto (2005) points out that Kubota originally met Paik in Tokyo in 1963. The meeting is detailed in Kubota’s memoir, which is unfortunately not available in English. 7 See, for instance, Paik’s TV Magnet (1965) and Paik and Charlotte Moorman’s TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969). 8 This essay was written in February 1970 but not officially published until 1973 in WNET-TV Lab News. Notably, 1973 is also the year Paik made Global Groove. 9 Paik further remarks, ‘The tired slogan of “world peace” will again become fresh and marketable’, suggesting his shrewd understanding of the increasingly important role that televisual media would play in politics.

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10 Many of Kubota’s videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). Europe on ½ Inch a Day can be found here: www.eai.org/titles/europe-on-1-2-inch-a-day ; Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky can be found here: www.eai.org/titles/ video-girls-and-video-songs-for-navajo-sky. 11 For a further discussion of Kubota’s relationship with the Japanese avant-garde, in particular, see Yoshimoto (2005). 12 For a further discussion of the intertangled trajectories of ‘orientalism’ and feminism in anti-Vietnam War activism see Wu (2005). I would like to thank Dr Siona Wilson for pointing out this text to me. 13 Kubota also called particular attention to the violence of the physical labour involved in making a videotape during the 1970s. For instance, in Video Poem she writes, ‘Portapak tears down my shoulder, backbone and waist’. 14 The use of sexuality and desire to critique and disrupt bureaucratised politics is a common motif of various avant-gardes, in particular Duchamp, with whom Kubota maintained an affinity throughout her artistic career. 15 The name of the collective is written in various orders through the historic texts. It also often appears as: White, Black, Red, & Yellow. 16 The comparison between water and video is a common motif in Kubota’s work. She is explicit about this relationship in her description of Riverrun, writing: ‘Water is a metaphor for moving images . . . In preindustrial times rivers connected communities and spread information. Now electronic signals perform this function: “charged electrons flow across our receiver screens like drops of water” ’ (Roth 1991: 82). 17 I am using the text originally written by Kubota to accompany Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky provided courtesy of the Shigeko Kubota Foundation. Portions of the original text were later edited and printed as ‘Notes for Three Mountains’. 18 These sketches have not been published and were provided courtesy of the Shigeko Kubota Foundation. 19 In fact, Paik reuses some of Kubota’s shots of the Arc de Triomph from Europe on ½ Inch a Day in Global Groove.

References Arlen, M.J. (1969) Living Room War. Viking Press: New York. Barlow, M. (2000) ‘Red, White, Yellow, and Black: Women, Multiculturalism, and Video History’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17 (4): 297–316. Bui, P. (2007) ‘In Conversation: Shigeko Kubota with Phong Bui’, The Brooklyn Rail, September. Available at https://brooklynrail.org/2007/09/art/kubota (Accessed 5 April 2022).

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Cheah, P. (2008) ‘What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity’. Daedalus 137 (3): 26–38. Hanhardt, J.G. (1979) Shigeko Kubota and Taka Iimura: New Video. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Jacob, M.J., ed. (1991) Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Kedmey, K. (2018) ‘How Shigeko Kubota Pioneered Video as a Personal Medium’. Artsy, 6 February. Available at www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-shigeko-kubotapioneered-video-personal-medium (Accessed 5 April 2022). Klein, M. (1995) ‘Shigeko Kubota and Mary Lucier’. Frieze, 11 September. Available at www.frieze.com/article/shigeko-kubota-and-mary-lucier (Accessed 5 April 2022). Kubota, S. (n.d.) Unpublished text. New York: Shigeko Kubota Foundation. Kubota, S. (1968–1976) ‘Video Poem’, in I. Schneider and B. Korot (eds.), Video Art: An Anthology. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and The Raindance Foundation. Kubota, S. (1976–1979) ‘Notes for Three Mountains’, in M.J. Jacob (ed.), Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Meskimmon, M. (1997) Engendering the City: Women Artists and Urban Space. London: Scarlet Press. Paik, N.J. (1973) ‘Global Groove and Video Common Market’, in Nam June Paik: Videa ‘n’ Videology, 1959–1973. New York: Tova Press. Paulsen, K. (2017) Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Roth, M. (1991) ‘The Voice of Shigeko Kubota: “A Fusion of Art and Life, Asia and America” ’, in M.J. Jacob (ed.), Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Schneider, I. and Korot, B., eds. (1976) Video Art: An Anthology. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and The Raindance Foundation. Watlington, E. (2019) ‘Red, White, Yellow, Black: A Multicultural Feminism Video Collective, 1972–73’. Another Gaze, 23 December. Available at www.anothergaze. com/redwhite-yellow-black-multiracial-feminist-video-collective-1972–73/ (Accessed 5 April 2022). Wiegand, I. (1975) ‘Video Poems’. The SoHo Weekly News, 12 June: 32, 38. Wu, J.T. (2005) Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yoshimoto, M. (2005) ‘Self-Exploration in Multimedia: The Experiments of Shigeko Kubota’, in Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York. New York: Rutgers University Press. Zippay, L. (2019) ‘It Rains in My Heart, It Rains on My Video Art’. VoCA Journal, 7 March. Available at https://journal.voca.network/it-rains-in-my-heart-it-rains-onmy-video-art/ (Accessed 5 April 2022).

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Patty Chang: Body, Performance and Transnational Border Crossings Jane Chin Davidson

The conceptualisation of ‘space’ in relation to transnationalism foregrounds the kind of feminist questions that became urgent in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The politics of identification, nations and borders acquired new significance in the advent of the anti-immigrant, ethno-nationalist shift in the representative democracies of the United States and Europe. These conditions have impacted the ways in which conceptions of the ‘transnational’ can have meaning and relevancy in broader social contexts, including in the expressive efficacy of the visual arts – especially for practitioners of performance media. In Étienne Balibar’s (2006) articulation of the xenophobic characterisation of ‘strangers as enemies’, he acknowledged the encroaching problem of the ‘aporias of transnational citizenship’. His explanation of the aporia can be understood as the chasm between a hopeful ‘transnational public space’ in the demos of his ‘cosmopolitical institution of citizens’ and the all-inclusive space of transnational capitalism for the ‘production of the stranger’ (Balibar 2006). As such, the territorial border of the nation determines the status of both citizen and stranger because the production of transnational space is mutually inclusive of the production of the citizen/stranger. Taking into account the prevailing ethno-nationalist politics, this essay examines transnational border crossings as conceptualised through the performative video work of the Chinese-American artist Patty Chang. Her embodied expression, performed and sited in the border contexts of China’s diverse cultural territories and autonomous regions, offers a unique potential for exploring the feminist and transnational issues associated with the conception of the citizen/stranger. The explosive growth of the performance medium in the twenty-first century is due in part to the advantages of its bodily-oriented practice, representing gender, race and sexuality through the open and 81

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transparent mirroring of the human subject. The conceptual figuration of the human being who is psychically neither citizen nor stranger is personified nonetheless by the legality of the citizen and the illegality of the foreigner. The status is one that is prescribed by the language of residents and ‘aliens’. Chang’s performance videos reveal the ways in which the artistic act can function to reimagine human subjects who are caught in the political domain of national borders by illustrating the assumptions of ethnicity and nationality. In this way, Chang’s work brings into light the irrational constitution of the citizen/stranger at a time when movements of migration and exile have become all-too prevalent among world populations. In her retrospective exhibition The Wandering Lake 2009–2017, which opened at the Queens Museum (New York) in September 2017, Chang showcased her individual projects involving travel to central Asia and to both metropolitan and rural regions of China. Situated in these diverse locations, the artist’s representation of her Chinese-American ‘self ’ on film puts into question the presumptions of a Chinese ‘nationality’. The title Wandering Lake refers to the subject of Chang’s 2010 video project Minor, her search for the disappearing and re-appearing Lop Nur lakes near the ancient city of Loulan, located in the vicinity of present-day Xinjiang and the Uyghur autonomous regions of northwest China. As early as 94 BCE, climate conditions and the shifting course of the inflowing Tarim River into the body of water at Lop Nur caused the lake to ‘wander’, creating the metaphor for Chang’s anthropomorphic ‘traveling bodies’ at this inauguration of her border-crossing journeys on film. Beginning with Xinjiang, these treks are also the central subjects of this essay since they have also taken the artist to the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in southwest China to complete her 2005 project Shangri-La, as well as to Beijing for the 2009 cinematic project titled Die Ware Liebe. In Shangri La’s staging of a fake wedding to her artistic partner David Kelley at the site of the Tibetan border of China, Chang reverses the émigré’s common path to legal citizenship by way of marriage between man and woman in the norm of American nationalism. The legitimating status given to the husband or the wife through the ‘marriage act’ is made transparent through her video project. Chang explores further the heteronormative fantasies of the patriarchal unconscious in her double-channel video installation Die Ware Liebe. Through this Brechtian staging, the viewer watches Chang’s cinematic production team ‘behind the scenes’ as they direct a pornographic film starring the Chinese actors

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Hu Huaizhong who plays the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin and Yi Ping in the role of the 1930s Chinese-American screen siren Anna May Wong. Chang’s transnational redoubling of substitutes and simulacra exposes the stereotypes of race and gender through the fictions of heteronormative desire perpetuated from 1920s–1930s cinema. She reveals how the sexual/commodity fetish, especially involving Asian women, has always played a role in the transnational production of the citizen/stranger. The performative practice therefore functions to re-conceptualise and restage important questions about the ways in which the heteronormative is constituted in modern nationalism. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2009: 78) in her essay ‘Nationalism and the Imagination’ articulates the way that ‘nationalism [is] related to reproductive heteronormativity as a source of legitimacy’. In the legislated norm of nationalism in US history, the Chinese-American was always policed according to the laws of heteronormative citizenship that regulated the stranger as enemy, even enduring generations of Chinese-Americans. Chang transgresses those norms through the clarity of the embodiments of her actors as viewed through her video lens, projecting the photographic real alongside the cinematic fiction. Her performances consist of transnational movements across territories, confounding the nationality of Chineseness, from her residence in California to locations in the outer regions of China, from Xinjiang in the northwest to Yunnan in the Tibetan southwest – places where Chinese identity is often rejected or contested by the Uyghur Muslim or Tibetan Buddhist constituents of China’s border territories. By situating the human body in the context of geographical bodies, Chang exposes the artificial construct of the territorial divides imposed by nationalism and citizenship. As she refocuses our vision toward these specific political conditions, Chang fulfils what Aihwa Ong (1999: 4) defines as the ‘transgressive aspects of contemporary behaviour and imagination’ which are paradoxically ‘incited, enabled, and regulated by the changing logics of states and capitalism’. The transnational has always been a conflicted term because of its mainstream distinction in denoting transnational corporate enterprises in global capitalism;1 however, the term is useful precisely because it can function to acknowledge the political contradictions that come with attaching identity to ethnicity as well as with ascribing artistic expression to nationalities. Along with her actors, Chang embodies those contradictions through her performance videos.

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Minor and the Autonomous Region The artist’s journey to Xinjiang in 2009 was on behalf of a mission: ‘I took the bus from Korla to Ruoqiang, cities on the old route of the Silk Road. I wanted to try to find a way to the Wandering Lake and the ancient city of Loulan that was along its shore’ (Chang 2017: 46). But according to reporter Edward Wong (2014: A8), the desert locations of the Silk Road are currently ‘crisscrossed with pipelines and high-voltage wires’ as hundreds of oil pumps were built to extract Xinjiang’s ‘estimated 21 billion tons of oil reserves, a fifth of China’s total, and major new deposits are still being found’. The appropriation of the region’s fossil fuels is among the numerous reasons why Beijing exerts tight control over the Xinjiang Autonomous Region and the Uyghur Muslim population of ten million Turkic-speaking people overall. The ongoing Uyghur separatist movements have perpetually pushed back against the Han Chinese regime, and in July 2009 before Chang arrived in Xinjiang, at least 200 Uyghurs were killed in the uprising at the regional capital of Urumqi (Jacobs 2013: A4). Since 2017, the population has continued to endure China’s comprehensive campaign to indoctrinate people into the Communist Party through the denunciation of their Islamic faith and through advocating their change from agrarian to factory lifestyles on behalf of China’s industrialisation. Under heavy surveillance, about a million Uyghurs have been sent to re-education camps while entire neighbourhoods considered as ‘slums’ were bulldozed by the Chinese in order to purloin territory (Buckley and Myers 2020). China’s discriminatory violence against the Uyghurs illustrates Balibar’s (2006) description for ‘the category of “new postmodern wars” which includes other forms of repression and elimination of dangerous, unwanted, superfluous, and exploited populations’. China’s re-education of the Uyghurs keeps them from fleeing industrial life, and ultimately, as Balibar’s (2006) theory exposes, the Chinese ‘see the status of frontiers essentially as the instrument by which imperial capitalism controls and defends itself against the threat of the Transnational Proletariat that it has produced and exploits’. China’s construction of the ‘stranger as enemy’ is for petro-capitalist gain, but in truth, the Uyghur community is no stranger whatsoever to the Xinjiang region since their roots as a nomadic populace run deep in this territory, stretching back thousands of years. Under the premise of her search for the Wandering Lakes, Chang’s (2017: 47) performance video Minor offers a contrasting perspective toward the border

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community through the documentation of her encounters with both Uyghur and Han Chinese residents: ‘Everyone said that I wouldn’t be able to get to Lop Nur, that it would take too many cars and lots of money and much of it is off-limits’. She arrived in Ruoqiang, the town closest to Lop Nur, a highly regulated place for visitors where hotels were stipulated for Chinese citizens only. Her trip revealed the tight restrictions placed on the residents who were considered as strangers in their own place of ancestry. But her experiences added to the mythology of the border, since Lop Nur’s shifting anthropomorphic body of water becomes yet another character in her narrative as the figure of ancient geography that co-existed with the archaic people of the past. The biological history accounts for the environmental life of humans no differently from the life of the lake. In the Shiji, Records of the Grand Historian, completed in 94 BCE, Sima Qian (1993: 233) was thought to have confirmed the existence of the Wandering Lakes by locating the ‘Salt Swamp’: West of Yutian, all the rivers flow west and empty into the Western Sea, but east of there they flow eastward into the Salt Swamp (Lob Nor). The waters of the Salt Swamp flow underground and on the south form the source from which the Yellow River rises. There are many precious stones in the region and the rivers flow into China. The Loulan and Gushi peoples live in fortified cities along the Salt Swamp.

Sima Qian (1993: 233) also explains that the nomadic people, ‘the Xiongnu occupies the region from the Salt Swamp east to the south of the Great Wall’. The constructed border wall was built to protect the Han Chinese from outsider ‘barbarian’ tribes like the Xiongnu. In the earliest creation of China’s borders, the concept of ‘strangers as enemies’ can be traced to the country’s most ancient and enduring ethnic relations. Minor’s representation of contemporary ethnic Chinese relations is poignant and personal. Chang captures her experiences with people she meets, such as the two young women, Munira who is Uyghur and Wulina who is Han Chinese. Chang (2017: 51) recounts her meeting on the bus to Qiemo: ‘There was a checkpoint for IDs, and when I pulled out my US passport two girls behind me wanted to see it. Munira was from Ruoqiang and going to school in Qiemo. Nuermanguli was sixteen and said she knows everything about Qiemo’. In this heavily regulated place requiring proof of citizenship at checkpoints, identity is constantly being policed. Later, Chang meets Wulina who is studying to be a nurse, and both Munira and Wulina were invited for a visit as new friends – a

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rather ordinary event in the extraordinary conditions of the border. Chang (2017: 51) questions them about their perceptions of identity: ‘I asked Munira if she were to write a word in Uyghur, what would it be? She said the word wolf. When there was a great war, the last Uyghur married a wolf, and that is where the Uyghur people came from’. Answering the same the question, what Chinese word could describe the Chinese people, Wulina invokes the Hundred Family Surnames, particularly the word ‘Wang’, which transliterally means ‘emperor’. The ancestral terminology is clear, denoting both the dynastic and patronymic tradition for inscribing male surnames. Minor captures the three women together at a cotton factory – their visit coinciding with the activities of the harvest season in this agricultural region where cotton is a major crop. Chang (2017: 52) describes their ride on pick-up trucks for transporting cotton, their flatbeds with walls made of chain link fencing: ‘Using headscarves, Munira wove wolf into the fencing. A Uyghur man said she wrote it incorrectly, and adjusted it. Wulina wrote Wang with paper cups. We rode on a third cotton truck and followed the two words as they chased each other down the road, one passing the other’. Chang’s captured image makes literal Jacques Derrida’s (2001: 353) argument in Writing and Difference that ‘the entire history of the concept of structure . . . must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names’. Chang’s performance in ‘naming’ acknowledges the structures of citizenship, by which the genealogy of ethnicity is discursively perpetuated and confirmed by actors in the present who substitute ‘center for center’ through the forms or names from the ancient past. Minor’s reflection of transnational Chineseness at the border of China disrupts the assumption that the foreigner, as described by Balibar (2006), is among ‘those “other humans” or precisely strangers who already belong to other spaces, who are citizens from different states, either by descent or by adoption’. Citizenship is usually legalised through birthright, and Balibar’s notion of ‘adoption’ acknowledges the unique reproductive process for attaining legitimacy. Citizenship is based on where you are born, it is a birthright that determines the Uyghur or Han Chinese nationality. As explained by Spivak (2009: 78), ‘to “naturalize” is to legalise a simulacrum of displaced birth, which becomes an actual birthright for the next generation’, and as such, it is a process that is ‘predicated on reproductive heteronormativity’. The modern concept in which ‘there is no nation before nationalism’ is one that Spivak (2009: 78) adapted from

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the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in her writing about her own experiences as a child growing up in Kolkata during Partition. She invokes the complexity of ethnicity as a lived identity whereupon citizenship triumphs over bio-political status, even if the ‘naturalization’ process is premised on the place of birth.

Marriage, Namesake, Citizenship and the Commodity of Love The logic of birthright and citizenship for defining reproductive heteronormativity was ultimately acknowledged by Spivak as a repetitious production of nationalism in the libidinal economy. In her 2005 video project Shangri-La, Chang illustrates heteronormative citizenship through her expressive use of the filmic medium. The artist stages a make-believe wedding with her artistic partner David Kelley (Figure 4.1) in the town of Xianggelila at the Tibetan border. The name Xianggelila is the Chinese pinyin alliteration of ‘Shangri La’, the fantasy paradise made famous by Frank Capra’s 1937 Hollywood production of Lost Horizon.2 The original fictional story, however, was created by James Hilton whose utopian lost world where its immortal inhabitants lived forever would become a

Figure 4.1 Patty Chang and David Kelley, Shangri-La, 2005. Video project (photograph courtesy of the artist).

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sensational classic. Shangri La was reimagined by the Chinese government in 2001–2002 when small idyllic locations competed in a contest to win the name Xianggelila for the purpose of transforming the place into a tourist destination. As such, the former town of Zhongdian in Yunnan province was reconstructed to become a blissful, paradisiacal resort in the southwest of China. This real place in China was reincarnated from a cinematic fantasy. As a Chinese tourist in China, Chang’s wedding performance reflects the transnational embodiment of the marriage contract. The viewer watches while the couple order a wedding cake, decorated with the objects Chang constructs during her visit, such as the oxygen pod for high altitudes, a vehicular chamber that emulates an airplane in reference to the plane crash that led to the discovery of Shangri La. The mystical lore established by Hilton was originally made into images on film by Capra.3 Chang also takes the viewer through the process of getting dressed and made up for the wedding ceremony. The entire staging questions what it means for a Chinese American to marry in China, in no less than the fantasy place of Shangri La. The country’s marriage law was radically transformed in the 1950s when Mao Zedong enacted the ‘Revolution of Marriage’ campaign, abolishing the patriarchal tradition of forced and arranged marriages, providing equal rights for women for the first time in the country’s history (Hsi 1960). Today, foreigners to China rarely obtain citizenship, and to do so, the applicant must give up all other nationalities. But getting married is still a pathway to citizenship in the United States, and it is important to note that the founding legislation for American immigration policy was premised on keeping out potential relationships with Chinese women. The first immigration law ever enacted, the 1875 Page Law, restricted the immigration of Chinese women who were considered a threat to the morality of ‘white men, white families’ under the misogyny of the erotic/exotic female stereotype (Peffer 1986; Railton 2013). The Page Law established the xenophobic response to the ‘stranger as enemy’ based on stereotypes of both gender and race – not only is the Asian-American female subject interminably devalued by the overly sexual stereotype, she is treated like a ‘stranger as enemy’ in her own country. Perpetuated by the Page Law, immigrant acts have continued to be the most obvious shows of nationalist power by political players, especially Donald Trump’s administration from 2016 to 2020, having enacted the most punishing incarcerations of migrants crossing the southern border of the United States. However, the way in which Trump performed hate speech through his racist language, calling Covid-19 the ‘Kung Flu’ and the ‘Chinese Virus’, gave license to those who have committed violence

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against all Asians, the majority of whom are women. This was exemplified by the white male shooter who murdered six Asian females out of the eight people he killed in Georgia on 16 March 2021 because he wanted to eliminate the ‘temptations’ of his so-called sex addiction (Anh Do 2021). Based on the legislated conditions of the artist’s American homeland, Chang’s fake marriage to a white male conducted in China juxtaposes the bodies of the ‘self ’ of ethnicity with their mischaracterisation from xenophobic nationalism and historical miscegenation. Questioning the racialised relations assumed between white males and Asian females, Chang’s performance of the ritual of marriage puts into question the transnational ‘real’ of heteronormative citizenship in the US while acknowledging the historical jurisdiction of ‘woman as property’ in modern China. Spivak (2009: 80) suggests that ‘woman is the most primitive instrument of nationalism’, and in the transnational context, marriage has historically functioned as the heteronormative representation of libidinal power. For this reason, marriage plays a primary role in the construction of the ‘stranger as enemy’, and the truth behind immigration bans is the patriarchal drive to conquer, to dominate, and to fulfil the materialist desires of transnational capitalism. Jean Francois Lyotard (1993: 109) integrates the libidinal relations of power: ‘every political economy is libidinal’ since ‘there is as much libidinal intensity in capitalist exchange as in the alleged “symbolic” exchange’. And Freud was one of the first to employ the Marxist conception of the fetish in the capitalist exchange whereby the sexual fetish is indistinguishable from the insatiable desire for the commodity. Lyotard (1993: 92) explains that the trade of the living being ‘does not suppress the fact that it is currency’ because the political exchange of human bodies, from one nation to another, transforms ‘these too into simulacra, appearances, and composes, with those fragments of assembled flesh, tableaux’. Like Freud, Lyotard emphasises the exchange of erotic bodies to make his point, acknowledging the doubles, the simulacra, of the ‘phantasms’ of capital in political economy. In this way, the libidinal economy functions to illustrate the transnational capitalist circuits in the marriage exchange of heteronormative citizenship. Chang’s double-channel video project Die Ware Liebe: The Product (or Commodity) Love confronts the symbolic and the commodity exchanges in very transparent ways.4 Creating a cinematic movie based on a 1928 essay written by Walter Benjamin titled ‘A Chinoiserie Out of the Old West’, Chang visualises a screen relationship between Benjamin and Anna May Wong, the actress who was the subject of his essay.5 The famous Chinese American screen actor of

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1920s–1930s film, Wong was typecast at a very young age in the roles of exotic sex worker, half-naked servant girl, and numerous ‘unchaste’ and ‘wantonly’ compromised women. In the majority of her movies, she plays the doomed illicit love interest for a white male character, and the typical story line is one where she ends up dying in order to compel moral punishment for her miscegenation. Chang’s restaged subjects remind the viewer that interracial marriage was prohibited in Benjamin’s Germany of the 1930s and illegal in the United States until 1967. The film fantasy supersedes the ‘real’ of unlawful miscegenation as shown in Benjamin’s writing about Wong through his fetishised gaze toward the illicit and exotic Chinese object of desire: ‘her name like the specks in a bowl of tea that unfold into blossoms replete with moon and devoid of scent . . . her hair flowing loose like a dragon romping in water’ a cascade that ‘cuts into her face and makes it most heart-shaped of all’ (Hodges 2004: 77–78). Chang creates a new cinematic fantasy by visualising Benjamin’s orientalist language as she stages an imaginary love scene based on Benjamin and Wong’s actual 1928 meeting in Berlin. But in her transnational reversal, she casts the Chinese actors Hu Huaizhong and Yi Ping in the respective roles for Benjamin and Wong (Figure 4.2). Rather than suggesting that orientalism is over and done with, Chang restages the very act of cultural translation to illustrate the way in which the orientalist imaginary is always created by the actors and the viewers of actors in history.

Figure 4.2 Patty Chang, The Product Love (Die Ware Liebe), 2009. Stills of actors from video installation, Hu Huaizhong as Walter Benjamin and Yi Ping as Anna May Wong (photograph courtesy of the artist).

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Chang’s method is Brechtian in practice as she shows the viewer the behind-thescenes set-up with the filmmaker she hired to direct the actors who actually shoots the ‘film within the film’ in Hangzhou. The humour in seeing Hu Huaizhong being made up to look like Benjamin, with the make-up artist using the photograph on the cover of his well-known volume Reflections, deflects from the studium of the cinematic scene taken from the pages of the detrimental history of yellowface cinema. Chang refers to the white masquerade of ‘the Chinaman’ made famous by Charlie Chan who was played by Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, and Peter Ustinov, to name just a few of the actors who took on the yellowface role. With dialogue spoken entirely in Mandarin Chinese, Chang explained (while corresponding with the author, 26 January 2015) that the ‘variations in their translations expand and make visible the slippage between language, culture and context’ as she instructs the film crew in Hangzhou to stage the ‘love scene in China, with the Chinese director interpreting the characters of Benjamin and Wong’. As explained in the film by the producer Jin Yu and director Gu Bo, their interpretation of the sex scene was transliterated through nationalist metaphors as they directed the character of Walter Benjamin to ‘treat the body of May Wong like he would treat or touch Eastern culture. To find the G point or G spot of culture’. Through this film metaphor, the sexual encounter constitutes a nationalist encounter in this make-believe porno between Wong and Benjamin (Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3 Patty Chang, The Product Love (Die Ware Liebe), 2009. Sex scene taken from video installation, Hu Huaizhong as Walter Benjamin and Yi Ping as Anna May Wong (photograph courtesy of the artist).

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The point of this return to historical cinema is that Chang’s casting of Yi Ping and Hu Huaizhong in the central characters of Wong and Benjamin revises the historical screenplay of miscegenation. The rewriting of the narrative, depicting illicit affairs between white males and Chinese females, creates a reversal of the 1930s film fantasy, notwithstanding the fact that these films document some of the few representations of the Chinese female body in European/American cinema. But ultimately, Chang’s use of Chinese actors interrogates the viewer’s ability to accept the casting of the Benjamin character – amidst the full effect of Brechtian distanciation, could the viewer ‘believe’ the German Benjamin in a Chinese body? What is the viewer’s propensity to fall into the actor’s spell if the Chinese actor plays the role of Benjamin? The Product Love places him in the position of reverse role-playing, not only to invoke the yellowface norm but also to test the aura, the cult value, of the great literary critic himself. As such, the porn relationship imagines a radically libidinal transformation from the intellectual aura of the man who had changed contemporary photography and film theory. Chang emphasises Benjamin’s theory of film in her description of the ambivalent pornographic ‘act of translation that could be a characteristic of the transnational’ (correspondence 2015). The significance of the entire exchange of The Product Love is the performative phenomenology, recognising the translating bodies of Chinese directors and actors who are connected by the transnational Chinese/German text. Overall, Chang pushes the viewer to rethink the masculinist deference to ‘nationality’, particularly because the fetishised female documented by film can show the historical ‘real’ of heteronormative citizenship. And for the cause of heteronormative nationalism, the sexual fetish (porn) is no different from the commodity fetish (advertisement). Through Chang’s transgressive lens, the exotica subject of Chinese women that was historically determined by film’s misogynist and xenophobic text was upended by her re-envisioning of the Euro-American cinematic past. It is this transgressive ‘trans’ of the transnational that makes visible the stereotypical pre-conceptions toward Chinese female bodies. In the end, Chang’s cinematic repetition of Wong and Benjamin – the real actors in history – represents a feminist insertion into Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction. Benjamin’s metaphysical discourse and philosophy of cinema were renewed by those like Giorgio Agamben who also examined the affinity between pornography and advertising. Agamben looked closely at Guy Debord’s films, which he concluded always appeared to show something more substantial than

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the artificial and false spectacles of sexual and commodity fetishes. While his examination into repetition and memory returns to Benjamin’s notion of ‘imagelessness’, an image that ‘is no longer an image of anything’ (Agamben 2002: 319), his argument presented another perspective. In Agamben’s interpretation, Benjamin’s theory of ‘imagelessness’ would function paradoxically as ‘the refuge of all images. It is here, in this difference, that the ethics and the politics of cinema come into play’ (p. 319). Instead of repetitions of colonialist commodification, ‘imagelessness’ becomes a blank slate for the text of cinematic Orientalisms that retrench the image of the fetishised Asian female. It is in this context that the translation of the term ‘Die Ware Liebe’ was also the subtitle of The Product (or Commodity) Love, and through Chang’s oppositional gaze, the conceptual video fulfils the ethics and politics of addressing false representations – the viewer is staged to see the difference between the real and the fetish substitute in her pornographic role-playing. Aligning with Agamben, her work reveals the potential of the element of repetition in cinema’s ability to re-make subjects anew – he thought that ‘memory is . . . that which can transform the real into the possible and the possible into the real. If you think about it, that’s also the definition of cinema’ (Agamben 2002: 316). Adding the human subject, the medium of the performance video engages altogether differently to visualise memory using both performative and cinematic processes. Die Ware Liebe exemplifies this extraordinary potential to restage memory through both processes. Through Chang’s artistic engagements using performance video to reflect and thus expose heteronormative cinema, her contribution to transnational feminism can be understood by her transgressive artistic practice, exemplified by the works discussed in this essay. But as the Asian-American artist places herself, her own body, in the space of the myth of origins – the site of biological ethnicities – her artistic expression also provides a template for understanding Chineseness, defined as the de-territorialised conception of diverse Chinese identities.6 Applicable to her own status in the United States, the heteronormative language of citizenship is exemplified by the history of her family’s immigration since they had to complete the naturalisation process for immigrants who symbolically became ‘adopted’, as described by Spivak, through a metaphoric ‘displaced birth’ to the new life in a new country. This process is one that ordains the change of nationality for each and every émigré. The political ideology is not very different in China since the country asserts power and control based on rights over territory. The oppression of ‘autonomous’

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cultures by the Han Chinese – from Uyghur to Tibetan populations – relies on their belief in the Chinese claim to other ethnic peoples and to an authority over liminal territories along the nation’s borders. And there is no question that transnational capitalism dictates the terms for this authority over Xinjiang and Shangri La. Chang’s insertion of her own Chinese ‘self as stranger’ amidst the polemics of the Chinese rule over border cultures problematises the meaning of border spaces for China’s particular version of the ‘production of the stranger’. But through the expanse of her border crossing work, I want to stress how Chang’s complex use of transnational contexts emphasises the fact that patriarchal nationalism always overshadows the repression of the female subject in particular. Die Ware Liebe exposes the juridical ‘blame’ of miscegenation on Chinese women while Minor reflects the patronymic assumptions of the male namesake that legitimates ethnicity and citizenship through marriage (recognised also by Shangri La). In conclusion, Chang’s performative practice has been highly effective for emphasising the human ‘self ’ as the object of the gaze, distinguished as inseparable from the embodiment of ethnicity. Her form of video representation also functions to document her border crossings, securing the record of her artistic version of ‘transnational citizenship’ in a kind of challenge to the norm of nationalism. Through the aesthetic theatricality of her representation, she problematises the wholesale acceptance of ‘strangers as enemies’ – in Minor, the female relationship among a Uyghur, a Han Chinese and a Chinese American illustrates the ideal of ‘strangers as friends’. Performance’s mode of conceptualisation puts into question what happens when the art object is the embodiment of the artist and her subjects. In the global context, contemporary art has increasingly become a migrating cross-cultural practice; however, Chinese contemporary art is still ascribed to the artist’s place of residence, birth place, or according to citizenship rather than defined by a specific Chinese artistic or cultural tradition. Nonetheless, the shift can be seen from artists who are integrating conceptual processes with diverse cultural rituals and traditions. Chang’s wedding in Shangri La, for instance, performed at the site of the territorial border of Tibet, not only addresses ritual but decentralises the history of immigrant acts that have circumscribed Chinese women from citizenship in the United States. And envisioning the transnational history of film, Die Ware Liebe casts the Chinese male body into the role of the German philosopher. In this way, Chang’s work reflects the significance of the institution of art, which for so long functioned as the ‘mirror’ to the

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Euro-North-American community whilst all other cultural representations reflected the ‘stranger’. Through the use of conceptualism for navigating Chineseness, from the past as much as in the present, the work of the Los Angeles-based, body-oriented artist provides a way to transgress the gendered and racial norms of identification, creating an innovative model for resisting the unethical priorities of heteronormative citizenship and its ‘production of the stranger as enemy’. She illustrates Balibar’s cosmopolitical ideal for ‘organizing different institutions and practices within the perspective of a redefinition of “citizenship”, or a revolutionary transformation of the historical figure of the citizen, from a more traditional notion of geo-politics (even if reformulated as democratic geo-politics, whose protagonists are not only states, but also emancipatory or anti-systemic movements . . .)’ (Balibar 2006: 11, emphasis in original). Not unlike the paradoxes of the ‘transnational’, which could mean the transfer of capital as much as the nomadic movement of people, Balibar considered the paradoxes of the ‘global’ to include the hopeful possibility of unlimited, inclusive communities of democratic citizenship. I am indebted to Patty Chang whose interviews and discussions were so important to the development of this essay.

Notes 1 The irony of China’s Communist governance over its ‘socialist market economy’ lies in the contradiction in which orthodox Marxist resistance functioned as the transgressive counter to the capitalist state; whereas, in China’s ‘Communist’ state today, the sovereignty of global capitalism rules through its multinational corporate structure. 2 Patty Chang, Shangri-La was presented at the UCLA Hammer Museum, 25 June–16 October 2005. 3 In Hilton’s fictional narrative, the fantasy place for immortality was found because of a plane crash in the Himalayas. I discuss Chang’s version of Shangri La in my full study in Staging Art and Chineseness: The Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions (2020). 4 Patty Chang, The Product Love was presented at the Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 21 May to 27 June 2009. 5 Before Chang presented Die Ware Liebe in New York, I saw the first half of the video installation titled A Chinoiserie Out of the Old West in the One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now exhibition at the Japanese American Museum, Los Angeles in 2008 (see Chiu et al. 2006).

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6 I have defined Chineseness more thoroughly in my study of the historical discourse in Staging Art and Chineseness: The Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions (2020).

References Agamben, G. (2002) ‘Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films’, in T. McDonough (ed.), Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press. Balibar, É. (2006) ‘Strangers as Enemies: Further Reflections on the Aporias of Transnational Citizenship’. Lecture delivered at McMaster University, 16 March. Benjamin, W. (1928) ‘Gespräch mit Anne May Wong’. Die literarische Welt, 27 July. Buckley, C. and Myers, S.L. (2020) ‘Battered but Resilient after Chinas Crackdown’, The New York Times, 18 January. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/world/asia/ china-uighurs-xinjiang-yarkand.html (Accessed 5 July 2021). Chang, P. (2015) ‘Interview with author’, Los Angeles, 26 January. Chang, P. (2017) Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake. New York: Queens Museum. Chin Davidson, J. (2018) Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum. London: Routledge. Chin Davidson, J. (2020) Staging Art and Chineseness: The Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Chiu, M., Higa, K.M. and Min, S., eds. (2006) One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now. New York: Asia Society. Derrida, J. (2001) Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. Do, A. (2021) ‘Asian Americans Have Been Verbally and Physically Attacked, Shunned During Pandemic, Study Shows’. Los Angeles Times, 16 March. Available at: www. latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-16/anti-asian-hate-pandemics (Accessed 5 July 2021). Gao Hodges, G.R. (2004) Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hsi, M. (1960) New Marriage Law in the People’s Republic of China: Translations, Development, and Evaluation. Taichung: Tunghai University. Jacobs, A. (2013) ‘Uighurs in China Say Bias is Growing’. The New York Times, 8 October: A:4. Lyotard, J.F. (1993) Libidinal Economy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Peffer, G.A. (1986) ‘Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women under the Page Law, 1875–1882’. Journal of American Ethnic History 6 (1): 28–46.

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Qian, S. (1993) Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty II. B. Watson (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Railton, B. (2013) The Chinese Exclusion Act. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Spivak, G.C. (2006) ‘Nationalism and the Imagination’. Lectora 15: 75–98. Wong, E. (2014) ‘China Invests in Region Rich in Oil, Coal and Also Strife’. The New York Times, 21 December: A:8.

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Borderless and Undocumented: Day by Day in Southeast Asia1 Cristina Nualart

All of my childhood, I felt like an outsider. There were local traditions and stories my family did not know. My grandmother and other relatives were far away, and we rarely saw them, so I did not learn the history and stories of my family like children who live near their relatives. I missed a sense of belonging. Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai, artist (Nguyen and Thalman 2015)

Transnational flows of labour have denied women their place in the system that benefits from their endless work, suggests a study on the artisanal lacemaking industry in India in the early 1980s (Mies 2012).2 In contemporary Southeast Asia, transnational forces also cause some people to lie outside the system while being victims of it. This paradoxical negation of a space of belonging to human beings caught in transnational nets is explored through the lens of two artistic projects, created between 2014 and 2016 by Vietnamese artists Lena Bui3 and Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai.4 In the past decade, Lena Bui experimented with human hair, marble and food. The source material of her Borderless project discussed here, however, is fabric and clothing. On her part, Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai has authored a singular oeuvre charged with the symbolic materiality of wire, tomatoes, found debris, rubber or gynaecological instruments. Here we attend to the photographs, film and objects made with old clothes that come together under the title Day By Day. Both art projects draw attention to spatial belonging by opposition, that is, by showing an erasure from space, and furthermore, they do so while generating a tangible presence for socially invisible groups. Functioning as metonyms, the artworks lay bare the mechanisms of social exclusion. Metonymical relations rely on habitual or conventional connections between sign and signified, and 99

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articulate larger wholes. As we shall see, art objects in the form of identification cards or garments stand for their signified: human beings, in a substitutive relation that binds the associated object with its possessor. The replacement of clothing and citizenship documents for persons vividly captures the ties between individuals and the treatment given to them on the basis of their clothes or their administrative link to a state. A central argument made here is that the two signs (attire and ID documents), subsume the signified (people), in an unjust power reversal that leads to the elimination of people’s spaces of belonging in the social sphere. The artists are critical of exclusionary public structures, and retaliate by focusing on two neglected groups: the stateless community in Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai’s research, and the ubiquitous working women represented in Lena Bui’s project. Both groups thus gain a space of belonging and public visibility, precisely the space they are denied in the mainstream social imaginary. Mai’s pieces, introduced first, achieve this by challenging the constructs that institutionalise personhood and artificially bind humans to places. In the second section, bodily notions of identity are reclaimed by Lena Bui’s pieces on the transformational power of clothing, a social marker of status and of place.

Un-Identities: Metonyms for a Transnational Community A sense of rootlessness marked Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai’s early life experience, after her family moved in the 1980s from northern Vietnam to the city of Hue, in central Vietnam.5 Her parent’s lack of awareness of Hue’s customs, and the disrupted contact with grandparents and extended family, left the artist feeling like she ‘missed a sense of belonging’ (Nguyen and Thalman 2015). During a two-month research residency, Mai tackled the experience of territorial belonging in dialogue with a community of undocumented ethnic Vietnamese on Cambodian territory.6 Conflicts with neighbouring Cambodia during the 1970s continue to have a regional impact, and the artist addresses the plight of those left stateless in the three artworks from 2014 entitled ID Card, Shadow and Travels. She later completed an hour long ethnographic documentary that captures the group’s livelihoods.7 The film bears witness to the community’s struggles to cope ‘day by day’, as they kept telling the artist, who chose that expression to title the documentary, and the exhibition shown in 2015 in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), then in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam).

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Day By Day is shot in Vietnam and Cambodia, featuring undocumented people talking about their situation. The credits of the film roll in over a black background, bringing the sound of a woman’s litany whose phrases are repeated by a chorus of children’s voices. The familiar rhythm of rote learning in a classroom dies out as a dirt-track village of shacks in Vietnam appears. Inside one of the huts – assembled from corrugated metal, wooden poles and palm leaves – a woman busily prepares food packages for sale, the family’s source of income, while she talks about the community. Only one of the children playing outdoors goes to school, she says. The other children can go to a night class in a border defence station in another commune, but many don’t attend regularly because the school is far and evening traffic is dangerous. Less than three minutes into the film, viewers learn that children without a birth certificate cannot access public education.8 The epitome of transnational livelihoods is the grandmother who has spent all her life between Vietnam and Cambodia, the two neighbouring countries (and former enemies) who deny these people basic services on the grounds of no proof of nationality or residency. In a floating village of boathouses in Cambodia, someone comments that ‘no one has any birth certificates or any kind of papers’. When a man says: ‘I heard that they are making ID cards for us’, a spark of hope fires up. He has heard that ‘they’re counting the population of overseas Vietnamese in Cambodia. A few hundred households’. But hope is lost when he announces the cost of each ID card, the equivalent of 62 US dollars, more than the monthly income of these families who can only eat twice a day. Like it began, the film Day By Day ends in darkness. The final take chugs along the river as it follows the boathouses bobbing against the night sky. The twilit lull echoes with a chorus of children’s voices reciting a prayer of gratitude to their village. Before uttering the amen, the children repeat as one: ‘banish illiteracy’. Knowing that illiteracy will be the trauma of those children’s future selves, Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai has chosen to begin and end the film with audio (but no imagery) of children learning. These ethnic Vietnamese live unprotected, unschooled and deadlocked in an administrative battle through no fault of their own, since their documents were lost with sinking boats, weathered beyond repair or otherwise destroyed. During the war some people burnt their own documents as self-protection. ‘In those days, people were so scared as hell they didn’t dare to keep any papers’ someone exclaims in the film Day By Day. Requesting replacement documents has proved to be a never-ending cycle for the residents of this community, trapped in a frozen system poisoned by former national rivalries.

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The failures of bureaucracy reach other scenarios, affecting people who have never lost their citizenship documentation. To secure necessary passports and visas, a transnational family will have to undergo what Earl (2010: 100) describes as ‘invasive procedures’: interviews, character assessments, language tests and general scrutiny. In the global north, the drawbacks of personal identification methods are exemplified by transgender philosopher Paul Preciado (2019), whose original birth certificate had to be officially destroyed to change his ID card.9 Perplexed at the widespread custom of assigning a gender at birth, Preciado thinks it paradoxical to include a sex category on identity documentation. Not only does this leave room for legal vacuums – such as the weeks in which Preciado’s existence lacked paper-based proof of birth – it constructs a malefemale order and excludes persons who self-identify as gender fluid or non-binary. However, Preciado admits to feel more enriched by the relational potential of transformation than burdened by the identitarian aspects of the procedure. Let us not forget that in some nations’ identity accreditation systems, religion is or has been a mandatory category, as if it were as impossible to change one’s beliefs as one’s date of birth. Nevertheless, the potential of transformation cannot be limited to the body, it must include the space around it. Embedded in laws and rules of belonging are ‘rights to the city’, Karis observes (2013). Legitimate entitlement to urban space can be curtailed by documentation, as with Vietnam’s ho khau system of permanent household registration. Over fifty years ago, the registry was implemented to keep track of internal migration and provide public services. Citizens with ho khau can access public schools and health care, work in the public sector and register vehicles to their name. Regulations to obtain urban ho khau impact Vietnam’s five and a half million internal migrants, limiting the rights of temporary workers and causing inequality of opportunity (Nguyen 2018). The gendered dimensions fall on the disproportionate number of girls not enrolled in secondary schools, or the women left to navigate the hurdles of securing health and education for their children (World Bank 2016). The disadvantages of the ho khau system go no further than the frontiers of the nation-state, but the consequences of statelessness have no borders, as artist Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai has witnessed. Until she willingly spent time with the undocumented ethnic Vietnamese ‘in their literally floating existence’, no one had shown a ‘genuine interest in their plight’ (Müllerschön and Tannert 2016: 24). With this transnational community, the artist has chosen a form of advocacy work, in the relational way defended by Preciado: one attuned to the

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potential of transformation. Mai says an ID card ‘is like the key for change in the life of some people: it could be identity, it could be power, it might be a matter of classification, it could be their dream’ (Sa Sa Bassac 2015: 3). To encourage these dreams, she offered to create these objects of power for her undocumented companions. Understandably, some wary individuals were concerned that fake ID cards could bring unwanted consequences, but once the community’s reticence dispelled, over three hundred people participated. To make ID Card (2014), Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai cut up old clothing once worn by the participants, and heat-transferred their data onto playful identity cards (Figure 5.1). On these colourful pieces of reused fabric, the photograph and personal details are clearly recognisable as identification documents, even without references to a government or a state.10 The recycled source material imbues bodily existence into the abstract symbol of personhood that an ID card is. To the people whose names appear on them, these pocket-sized art pieces represent a place of belonging in officialdom, even if illusory. The aspirational quality of the work is extended to the exhibition visitors, who have free rein to

Figure 5.1 Nguygˆ˜n Th․i Thanh Mai, ID Card, 2014. Heat transfer prints on recycled fabric, 348 pieces, 5.7 × 8.1 cm. Installation view of the exhibition Skylines with Flying People 3 at The Japan Foundation for Cultural Exchange in Vietnam, Hanoi, 2016. Photo courtesy of Skylines with Flying People 3.

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endlessly rearrange the over 300 mock identity documents. Looking nothing like a checkpoint, the participatory installation on a wobbly wooden table grants the audience the power to subvert the violence of ID checks. The ID cards become construction toys, ready to be interrelated, moved in and out of groups or assembled into shapes. The fabric of society comes alive as a configuration of people who can remap their place at will. Each ID card metonymically accounts for an actual human being, and metonymy, it is worth noting, has been understood by some linguists as a non-figurative shortcut, a means to reduce redundancy (Preminger and Brogan 1993). In governance procedures, the actual person becomes redundant, rather than the artefact that represents her. Moreover, people who do not exist on paper are doubly redundant, since they count as non-existent. This injustice is a key part of the artwork’s meaning, though it also highlights the unfairness within a given taxonomy, creatively modelling how a classificatory system pushes habitual thinking patterns into beliefs and thus into normative structures. The inference is that undoing categories is a means to destabilise orders that have been naturalised, such as nationalities or the gender binary order. Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai’s artwork softens the rigidity both of the classificatory system and the objects it uses, the ID cards. Metonymically transposing a person into a soft, bright, flexible and personalised artefact – instead of a hard, legal ID card – brings back individuality. In contrast, digital photographs of the floating village in Cambodia show human figures completely blacked out (Figure 5.2). In the series called Shadow (2014), the artist turns individuals into solid silhouettes that flatly go about their daily lives at home, at work or in local businesses. The community’s shared uncertainty is like a Shadow, interprets curator Roger Nelson (Sa Sa Bassac 2015). For curator Zoe Butt, the tense marks of the pen-work, only noticeable on close inspection, express angst (Müllerschön and Tannert 2016). I would add a stronger layer of critique on the part of the artist: blacking out human figures with the stroke of a pen, the instrument used to sign documents is transformed into the weapon that makes people disappear from their own spaces of belonging. The blatant action reads like a Jenny Holzer’s truism, expressing something like: ‘denying ID documents negates personhood’.11 As a counterpart, Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai reinstates agency through a companion photographic series, Travels. Whereas Shadow cancels people out of their home environments, the same community dwellers enjoy their ideal life in the digital collages called Travels. It seemed to the artist that the utterers of the

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Figure 5.2 Nguygˆ˜n Th․i Thanh Mai, Shadow, 2014. Ink on digital C print, mounted on plywood, 13 × 18 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist.

‘day by day’ phrase repeated across the fishing village must have no plans or dreams for the future. Her response was to render a desirable future onto glossy prints. In these, the villagers wear fancy clothes, holiday in luxurious places, or pose next to high end vehicles. The artist has not invented the fantasy selfportrait, since touched up images of people against the artificial backdrops modelled in magazines are popular. Local photography shops offer these editing services cheaply and routinely.12 What is striking is the distance between the aspirational enactment of future experiences and the annulled identities seen in Shadow. Interviewed about the people in these works, the artist states: ‘They have lived there for generations, experienced wars, genocide, starvation, survived and are expecting good things to happen in the future’ (Müllerschön and Tannert 2016: 41, emphasis added). The world over, people expect good things to happen in the future, and take risks to make that happen. The ‘global media is the primary source of imagined places of immigration for many’, state Bélager, Khuâ´t and Trâ`n (2013: 81) whose study argues that Vietnamese media tends to malign the nation’s emigrants. They

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find that in local media young women that marry foreigners are stereotyped as gold-diggers. The state-controlled messages warn that many apply for citizenship in their destination country, but lose it if they break up with their husbands, and once divorced they become people with no citizenship (Bélager et al. 2013). In Western media, it is usually the immigrants, not the emigrants, that are portrayed negatively. The harrowing death of thirty-nine Vietnamese migrants in a container lorry in England in 2019 broke the impersonal reports on ‘illegal’ immigrants, once the deeply touching final goodbyes written by an oxygen-deprived young woman were broadcast. A piece of investigative journalism on the case found that sheer desperation is hardly the sole motive pushing people to undergo the expensive and dangerous trips into foreign lands (Khue and Vu 2020). It can be inferred from these examples that the media discourages even a moderately positive conception of transnational living, whereas a life unbound by regimented belonging to a polity can be made credible through art. Spatial entitlement is linked to accredited membership to a state, yet it is also shaped by the compelling force of social status. As Earl (2010) suggests, social norms weaponise personal appearance and attire as a way of erecting barriers. This leads us to explore gender-determined attire in Vietnam, seeing that dress is another metonym for human beings.

The Invisibility Cloak: Metonyms for Working Women Twenty years before Day By Day exposed the denial of a basic education to undocumented children, prize-winning artist Nguyen Thi Mong Bich (b. 1933)13 was delighted to put towards her grandson’s schooling the roughly 1500 US dollars she was awarded at Hanoi City’s Annual Art Exhibition. Her winning painting of 1994 was derided as old fashioned and dull, maybe aggravated by sexist bias. With foreign investment entering Vietnam in the 1990s, some young artists were selling well enough to not think much of the prize (Taylor 1996). The watercolour on silk portrayed an unpretentious older woman wearing a traditional ao ba ba, a top typically buttoned at the centre and worn over trousers, since skirts or sarongs are rare in Vietnam.14 The familiar presence of millions of working class women all over Vietnam is precisely what makes their presence inconspicuous. Their cloak of invisibility is their recognisable working class attire, an effective reminder of the transnational mechanisms that eclipse women’s place in the world.

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A year after Mong Bich won her prize, the capital city glorified simple livelihoods in an exhibition in the Army Museum. Heroic Mother highlighted women’s war efforts and patriotic generosity.15 A cadre from the Hanoi Women’s Union thought it an educational display for the young women of the bountiful 1990s, ‘who know nothing of sacrifice’ (Pettus 2003: 4). A generational clash of values was taking place with the shift to market transition, an important moment in Vietnam’s cultural politics. To soothe the population’s ambivalent feelings towards its recent history, the exhibition commemorated older women, honouring them as ‘heroic mothers’ in a mission to process the collective trauma. Ashley Pettus (2003: 104) suspects that personal objects like wartime clothes and utensils were displayed to elicit sympathetic feelings towards the war mothers, but not feelings of identification. In the context of the government’s push for growth, Pettus makes an important point: incentivising the public to emulate the sparse livelihoods represented in the exhibition ran counter to the pursuit of global standards of economic and cultural modernity. Feminist scholar Nguyen-Vo Thu-Huong (2006) shares similar views on the state’s modus operandi, an arranged marriage between a socialist state and transnational capitalism. The incongruent union mirrors the state’s drive to nudge women towards conflicting behaviours, simultaneously proletarian and consumerist. Nguyen-Vo finds evidence of this in the feminising processes initiated to reverse the masculinisation of the working class upheld since the anticolonial period. She draws on a short story by Pham Thi Hoai published in 1994, ‘The Saigon Tailor Shop’, which reflects Vietnam’s location globally: it is a sweatshop that produces clothing for export, and a place where women experience the conflicting calls to be both feminised workers and consumers of femininity (Nguyen-Vo, 2006: 276). Other studies have shown how manipulative messages wielded by the Vietnamese state, such as the ‘Civilized Way of Life and Cultured Family’ social mobilisation campaign, sought to encourage consumption (Drummond 2004). Moreover, from the 1990s women received mixed messages from their elders and from their own experiences. The post-war years of austerity had forbidden expressions of femininity, and the opportunity to make up for past hardships and buy new fashion was something even women who were ‘just getting by’ wanted to do (Leshkowich 2012: 105). By 2002, the Women’s Museum in Hanoi was exhibiting photographs of beauty pageants with women wearing ‘proper’ traditional attire, ao ba ba (áo bà ba) and ao dai (áo dài), as embodiments of the nation (Nguyen-Vo 2006). The ao dai is a two-piece combination of long tunic and loose trousers, the ancient

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straight up-and-down pattern now replaced by the shapely cut made popular during the Indochina wars. Efforts to resist invading armies, Lady Borton (2018) writes, are rife with anecdotes of women whose gender-determined dress, often an ao dai, deceives or bedazzles the enemy. In contrast, women wearing simple ‘pyjamas’ were judged by military forces to be allies or enemies according to the colour of their outfit, black or white. Today, the media and official spaces present the fitted bodice that sashays down to the ankles as the ‘traditional’ symbol of national beauty. The ao dai has been part of the nationalist historiographies but not the do bo ` (đô bô ․), words that translate as ‘clothing set’ or ‘two piece’ outfit. English expressions like twinset or trouser suit may connote middle or high status, quite distant from the common impression that the do bo exudes in Vietnam. Artist Lena Bui realised that much more research has been done on the ao dai than on working class clothing, and addressed that gap. Under-researched and ignored by museums, the do bo has only recently been the protagonist of an exhibition in Hanoi. In December 2016, selected works from a series the artist had been working on for two years were installed in a gallery on the top floor of the building that houses the Vietnam Women’s Museum. For curator Bill Nguyen, the Women’s Museum in Hanoi presents ‘a highly politicized representation of Vietnamese women’.16 Lena Bui’s show, part of the Skylines with Flying People 3 expanded exhibition (Nhà Sàn Collective 2016), evokes simple lifestyles similar to those of the Heroic Mother exhibition of 1995 in Hanoi’s Army Museum, although it presents an altogether different proposition. Ordinary women’s experiences have been silenced within the meta-narrative of Vietnamese history (Nhung 2006; Dutton 2013), and Lena Bui’s daring response has been to give centre stage to the do bo wearing community, with art pieces that use the do bo as their main material (many of the artworks are a do bo) and as signifiers of the women who wear them. The exhibition title, Borderless, is a reference to the endless hours of work that women do. This is the first time Lena Bui uses do bo garments as art material, although it is worn by the main characters in her docufiction film Flat Sunlight (Bui 2016). ‘This outfit is simply a part of everyday life’,17 states the artist about the non-official uniform that identifies working class women in Vietnam. In practice, do bo is popularly translated as pyjamas, an English word that originates from the South Asian countries where, as Lena has researched, the loose trousers and matching tops were adopted as casual wear by Westerners. This type of ‘pyjama’ is not nightwear, Lena says – in Vietnam women wear do bo for its comfort around the

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Figure 5.3 Lêna Bùi, Borderless, 2016. Fabric and poles, dimensions variable. Installation view of the exhibition Skylines with Flying People 3 at MAM Art Projects, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2016. Photo courtesy of Skylines with Flying People 3.

clock while they run back and forth between domestic work and work outside the home.18 Women running roadside food stalls, vendor carts or small family businesses in a traditional Southeast Asian shophouse are a common sight, almost invariably clad in a do bo. Probably made in an unknown tailor shop by a working class seamstress, a do bo hangs dishevelled over a floor covered in bits of thread (Figure 5.3). The space is not a fashion sweatshop, but a dramatically lit art gallery. The shredded do bo floating in the room is the painstaking result of hours that artist Lena Bui has spent unpicking the fabric’s weave. Not only has this creative destruction made the do bo see-through, the invisibility of women’s work is made tangible in the clusters of threads on the floor. Titled 132 hours 49 minutes, the scattered debris is testimony of much time spent defying the state-backed push to consumption. Work is doubly present in this installation, both in the artists’ toil to extract all

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the vertical threads from the woven cotton fabric, and in the do bo as a working class outfit. Largely without acknowledgement, women often carry out a double shift of housework and commercial trade, their time thus disappearing from view, and therefore from the visible space. In feudal times, incidentally, traders had the lowest social rank; even men who worked the land left the inferior occupation of commerce to the women.19 This produces a social imaginary in which working class women belong in the street, which is where Lena Bui’s first explorations for this project started taking shape. The artist’s initial tests with do bo began in 2014, after she sourced garments from second-hand markets and from her mother and grandmother.20 Lena made large patchwork drapes from the cut-up clothes, and hung them in alleyways asking neighbourhood women or passers-by to pose for photos. Amused, women dressed in do bo were happy to find their street clad in fabrics so typical of do bo. These social interactions resulted in a series of photographs which have never been exhibited (at the time of writing).21 And whereas social norms would prevent do bo wearers from setting foot into a museum or high class enclosure, their virtual presence permeates the gallery space in Lena Bui’s exhibition. Anthropologist Erik Harms peppers his research on the dynamics of public spaces with sociocultural observations of daily life, even noticing that some restaurants have staff uniforms designed to project a traditional home cooking impression. A woman told Harms (2011) that she once finished her working day in a market stall and took up an invitation to see a concert at the opera house, a place where she felt so embarrassed in her ‘peasant’ clothing that she left within minutes. Her outfit was out of place in the city centre’s unwritten regime of fashion and distinction, but it was perfect for work.22 Conversely, Catherine Earl (2010) has found middle-class women that put on a do bo when they want to appear inconspicuous in certain urban spaces. Thus we see that the ao ba ba, do bo and other types of clothing act as place-making tools. Various Vietnamese outfits can be read as falling into spatial categories as well as gendered ones. Designs and patterns will modulate the meaning, but let us propose that the ao ba ba can connote a grandmotherly kind of elegance. It looks traditional and is somewhat formal. Banks, airlines and universities have made the long tunic suit, the ao dai, their female uniform, therefore situating it in institutional spaces, whereas the traditional male tunic is only worn for staged wedding shots of the groom. The ao dai ‘was not seen just as everyday attire’, states Huynh (2005: 201), whereas the do bo is precisely ‘everyday attire’, almost in a non-compliant structure of its own, since the pyjama twinset is neither

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masculinising, nor does it feed hegemonic femininity constructs. The do bo could be associated with wet markets and workspaces of non-sedentary trade, but it would be out of place if worn to eat in a restaurant, visit a museum, or work an office job. Unseen in high status spaces, it belongs in the lower echelons of spatial power structures, where unsuspecting acts of resistance can be invoked. Although little research has been done on the do bo, the revolutionary ethos of pyjamas and simple clothing has merited observations by Hunt (2014) and Borton (2018), among others, with descriptions of low-grade fabric outfits, only available in black, white or the earthy shades of burlap. Nowadays plain colour fabrics are rare, as what makes do bo easy to spot are the busy, often garish, patterned prints. Arguably, the prints are such a distinguishing feature of the do bo that these garments seem unique to Vietnam. Lena Bui thought so, but discovered that most of the fabric is imported from China.23 In any case, the flamboyant patterns that the artist Lena Bui has purposefully chosen for her patchwork wall coverings have a language of their own. Among dainty flowery patterns the artist invites us to find the fabric patches printed with Gucci watches over a glaring yellow background (Figure 5.4).

Figure 5.4 Lêna Bùi, Vô biên, 2015–2016. Fabric patchwork, wire and free-standing supporting poles, dimensions variable. Installation view of the exhibition Skylines with Flying People 3 at MAM Art Projects, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2016. Photo courtesy of Skylines with Flying People 3.

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The incongruous overlap of high-end goods and working class clothing brings to mind the colonial era novel Dumb Luck, of 1936. In this satire, a tailor profits from the Vietnamese who feel the modernising compulsion to adopt foreign clothing styles. Unable to gauge the unwritten dress codes of European attire, clients fall for an ideology that privileges colonial fashions against traditional costumes positioned as dour and outmoded. Persuaded, they buy risqué outfits with skimpy designs ironically named ‘Conquest’, ‘Innocence’, ‘Wait-a-Minute’ or ‘Stop-Those-Hands’. For women who are oppressed by their husbands, the salesman recommends ditching the ao dai and cladding the ‘civilizing’ outfit titled ‘Women’s Rights’, which is ‘guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of your husband’ (Vũ 2002: 66–69). Like the old tale of the emperor’s new clothes, these caricatures unveil the power structures behind dress. Exaggeration, ridicule and irony, however, would be counterproductive to drive across the message in Lena Bui’s project. Her do bo artworks become porous channels that destabilise the hierarchies of social and class diversity, filling the high-end exhibition space with working class references. Moreover, Borderless was not confined to the gallery, as the artist disobediently intervened in the Women’s Museum on the lower floors of the building. She secretly placed bits of fabric around the museum, sneaking cuts into baskets or under mannequins, discretely and fleetingly occupying official spaces, to the admiration of curator Bill Nguyen.24 The artist felt that these textile intrusions were hardly noticed by the museum, since only a few were removed by cleaning staff. Lena also gave fabric offcuts to people who were invited to resituate them outside the museum, somewhere in the city, and to document the new place of belonging of the textiles. Proof of these actions was hidden-in-plain-sight in Lena Bui’s exhibition, in the testimonial pile of photographs atop a large table. The prints record the do bo fabric pieces that surreptitiously challenged the state’s feminine constructs enshrined in the Vietnam Women’s Museum. In the official exhibition displays discussed earlier (Nguyen-Vo 2006; Pettus 2003) and in countless museum vitrines across Vietnam, mannequins are likely to be wearing ao dai, military uniforms or typical costumes of any of the nation’s fifty-four ethnic minorities. Other than Lena Bui’s short-lived interventions, the do bo is absent from the ideological discourses in museum representations. The Borderless exhibition purposefully gave a space of belonging to the unseen majority of women that toil day by day. Bui Kim Dinh, another curator of the multivenue exhibition – that was conceptually anchored on notions of trespassing or journeying – recognised the project’s own cultural and geographical

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limitations, after these were widened by artists such as Lena Bui (Nhà Sàn Collective 2016). Sociological research stresses that women in Vietnam ‘continue to constitute a large majority of the working poor’ (Khuat 2016: 116). Because Lena Bui’s project does not refer to women in a single type of occupation (e.g. lace making), it is all the more relevant to present times. Do bo wearers may be petty traders, cleaners, market vendors, or factory workers. They may work on building sites or in restaurant kitchens, but they, like workers in the contemporary gig economy worldwide, rely only on themselves to obtain what income they can get from a disaggregated environment traversed by transnational commerce that hinders collective action. With more self-reliance than support, women are often the main providers and/or owners of various street-side businesses/vendors, says Bill Nguyen.25 The colourful presence of do bo wearers is indicative of modest means in the current social hierarchy, where women become borderless if they dress – that is, incarnate an appearance that is socially read as a place marker – in apparel that does not reflect the successfully marketed image of economic success. In summary, clothing is a place-making tool, used metonymically in Lena’s exhibition to gather together the do bo wearers, making the (absent) working women visible as a community.

Conclusion Legaspi-Ramirez (2019) calls for a grassroots feminist historiography of Southeast Asian art that takes into account low-visibility maintenance tasks, often those done by female artists. Credit should go to Lena Bui and Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai for the invisible tasks integral to their creative processes: conversing with underrepresented groups of people, and developing inclusionary display practices. Both art projects, Borderless and Day By Day, propose metonymical representations of people in preference over more descriptive figurations. Without a doubt, invisibility can be strategically used to advantage by individuals or groups, but keeping injustices out of mainstream spaces can only hinder their resolution. The artistic substitution of objects for human beings reinforces awareness of the identity erasure and social invisibility experienced by the communities the artists have engaged with. Official versus self-reported representations of identity come alive in Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai’s ID Card piece, as it critiques the legitimation of nation-state systems over people themselves. ID

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Card unmasks the ‘legal fictions’, to use Preciado’s words (2019: 237), that translate individuals into cards and numbers. The undocumented people who fall through the transnational network recuperate ‘validity’ through the artists’ colourful IDs, and thus can occupy a place. The relational set up of the installation draws a parallel with the mobility and the social groupings of individuals. In addition, viewers can interact and get to know the names of people in the community. In reality, people who don’t have officially sanctioned metonyms – birth certificates, residence permits, passports, safe-conducts or even reference letters – face escalating legal barriers that obviate their existence. In the face of oblivion, as seen in Shadow, the artist introduces messages of hope and future vision, first by acknowledging the existence of the undocumented community and working relationally with them, and then by turning their aspirations into images with the Travels series. Likewise, Borderless accomplishes the community bonding achievement of bringing a disaggregated group together in a single space. In Lena Bui’s exhibition, do bo fabrics and garments occupy the cultural space in lieu of their habitual wearers, a metonym that suggests that workers are taking up space in the art gallery, unconstrained by the barriers of social norms. This artistic levelling of social hierarchies contrasts with a critical tool used for many years by some feminist artists in the West, where the placing of women in feminised spaces has been a territorial affirmation of belonging, albeit ironic.26 Significantly, the artworks in this commentary provide a vision of women who are human beings being in society at large – as opposed to being in kitchens, other domestic settings or segregated spaces – while offering a feminist critique. Including gendered signifiers such as long hair or patterned clothing in the imagery, Lena and Mai’s artworks do not question womanhood; rather, they successfully transmit a worldview where women as gendered humans have ownership or access to the social space in a way that is not patriarchally restricted. To describe our epoch in which the balance of power is shifting in multipolar directions, both artists have authored works that deliver a political statement without engaging in exploitative representations of marginal subjects. To the contrary, these artworks are fruitful channels to envisage a new world order traversed by uncertainty, but altogether life-affirming. Cognisant that personal registries and forms of clothing can be weapons of structural violence, Lena Bui and Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai rebut history’s silences on women and disenfranchised groups, and demonstrate methods to construct decentred histories.

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Notes 1 To Lena, who welcomed me generously in a space where I missed a sense of belonging. My gratitude and admiration also go to Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai for her vision. 2 Women’s opportunities to climb out of poverty were limited by local customs on the sexual division of labour and by a transnational cycle that kept them in ignorance about the worth of their lace production, preventing any thoughts about unionising (Mies 2012). 3 The artist is widely known as Lêna Bùi, as spelt with Vietnamese diacritics, though some Asian publications use the naming convention surname, first name: Bùi Lêna. http://san-art.org/producer/lena-bui/. 4 The Western naming order is rarely found in references to Nguyê˜n Th․i Thanh Mai, where the surname is Nguyê˜n, and the first name Mai. https://san-art.org/producer/ nguyen-thi-thanh-mai/. 5 Territorial histories are beyond the scope of this chapter. It should suffice to point out that area classifications of present-day Vietnam have included north-south divisions both before and after colonisation, and that the French colony of Indochina mapped it into three parts: Cochinchina (South), Annam (Centre) and Tonkin (North), now roughly corresponding to the three economic zones: North, Central and South. 6 Migration occurred for centuries throughout the lower Mekong region. Patterns jolted in the 1970s due to the violent persecution of the ethnic Vietnamese minority living among mainstream Khmer society, and again in the 1980s with the return of Vietnamese who had left Cambodia fleeing the Khmer Rouge. Many experienced the loss or destruction of citizenship documentation or proof of their ties to Cambodia. 7 Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai, Day By Day, single-channel digital video, 2014–2015. Film stills and images of the 2015 exhibition in Cambodia can be seen on Sa Sa Bassac’s website: http://sasabassac.com/exhibitions/30_day_by_day/daybyday_daybyday.htm. 8 For specificities about documents and procedures affecting the Vietnamese in Cambodia see Nguyen and Sperfeldt (2012: 34–36). 9 Preciado’s account informs of the situation in Spain, as described in the chapter named after the proceedings, ‘Expediente 34/2016’, pp. 222–224. 10 Raffin (2008: 340) provides a scan of a colonial Titre d’Identité (Title of Identity), signed in 1940, alleging it is almost identical to the present day Vietnamese ID card. 11 Since the late 1970s, artist Jenny Holtzer has authored over 300 one-liner artworks that she calls Truisms, featuring maxims or provocative statements such as ‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise’. 12 Hien (2012) has an engaging article on the significance of retouched photography in Vietnam. 13 Widowed young, Nguyen Thi Mong Bich fought with the National Liberation Front, leaving her young children in the care of a friend, fellow artist Le Thi Kim Bach.

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Both pursued artistic careers, and both received much less attention than male painters of their time (Taylor 1996: 118). Earl (2010: 97) adds that the ao ba ba is a southern style blouse, that is, from former South Vietnam. Not to be confused with the Hero Mother exhibition held in Berlin in 2016, containing some feminist artworks from Vietnam (Nualart 2018). Operated by CUC Gallery, MAM Art Projects is a private art space above Vietnam Women’s Museum (https://baotangphunu.org.vn/). The curators of Skylines with Flying People 3 (https://swfp3.org/) had a particular interest in MAM because of its proximity to an institution that they believe embodies a highly politicised representation of Vietnamese women. The Women’s Museum has three floors dedicated to ‘women during the wars’, ‘marriage’, ‘fashion and textiles’ and the Mother Goddess religion. It is not a bad representation of women in Vietnam, says curator Bill Nguyen in personal communication (26 June 2020), ‘but it definitely isn’t enough, or rather, open-ended nor inclusive enough’. The public going to visit Lena Bui’s show necessarily had to pass through the Vietnam Women’s museum’s floors, he adds, stressing how positioning Lena’s show in that building allowed her pieces ‘to poke questions and cause moments of “revelation” ’ in the face of the official narratives. Personal communication with Lena Bui, 29 April 2020. Personal communication with Lena Bui, 23 May 2020, who adds that during the war, Americans called Vietnam’s female soldiers ‘guerillas in pajamas’. ‘The Confucianist formulation of social hierarchy centered on occupations of scholar, peasant, artisan, merchant [sĩ, nông, công, thư ơ ng], . . . relegated commercial activity and its agents to the bottom rung of the social order’ (Dutton 2013: 10). Personal communication with Lena Bui, 23 May 2020. Somewhat misleadingly, some of these photographs appear on the exhibition website, although not in the curated show. Skylines with Flying People 3, https:// swfp3.org/frontpage/. Erik Harms (2020) cannot confirm with certainty what type of outfit the woman was wearing, although his fieldwork photos suggest it was probably a do bo. Admitting an untrained eye for fashion, he believes there is a wide range of inflection in do bo styles, some seeming rather urban and others tending towards a rural aesthetic. He has witnessed the fan base for certain do bo designs, whose subtle qualities can be differentiated by loyal customers with ‘true expertise’, he says. Personal communication with Lena Bui, 23 May 2020. Personal communication with Bill Nguyen, 26 June 2020. Personal communication with Bill Nguyen, 26 June 2020. From Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) to Pilar Albarracín’s Tortilla a la Española (1999).

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References Note: Vietnamese authors are listed by the naming convention used on their publication. Typically, this is the full name: surname first, with no comma before the given names. Bélager, D., Khuâ´t Thu Hô`ng and Trâ`n Giang Linh (2013) ‘Transnational Marriages between Vietnamese Women and Asian Men in Vietnamese Online Media’. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 8 (2): 81–114. Borton, L. (2018) ‘Behind the Scenes, in the Forefront: Vietnamese Women in War and Peace’. ASIANetwork Exchange 25 (1): 7–59. Bui, L. (2016) ‘Nă´ng B`ăng Phẳng / Flat Sunlight Trailer’ [film]. Available at https://vimeo.com/176916861 (Accessed 30 April 2020). Drummond, L. (2004) ‘The Modern “Vietnamese Woman”: Socialization and Women’s Magazines’, in L. Drummond and H. Rydstrom (eds.), Gender Practices in Contemporary Vietnam. Singapore: NIAS Press. Dutton, G. (2013) ‘Beyond Myth and Caricature: Situating Women in the History of Early Modern Vietnam’. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 8 (2): 1–36. Earl, C. (2010) ‘Vietnam’s “Informal Public” Spaces: Belonging and Social Distance in Post-Reform Ho Chi Minh City’. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 5 (1): 86–124. Harms, E. (2011) Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Harms, E. (2020) ‘Sources on đô` bô ․ and Vietnamese attire’. Vietnam Studies Group online forum comment, 29 July. Message posted to: https://sites.google.com/a/uw.edu/vietnamstudiesgroup/ (Accessed 29 July 2020). Hien, N. (2012) ‘Ho Chi Minh City’s Beauty Regime: Haptic Technologies of the Self in the New Millennium’. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 20 (2): 473–493. Hunt, D. (2014) ‘ “Modern and Strange Things”: Peasants and Mass Consumer Goods in the Mekong Delta’. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 9 (1): 36–61. Huynh Boi Tran (2005) Vietnamese Aesthetics from 1925 Onwards. PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Available at http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/633 (Accessed 26 February 2013). Karis, T. (2013) ‘Unofficial Hanoians: Migration, Native Place and Urban Citizenship in Vietnam’. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 14 (3): 256–273. Khuat Thu Hong (2016) ‘Women and Development in Vietnam: Caught between Social Tradition and Economic Globalization’. Regions & Cohesion 6 (2): 110–119. Khue Pham and Vu, V. (2020) ‘Pray for Me’. Die Zeit, 17 May. Available at https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2020-05/migration-vietnamesedead-bodies-lorry-essex-grossbritannien-english (Accessed 15 June 2020). Legaspi-Ramirez, E. (2019) ‘Art on the Back Burner: Gender as the Elephant in the Room of Southeast Asian Art Histories’. Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 3 (1): 25–48.

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Leshkowich, A.M. (2012) ‘Finances, Family, Fashion, Fitness, and . . . Freedom? The Changing Lives of Urban Middle-Class Vietnamese Women’, in V. Nguyen-Marshall, L. Drummond and D. Bélanger (eds.), The Reinvention of Distinction. Modernity and the Middle Class in Urban Vietnam. Dortmund: Springer. Mies, M. (2012) The Lace Makers of Narsapur. Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Müllerschön, N. and Tannert, C., eds. (2016) Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai: In Silence. Dortmund: Kettler. Nguyen, L. and Sperfeldt, C. (2012) A Boat without Anchors. Cambodia: Jesuit Refugee Services. Available at https://jrscambodia.org/aboat_without_anchors.html (Accessed 11 May 2020). Nguyen, G. (2018) ‘Consumption Behavior of Migrant Households in Vietnam: Remittances, Duration of Stay, and the Household Registration System’. Journal of Asian Economics 57: 1–12. Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai and Thalman, E. (2015) ‘Lives Drifting on the Water’. D+C Development and Cooperation, 25 October. Available at https://www.dandc.eu/en/ article/vietnamese-artist-mai-nguyen-thi-thanh-tackles-social-issues-0 (Accessed 9 May 2020). Nguyen-Vo Thu-Huong (2006) ‘The Body Wager: Materialist Resignification of Vietnamese Women Workers’. Gender, Place and Culture 13 (3): 267–281. Nhà Sàn Collective (2016) Skylines with Flying People 3. Hanoi: Nhà Sàn Collective. Nualart, C. (2018) ‘Contemporary Feminist Art in Vietnam: The Visual Emergence of Agency’. Irish Journal of Asian Studies 4: 22–38. Pettus, A. (2003) Between Sacrifice and Desire: National Identity and the Governing of Femininity in Vietnam. New York: Routledge. Preciado, P.B. (2019) Un Apartamento en Urano, Crónicas del Cruce. Barcelona: Anagrama. Preminger, A. and Brogan, T.V.F., eds. (1993) New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Raffin, A. (2008) ‘Postcolonial Vietnam: Hybrid Modernity’. Postcolonial Studies 11 (3): 329–344. Sa Sa Bassac (2015) Day by Day, by Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai. Phnom Penh: Sa Sa Bassac. Taylor, N. (1996) ‘Invisible Painters: North Vietnamese Artists from the Revolution to Doi Moi’, in D. Dysart and H. Fink (eds.), Asian Women Artists. Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House. Vũ Tro ․ng Phu ․ng (2002 [1936]) Dumb Luck. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. World Bank (2016) ‘Vietnam: Reforms Needed to Close the Gap in Social Service Access for Migrants’. The World Bank, 16 June. Available at https://www.worldbank. org/en/news/press-release/2016/06/16/vietnam-reforms-needed-to-close-the-gapin-social-service-access-for-migrants (Accessed 10 May 2020).

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Suspended: Bahar Behbahani’s Displacement and Longing in the Persian Garden Aliza Edelman

Fin merits close attention and special interest . . . because it is the epitome of the Persian garden . . . The garden expresses a series of accentuated contrasts between the arid, inhospitable landscape outside the walls and the lush foliage within. Outside water is scarce and precious; here it flows with superabundance to produce a dense jungle of growth. Donald N. Wilber, Persian Gardens and Garden Pavilions (1962) Bahar Behbahani’s (b. 1973) multidisciplinary practice chronicles and reimagines the Persian garden’s rich socio-historical legacies and horticultural lexicon. Born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in the capital city during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which overthrew the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941– 1979), Behbahani has resided in New York since 2007 and has returned periodically to her native homeland for research and filming. The chronic dislocation between the United States and Iran underscores the visual images of disrupted social and spatial borders in her paintings, videos and installations. The seductive beauty of Iran’s landscape and its contiguous areas of the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan and Turkey have also assumed a defining presence in her practice as a locus for geographic orientation. The artist has bridged the ‘personal and collective’ memories of ‘self ’ and national mythologies (Balaghi 2017: 7; Javaherian 2004) through these salient metaphors of displacement and longing. This paper introduces Behbahani’s abstract paintings that examine the topologies of the Persian garden as an ever-shifting geographical repository for transnational and transcultural networks. The artist mitigates her own precarious agency through the creation of visual layers that metaphorically connect Iran’s conflicted discourses and iconographies. The related discussion of Behbahani’s video trilogy – Suspended, Saffron Tea and Behind the Mirrors – is also critically 119

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grounded in the dominant narratives of the Persian garden. The trilogy – produced in Iran and Turkey over an eight-year period, from 2007 to 2015 – focuses on the artist’s use of her body as a prominent axis or ‘schema’ in the construction of imaginary landscapes and shifting temporal narratives, and develops a heightened encounter between the structural position of her body as a mobile apparatus and the physical occupation of her variously constructed environments. Moreover, her corporeal presence and performative enactments produce expansive topographies of social and familial relationships that appear woven into the historical fabric of the Persian garden’s private and public spaces, and, by extension, the shared rituals and artifacts of domestic life in postrevolutionary Iran. Behbahani’s larger practice rigorously utilises archives and primary sources, relying heavily on her own childhood experiences, her formal education in Tehran and her subsequent research in the United States.1 A collective hybridisation of documents, borders, bodies, and communities frame her projects’ ‘oblique points of entry’, a concept drawn from the cultural theorist and art historian Irit Rogoff (2015) to examine the critical strategies and reception of contemporary artists from the Middle East. This critical lens is frequently deployed by contemporary artists working from inside ‘turbulent geographies’, in order to reinvigorate their own epistemic relationships to a ‘troubled’ present from a postcolonial position open to the ‘numerous registers and textures’ of the global, regional and local past. By Rogoff ’s (2015: 40) account, ‘geography is not a location but a situated knowledge – of who we are, where we are, what we know, who we learn from, what we encounter’. Many of Behbahani’s interrelated projects, therefore, fundamentally affirm the use of Rogoff ’s (2000: 7) application of geography studies in the examination of artist careers from the Middle East, understood as an aesthetic arena to locate ‘an alternate set of relations which determine both belonging and unbelonging . . . linked sets of political insights, memories, subjectivities, projections of fantasmatic desires and great long chains of sliding signifiers’. By formulating a new index of archival and present-day relationships between Tehran and New York, Behbahani visualises rhetorical modes of contact between bodies and spaces, imaginary networks and geographies; these new encounters foster her own methodological processes of ‘active positioning’, inhabiting and adapting, a transnational approach that freely mines her own pedagogy on Orientalism and the histories of Western art, and transmits the implicit challenges of feminist agency and censorship within the context of a modern and post-revolutionary Iran. In accord with Marsha

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Meskimmon’s (2020) proposals on the related topic of transnational feminisms, Behbahani’s own exploration of ‘entangled genealogies’ between bodies and spaces resists an essentialised politics of location and origin in favour of a ‘denizen cartography drawn by embodied subjects as they make and re-make worlds from within’ (2020: 4). Behbahani (2020) concurs: Transnationalism is not always translatable because we don’t always need to understand everything – it is a paradox within itself. Rather, it is about the unknown, a negotiation and re-positioning almost every second that must involve for me two things: memory and language. I have memories that I am longing for, but I am also fully in the present and in another language, constantly being and non-being, pessimistic and optimistic, articulating and miscommunicating.

More than merely engaging the visual tropes of the Iranian diaspora and the ‘geopolitical’ tensions between globalism and the Middle East, Behbahani identifies transnational belonging as a feeling of worldly suspension, a ‘floating’ multipositionality and reterritorialisation through which she remaps the boundaries of the Persian garden from within and from above.

Remapping the Archive The Persian garden’s axial ground plans, watercourses, and aqueducts were miraculous feats of engineering developed for the ancient palace complexes dating from the sixth century BCE to the Achaemenid Empire and Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae (Gharipour 2013; Khansari et al. 2003). Xenophon, the Athenian philosopher, recorded the wide swath of gardening activities by the Persian kings (first observed by the Spartan General Lysander), and thereby translated the Greek word paradeisos (paradise), from the Old Persian pairidaeza, to refer to an enclosed and walled space. In modern Farsi, the word ferdous (or more commonly, ferdows) means both paradise and garden (pardis) (Hobhouse 2004; Clark 2004). As walled paradises, the fourfold plans or chahar bagh (from the Persian chahar ‘four’ and bagh ‘garden’ or, literally, ‘four garden’) were formally arranged around four channels that flowed from a central pool, fountain, or pavilion, and housed vast orchards to serve as royal and civilian sanctuaries. Over time, this quadripartite design, variously illustrated and animated by a menagerie of animals, flora, and decorative motifs in stylised Persian garden carpets, textiles and miniature paintings, symbolically came to manifest Iran’s spiritual faithfulness to the Quran and its ‘well-managed’ kingdoms. From the

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medieval gardens of Shiraz to the imperial palaces at Isfahan, the reflective pools, irrigated waterways and channels, called qanat, nurtured the fragrant orchards and fruit trees, a respite for the soul and senses receptive to the nightingale’s song. These earthly gardens of unheralded beauty, solace, and unrequited love were captured in romantic and mystical verse over the centuries by the eminent male poets Ferdowsi (author of the Shahnameh or ‘Book of Kings’, the great Persian epic composed in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries CE), Hafiz, Omar Khayyam and Jalal al-Din Rumi, to name only a few, who metaphorically cultivated and tended to the country’s indigenous and European flora, such as the rose, pomegranate and fig, or the expressive cypress, juniper and poplar, in the contemplation of the Divine. The historian Shiva Balaghi (2017: 7) alludes to the territories of the Persian garden as ‘a kind of map on which milestones of Iranian history are plotted’. From the opulent Qajar kingdoms (1785–1925) to the receding empire of the Pahlavi monarchs (1925–1979), the Persian garden has persevered in its auxiliary purpose for diplomatic and imperialistic negotiations, a cartographic and allegorical battleground. For Behbahani, a chronological timeline was also indelibly imprinted on Iran’s historical memory: it readily conjured both the 1852 murder of Amir Kabir (the modernising and reformist prime minister) in the Qajar palace of Bagh-e Fin, a beautiful provincial garden near Kashan, and the extended house arrest of Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister whose efforts to nationalise the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company precipitated the 1953 British and US-backed military coup empowering the Shah and consolidating American interests in Iran. Underscoring the Persian garden’s polyvalent spaces and geopolitics, Behbahani (2018b) has stated: ‘When I paint the Persian garden, I think about a new language of communication, an abstract form for remapping history. I paint the Persian gardens from inside and sometimes from above, so high that I can watch it from a distance’. From this strategic position, simultaneously submerged and suspended through time and space, Behbahani envisions and embodies her gardens as both abstracted and gendered sites for transnational mobility, circulation and resistance (Göçek and Balaghi 1994). Behbahani’s ongoing painting series titled Persian Gardens, begun in 2013, spatially conflates and transposes the ground plans of garden palace complexes (maps, canals, pools, irrigation terraces and vegetation) and global and local vectors in a gestural interplay of axial geometries and floral undertones. Paintings evocatively titled Palais Sassanide (after Pascale Coste, 1841) and Pavilion of the

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Eight Heavens (both 2013–2014), for instance, imbue densely mottled surfaces with earthly and nautical pigments – copper, ochre, rusty bronze, luxuriant magenta and marine blue. Simplified and refined, the painting Char Bagh (4 Quadrilaterals) (2015–2016) distils the garden’s four sectors into dark evergreen compartments, akin to the branches of the coniferous cypress, against a weathered brown background drawn with tessellated mosaics; rose-coloured petals bloom from the chahar bagh’s inner quadrangle. Behbahani was immersed in the research of historical drawings, engravings and photographs on Persia surveyed by eighteenth and nineteenth century European travel writers; she examined the collected observations on the social dynamics of courtly life and the representations on botany and engineering that were documented and circulated by likeminded diplomats, scholars and merchants. The travelogues by Sir John Chardin, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Eugène Flandin and Pascal Coste especially contributed to the manifold authoritative literature on an Orientalised Persia. European travel books from this era gave Western readers ‘a sense of ownership, entitlement, and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonialized’, scholar Mary Louise Pratt (2008: 3) argued, and by virtue of being read ‘at home’, such illustrative books created the ‘ “domestic subject” of empire’. Similarly, cartography and maps contributed to the geographical success of territorial expansions and were examined and decoded via the mapmaker’s technical and ‘graphic language of color, cartouches, vignettes, boundaries, and blank spaces’, Thomas J. Bassett advances (1994: 316). Through the meticulous attention to her painting’s physical surfaces – a cultivation process that rhythmically transposes, wipes, erases and rebuilds painterly layers of archeological plans and florilegium – Behbahani’s Persian Gardens seek to reclaim the material visions of Iran’s ‘empire formation’, and in the process reformulate imperialistic sightlines and Orientalist paradigms (Jay and Ramaswamy 2014). Behbahani’s experience as an art student in Iran also played a significant role in her ontological process of garden reclamation. While her childhood was abutted by the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988, her later university and graduate studies were admittedly influenced by the ideas of Western male authorities on Iranian art and culture, scholarly contributions that are still critically debated today in the complicated intellectual reconstruction of Iran’s mid-twentieth century modernisation. She absorbed readings on Persian art and architecture from the multivolume Survey of Persian Art: From Prehistoric Times to the Present, authored in 1938–1939 by the American archeologist, art historian and

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curator Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969). Pope’s scholarly ascent under the Pahlavis in the early to mid-twentieth century, and subsequent connoisseurship and research on Iran’s pre-Islamic and Safavid period, intractably shaped Persian art pedagogies (Kadoi 2016).2 In post-revolutionary Iran, Behbahani’s training as a painter was likewise circumscribed by the challenges of censorship, which included classes conducted without models or nudity, or rather the propagandistic contextualisation of representational subject matter. She recalled, anecdotally, how her generation was raised ‘singing revolutionary songs and chanting nationalistic slogans in school’ (Bajoghli 2011). Thus, a parallel education materialised underground, whereupon Behbahani (2018a) privately devoured the French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir and the philosopher Edward Said, whose seminal book Orientalism was published in 1978. In response to such didactic challenges and pedagogical omissions, Behbahani strategically implemented the use of archiving as a dissonant artistic practice, a methodology defined by scholar Sussan Babaie (2015: 251) as one grounded in temporal experiences from both the ‘visual and the spatial’ fields of a global Iran. Describing the archive’s long historical presence ‘as a repository of documents of human interactions across diverse social spheres of action’, a concept and structure originating in ancient Mesopotamia and later in central Iran, Babaie underlines the pronounced emergence of contemporary archival approaches by artists who have launched their careers and practices outside their home countries, particularly those practitioners in Europe and North America, while maintaining substantial connections to Iran and the Middle East. Principally framed as a transnational method to mediate the global and ‘historical locations of artistic practice’, Babaie (2015: 253) observes: ‘The global is an impossibility without a local and . . . the notion of the present is contingent on the conjunction of the past and the future’. In Persian Gardens, Behbahani most readily mediates her archival research around the enigmatic figure of Donald N. Wilber (1907– 1997), an American archeologist whose beautifully illustrated 1962 book on the gardens of Persia was studied by the artist while at university (Wilber 1962).3 Further, Wilber’s 1986 memoir recounts his wide-ranging adventures in the Middle East, a publication closely monitored and abridged by the US government because of his primary role as an intelligence agent and major operative for the Central Intelligence Agency to dethrone Mohammed Mossadegh in the 1953 coup (‘Operation Ajax’). Behbahani’s The Bagh-I-Fin (after Donald Wilber, 1979) (2013–2014; see Figure 6.1) and Bagh-e Fin (Annexes) (2013–2014), from the series Persian Gardens, exemplify the artist’s enduring and complicated

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Figure 6.1 Bahar Behbahani, The Bagh-I-Fin (after Donald Wilber, 1979), 2013–2014. Mixed media on canvas, 70.9 × 53.9 in. (180 × 137 cm). © Bahar Behbahani.

intellectual relationship with Wilber, by visually transposing onto a charred landscape the stark axial plans of the royal garden Fin, a site renowned as the execution site of the Qajar prime minister. Wilber (1962: 221) drastically conflated the royal garden’s monumental presence with this ‘historical incident’ that, in his view, belied this garden’s beauty for all Persians. The Fin garden, dating to the early sixteenth century and later redeveloped in the 1800s, was likewise a vital touchstone in the artist’s early elementary school memories, as it was closed to visitors during the Iran-Iraq War. Admiration, disguise, and betrayal are brought full circle in the painting series Garden Coup (2015–2016), a pictorial programme that conspires to create the

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artist’s own oblique encounter with the Persian Orient, a meeting governed by paradoxical influences and localities in the realisation of her own epistemic knowledge of modern-day Iran.4 In Consolidating the Plan, Garden of the Envy of Paradise, and The Decisions Are Made: Activity Begins (all 2015–2016), for example, the chahar bagh’s underlying organisational structure is gently released in favour of sweeping colour fields and carefully layered brushstrokes, repetitive and fragmented all-over patterns of tiles and flora illuminated in the traditions of ‘aniconic’ calligraphic ornamentation and garden carpet design. However, the insertion of large black rectangles or blackouts across the fields conveys the realities of parallel narratives in the historical construction of the Iranian landscape: first, Donald Wilber’s masquerade in his ‘open-secret’ as a special agent, a role recognised alongside his distinguished academic career; and second, the publication in the New York Times of over 200 pages of documents previously written by Wilber that pertained to this covert operation, followed closely by the pro forma release by the CIA of an additional, heavily redacted account (Balaghi 2013). In Apparent Failure (Figure 6.2), an expansive black square or void, an untidy inkblot, overruns the painting’s carefully cross-hatched surface, an incontrovertible stain that may arguably invoke Behbahani’s sympathetic albeit controversial identification with Wilber’s presence, not only in Iran, but in her own pedagogic aesthetic development, thus further underlining the artist’s problematic desire to expose and rectify declassified narratives, even those that ‘metaphorically’ foreground herself. In her remarkable essay on the dynamics of the 1953 coup, Shiva Balaghi (2013: 78–79) examines the complicated position of Wilber and his contemporaries, and the postcolonial ‘silences’ or ‘lacunae’ hidden in plain sight amidst official authoritative accounts, a deductive process to unveil what remains unspoken as a result of such discursive paradigms of ‘colonial aphasia’. Behbahani’s accompanying installation to Garden Coup, titled Eram Garden (After Donald Wilber, 1945) (2015–2016), confronts the unexpected consequences of such historiographical imperialist omissions through the presentation of a didactic archive arranged along two long tables. On view are documents from Wilber’s report titled ‘Clandestine Service History’, and pages from his memoir partially concealed by variously selected items – drawings, a zinc etching plate, an architectural etching and a 1940 exhibition catalogue on Persian gardens curated by Wilber at the Iranian Institute in New York. Exploring the abundant Cold War era contradictions encircling Wilber and his memoir’s ‘sanitized’ CIA-approved account, Balaghi (2013: 72) asks, ‘And what are the implications when autobiography becomes a

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Figure 6.2 Bahar Behbahani, Apparent Failure, 2015–2016. Mixed media on canvas, 72 × 54 in. (183 × 137 cm). © Bahar Behbahani.

primary source for writing histories of contentious events?’ By extension, Behbahani’s contemporary archival installations and related paintings respond to this question: not only because the artist unwittingly became one of Wilber’s most dedicated readers, but by the unforeseeable visualisation of events whereby she internalised the agent-scholar’s historical narratives on Iran, and imprinted hers onto his, a reciprocal act with herself as the central propagator in an ‘intertextual and intervisual’ process of remapping the Persian garden (Behdad and Gartlan 2013: 2). In so doing, Behbahani’s Persian Gardens migrate through history in a transversal manner and, unexpectedly, provide a transnationally politicised space for intersectional encounters and dialogues.

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Spatial Memories Behbahani’s video trilogy – Suspended (2007), Saffron Tea (2009) and Behind the Mirrors (2015) – function as formative signposts in the artist’s mapping of the contemporary landscape and home through ‘operations of memory’ (Babaie 2015: 252). Even as Behbahani identifies foremost as a painter, her video practice allows for greater spectatorial control and experimentation by which she corporeally enters, embodies and ‘performs’ her archive in non-linear visual sequences. Alongside her painting series, the videos call upon our shared sense of nostalgia, a memory-induced longing, estrangement and affection or ‘romance’ with one’s own phantasy that no longer exists, as identified by historian Svetlana Boym. As Boym (2001: xv) offers, ‘Nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress’, and subsequently acts upon our desire to ‘revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition’. The artist’s primal childhood memories are likewise rooted in the home garden in Tehran that once belonged to Behbahani’s grandfather, who named the artist ‘Bahar’, meaning ‘Spring’. His garden was an otherworldly refuge for her to play hide and seek, to learn how to count and draw, and from which family gatherings and poetry readings transpired; it was her responsibility to water the garden’s roses, a prophetic gesture captured in an old photograph. ‘All the memories are around the central pool . . . under the cypress trees’, she recalled in a lecture evoking the garden in springtime (Behbahani 2019). The artist was only seven years old when her grandfather was assassinated in his home at the time of the Iranian Revolution, an alleged threat in his activities as a cleric and ‘progressive, spiritual leader’. As her later testimony bore witness to this vivid trauma, she further revealed how ‘the silence of the house was violated by a thunderous noise’, and the ‘garden was suddenly empty’ (Behbahani 2019). Having had such a carefully nurtured world ruptured, Behbahani has since inverted the ‘heterotopias’ of the Persian garden, a multivalent spatial agency subtly captured by Michel Foucault’s (1997: 334) existential reference to the unique arrangement and place of the charbagh as ‘the smallest fragment of the world and, at the same time, [one that] represents its totality . . .’. While Behbahani’s videos are not explicitly biographical, her images’ fluid circulation and redistribution of public and private domains – formally organised under the surveillance operations of the Iranian State – undoubtedly inform the transnational construction of her ‘psychogeographic landscapes’ (Bajoghli 2011).

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In her essay on Iranian video art, Julia Allerstorfer (2013: 179) addressed women’s subversive performative strategies that are metaphorically ‘located in the artist’s private and personal scope’ and can be understood as a ‘continuum of fluid interchanges’. Applying the conceptual explorations of estrangement and nostalgia more broadly to Iranian modern and contemporary art, Fereshteh Daftari’s (2019: xi) recent study proposes ‘aesthetics as a coping mechanism’ in artists’ visualisation of interconnected spaces and historic sensibilities. Contextualising a gendered agency, Daftari (2019: 148, 152, 249) explores how artists’ ‘aesthetics of dissidence’ involve the strategic appropriation of sanctioned traditional artistic practices and religious markers, also suggesting that contemporary Iranian women artists under this rubric are ‘reclaiming the stereotype of [their] native culture’ as subversively ‘post-Orientalist’. The examination of global positioning by contemporary artists from the Iranian Diaspora, especially those who have exhibited a chronic preoccupation with their own histories in the pursuit of cultural identities and subjectivities, has received extensive scholarly and curatorial attention in the field (Downey 2009; Kamaroff 2018). Like many of her post-revolutionary generation who resist a teleological narrative of Iranian art yet engage, simultaneously, an overwhelming anachronistic language and iconography – one inextricably tied to Persia’s pre-Islamic cultural heritage and/or Iran’s modern Islamic Republic – Behbahani is driven by more than reappraisals of national histories (Grigor 2014).5 In his essay on the ‘crisis of belonging’ and contemporary global practices, Hamid Keshmirshekan (2015: 111) has procured the use of the term ‘ethno-cultural identity markers’ to describe the complex syncretic processes by which Iranian artists have reconciled and resisted so-called Indigenous signs of authenticity and Western modernisms, a complicated rapprochement identified by ‘localized historical and cultural landscapes’, but one that ineluctably reproduces regional and ‘essentialised cultural views’ in the international interpretations and receptions of artworks. Relatedly, Foad Torshizi (2012: 550) has argued that non-Western and particularly Iranian artists are ‘removed from the contemporariness of contemporary art’ through discursive structures that produce an ‘inexorable fabricated relation to their country’s ancient history’ and, in the case of contemporary Iranian artists, an exoticism located in ‘an ahistorical Orientalist trope posing as historical authenticity’.6 In light of the manifold global terminologies attached to contemporary Iranian art and the aesthetics of diaspora, Behbahani intentionally resists categorisation through her reliance on dissonant archival strategies that materialise a nuanced transnational network of active subject positions, historical voices, and geographies from ancient to present-day Iran.

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Suspended The artist’s filmic images appear as a continuous reel of layers, carefully embroidered and punctuated by sound – some are imagined from childhood, while others develop a female ‘protagonist’. In Suspended, a seven-minute single-channel video produced in Tehran, a home courtyard comes into view inverted: a table and chairs appear upside down; dappled, cool light create shadows on the inner walls and windows; and dampened leaves rustle near the small pool from which tangerine cats steal a drink. A figure (who is the artist) emerges from this inner sanctuary hanging and tethered at her feet to a wooden trellis among the pomegranates and water (Figure 6.3). Holding this controlled position while experiencing extreme discomfort and ‘shortness of breath’, Behbahani (2018a) says she ‘contemplates the situation . . . and the invisibility of the woman who is . . . present yet unseen, a hyperinvisibility [that] brings about her visibility’. The chahar bagh’s compartmentalised spaces and courtyards were likewise arranged, as Behbahani offers, with an underlying intent to conceal and protect women’s invisibility.7 In Behbahani’s construction, the garden’s polyvalent spatial organisation metaphorically resists, perpetuates and nurtures women’s positions of visual and

Figure 6.3 Bahar Behbahani, still from Suspended, 2007. Single-channel video (7 minutes), Tehran, Iran. © Bahar Behbahani.

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corporeal agency, an agency negated and procured through an ‘Orientalist network’ of historiographies and images, and, by extension, through women’s modern and post-revolutionary poetic discourses. Ali Behdad’s (2013: 13) compelling analyses on photography offer the paradigm of a ‘network theory of Orientalism’ that ‘studies the symmetrical and asymmetrical relations between discrete objects, specific individuals, and concrete practices’. Comparatively, Meyda Yeğenoğlu’s (1998: 11) feminist study critiques the fantasies, desires and sexual differences incurred by geographically ‘inhabiting a place’ as conducted in the European travel books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the unconscious fantasies brought about not only through ‘signifying Oriental woman as mysterious and exotic but also as signifying the Orient as feminine, veiled, seductive and dangerous’ in the constitutively active process of Westernising or Orientalising.8 In her videos, Behbahani (2018a) has affirmed this critical nexus between bodies, borders and spaces: ‘Colonialism and the Persian garden are metaphors for a place where we can find the seed and the root of Orientalism. At the same time, the garden is a feminine act and the place where women’s bodies are hidden. No one talks about the women around these gardens, they’re invisible’. The harem’s complexity as a non-static gendered space was defined by Marilyn Booth (2010: 4–5) as a ‘geographically and socially viable concept’, referring both to an ‘inviolable space’ dedicated to women, and institutionally as an ‘arrangement of domestic spaces’. In conjuring the nuanced meanings of the word harem, a word derived from the Arabic root h-r-m to convey veneration and prohibition, Behbahani underscores its geographically multivalent purpose as a ‘spatial term’ that ‘denotes both a space and a category of people’: In Persian andarun (harem) and birun (outer, men’s section) refer to this interior and exterior dichotomy between harem and central courtyard (Schick 2010: 69–70). In her video trilogy, Behbahani proclaims women’s feminist agency in their ‘walled’ gardens, inner courtyards, harem and homes, revealing how these interrelated spaces that have transhistorically connoted both confinement and sanctuary were socially constructed and aesthetically mitigated and controlled. These spaces are politicised gendered territories that have, in Behbahani’s (2018a) words, sheltered ‘the unseen’, the hidden and the invisible. In the spatial interiority of the garden, women’s corporeal emancipation and immanence are unveiled through Behbahani’s ‘vision-oriented’ filmic images.9 Indexically, Behbahani draws upon the collective chain or transnational network of precarious subject positions and gendered bodies – the masculine architect, photographer, travel writer or cartographer, for example – in an inter-discursive narrative about

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exoticism, Westernisation, and female agency, all mobilised together across time by the artist’s suspension in her own fictive landscape. In Suspended, moreover, the protagonist displays an acute sensibility to the materiality of the inner courtyard and the garden’s unmanicured space. Through the force of her corporeal insertion, she becomes more than mere witness to its fertile creativity and destruction, and physically upends the ‘specificity’ of her position and coercion through history as a ‘social body’.10 Correspondingly, Rogoff ’s informed discussion on the global circulation of knowledge in the Middle East considers artists’ lingering notion of ‘nostalgia’ by situating such critical acts of ‘dislocation’ as a primary means to ‘exhaust’ the geography. As Rogoff (2015: 38–41) proposes, ‘If subjects are not liberated from boundaries by the universalist claims of globalisation, or cosmopolitanism, can these same boundaries somehow implode through subjects’ different inhabitation of them – i.e. not a resistance to boundaries, but a subjection of them to a different form of occupation?’ It is precisely this situated act of occupation and inhabitation, in subtle distinction from its ally, exilic expression, which locates Behbahani within her ‘extended topography’ and diasporic status (Rogoff 2015: 46–47). Suspended conceptualises the elusive vantage point of her subject and the stylisation of her body as a site and object, not unlike a gyroscope set obliquely, galvanising force and motion and spinning in space. This association with women ‘engendering’ their own axis was granted agency by the psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray (1993: 98–99), who noted women’s protection from abandonment, depression, and loss of self through their ‘energetic circular movement’: ‘Their [women’s] need is for an axis of their own, which on the microcosmic level moves from between the feet in the standing position through the head . . . This axis can be seen represented in the iconographic traces of traditions in which women had some visible presence. This is how women find the necessary conditions to establish their territory and the autonomy of their body . . .’. The protagonist in Suspended remains moored to her trellis, even as piercing rain gradually transpires to a crackling fire (built beneath her by shaded figures), productively generating motion and conjuring multiple spectres as the tinkering sound of a child’s music box winds to an end.

Saffron Tea In Saffron Tea (2009; see Figure 6.4), a single-channel video of twelve minutes and forty seconds produced in Tehran, the ritualistic expression of domestic life

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Figure 6.4 Bahar Behbahani, still from Saffron Tea, 2009. Single-channel video (12:40 minutes), Tehran, Iran. © Bahar Behbahani.

and the patterned artifacts of childhood unfold in a whirlwind of images. Focus is continually lost and regained through the optical play of refracted light: a dreamy afternoon languishes with the uninterrupted hum of a circulating fan and faint birdsong; the bricolage of ornamental crystal, china, tablecloths, photographs and upholstered chairs sharpen and dissolve; young children delightfully play and laugh while holding hands; and women rhythmically fan themselves in muted conversation at the petite bourgeois tea service. Unlike Suspended’s exteriority, we encounter in Saffron Tea the interior spatial realm and organisation of quotidian household life and domestic material culture, a liminal segregation and separation of public and private life. After eight minutes of this video, the oscillating visual scenes crystallise within a large vestibule: Behbahani appears as an upright floating body in a large rectangular glass tank or pool filled with water. From this hermetic vessel curiously positioned within the home, we are alerted as viewers to the direction of her hallucinatory gaze and surveillance on us, a gaze that, like the submerged body quarantined within, resurfaces the palimpsests of fragmentary memories. Svetlana Boym (2001: xviii) distinguishes this form of ‘reflective nostalgia’ as a seductive mechanism that ‘thrives’ on ‘the longing itself, and delays the homecoming – wistfully, ironically, desperately’. Defined as a social memory made up of ‘collective frameworks’, reflective nostalgia ‘does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different

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time zones . . .’. Behbahani (2018a) describes the domestic feast of Saffron Tea as the trappings or ‘belongings of society and culture’, the West and East connected and bound inextricably to the extent that objects themselves take precedence in her research, sometimes more than the characters and figures themselves. Saffron Tea’s intimate portrayal investigates women’s presence through an embrace of the objects, where the ‘belongings’ are a fluid extension of the ‘critical geography of home’, a place equally contextualised as a female ‘spatial imaginary’, to follow Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling’s (2006: 2) important exploration on the subject. Pamela Karimi’s (2013: 9) elucidating analysis more specifically explores the complicated discourses at stake in the modernisation of the Iranian home and the spatial organisation of women’s private domestic spaces and gendered relationships throughout the twentieth century, fundamentally understood as a ‘physical entity and storehouse of people’s belongings’, and a social space conflating notions of national identity, interior design and decoration, and the cultivation of consumer tastes and influx of Western commodities. In Homi Bhabha’s (2004: 13) reading of the charged interiority of the home, the ‘recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting’. Bhabha’s concurrent notion of unhomeliness draws upon Freud’s (1963 [1919]: 61) concept of the uncanny, a relationship between familiarity, strangeness or the unheimlich, a word whose twofold meaning in German suggests that which belongs to the house as well as what is concealed, hidden or repressed. Her subject’s compulsive state of visceral exertion and exhaustion in the pool of Saffron Tea is evidenced by a shortness of breath, disorientation and aphasia where air bubbles surface. During this unrelenting bodily labour, the artist says that she establishes her own gaze and the awareness of the spectator’s gaze upon her, and at that moment it ‘all comes together’ spatially as part of the ‘physical experience’ and process of seeking ‘control’ from her predicament, whether suspended or submerged (Behbahani 2018a).

Behind the Mirrors Behbahani’s Behind the Mirrors (2015), the third single-channel video from the trilogy at 18 minutes, was filmed in the otherworldly landscape of Cappadocia in modern day Turkey. The area’s rugged plateau was volcanically shaped into

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magical cones and valleys and transformed by prehistoric and ancient settlements into underground man-made caves, tunnels and dwellings; the site also marked the boundaries and intersections of rival empires and religions, from Persia and Byzantium to Rome. As in her previous two videos, Suspended and Saffron Tea, Behbahani’s filmic mode was again inspired by the materialisation of a ‘sense of place’ that was not a singular destination or locality, but rather a transnational expansion through the landscape analogous to a dreamscape, generating a sense of ‘belonging, collectivity, and intersubjective agency’ (Meskimmon 2017: 25). Under the sun’s afternoon glare, Behbahani appears rotating steadily on a low podium while holding a statuesque pose in an ornamental dress and red heel boots, not unlike a glossy figurine from a child’s carousel (Figure 6.5). The encompassing long mirrors surrounding her figure illuminate the panoptic sweep of the geography. There are juxtaposed reflections of a gyrating girl with a red hula hoop, a neighbouring luncheon with chattering voices, navigating birds, unnerving dolls and battling play soldiers touring the grass. Her presence among them goes merely unnoticed. Yet, the artist conveys a wilful desire for ‘selfpositioning’, a transgressive form of ‘positioned spectatorship’ that on her part demands great endurance, adaptation, and unease in the ‘active process of spatialization’ and ‘multi-inhabitation’ of the topography, to cite Rogoff (2000: 27, 25). Until nightfall, this displacement and inhabitation is exerted through the body’s revolution, simultaneously fragmented by the mirrors’ reflective surfaces.

Figure 6.5 Bahar Behbahani, still from Behind the Mirrors, 2015. Single-channel video (18 minutes), Cappadocia, Turkey and United States. © Bahar Behbahani.

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Through these modes of locating herself in the imaginatively constructed landscapes of Suspended, Saffron Tea and Behind the Mirrors, Behbahani mobilises transnationally through time and terrain, geographically traveling and intersecting histories from Turkey to Tehran, through Persian gardens and contemporary domiciles. Even as her subjects repeat corporeal ‘points of entry’ – inverted, submerged and erect – to rupture topographies, the viewer never witnesses the processes by which the protagonist achieves positionality, a point emphasised by the artist. Rather, Behbahani’s interventions, in both her paintings and videos, occupy a multi-axis threshold and transnational network of documents, borders and bodies, in order to reorient our perception of the topology of Iran’s Persian garden and to reclaim its space for the artist’s reimagined historical encounters and feminist agencies. In this respect, Behbahani’s works evoke the mundus imaginalis or imaginal world of Henry Corbin, the French philosopher and Islamic scholar whose metaphysical ideas on an intermediary ‘immaterial’ world, one existing beyond our empirical and intelligible realities (Nasr 2006: 330), made an early impression on the artist. In the process, Behbahani physically tends to, labours and cultivates her own garden as a polyvalent space for transnational belonging and circulation, one not at all severed from an Orientalised Persia or the conflicted aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, but rather one deeply rooted in her contemporary artistic struggles in the United States and continually displaced by memories, language and longing.

Notes 1 Bahar Behbahani (www.baharbehbahani.com) received her BFA and MA from Alzahra University and Azad University in 1995 and 1998, respectively, in Tehran, Iran. 2 Pope eventually directed the headquarters of the American-Iranian Society in New York, relocated to Shiraz in 1966. In her essay, ‘Gendered Politics of Persian Art: Pope and his Partner’, Talinn Grigor (2016: 45, 55) examines women’s marginalised positions of agency in the reappraisals of Iran’s cultural histories and scholarly contributions. 3 In 1940, Donald Wilber organised an exhibition titled The Persian Garden at the Iranian Institute, New York. 4 Here I am responding broadly to the important analyses on Orientalism by Hamid Dabashi (2015: 11).

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5 In her important book, Talinn Grigor (2014: 12–13) considers the wider cultural networks of spatial environments – the multifaceted studios, galleries, and private and public domains – which inevitably played a significant role in the construction of a visual and material culture in Iran after the Revolution. Following her thesis that ‘the struggle of identity in modern Iran can be interpreted as a multilayered and intensely contested pictorial discourse’, Grigor underscores the implicit logistical and political challenges of her project, especially in light of the successful outpouring of artistic production from a country defined as an ‘interlocked system of visual economies’. 6 In this regard, Behbahani is keenly attuned to the immense contextual challenges and critical reception of her artwork within the commercial structures of galleries, international biennials and art fairs, and museums. 7 Donald Wilber (1962: 155–156) resorted to an uncritically narrow and Western representation of the imperial harem, recounting the celebrated nineteenth century Persian travelogue of Sir Robert Ker Porter (a diplomat and court painter to the Russian Tsar), and citing his portrayal of the royal residences of Qajar prince Fath ‘Ali Shah’ (who ascended the throne in 1797) and the illicit visual mastery over concubines reposing and undressing in the harem baths and chambers. (See Porter 1821.) 8 Examining the ‘ocular centered’ politics of Qajar-era Iranian photography (1785–1925), Staci Gem Scheiwiller (2017: 3, 17) extrapolates the sexual desires and anxieties of ‘gendered physical bodies’ characterised in royal harem photographs that were located in private archives and albums; these objects illustrate photography’s construction of liminal social spaces and the power ‘modalities’ imbued in the historically public and private spaces of Persia. Her arguments are informed by Afsaneh Najmabadi’s (2005) seminal study that argues how gendered readings and women’s positionalities in the early constructions of Iranian modernity may be inversely read through sources produced by men, due to the absence of historical sources on or by women, an approach that extends, variously, to Behbahani’s visual methodologies. 9 It is also important to note the artist’s fear of ‘exoticism’ in terms of the Western gaze in the presentation of herself in her works, a structure that influenced her desire to work through modes of abstraction in her paintings. For a discussion exploring the related subject of ‘self-exoticism’, see Hamid Keshmirshekan (2010). 10 As Elizabeth Grosz (1994: 142) writes, ‘Every body is marked by the history and specificity of its existence. It is possible to construct a biography, a history of the body, for each individual and social body’.

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References Allerstorfer, J. (2013) ‘Performing Visual Strategies: Representational Concepts of Female Iranian Identity in Contemporary Photography and Video Art’, in S. Scheiwiller (ed.), Performing the Iranian State: Visual Culture and Representations of Iranian Identity. London and New York: Anthem Press. Babaie, S. (2011) ‘Voices of Authority: Locating the “Modern” in Islamic Arts’. Getty Research Journal 3: 133–149. Babaie, S. (2015) ‘The Global in the Local: Implicating Iran in Art and History’, in A. Downey (ed.), Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris. Bajoghli, N. (2011) ‘Painting a State of Suspension’. The Revealer: A Review of Religion and Media, 29 November. Available at https://wp.nyu.edu/therevealer/2011/11/29/ painting-a-state-of-suspension/ (Accessed 4 April 2020). Balaghi, S. (2013) ‘Silenced Histories and Sanitized Autobiographies: The 1953 CIA Coup in Iran’. Biography 36 (1): 71–96. Balaghi, S. (2017) ‘Surrounded by Quiet Nothingness: Bahar Bebhahani’s Paintings’, in U. Nzewi (ed.), Let the Garden Eram Flourish. Dartmouth, NH : The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth. Bassett, T.J. (1994) ‘Cartography and Empire Building in Nineteenth-Century West Africa’. Geographical Review 84 (3): 316–335. Behbahani, B. (2018a) ‘Interview with Aliza Edelman’, 27 February, New York. Behbahani, B. (2018b) ‘A Scholar’s Day on The Wagner Garden Carpet from the Burrell Collection, Scotland’, artist lecture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 19 September. Behbahani, B. (2019) ‘Ispahan Flowers Only Once’, artist lecture. Creative Capital Artist Retreat, Bard College, New York, June. Behbahani, B. (2020) ‘Interview with Aliza Edelman’, 24 November, New York. Behdad, A. (2013) ‘The Orientalist Photograph’, in A. Behdad and L. Gartlan (eds.), Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation. Los Angeles, CA : Getty Publications. Behdad, A. and Gartlan, L., eds. (2013) Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation. Los Angeles, CA : Getty Publications. Bhabha, H. (2004) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home. New York and London: Routledge. Booth, M., ed. (2010) ‘Introduction’, in Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces. Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Clark, E. (2004) The Art of the Islamic Garden. Rambsbury : Crowood. Dabashi, H. (2015) Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press.

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Daftari, F. (2002) ‘Another Modernism: An Iranian Perspective’, in S. Balaghi and L. Gumpert (eds.), Picturing Iran: Art, Society, and Revolution. London: I.B. Tauris. Daftari, F. (2019) Persia Reframed: Iranian Visions of Modern and Contemporary Art. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Downey, A. (2009) ‘Centralizing Margins and Marginalizing Centers: Diasporas and Contemporary Iranian Art’, in S. Bardaouil and T. Fellrath (eds.), Iran Inside Out: Influences of Homeland and Diaspora in the Artistic Language of Contemporary Artists. New York: Chelsea Art Museum. Foucault, M. (1997 [1967]) ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, in N. Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge. Freud, S. (1963 [1919]) ‘The “Uncanny” ’, in P. Rieff (ed.), S.E. 17, Freud: Studies in Parapsychology. New York: Collier. Gharipour, M. (2013) Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry, and the Arts. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Göçek, F.M. and Balaghi, S., eds. (1994) Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity, and Power. New York: Columbia University Press. Grigor, T. (2015) Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio. London: Reaktion Books. Grigor, T. (2016) ‘Gendered Politics of Persian Art: Arthur Pope and his Partner’, in Y. Kadoi (ed.), Arthur Upham Pope and a New Survey of Persian Art. Leiden: Brill. Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN : Indiana University Press. Hobhouse, P. (2004) The Gardens of Persia. E. Hunningher (ed.). San Diego, CA : Kales Press. Irigary, L. (1993) ‘Gesture in Psychoanalysis [1985]’, in Sexes and Genealogies. G.C. Gill (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Javaherian, F. (2004) ‘Paradigms Lost: The Persian Garden Revisited’, in Gardens of Iran. Tehran: Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Jay, M. and Ramaswamy, S., eds. (2014) Empires of Vision: A Reader. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Kadoi, Y., ed. (2016) Arthur Upham Pope and a New Survey of Persian Art. Leiden: Brill. Kamaroff, L., ed. (2018) In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art. Munich and New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel and Los Angeles Museum of Art. Karimi, P. (2013) Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran: Interior Revolutions of the Modern Era. London and New York: Routledge. Keshmirshekan, H. (2010) ‘The Question of Identity Vis-à-Vis Exoticism in Contemporary Iranian Art’, Iranian Studies 43 (4): 489–512. Keshmirshekan, H., ed. (2015) ‘The Crisis of Belonging: On the Politics of Art Practice in Contemporary Iran’, in Contemporary Art from the Middle East: Regional Interactions with Global Art Discourses. London: I.B. Tauris.

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Khansari, M., Moghtader, M.R. and Yavari, M. (2003) The Persian Garden: Echoes of Paradise. Washington, DC : Mage. Meskimmon, M. (2017) ‘From the Cosmos to the Polis: On Denizens, Art and Postmigration Worldmaking’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 9 (2): 25–35. Meskimmon, M. (2020) Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections. London and New York: Routledge. Najmabadi, A. (2005) Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties in Iranian Modernity. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Nasr, S.H. (2006) Islamic Philosophy from its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy. New York: State University of New York Press. Porter, R.K. (1821) Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia during the Years 1817, 1818, 1819, and 1820. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. Pratt, M.L. (2008) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Rogoff, I. (2000) Terra Firma: Geography’s Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Rogoff, I. (2015) ‘Oblique Points of Entry’, in H. Keshmirshekan (ed.), Contemporary Art from the Middle East: Regional Interactions with Global Art Discourses. London: I.B. Tauris. Scheiwiller, S.G. (2017) Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography. London and New York: Routledge. Schick, I.C. (2010) ‘The Harem as Gendered Space and the Spatial Reproduction of Gender’, in M. Booth (ed.), Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces. Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Torshizi, F. (2012) ‘The Unveiled Apple: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Limits of InterDiscursive Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art’. Iranian Studies 45 (4): 549–569. Wilber, D.N. (1962) Persian Gardens and Garden Pavilions. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company. Wilber, D.N. (1986) Adventures in the Middle East: Excursions and Incursions. Princeton, NJ : Darwin. Yeğenoğlu, M. (1998) Colonial Fantasies: Toward a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Through Walls and Windows: Irene Buarque’s Work in the 1970s Margarida Brito Alves and Giulia Lamoni

In December 1978, Brazilian artist Irene Buarque1 presented her exhibition Leitura e Contraleitura de um Espaço Limite: Janela (Reading and CounterReading of a Space Limit: The Window) at Quadrum Gallery, in Lisbon. As suggested by the title, the show brought together a series of artworks that explored the window, physically as well as metaphorically, as an architectural feature capable to synthesise different cultural and formal markers and to problematise the relationship between interior and exterior space. Most importantly, Buarque’s combined use of photography, printmaking, artists’ books and objects demonstrated that the spatial and cultural interrogations that traversed her work did not require a medium-specific practice. On the contrary, they encouraged the artist to continuously explore new possibilities in terms of materials and techniques. At the same time, though, the strongly abstract and geometrical language that the artworks on display foregrounded hinted at the genealogy of Buarque’s practice – and in particular to its rootedness in the São Paulo artistic scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. What happened between the artist’s formative years in Brazil and her 1978 exhibition in Lisbon? And how did it inform the conceptual, political and formal developments of her work? Having migrated to Lisbon in the early 1970s thanks to a scholarship awarded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Buarque was a relevant actor of the Portuguese experimental art scene of that decade. Indeed, differently from other Brazilian artists who, during the final phase of the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal (1933–1974), passed by Lisbon en route to other destinations, especially during World War II, or lived there for a limited period of time – like Amélia Toledo (Alves and Lamoni 2020) in the mid-1960s or Evany Fanzeres in the early 1970s – Buarque remained, making the Portuguese capital her home.

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Drawing from the artist’s experience of migration, this text aims at exploring the relationship between the artworks that she created in São Paulo in the early 1970s and those produced in Lisbon between 1973 and the end of the decade, while simultaneously attempting to map the transnational connections and the ruptures associated with her transits between Portugal and Brazil. Considering that the synchronic investigation on space, form and colour characterising her early work – as referred to by Walter Zanini, art critic and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, in 1971 (Zanini 1971) – actually became a key feature traversing the artist’s practice in the following years, space and architecture are envisioned here as a potential bridge between different geographical and cultural areas. Furthermore, these elements will be addressed as a locus of connection with the contemporary practices of other artists in Portugal and Brazil, and as a privileged site for Buarque to shape her singular discourse on belonging. In the artist’s trajectory, in fact, belonging seems to correspond, first and foremost, to an embodied experience of space and place. In this sense, it is also gendered, affectively produced and – as it connects Brazil to Portugal – strongly marked by a common colonial history. To a certain extent, these colonial ties often seem to translate, in Buarque’s practice, in the exploration of the ambiguities that circulating between these two countries entails – that is, in the tensions between inextricable similarities and differences, cultural as well as political and historical. Indeed, as a female Portuguese-speaking artist in Portugal in the early 1970s, Buarque was not a complete foreigner, nor was she a Portuguese national. By opening a space in which the links and breaks that constituted the in-betweenness of her position as a Brazilian migrant could be addressed, made visible and somehow sutured, the artist critically acknowledged the complexities of her multiple attachments. At the same time, it is precisely the articulation of this space – as a kind of ‘third space’2 – that allowed Buarque to weave the transnational network of relations that made, and are still making, her home, in Portugal, Brazil, and beyond. It is also the construction of this ambiguous, uncertain and at times imaginary space that this essay seeks to explore.

From São Paulo to Lisbon In 1971, the Ars Mobile Gallery in São Paulo, Brazil, organised the first solo exhibition of Irene Buarque. The show presented a sequence of 26 geometrical

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abstract paintings and three serigraphs produced since 1968, most of them circular in shape, with diameters between 61 and 120 cm. The clear and sharp compositions of the artworks, based on intersecting triangles, explored a set of intense chromatic variations (Figure 7.1). Contrasting with their rigorous structure, the titles of the pieces – such as Rolling Stock, Watermelon-Melody, Aqua-Limo-Semi-Sol (Water-Limo-Semi-Sun), Tátil (Tactile), Vibra-Verde (Vibrate-Green) and Marrom-Bom-Tom (Brown-Bon-Ton)3 – added a poetic, playful and sensory dimension, evoking pop culture. Writing for the catalogue of the exhibition, Walter Zanini identified in Buarque’s geometrical abstraction ‘two congenital areas with identical strength of concentration and activity in the affirmation of the image’: ‘the organization of space’ and ‘the expression of colour and its spectral effects’ (Zanini 1971).4 Although noticing the palpable relations that the artist’s paintings established

Figure 7.1 Irene Buarque, Sujeito III (Subject III), 1971. 120 cm (diameter), acrylic on platex. The artist’s collection. © Irene Buarque.

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with different international artists, Zanini also pointed out the personal quality of a ‘language in progress’, recognising, as previously mentioned, a synchronic exploration of spatial, formal and chromatic values (1971). Immersed in São Paulo’s composite cultural environment, marked, among others, by the strong legacy of Concretism and by the artistic dynamics associated with the Biennial since the early 1950s, Buarque studied Fine Arts in the city, at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado, between 1964 and 1967. As her pictorial practice developed, from the mid-1960s, she became part of a small group of young artists5 who took up abstraction as a field of new experimentation. In fact, as observed by art critic Aracy Amaral in 1972, after many years in which the Brazilian artistic scene was dominated by figurative currents – and, we should add, by a strong proximity between art and politics as a response to the oppressive military regime inaugurated by the 1964 coup6 – geometric abstraction re-emerged in São Paulo, as exemplified by the work of Irene Buarque and Massuo Nakakubo (Amaral 1971:1). Indeed, developing at the same time as new conceptual tendencies began to gain momentum – in events such as Salão da Bússola in Rio de Janeiro, in 1969, and Do Corpo à Terra, organised by Frederico Morais in Belo Horizonte in 1970 – Buarque’s research took a radically different path. Although establishing a clear dialogue with the theories that framed Brazilian concrete abstraction – strongly informed by international references, such as Soviet Suprematism and Constructivism, De Stijl, Bauhaus and Ulm School – and its quest for ‘pure visuality’, the paintings and serigraphs that the artist produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s also incorporated a three-dimensional potential. This feature, to a certain extent, revisited and created articulations with the experimental work that artists like Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape produced in the late 1950s in Rio de Janeiro, infusing abstraction with a threedimensional, and even spatial, dimension.7 Definitely, for Buarque, threedimensionality was part of a pictorial experimentation focused on form, space and colour that followed an earlier ‘cubist phase’ (Buarque 1971a). As she stated in an interview in 1971, her paintings included ‘three-dimensional concerns’: ‘I try to contain the volume in the surface and maintain a dynamic that circulates outside the frame’ (Buarque 1971b). Not surprisingly, the artist often referenced architecture as an influence for her geometrical work, an interest that, in some way, she had the opportunity to explore while collaborating with artist Maria Bonomi, as her assistant, in the scope of a set of scenography projects in the late 1960s. Traversed by spatial preoccupations, Buarque’s paintings and serigraphs also connected, through

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their titles, with diverse contemporary phenomena, from the language games of concrete poetry8 – i.e. in GirasSol-a-Sol (SunFlower-to-Sun) and TriCôr-Círculo (TriColour-Circle) – to references to North American culture in English titles like DROPS I and DROPS II and High Wall.9 In this sense, Zanini’s use of the term ‘hard edges’ (Zanini 1971), in his 1971 text, to describe contrasts between coloured triangles in Buarque’s circularly shaped canvas, was possibly meant to suggest a resonance with ‘hard edge’ geometric abstraction produced in the United States and beyond. In fact, Buarque considered the work of Japanese artist Kumi Sugai, exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial in 1963 and 1965, as an important reference, along with the work of Brazilian artists Alfredo Volpi, Maria Bonomi and Amélia Toledo (Buarque 1971a). As for her use of colour, she acknowledged that Portuguese émigré artist Fernando Lemos was an influence for her practice (Buarque 1971a). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, and complementarily to her work as an artist, Buarque attended different courses, and it was in this context that, in 1970, she met Lemos, who had migrated to Brazil in 1952. Furthermore, in 1971 the renowned Portuguese art critic and historian José-Augusto França travelled to Brazil, invited by Lemos, to teach an art history course at Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis de Chateaubriand. Buarque attended the course and, at Lemos’s suggestion, decided to apply for an international scholarship provided by the Portuguese Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to pursue her work in Lisbon. Thus, the encounter with Lemos and França turned out to be of particular importance in Buarque’s trajectory. As she would later recall, Lemos was ‘responsible’ (Buarque and Santos 2005) for her migration to Portugal in 1973. Leaving Brazil during the most oppressive phase of the dictatorship, Buarque arrived in Lisbon in March 1973, after spending two months in Paris. Even though Portugal was living the final phase of an extremely long dictatorship, as Lemos pointed out: ‘[it] was in Europe, after all’ (Buarque and Santos 2005).

Confronting Walls Benefiting from the dynamics of social, cultural and political opening that characterised the previous decade, the atmosphere in Portugal at the beginning of the 1970s was of relative optimism – an optimism implied in the expression ‘Primavera Marcelista’ (Marcelist Spring), which refers to the initial years of Marcelo Caetano’s government, after replacing António Oliveira Salazar in 1968.

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In fact, between 1968 and 1970, Caetano introduced a supposedly more moderate politics in the long Portuguese Dictatorship (1926–1974), while dealing with a context of increasing dissatisfaction triggered by the Colonial War in Mozambique, Angola and Guiné Bissau (1961–1974). Sustained by economic growth, but also by greater social stability, as well as by a more open dialogue with Europe, it was precisely this optimism that was key to the subtle emergence of an art market, as testified by the opening, from the mid-1960s, of several art galleries in Lisbon and Porto. This development complemented the fundamental initiatives of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which, since 1956, had widely contributed to the consolidation of the arts in Portugal through the organisation of exhibitions, the acquisition of artworks and the attribution of scholarships to many artists, who, as a result, had the opportunity to expand their experiences in an international circuit. Often referred to as the ‘Anos de Ruptura’ (Rupture Years) (Rodrigues 1994), the 1960s had corresponded indeed to a phase of renewal in the arts in Portugal, as a young generation of artists, distancing their production from the animated debates on neorealism/ surrealism or figuration/abstraction of the previous decades, explored a new set of possibilities, as testified by the multidirectional experimentalisms that – in many cases in dialogue with experiences of migration (mainly to Paris and London) – made the Portuguese artistic context considerably more complex and rich. On her arrival in Lisbon, Buarque’s intention, as a Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian fellow, was to develop a ‘literary research’ (Buarque 1973) on the signification of the circular form in both painting and scenography. Her programme – which also included the improvement of her skills in the field of printmaking, with a specific focus on serigraphy – was closely connected to her own use of the circle, and of circularly shaped canvas, in her artistic practice. When she met José-Augusto França at the beginning of her stay in Lisbon, though, he examined Buarque’s curriculum and slides of her work and advised her to give priority to her studies in the area of scenography. In fact, França, who was the artist’s main contact in the country, surprisingly told her that, regarding painting, she ‘had nothing to learn in Portugal’ (Buarque and Santos 2005). Following the art critic’s suggestion, Buarque enrolled in the Conservatório Nacional (National Conservatory), attending scenography and art history courses. Thus, she did not immediately connect with Portuguese artists who were experimenting with a ‘new abstraction’ (Rodrigues 1994) – geometrical, objectbased and op – since the mid-1960s, such as Eduardo Nery, Artur Rosa, Jorge Pinheiro, António Palolo and also, to some extent, Alice Jorge. But, whereas

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Buarque did not mention any of these artists in her quarterly reports addressed to the Gulbenkian Foundation, she was possibly aware of the work of some of them. While she was not immediately ‘impressed’10 by the work of young Portuguese painters, and developed her practice in a certain isolation, Buarque delved enthusiastically into Portuguese culture through music, literature, architecture and theatre. She travelled around the country, read Portuguese concrete poetry, practiced woodcut engraving and serigraphy with printmaker Ilda Reis and visited art galleries as well as the Clube de Gravura (Printmaking Club) (Buarque 1973). In the fall of 1973, she took part in a printmaking exhibition at Galeria Grafil,11 a space that she later frequented to study lithographic printing techniques. As for theatre, besides attending the courses at the Conservatory – where she also assisted to Peter Brook’s interventions in February 1974 – she went to see many shows, including A Grande Imprecação contra a Muralha da Cidade (Great Denunciation by the City Wall) by Tankred Dorst (1961), directed by Mário Barradas and with costumes by Christian Ratz (Buarque 1973). Premiered in Lisbon, at the German Institute, in January 1974, a few months before the Carnation Revolution that took place on 25 April and that finally put an end to the Portuguese dictatorship, Dorst’s play articulated a harsh critique of political power, materialised by the city walls. As observed by writer Ernesto Sampaio: ‘in the context of the movements against the colonial war, and of the workers’ and students’ turmoil happening at the time, the show acquired, as stated by Curt Meyer-Clason in his Memories, “a disturbing premonitory sense of the 25th of April” ’ (Sampaio 2020: 93). In fact, resonating with the longing for the end of the dictatorship in Portugal, the show was a great success and thus was extended for three more weeks (Zurbach 2007: 40). Furthermore, thanks to the fact that it took place at the German Institute, censorship – which was still an expressive obstacle in Portugal at that time – could be avoided (Zurbach 2007). Interestingly, the image of the city wall, politically charged in Dorst’ play, was also at the centre of Buarque’s first solo exhibition in Lisbon, in August 1975, at the Gulbenkian Foundation – and later titled As Muralhas de Lisboa (Lisbon City Walls)12 (Figure 7.2). Installed in the garden of the Foundation, the artist’s sequence of circularly shaped acrylic paintings was displayed on the ground, as a crescent. In these artworks, painted on wood chipboard, and with a diameter of 110 cm, a central band folding geometrically in various ways divided the space into three, differently coloured, sections (Figure 7.3). The title of the pieces, along with a photograph of the circular walls of the city of Arraiolos – located in the rural Alentejo region in Portugal – published in the

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Figure 7.2 Irene Buarque, As Muralhas (The City Walls), 1975. Front view of the installation in the gardens of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon. 110 cm each (diameter), acrylic on platex. © Irene Buarque.

Figure 7.3 Irene Buarque, As Muralhas (The City Walls), 1975. Side view of the installation in the gardens of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon. 110 cm each (diameter), acrylic on platex. © Irene Buarque.

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catalogue, seemed to suggest that these geometric compositions, apparently abstract, may in fact allude to city walls. Furthermore, the exhibition’s catalogue also included a passage from the book Sombras de Reis Barbudos (1972) (Shadows of Bearded Kings) by author José J. Veiga, often considered as an allegory of the Brazilian military dictatorship (Gomes 2005). Indeed, the fragment of text selected by the artist described a dystopian place, possibly a city, in which new walls appeared overnight, separating what was once united, cutting through the streets and ‘covering up the views’ (Buarque 1975). Initially troubled by the walls’ presence, the people grew increasingly accustomed to it, while ‘life was getting harder and harder for everyone’ (1975). Buarque thus presented a series of abstract compositions that could not avoid establishing some resonances with the Carnation Revolution of the previous year. As Muralhas de Lisboa (Lisbon City Walls), in fact, symbolically deconstructed walls – architectural structures of containment – releasing their fragments onto the green lawn of the Gulbenkian Foundation’s gardens. At the same time, the installation created an understated connection between the overthrow of the dictatorship in Portugal and the persistence of the military regime in Brazil. In this sense, the artwork could be read as condensing traces of the artist’s experience in both Brazil and Portugal – not only because of the process of cultural crosspollination that her artistic practice went through, but also regarding the possibility to give voice to everyday life under conditions of political oppression and to the struggles for liberation. Effectively, informed by her transnational experience, Buarque found herself in a position that allowed her to gain a wider perspective, enabling her to recognise the proximities and distances between the political circumstances in both countries. In parallel, it is equally significant that Buarque considered this presentation not a painting exhibition, but an installation. This important shift shows her concern not only with the articulation between the pieces and the features of the space that she selected to present them, but also with the place created by such an articulation. In fact, taking into consideration the display of the paintings as a crescent, and their scale, the work consisted, somehow, in a receptacle – or even in a scenography that called for a certain performativity on the part of the viewer. In this perspective, the installation connected with some post-minimalist or conceptual productions, as the paintings were but one of the elements of a more extended work that configured a relation between the pieces, the presentation space and the viewers’ perceptive and bodily experience.

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Furthermore, besides creating a physical and relational space, this installation soon became a means that allowed Buarque to connect and bond with the local artistic scene. As a vehicle of new encounters, it lead to a series of friendships and collaborations that would constitute part of the artist’s affective transnational network, weaving the map of her belonging in Portugal. It was, actually, in the scope of this exhibition that Buarque first met José Ernesto de Sousa, a key figure of the Portuguese artistic scene in the 1970s. While Buarque’s installation was in the garden, the works of Portuguese artists Eduardo Batarda and Fernando Calhau – who, at the time, were also Gulbenkian fellows – were on display inside the building. After visiting the exhibitions of these two artists, Ernesto de Sousa saw Buarque’s installation – which he then considered ‘a breeze of fresh air’ (Alves et al. 2019). The encounter with Ernesto de Sousa had indeed a significant impact on Buarque’s artistic trajectory in Portugal. In fact, it was after this contact that she possibly became more aware of the experimental production that was being developed by different Portuguese artists. As she recalls, she first saw Helena Almeida, Ana Vieira, Artur Rosa, Eduardo Nery and João Vieira – artists whom she would later meet and collaborate with – in June 1974. On that occasion, she decided to go with a friend to the Belém neighbourhood in Lisbon to watch a group of 48 artists collectively paint a mural celebrating the 10 June Portuguese national holiday (Alves et al. 2019). Along with Ernesto de Sousa, another important contact established by Buarque at that time was Monteiro Gil, whom she had met at the National Conservatory. Gil was one of the owners of the Galeria Grafil in Lisbon where Buarque practiced printmaking. But Grafil was also a crucial place for the artist to expand her network of friendships. Most importantly, it was the seed that would later lead her, Monteiro Gil and Ernesto de Sousa, together with artists Helena Almeida, José Carvalho, José Conduto, António Palolo, Fernanda Pissarro, Maria Rolão and Marília Viegas, to create the Cooperativa Diferença in 1979. This cooperative and gallery, still functioning today, was not only dedicated to teaching art and to championing the work of artists living in Portugal, but also to creating and promoting transnational dialogues and exchanges with artists based in other countries.

Opening Windows After 1975, Irene Buarque continued to explore Lisbon, walking around different neighbourhoods. She also began to take photographs of diverse aspects and

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details of the city that caught her eye, as she was particularly sensitive to the contrasts that this experience established with her previous references to the city of São Paulo. Some of these walks took place during the weekends with Portuguese architect Nuno Teotónio Pereira, whom Buarque had met through mutual friends while she was preparing her exhibition at the Gulbenkian Foundation (Alves et al. 2019). In fact, as recalled by Buarque, the architect – who would later become her husband – had ended up helping her with the definition of the installation and designed the structure that kept the paintings in the correct position (Alves et al. 2019). City pavements, tiles and various ornamental pieces incorporated in buildings drove her attention. But the window, an architectural element with multiple meanings – not only social and economic, but also cultural – became the specific object of a research that she began developing in 1976. Initially looking at the geometric qualities of the window – usually a rectangle – Buarque soon became aware of its symbolic potential. If the city walls were subtly related to the dictatorship and its overthrow in As Muralhas de Lisboa, the window could possibly materialise the sense of freedom and opening of the post-revolutionary years, unfolding it in different directions. The window – a well-known metaphor for painting – also connected Buarque’s work with the practice of other artists in Portugal who resorted to this architectural element in various ways, and with different purposes, since the late 1960s. For some female artists in particular, such as Helena Almeida or Ana Vieira, the appropriation of the window, a sign alluding to oppressive seclusion but also to a possible liberation, was a strategic way to reclaim agency as women and citizens of a country in a rapid transformation. In Almeida’s well-known piece Tela Habitada (Inhabited Canvas) (1976), for instance, the act of passing through the canvas, or window, interweaves the artist’s interest in the borders of representation with the evocation of the struggle for liberation of oppressed subjects and groups, most likely women. Vieira, on the other hand, resorted to the window in a more direct form in her acrylic boxes Caixa-Objectos (Box-Objects) (1972–1974). In Figura à Janela (Figure at the Window) (1973), for example, the silhouette of a woman or man stands behind a window. If the transparency of the acrylic box makes it possible for the viewer to walk around and observe it from different angles, the human figure is trapped inside, thus indicating that the window can paradoxically open up the field of vision for some and be part of a confinement device for others. Clearly, the gendered construction of domesticity in Portugal,13 as well the

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country’s cultural isolation during the dictatorship, were both important referents here. These were remarkable artistic and political gestures considering the fact that the relations between art and feminism in the 1970s in Portugal were quite ambiguous, contradictory and often understated. In dialogue with the work of Helena Almeida and Ana Vieira, Irene Buarque’s interest in the window encompasses the domestic sphere but, ultimately, it shapes a broader and more intersectional approach. Indeed, the artist is not only interested in the window as a metaphorical element – thus as a device that alludes to both isolation and liberation – but also as an architectural feature that strongly connects space, history and locational identity. In this sense, if the use of the window as a sign is connected to the reclaiming of agency, and more particularly of female agency, for Buarque this process of reclaiming is also strongly linked to the acknowledgement of the in-betweenness of her position – an embodied in-betweenness that architecture formally translates into space and place. Interestingly, the artist set herself to explore the window from multiple perspectives, while at the same time resorting to a variety of media, from photographs to objects and artist’s books. Initiated in 1976, Buarque’s research on windows developed over the next two years and beyond, culminating in the installation Leitura e Contra-Leitura de um Espaço Limite: Janela (Reading and Counter-Reading of a Space Limit: The Window) at Quadrum Gallery, in Lisbon, in December 1978 (Figure 7.4). According to the artist’s description, this research included five phases: a photographic survey of the window envisaged as a painting (figurative, abstract, pop etc.); the structure of the window as an object with formal and symbolic features; formal projects of windows produced in different materials such as paper, sand, glass and stickers; the window as a geometric form with reference to the tensions between inside and outside, full and empty; the ‘window-reflection’ and its transformation in articulation with light and its projections.14 Although the idea of the window envisaged as painting determined the first phase of Buarque’s research, it is nevertheless significant to approach that photographic corpus of work as a catalogue, an inventory or even a collection of architectural elements – a compilation of images that, to some extent, testified to the features of a city that, particularly after the revolution, was under transformation. This interest in architecture was also nourished by the artist’s proximity to Nuno Teotónio Pereira – with whom she collaborated, as a photographer, in the scope of producing a survey on collective housing in Lisbon, developed between 1978 and 1979.15

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Figure 7.4 Irene Buarque at her exhibition Leitura e Contra-Leitura de um Espaço Limite: Janela (Reading and Counter-Reading of a Space Limit: The Window), Galeria Quadrum, Lisbon, 1978. Photograph by Nuno Teotónio Pereira. © Irene Buarque.

For Teotónio Pereira, as he stated in a letter supporting Buarque’s request for a second Gulbenkian scholarship, in 1978, her photographs captured ‘the environmental qualities’ (Pereira 1978) of those architectures, as the photographic record should not be limited to their physical dimension. Regarding Buarque’s connection to architecture, it is actually quite telling that, in the same letter, Teotónio Pereira pointed out the artist’s ‘perception, and translation in painting, of constructed space and of the architectural elements that define that space’ (1978), and referred to her as a painter who ‘poetically interprets architectural space’ (1978). The first results of Buarque’s research on windows appeared in June 1977 in Colóquio-Artes – an art journal published by the Gulbenkian Foundation and directed by José-Augusto França – where Buarque had the opportunity to publish a sequence of photographs. Titled Os Defenestrados (The Defenestred), this edited work established a dialogue between Buarque’s images and a text by Alexandre O’Neill, a well-known poet and a friend of the artist, who was very

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enthusiastic about her windows project. In his introductory text, José-Augusto França – who selected the photographs to be published – considered that the windows constituted ‘an improbable game of plastic signs, elements of a language that it would be possible to codify and then read in its multiple senses’ (França 1977: 24). On the other hand, O’Neill’s poetic prose played with the ambiguities embodied by this architectural element, both spatial – inside/outside, far/close – and as a device framing the field of vision – looking at / being looked at. To a certain extent, these readings served the artist’s purpose of multiplying to exhaustion the viewpoints, forms and materials through which the window could be addressed, insofar as they produced two very distinct interpretations that used language instead of the image or the object. Subsequently, Buarque’s images of windows were exhibited on several occasions,16 as a sequence of photographs as well as in artist’s books. In order to expand her technical skills in this area, and specifically to learn how to control the revelation process, in 1977 she decided to take a photography course at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (Centre for Art and Visual Communication) – an independent school that had been created in 1973. In the following year, Ernesto de Sousa invited Buarque to take part in a cycle of solo exhibitions at Quadrum Gallery – one of the main centres consecrated to artistic experimentation in Lisbon in the 1970s – which also included artists Leonel Moura, Mário Varela and José Conduto. It was also in 1978 that Quadrum hosted performances by Ulrike Rosenbach and Gina Pane and an installation by Ana Vieira that played with the borders of domestic space and the tensions between women’s confinement and the possibility of its transgression through imagination. In line with this approach, Buarque’s exhibition, Leitura e Contra-Leitura de um Espaço Limite: Janela, was once more conceived as an installation, thus accentuating its spatial dimension. The installation explored the idea of the window as a threshold or a liminal space by constructing an environment through the combination of heterogeneous objects and images of windows. Photographs of the exhibition show that, on one side of the gallery, rectangular ozalite prints hanging from metallic devices, and touching the ground, presented a series of geometric structures resembling windows (Figure 7.5). On the other side, a long, unfolded, ozalite roll displayed a deconstruction of the geometric frame of the window. In other parts of the gallery, artists’ books were exhibited inside and outside display cases, photographs and prints of windows or of window-shaped objects made by the artists with materials like wood and sand were either

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Figure 7.5 View of Irene Buarque’s exhibition Leitura e Contra-Leitura de um Espaço Limite: Janela (Reading and Counter-Reading of a Space Limit: The Window), Galeria Quadrum, Lisbon, 1978. Detail: Ozalite prints (dark blue on white), 100 × 400 cm. © Irene Buarque.

hung on the walls, located on the ground or on a base, or hanging from a metallic structure.17 In a text published in the exhibition catalogue, Buarque defined the window space as ‘internal-external, interior-exterior, continuous, ambiguous, dynamic, relating the inside to the outside and the outside to the inside, now defining, now confusing one with the other, in parallel with the interior “inside-outside” of people’ (Buarque 1978). This spatial fluidity and the impossibility of fixing a definite meaning for this liminal space translated in the artist’s repetitive use of the gerundive in her text, indicating continuity in time rather than finiteness: ‘the window as an extension of people; a situation, a function, a wait, a reflecting, an [act of] reflecting . . . referring . . . cutting out . . . breathing . . . remembering . . . reliving . . . resisting . . . repressing . . . resting . . . spattering . . . re-closing and re-opening with the personal “decorated” or “simple” of each interior’ (Buarque 1978).

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While Buarque’s approach of the window was essentially multifocused, it also opened a significant space of connection – as the city wall had previously done in As Muralhas de Lisboa – in which her cultural and political experiences in both Brazil and Portugal could be articulated. As previously mentioned, the language of architecture was one of the main elements performing this connective function. In the artist’s collection of photographs taken in Portugal, in fact, some windows bore striking similarities with those of colonial buildings in Brazil. Underlining a common history of colonisation, these reverberations also emphasised the circulation of cultural forms between the metropolis and its colonies, as well as the processes of transformation, re-signification and transgression often involved in such transits. As observed by architect Alexandre Alves Costa, the very existence of Portuguese heritage depends on the possibility of ‘finding the common denominators that allow us to rigorously consider that heritage as a whole’ (Costa 2007: 27).Although Buarque’s research was not directly concerned with the question of heritage, her portraits of Portuguese windows seemed to implicitly suggest the existence of a common matrix between Portuguese and Brazilian vernacular architecture that had to be critically addressed. In this sense, it is not surprising that in 1979 the artist travelled back to Brazil to photograph local windows for an artist’s book that was to be edited in São Paulo18 – thus proposing a sort of reverse perspective on the same subject by adopting the point of view of Brazilian architecture. In this trip to Brazil, she was accompanied by Nuno Teotónio Pereira, who, as written by Ana Vaz Milheiro, visited the historical cities, privileging ‘the search for colonial marks’ (Milheiro 2012: 18). Most importantly, the window symbolically served the purpose of opposing a conception of space and location as univocal and self-contained. Using transparency and opening to connect the here and there, the window possibly became a challenging metaphor for the artist not only to envision reality and experience, but also to think about the hybridity of her own artistic practice and the specific language that her experience of migration contributed to shaping through encounters as well as divergences. As a vanishing point, in fact, the window bridges the gap between the inside and the outside, the place left and the place found, by drawing a line of continuity across what is generally considered as fractured. In this sense, it is not a coincidence, perhaps, that Buarque’s research on windows roughly corresponded, in chonological terms, to the government of General Geisel in Brazil (1974–1979), which introduced a gradual process of political opening towards democracy – a sort of window through which another future could be imagined.

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Over the following decades, Irene Buarque’s emphasis on transnational connectedness, and the reclaiming of her agency as a migrant female artist – between Portugal and Brazil – materialised by the image of the window, had a series of implications involving not only her artistic practice but also her attitude concerning collaboration and her role in championing the work of other artists. On the one hand, her work, possibly considered difficult to classify because of its specific in-betweenness, was left out of canonical art historical narratives in both Portugal and Brazil. Significantly, no museum retrospective of her extensive production has been organised to date in either country. Nor was her work included in the panoramic show dedicated to art in Portugal in the 1970s, entitled Anos 70, Atravessar Fronteiras (1970s, Crossing Borders) – held at the Gulbenkian Foundation in 2010. Ironically, though, the exhibition title would have been perfectly suited to Buarque’s practice. On the other hand, the artist gained a certain recognition for her activity in support of other artists, and for the promotion of artistic creation at large. In this sense, it is unavoidable to point out her commitment to the Cooperativa Diferença – a place collectively run and a reference in the Portuguese artistic context since its creation in 1979. Through her pivotal function at Diferença, Buarque had the chance to strengthen her collaborative ways of working, sharing her transnational attachments with a community of artists in Portugal and abroad, finally showing that belonging is more a matter of connection than of rootedness. Finally, the artist’s practice itself can perhaps be read according to the powerful metaphor that it constructed in the mid-1970s – that of the window. Buarque’s work, in this sense, becomes a window through which art historical narratives developed in Portugal come out of their isolation to envision their transnational extensions and crossings as core elements of transformation. As a figure of connectedness, the window signals the urgency for art historical writing to unearth the transits, circulations, in-between and marginal practices that, because of their reluctance to fit in canonical discourses – and because of canonical discourses’ inner structures of exclusion – have been devoid of historical representation. Perhaps, with the work of Buarque, we can imagine that these transnational itineraries have been traditionally approached as walls, when they are windows after all. We are extremely grateful to Irene Buarque for her generosity and collaboration. Our conversations with her, along with the access to her fellowship dossiers at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, were key elements in the research that led to this text.

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Notes 1 See the artist’s website: www.irenebuarque.com 2 We refer here to Homi Bhabha’s conceptualisation of a ‘third space’. Referring to Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, Bhabha writes ‘He sees it as accompanying the “assimilation of contraries” and creating that occult instability which presages powerful cultural changes. It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance’. (Bhabha 1994: 38). 3 The exhibition catalogue does not indicate any specific date for these works. 4 Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are by the authors. 5 As Zanini wrote in the same exhibition catalogue ‘[she] is one of the not many of the generation under 30 to ensure the continuity of an art of pure visuality in our environment’ (Zanini 1971). 6 Carried out by armed forces, the 1964 coup lead to the collapse of the administration of João Goulart – that had been democratically elected in 1961 – and to the instauration of a military dictatorship that lasted until 1985. 7 This spatial dimension became evident in the Neoconcrete Manifesto – published in the Jornal do Brasil, as a supplement to the I Exposição de Arte Neoconcreta (I Neoconcrete Art Exhibition) that took place at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro in December 1959. 8 In the 1960s, Buarque had the occasion to take part in the informal gatherings organised by concrete poets Augusto and Haroldo de Campos in São Paulo (Alves et al. 2019). 9 The exhibition catalogue does not indicate any specific date for these works. 10 In the first of the artist’s quarterly reports addressed to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, dated from 26 June 1973, Irene Buarque wrote ‘painting is the only sector with which I still have not had a contact that impressed me as a contemporary work (or proposal)’. Irene Buarque’s fellowship dossier, 1973, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Archives. 11 More specifically, she took part in the exhibition 13+1 Novos Gravadores. 12 The artist posteriorly attributed this title to the exhibition. In the 1975 exhibition catalogue, the show was simply titled ‘Irene Buarque’ and the paintings ‘Muralhas’ (City Walls). 13 The Estado Novo regime promoted an ideal of femininity based on traditional roles such as mother and housewife. 14 We are paraphrasing here the artist’s description (Buarque 1978). 15 Titled Evolução das Formas de Habitação Plurifamiliar na Cidade de Lisboa (Evolution of Collective Housing Forms in the City of Lisbon), and supported by the Gulbenkian Foundation, this research aimed at mapping and registering collective housing structures in Lisbon – many of them on the verge of ruin and destruction – spanning

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from the Middle Ages to the 1930s. This survey would finally be published as a book in 2017. (See Buarque and Pereira 2017.) 16 One of these occasions was the exhibition 11 Artisti Portoghesi d’Oggi (11 Portuguese Artists of Today), which took place at the Laboratorio Teoria e Pratica della Comunicazione in Milan, in January 1978. The exhibition, organised by Leonel Moura and Ernesto de Sousa, mainly presented photography-based artworks by Helena Almeida, Irene Buarque, Fernando Calhau, Alberto Carneiro, José Conduto, Leonel Moura, Julião Sarmento, Ângelo de Sousa, Ernesto de Sousa, Mário Varela and Ana Vieira. Buarque exhibited five photography notebooks titled Do Discurso das Janelas à Janela como Pintura (From the Windows Discourse to the Window as Painting). 17 Photographs of the exhibition are available at http://quadrumarquivoparalelo. blogspot.com/search/label/1978. 18 This information appears in a chronology published in Do Discurso: Da Janela, Irene Buarque, Escolha do Crítico / Ernesto de Sousa, exhibition catalogue, Lisboa, Centro Nacional de Cultura, 9–16 July 1981. Meanwhile, the artist remembers that in 1980 she did a small edition with photographs of Brazilian windows. Email exchange with the artist, 25 May 2020.

References Alves, M.B. and Lamoni, G. (2020) ‘The Margin as a Space of Connection: The Artists Mira Schendel, Salette Tavares and Amélia Toledo in Lisbon’, in B. Dogramaci, M. Hetschold, L.K. Lugo, R. Lee and H. Roth (eds.), Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Alves, M.B., Buarque, I. and Lamoni, G. (2019) ‘Interview with Irene Buarque’, 26 November, Lisbon. Amaral, A. (1971) ‘Reflexões: O Artista Brasileiro II. E uma Presença: Cildo Meirelles’. Suplemento Literário, 22 August, issue 734: 1. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Buarque, I. (1971a) ‘Artes Visuais’. Jornal da Tarde, 17 March, in I. Buarque (1973) Fellowship Dossier 1. Lisbon: The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Archives. Buarque, I. (1971b) ‘Arte nasce da definição’, Estado de São Paulo, 17 March, in I. Buarque (1973) Fellowship Dossier 1. Lisbon: The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Archives. Buarque, I. (1973) ‘Scholarship Report’, in Fellowship Dossier 1. Lisbon: The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Archives. Buarque, I. (1978) Leitura e Contra-Leitura de um Espaço Limite: Janela (exhibition catalogue). Lisbon: Galeria Quadrum.

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Buarque, I. and Pereira, N.T. (2017) Evolução das Formas de Habitação Plurifamiliar na Cidade de Lisboa. Lisbon: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa. Buarque, I. and Santos, R. (2005) ‘Entre Nós’ [television interview], RTP, 11 November. Available at: https://arquivos.rtp.pt/conteudos/irene-buarque/ (Accessed 25 May 2020). Costa, A.A. (2007) Textos Datados. Coimbra: EdArq. França, J.A. (1977) ‘Os Defenestrados’. Colóquio Artes 33: 24–31. Gínia, M.G. (2005) ‘Sombra de Reis Barbudos: A Representação Alegórica da Realidade’. Revista Nau Literária, Dossier ‘A Literatura em Tempos de Repressão’, 1 (1): 1–6. Milheiro, A.V. (2012) Nos Trópicos sem Le Corbusier: Arquitectura Luso-Africana no Estado Novo. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água. Pereira, N.T. (1978) ‘Letter of Support’, in Fellowship Dossier 2. Lisbon: The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Archives. Rodrigues, A. (1994) Anos 60, Anos de Ruptura: Uma Perspectiva da Arte Portuguesa nos Anos 60 (exhibition catalogue). Lisbon: Livros do Horizonte. Sampaio, E. (2020) Fernanda. Lisbon: Editora VS . Zanini, W. (1971) Irene Buarque (exhibition catalogue). São Paulo: Galeria Ars Mobile. Zurbach, J.A.F. (2007) ‘Mário Barradas: Um Impenitente Fazedor de Teatro’. Sinais De Cena 7: 35–44. Available at https://revistas.rcaap.pt/sdc/article/view/12517 (Accessed 27 May 2020).

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Disrupting Subaltern Geographies: The Artistic Intersections of Belkis Ayón Samantha A. Noël

Despite the reality that Black populations have been deemed ‘ungeographic’ since slavery, their collective opposition to geographic domination has nonetheless endured. According to Katherine McKittrick, traditional geography refers to the physical landscape and infrastructures that have been viewed, assessed and organised from a white, patriarchal, Eurocentric and heterosexual vantage point (2006, xi–xv). Black people have historically negotiated a traditional geographic landscape upheld by legacies of exploitation, exploration and conquest. Consequently, Black people and their attendant geographies have been ‘ungeographic’. The need to undo these traditional geographies made it necessary to establish alternative spatial practices since space is socially produced and gives Black lives meaning (McKittrick 2006, xi–xv). The Abakuá Secret Society emerged during slavery in Cuba (slavery existed in Cuba from 1513 until 1886) as a fraternity for mutual aid and protection for Black Cuban men. Secret societies such as Abakuá function as alternative social realities that exist in, what McKittrick calls, subaltern geographical arrangements (2006, xi–xv). In many ways, they almost serve as ‘antispaces’ since they have often not been recognised as legitimate (Glissant 1989: 159–160). However, this kind of space-claiming has been exclusively for Black men given the patriarchy endemic in the colonial society of Cuba and also amongst the various Sub-Saharan African societies from which many of the enslaved originated. Yet, as the art of Belkis Ayón has conveyed, Black Cuban women have also had a dire need for space in secrecy. The discursive lens through which I conceptualise the notion of space is gleaned from Katherine McKittrick’s deconstruction of the term; for her, ‘[G]eography, then, materially and discursively extends to cover three-dimensional spaces and places, . . . geographic imaginations, . . . exploring, and seeing, and social relations in and across space’ (2006, xiii). It is through this lens that we must deduce how 161

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Black Cuban women of the late nineteenth century would have interpreted their environments and thus recognised the need for reprieve in secret from spaces dominated by hegemonic power. This chapter will consider how Ayón’s works such as Perfidia (Treachery) and Resurrección (Resurrection), both of 1998, recognise power in invisibility and thus disrupt the established paradigm of the secret society, despite its mythology dictating the omission of female members. Black Cuban women needed access to these secret societies during the era of slavery, and this need for secrecy continued long after the abolition of slavery. Being included in such spaces would ensure the protection and dissemination of knowledge across generations, and opportunities for self-care. Indeed, to be secret is a viable strategy against the colonialist imperative of the hegemonic order. This need for secrecy is due to the forces that maintain imbalances of power socially, politically and culturally across different time periods. In this chapter, I will explore how Ayón’s art reveals imbalances of power in Abakuá given the omission of women which ultimately mirrors social and political inequities. I will in turn examine how her art illuminates the ways secrecy functions as an act of resistance that privileges Black subjectivity. Of significance in this endeavour is acknowledging the Abakuá secret society and its mythology as substantial archives of history and culture. Sikán’s death according to the myth, which will be explored at length in the next section, rings true to Saidiya Hartman’s assertion that ‘to read the archive is to enter a mortuary’ (Hartman 2007: 17). However, Sikán lives on in Belkis Ayón’s art and the artist circumvents the established truth of the origin of the Abakuá by creating a new narrative. Mythologies such as this and even written accounts of the lives of enslaved people throughout the African diaspora are often imbued with violence. The redemptive qualities endemic in Ayón’s art that indisputably emboldens Black female subjectivity makes feasible ‘the dream [which] is to liberate them from the obscene descriptions that first introduced them to us’ (Hartman 2008: 1–14).

Abakuá The Abakuá Secret Society is a mutual-aid organisation only for men and is the only one of its kind in the Americas. The Abakuá Secret Society of Cuba emerged in the 1830s from several variants of the Ékpè Leopard Society of West Africa’s Cross River Basin. This region in present-day southeastern Nigeria and

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southwestern Cameroon consisted of a number of ethnic groups including the Èfik, the Efut, the Oru, the Ekoi and the Ibibio who were not organised in kingdoms. Rather, they were dispersed sovereign communities united by networks of prestige. In the absence of a state, each community had its own lodge of the Leopard Society known throughout the region as Ékpè, Ngbè and Obè, the respective local terms for leopard (Miller 2009: 18). Since the societies were created in West Africa as a result of increased trading with the Europeans starting in the 1600s, these organisations established trading networks, and even when necessary joined forces for mutual defence (Miller 2009: 20). As the European demand for enslaved Africans increased, competition among various settlements for access to the coast intensified, resulting in several battles among the ethnic groups. This led to Ékpè members and members of Cross River Basin communities being enslaved and sent to the Caribbean starting in the early nineteenth century (Miller 2009: 21, 48). The term Abakuá is most likely derived from the Àbàkpà community of Calabar, the historical capital of the Cross-River Basin region. The members of Cross River Basin communities who were forcibly transported to Cuba ended up in Havana as well as Matanzas and Cárdenas beginning around 1800 and stopping as late as the 1860s. They would soon participate in the formation of cabildos de nación (nation groups), many of which included Ékpè who guided the emerging Abakuá. Arguably, their main impetus for creating these nation groups was to mobilise the various African ethnic groups to join forces with the creole Black Cubans in order to resist their common enemy, the Spaniards (Miller 2009: 50–51). Despite the addition of Catholic imagery that came with the founding of the first ‘white’ cabildo in 1863, the Abakuá secret society cannot be described as an African-European mixture, though it is syncretic in a number of ways (James 2008: 86).1 Given this history, it is understandable that the oral texts of Abakuá philosophy are held in secrecy. There are also very few written texts that reveal the origin myth of the Abakuá Society. However, we do have one version of the myth written by Serafín Quiñones (1994). This short version refers to Sikán of the Efut nation, who one morning went to the Oddán River to collect water in a vessel and unknowingly trapped a mysterious fish that would bring peace and prosperity to anyone who caught it. This fish also had the ability to utter a strange bellow that represented the voice of a deified ancestor, King Tanze, who was also a manifestation of Abasi, the Almighty God. When she placed the gourd with the fish on her head, Sikán heard the bellow and was the first to know the great

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secret, since she was automatically consecrated. With the authorisation of Iyamba, Sikán’s father, she was immediately hidden by Nasakó, the priest, in a place in the bush to avoid the disclosure of the secret to neighbouring communities who also wanted to have the fish. However, Sikán told the secret to her boyfriend, a prince of the Efik community, who then appeared before Sikán’s father, the head of the Efut nation. A pact was made with them to avoid war but Sikán was condemned to death for disclosing the secret. Nasakó, the priest, attempted to get the fish to make its sacred sound, but it died and Nasakó then built a sacred Ekwe drum with the skin of the fish to resuscitate the voice, but the voice was very weak. He then tried to do this with the skins of different animals: snake, crocodile, deer and ram, but the voice was never heard again. Nasakó finally made the sacred Ekwe drum with the skin of a male goat. When the sacred drum was consecrated, all the hierarchies and rituals of the Abakuá Secret Society were established (Hernández 2010: 18). Belkis Ayón would have learned about the myth and aspects of the Abakuá philosophy from books written by Cuban anthropologists such as Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera and Enrique Sosa, as well as from conversations with members of the society (Vives 2018: 25). She would even conjure characters of her own making that may have been indicative of the dispositions of late twentieth century Black Cuban women. Although not central figures in her compositions, their presence underscores the importance of expanding the established narratives of Abakuá to include a contemporary feminine perspective. Indeed, Ayón created a new version of the myth in her art that is still in keeping with the origin myth of the secret society (for more on Ayón’s art, view her website: www.ayonbelkis.cult.cu/en/home/). Still, one cannot discount the fact that much work needs to be done to unpack the complex imagery in the artist’s compositions. As curators such as Orlando Hernández, Gloria Riva and Chris von Christierson have pointed out, the perspective of practicing members of the Abakuá society will be hugely instrumental in this undertaking (Hernández 2010: 19). Nonetheless, these challenges should not deter one from beginning the process of deconstructing her compelling art.

Secrecy as Agency Given the levels of complexity and mystery endemic in Ayón’s art, simply having the ability to reveal reticent elements of her work ought not to be the ultimate

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goal when engaging with her collagraphy (sometimes spelt collography). The efficacy and power of the Abakuá society lay heavily on maintaining the secrecy of the society’s philosophy, oral texts and origin myth. Ayón’s art consequently possesses a similar tendency and compels one to consider the significance of secrecy. Information kept secret cannot simply be viewed as omissions from narratives waiting to be unearthed. Secrets created out of tradition and held by beholders of this information can be better appreciated as attempts to keep certain facts from ever being registered, written or knowable. Doing so makes it possible to view secrets as ‘a particular type of silence that is commensurate with nonexistence’, and thereby fundamental to the development and sustenance of marginalised enclaves of any society (Childs 2015: 37). The heavy reliance on the historical record renders one vulnerable to the limits of the archive and its numerous fictions of history (Hartman 2008: 1–14). Ayón’s prints thus function as an alternative form of archiving and knowledge production with a visual transcription that brings to the fore intersectional inequities often prevalent in post-slavery societies. This idea of secrecy can also be recognised as a means of space claiming that exists in the schism between invisibility and visibility. Due to the lack of a historical record, with no means of tracking down various plans, activities and accomplishments of the Abakuá, such a non-existence allows for a level of freedom in claiming space in the physical world in a way that is ambiguous, indeterminate. Black Atlantic peoples have survived in the terrains they occupy in large part by summoning their geographic imaginations and yearnings in order to manifest and thereby reclaim spaces and communities they sought to reconstitute.2 Ayón’s collagraphic works effectually refashion landscapes dominated by traditional geography in order to become newly organised spaces that serve to sustain the aspirations of the Abakuá society. Indeed, the fact that she was a woman complicates the patriarchal ethos of Abakuá, an organisation whose striving for secrecy only benefitted men. As a woman artist, Ayón visually rendered what is mandated as secret, even when there is no imagery of the origin myth of the Abakuá in existence. She essentially went against the established authority of the society. At the same time, the fact that she created these representations of Abakuá for the first time in her striking artworks brings to the fore Ayón’s pioneering invention of Abakuá imagery. She is congruously exercising a strategic subversion to find new possibilities for the secret society.3 Born in 1967 in Havana, Ayón graduated from the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte in 1991. The school was renowned for encouraging experimentation and

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a range of art practices. While international movements were influential, students were not expected to adhere to these trends but rather incorporate ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms that ultimately reflected the cultural pluralism endemic in Cuban culture. The 1980s and early 1990s in Cuba is often characterised as a renaissance period of artistic production and political liberation that countered the prior historical moment which was tinged with political repression. By the time Ayón began practicing as a professional artist, the era of ‘New Cuban Art’ was in full swing and such a liberated environment made it permissible for artists to utilise subtle forms of irony, metaphor and ambiguity in their engagement with political discourse while also employing a variety of experimental techniques in their artmaking. In addition, this era saw the establishment of the Havana Biennial of international art that focused particularly on art of the Third World (Oliver-Smith 2007: 21). At the same time, the early 1990s also marked the beginning of a severe economic depression in Cuba due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of subsidies and the tightening of the US embargo. Artists’ experiences of the recession were exacerbated by the removal of the Ministry of Culture and the government prohibiting them from accepting US dollars (Oliver-Smith 2007: 23). Given these circumstances, it is important to consider how the medium of collagraphy can be seen as a means of visually speculating secrecy as it pertains to the Abakúa.4 Collagraphy evolved over the course of the twentieth century into a printmaking technique that calls for the artist to place layers of materials such as fabric, string or even pieces of cardboard onto a rigid surface. The artist then coats the plate with acrylic gesso or any acrylic medium to make it impermeable, which is then revealed on the prints (Covey 2015: 137). It is clear that collagraphy could be an advantageous and effective medium of expression for those with limited resources. Such layering makes for visually complicated imagery that incorporates materials, textures, forms and shapes from disparate sources. Unlike other forms of artistic expression that invite the viewer to ponder on the process of creativity made visible on the surface of the medium, one is not given the same privilege when viewing a collagraphic work given the impermeable nature of the printing process. Although Ayón mastered this technique of printmaking out of necessity given the economic, social and political limitations of early 1990s Cuba, she nonetheless utilised a medium in which concealment is fundamental to its execution. Speaking about the influence of Abakuá in the development of her imagery, Ayón explained: There are countless variations of the popular imagination that relate the facts and that tell the origin of this type of secret society, and starting from them

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I visualize my variations, intertwining their signs with mine, utilizing the transformed collagraph – a medium which I identify very strongly with and which I adjusted to a style of working that I have been using for some time. It offers very peculiar visual information with effects and results, which in a certain way harmonize with the theme. Besides, the possibilities that are presented in the multiple qualities of the collage impression, . . . like her [Sikan], seem generally defined.5

The metaphorical underpinning of secrecy that binds the subject matter of Ayón’s artwork with her medium of choice also brings to the fore the reality that narratives of Black Cuban women are seldom known or even heralded in the same way as those of their male counterparts. These groundbreaking representations of the artist should thus be recognised as conduits of critical fabulation. Saidiya Hartman describes critical fabulation as ‘straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration’ (Hartman 2008: 6). Through visual representations of key female figures of the Abakúa origin myth such as Sikán, Ayón inserts the feminine presence into the male-only secret society in a way that affirms the importance of not excluding narratives that would offer a comprehensive telling of the Black Cuban experience in post-slavery Cuba. As a counter institution, Ayón’s reimagined secret society can be seen as a means of enacting a collective agency on the part of its institutionally oppressed members.

Womanhood Asserted, Secrets Revealed In Ayón’s work, Sikán is not represented by the male goat, which is sacrificed in a substitution ritual, or by the signature or anaforuana, the abstract symbol with which Sikán is also represented. Ayón herself served as a model for her representations of Sikán; this insertion of herself into the art reflects her connection to and intense preoccupation with the ideologies of the Abakuá (Hernández 2010: 19). Such is the case in Perfidia (Treachery) (1998) (Figure 8.1). Very evident in the structure of the composition, as in her other pieces, is the influence of Byzantine icons and Russian iconic painting. Also, as in other works, the composition features important characters associated with the origin myth of Abakuá. The figure on the right is Mpegó, one of the elevated dignitaries of the Abakuá hierarchy. He is holding his drum of authority and conveying to Sikán’s

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Figure 8.1 Belkis Ayón, Perfidia (Treachery), 1998. Collograph, 2080 × 2520 mm. Photography by: José A. Figueroa. Copyright © Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba.

father, King Iyamba, the need to sacrifice the princess. Princess Sikán is on the left, her body covered in scales. Ayón renders both her front and back in order to show her hiding the fish in her right hand. At the bottom right, Nasakó is depicted with graphic symbols (anaforuana) on his back that represent his status as a diviner. He presents a rooster for sacrifice. The adjacent character offers what could be the light of a candle to remove negative spirits. All of this is done to make the spirit of Sikán appear, without whom no ceremony can be performed. This work compellingly articulates the ultimate betrayal. Here, Sikán’s father enacts treachery, a deliberate breach of faith and trust, against his daughter who goes along with the dignitary’s decision to sacrifice the princess. Sikán’s dichotomised depiction in the composition serves to multiply her presence which is further illuminated by the mostly white colouring of her body. Without question, this multiplying effect increases the female presence so often lacking in Abakuá. As in many of Ayón’s works, the eyes of the characters are often looking

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out at the viewer. In Perfidia, Sikán’s gaze veers to our direction and, when one considers that Ayón often rendered Sikán as a self-portrait, it begs one to question who is truly looking out – Ayón or Sikán – who is she looking for, and what could that look be saying? Speaking of her representations of Sikán, Ayón expressed in an interview: ‘I see myself as Sikán, somewhat observant, intermediary, and revealing. I invent the imagery from my studies and experiences, since I am not a believer. Sikán is a transgressor and I see her as such, as I also see myself ’ (Sarusky 1999: 68–71). Often conveyed in Ayón’s work completely covered in scales, such a characterisation of Sikán presents a predicament. Like in Christianity, Sikán is recognised in Abakuá as the cause of eternal suffering of mankind, or indeed in the case of Sikán the possibility of that imminent threat. The origin myth declares that the secrets of the precious fish are not seen as being safe with the woman, and therefore the cause for the exclusion of women in the secret society. It is certainly fascinating that Ayón chooses to represent Sikán covered in the scales of fish, as if to constantly offer an explicit reminder of their connection. However, this visual marker can also serve to uplift and legitimise the role of women in this narrative that justifies their exclusion in the secret society. The parallels between Black Cuban women’s exclusion from Abakuá and the overall exclusion of women from other discursive spaces is tangible. Historically, women the world over have often been marginalised or excluded from numerous movements of political, social and cultural significance that serve to challenge any society’s hegemonic order. Despite these exclusionary practices, women have unquestionably been pivotal to the evolution and success of these movements. Indeed, Ayón’s art explicitly conveys the fact that, although Black Cuban women are forbidden in the Abakuá secret society, Sikán’s role in the origin myth is key and her presence is absolutely necessary in every Abakuá ceremony. Ayón’s decision to convey Sikán in the work purposely redeems her importance in the Abakuá and makes a claim on the necessity for the inclusion of women. In a similar vein, the recognition of such efforts to exclude and marginalise women in Cuba and in other localities can lead to new understandings of belonging for marginalised women regardless of geographic location. These new notions of belonging that are transnational in scope can embolden women such as the Black women of nineteenth century and early twentieth century Cuba who were dedicated to establishing counter-institutions to slavery and later forms of oppression via subaltern geographical arrangements (Pappademos 2011: 108, 125). Black Cuban women certainly needed access to these secret societies during the era of slavery, and this need for secrecy continued long after the abolition of

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slavery. Being included in such spaces would ensure the protection and dissemination of knowledge across generations, and opportunities for self-care. The Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde wrote relentlessly about the importance of self-care in her book A Burst of Light in which she draws parallels between battling cancer and the fight against anti-Black racism: ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare’ (Lorde 1988: 13). It was vitally important to care for oneself and others in secret during and after slavery. Indeed, to be secret is a viable strategy against the colonialist imperative of the hegemonic order. This need for secrecy is due to the forces that maintain imbalances of power socially, politically and culturally across different time periods. Black Cuban women would have realised how integral self-care was in efforts to subvert institutionalised oppression. And engaging in various forms of self-care in secret would have been an imperative part of the secret society’s resistance since, as mentioned earlier, their feats should truly be appreciated as attempts to keep certain facts from ever being registered, written or knowable. Curator Cristina Vives opines that Ayón’s compositions represent a universe of relationships within society that exceed the issues of gender, race and even religion given the homogenous and androgynous nature of the silhouettes (Vives 2018: 37). However, Abakuá societies who were organised around African philosophies were active forces in resistance movements throughout Caribbean history (Miller 2009: 21). A mere three decades prior to their arrival in Cuba, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) ended successfully and, as history reminds us, was a great source of inspiration for enslaved Africans throughout the Americas.6 Given Ayón’s devoted study of the society, it is not far-fetched to conclude that the artist’s compositions would have been informed by these histories and political leanings. Due to the Abakuá’s historical stance of anti-establishment, one can recognise the similarities between these secret societies and maroon societies. Fundamentally, marronage refers to a group of persons who have extracted themselves from a predominant hegemonic order in an effort to create a fully autonomous community. Typically, these communities of freedom would situate themselves as far as possible from the borders of the plantation, often settling in the highest mountains of a region or even in swamp areas. During the era of slavery, maroons existed in liminal suspension between slaves on a plantation and colonisers determining standards of normativity. They thus cultivated freedom in their own terms within an established space that allows for subversive social and cultural practices deemed antithetical to the institution of slavery. This freedom engendered in marronage can be described as a manifestation of a political

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imaginary in which ‘an agent’s imagined state of existence within the body politic’ bears a ‘temporality [that] is oriented toward the present as well as the future and it includes a concern for the social’ (Roberts 2015: 4–5, 7). Indeed, the unsanctioned spaces utilised by the lodges of Abakuá societies for their ceremonies during the era of slavery paralleled these antispaces of maroon societies, especially given the potential endemic in the political imaginary (Glissant 1989: 159–160). And even after the abolition of slavery, these spaces held the same signification. Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant describes antispace as limiting but still ‘diverse enough to multiply to infinity’. Although the land of suffering (during slavery) is the other’s possession, Glissant asserts that the poetics of the limited land of antispace is a poetics of excess and can be exhaustive (Glissant 1989: 159–160). These liminal spaces such as those utilised by secret societies thus become integral for survival but also for emotional and physical resuscitation. And Black Cuban woman needed access to these spaces just as much as their male counterparts. Undoubtedly, Ayón’s prints revealed this conundrum. Black Cubans had always endured institutionalised racism, but this was because of a predominant view that rejected Africa’s legacy in the formulation of a civilised and modern Cuba. Black Cuban cultural forms like Abakuá and rumba were seen as culturally backward and antithetical to any kind of national progress. In fact, many republican Black activists opined that Cuba’s African cultural inheritance worked against their struggle for public resources. And they firmly believed that there was a direct correlation between Black social and economic aspirations and ‘their ability to distance themselves from the cultural backwardness embodied by Africanist practices’ (Pappademos 2011: 125–126). Due to laws and ordinances banning the existence of these organisations well into the mid-twentieth century, events of African-derived religions and cultural organisations would often occur at night (Pappademos 2011: 126). And they would take place in the forest. Dense untilled botanical areas, the monte, where religious ceremonies transpired are often considered to be sacred. It is believed that orishas (the Yoruba deities of the Santeria religion) are invoked in these spaces, thereby allowing the sacred to come into the space (Cabrera 1975: 66–67). The dark natural environment suggested in Ayón’s prints persuasively renders Glissant’s concept of antispace, and aligns the Abakuá with the sacred. Such themes are also present in another powerful work, Resurrección (Resurrection) of 1998 (Figure 8.2). Here, Ayón meticulously conveys an important aspect of the inner workings of the secret society. The white figure is the Ndisime (aspirant) who is born into a new life in the Abakuá society after

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Figure 8.2 Belkis Ayón, Resurrección (Resurrection), 1998. Collograph, 2630 × 2120 mm. Photography by: José A. Figueroa. Copyright © Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba.

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being initiated. This is suggested by the anaforuana graphic symbol painted on the shaved head of the bent-over Black initiate figure just below him. In the background are curtains that could represent those of the iriongo, the secret place where the Ekwe, the sacred drum, is kept. To the left of the Ndisime is most likely the spirit of Sikán who emerges from behind the curtains that hides the sacred drum and comes to protect him. An open-mouthed face at the pinnacle of the work is rendered to mimic the sacred sound of the sacred drum. The significance of the sacred drum is explored in Resurrección along with Sikán’s vital role in its existence. And Ayón not only depicts the secret place where it is typically hidden, but she also strategically places Sikán in its vicinity behind the curtain. In many ways, this underscores Sikán’s importance and advocates for Black women’s need for the secrecy that the Abakuá provides. So not only is Ndisime resurrected. Here, Sikán is understatedly yet explicitly raised from death and inserted back into the society as a living and breathing figure. She is once again the surrogate for all Black women who seek refuge in the Abakuá. In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman proclaims that ‘to read the archive is to enter a mortuary’ when referring to any scholar’s desire and imperative to write counterhistories of slavery that challenge predominant historical narratives of the Black experience during slavery (Hartman 2007: 17). Yet, the Abakuá archive is indeed a mortuary for Sikán. The archive is ultimately Sikán’s fate since the secret myth states her inevitable death. However, Ayón’s art challenges the Abakuá archive by keeping Sikán alive in her art, truly creating a counter-history of the Abakuá. The sacred space depicted in Resurrección is indicative of marronage in many ways. In his exploration of marronage, Neil Roberts defines it as an act of flight that involves movement (one of four pillars). For him, ‘movement is the ability of agents to have control over motion and the intended directions of their actions. Flight is directional movement in one’s physical environment, embodied cognition, and/or the metaphysical’ (Roberts 2015: 17). Roberts also states that during marronage, one lives in a liminal position, and by extension the ability of flight one attains in marronage can be both real and imagined. Freedom, therefore, is not a place, but a state of being (Roberts 2015: 10–11). Resurrección reminds the viewer of the Abakuá secret society’s liminality, particularly with its setting in a forest in the dark of night. The presence of Sikán amplifies her crucial role and ultimately signifies the women who remain excluded from the Abakuá. In many ways, Sikán emblematises that directional movement of flight is integral to the Abakuá philosophy. As in the other work, this composition fully manifests Sikán as the metaphysical core of the Abakuá secret society as it exists in the

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Figure 8.3 Belkis Ayón, La Cena (The Supper), 1988. Collograph, 1370 × 3000 mm. Photography by: José A. Figueroa. Copyright © Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba.

liminal realm. And Ayón’s rendering of Sikán as part human and part fish exclaims the paralleled liminalities of both Sikán and the Abakuá. Sikán’s positionality in the secret society is yet again interrogated in La Cena (The Supper) (Figure 8.3). A seminal work, Ayón created three iterations of La Cena in 1988, 1991 and 1993. The composition depicts the event before Sikán’s sacrifice and the formation of the Abakuá society; this event is the initiation banquet (Iriampó) (James 2008: 109; Vives 2018: 53). The 1988 version is the only coloured composition of the three, and was created before Ayón concluded that white, Black and tones of gray offered the most suited palette for depicting the complicated imagery of the Abakuá (Vives 2018: 53). At first glance, the visual references to the Last Supper and the Christian apostles are unmistakable given the structure of the work and the details of the meal. However, Ayón’s striking work features eight women and only two men. Sikán, coloured green with a Black snake resting around her neck, sits in the middle of the table and stares directly at us as the drama around her unfolds. Only some of the figures are sitting while others are standing, all engrossed in Sikán’s centrally positioned form. The first standing figure on the left covers her eyes, while the figure next to her is blindfolded. The reddish-brown figure in front of her covers her mouth as if in shock as the ochre-coloured figure standing covers an eye with a fist. The second to right figure leans toward Sikán, and the male figure standing on the right has his back turned away from the entire group. Three other seated figures accompany Sikán, and all four of them have plates of fish in front of them on a table accented with other furnishings. On the left is a figure whose hand covers her face as she

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peeks through one eye. The next figure rests languidly on the table staring at the plate in front of him. On the other side of Sikán is a figure whose body is turned slightly away from the group as she covers her ears and closes her eyes. The pink background complements the array of colours, textures and patterns Ayón used to render each of the ten figures in the composition. The artist chose to pattern the background with a cross and circle motif that is indicative of the anaforuanas, the symbolic writing of the Abakuá (James 2008: 110). This work emphatically declares these women as occupying their rightful place in the secret society, despite the reality of their mandated exclusion. Here, they are participating in a lavish initiation banquet reserved for new members. Ayón acknowledged in an interview that La Cena references Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1490s), and she explains the significance of the presence of the two men: ‘[T]he composition consists of all women except two men – one to the right, the Black figure that is completely disinterested, as it appears as if he is going to leave the composition and the other that has a Black face (referencing minstrelsy or deception)’ (Sarusky 1999: 70). The inclusion of the two men in the work is the source of the disconcerted deportment of all of the women depicted here. Typically, once the secret has been shared, the initiate enters the room blindfolded and then gains insight that renders the bandage penetrable, allowing the eyes to see. Here, the presence of these two men has not only debased the feast but the entire initiation process itself (James 2008: 113). The plate of fishbones in front of the seated man in ‘Black face’ epitomises the symbolic destruction of the secret society that these women have invaded. Still, their defiant presence in such an important event for the secret society underscores their absence and various forms of gender inequities that existed and still exist in Cuban society. Without question, La Cena is a stark reminder of the displacement many women experience in different societies around the world. Given that Ayón served as a model for her representations of Sikán, who is present in almost every piece, the artist’s body of work may serve as a testament to Ayón’s desire to be a part of the Abakuá. Ayón’s inserting herself fully into the imagery through the rendered embodiment of Sikán reflects the artist’s own incarnation as this new identity. It is all the more puzzling that Ayón took her own life on 11 September 1999 at the age of 32. This was at the height of her career when she had acquired great prominence. Perhaps it speaks to her vulnerability and the burdens she conveyed in her art which she could not live with (Garcia 2018: 10). Nevertheless, her commanding and beautiful art will never be forgotten.

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Notes 1 James notes that ‘race in Cuba and much of the wider Caribbean, is determined by a complex and uneven combination of skin colour, hair texture, wealth, class and societal roles. In Cuba today one can be visibly Black, but obtain legal status as a white person’. 2 I borrow the terms geographic imaginations and geographic yearnings from McKittrick (2006: xiii, xx). 3 My thanks to Anna Indych-López for bringing this idea to my attention. 4 My thanks to Anna Indych-López for bringing this point to my attention. 5 As quoted in James (2008: 94). 6 For more on the impact of the Haitian Revolution, see Munro and WalcottHackshaw (2008).

References Cabrera, L. (1975) El Monte: Igbo, Finda, ewe Orisha, Vititi Nfinda: Notas Sobre las Religiones, la Magia, las Supersticiones y el Folklore de los Negros Criollos y el Pueblo de Cuba. Miami: Ediciones Universal. Childs, G.L. (2015) ‘Secret and Spectral: Torture and Secrecy in the Archives of Slave Conspiracies’. Social Text 33 (4): 35–58. Covey, S. (2015) Modern Printmaking: A Guide to Traditional and Digital Techniques. Berkeley, CA : Watson-Guptill. Garcia, S.E. (2018) ‘Overlooked No More: Belkis Ayón, A Cuban Printmaker Inspired by a Secret Male Society’, The New York Times, 2 April, Section D. Glissant, E. (1989) Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. J.M. Dash (trans.). Charlottesville, VA : University Press of Virginia. Hartman, S. (2007) Lose Your Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Hartman, S. (2008) ‘Venus in Two Acts’. Small Axe 12 (2): 1–14. Hernández, O. (2010) Without Masks: Contemporary Afro-Cuban Art, The von Christierson Collection. London: Watch Hill Charitable Foundation. James, E.M. (2008) Re-Worlding A World: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary. PhD dissertation, Duke University. Lorde, A. (1988) A Burst of Light: Essays. London: Sheba. McKittrick, K. (2006) Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Miller, I.L. (2009) Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba. Jackson, MI : University Press of Mississippi. Munro, M. and Walcott-Hackshaw, E. (2008) Echoes of the Haitian Revolution, 1804– 2004. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press.

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Oliver-Smith, K. (2007) ‘Globalization and the Vanguard’, in A.G.M. Chicuri (ed.), Cuban Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection. Gainesville, FL : University of Florida Press. Pappademos, M. (2011) Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic. Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press. Quiñones, S. (1994) ‘The Sikán Legend: The Origin of the Abakuá Myth’, in Ecorie Abakuá: Cuatro Ensayos sobre los Ñáñigos Cubanos. Havana: Ediciones UNI Ó N . Roberts, N. (2015) Freedom as Marronage. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Sarusky, J. (1999) ‘Hablar de los Mitos y el Arte’. Revolución y Cultura 2–3 (99): 68–71. Vives, C. (2018) Behind the Veil of a Myth: Belkis Ayón. Houston, TX : Station Museum of Contemporary Art.

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Keren Anavy’s Garden of Living Images: Transnational Landscapes as Spaces of Ecological Order Ketzia Alon and Aliza Edelman Translated from Hebrew by Sivan Raveh

A person is but his childhood landscape. Shaul Tchernichovsky (1951) This essay utilises a multidisciplinary approach to the transnational practice of Keren Anavy (b. 1974), an artist born in Israel who currently resides in New York. The discussion broadly analyses her site-specific installation, Garden of Living Images (2018), the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition in the United States organised at Wave Hill, a garden and cultural centre in the Bronx, New York. Garden of Living Images foregrounds the progressive development of Anavy’s environmental spaces that have developed around transcultural ideas of belonging, home and memory. Anavy arrived in New York with her family in late 2015 for an artist residency, but near the end of her first year was overcome by grief with the tragic news of her father’s sudden death in Israel.1 In many ways, the installation of Garden of Living Images chronicles the artist’s bereavement as she symbolically laid new roots in the United States without the reassuring emotional support of her father, a fundamental source of encouragement and companionship over the artist’s career who also participated in the planning and installation of many of her projects. Even as this was a deeply challenging period in the artist’s life, the words of the renowned Israeli poet Shaul Tchernichovsky (1951: 466) often served as a meaningful reminder for her practice that ‘A person is but his childhood landscape’. The experiential and empirical knowledge of landscape rests at the core of Anavy’s works. The research and presentation of Garden of Living Images address the artist’s positional bearing or locality by 179

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exploring a transnational dialogue about geography and place: the landscape embodies a ‘place’ for our critical understanding of home and homeland, imaginary topographies intimately connected to spatial and corporeal memories, and endowed as potential sources of liberation from historical, psychological and environmental crises. Anavy’s landscapes – installations and site works – strategically engage transnational feminisms through an expanded ‘enterprise of world-making’, an endeavour aptly described by Marsha Meskimmon (2013: 16) as an ecological world-making or ‘re-making’, which in its efforts to undermine ‘unidirectional temporality’ or contest utopian idealisation produce ‘ongoing, mutable processes and systems of relation that take place between living and non-living things’, in the revelation of their affective material transformations. Framed as an ecosystem of interdependent ideas and material structures about place and space, water and light, Anavy’s Garden of Living Images draws heavily upon the ‘worlding ecologies of transnational feminisms’ by privileging horizontality over hierarchy, embodiment over individuation, process over stasis and life over death, aspects of her agential pursuit to extract insights from the environment in which we live and belong through an effort to detoxify the landscape (Meskimmon 2020: 70). Anavy’s broader social practice has sought to examine the powerful ideological dynamics at work in the creation of landscapes that respond to Israel’s arid desert climate, reflecting upon the multifaceted ways that artificial approaches to nature reshape culture. Her process employs a global ‘ecological thinking’ in building knowledge about vital anthropocentric relationships fostered between nature and culture, and likewise those taxing social habitats and structures that impose ecological order on the natural world as ‘epistemologies of mastery’, as Lorraine Code proposes (2006: 50). On a more circumscribed scale, the ontological conceptualisation of the garden as a contested place and space has had great meaning for Anavy. The garden, as part of a multidimensional geographical and cultural system, is cultivated and engineered to appeal ethically and metaphysically to a sense of natural order, organisation and control, revealing underlying social and political complexities that may be framed as ‘an ecology of interrelated and connected thoughts, spaces, activities, and symbols’ (Francis and Hester 1990: 2). Anavy brought this heightened sensibility of an ‘ecology’ of transnational places and spatial histories – a ‘nature-under-control’ – to her installation in New York. Garden of Living Images began as a local study of the natural flora and fauna in the Wave Hill garden that materialised technically by the implementation of an innovative ecosystem of water basins and colourfully

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drawn Mylar scrolls. In this artificial ecosystem, water, an elemental chemical compound and liquid, was activated and employed viscerally to dissolve ink, submerge surfaces and initiate contact among media in the constructive manipulation of painterly properties. However, Anavy entrusted water with greater value than merely aqueous resourcefulness, treating it congruously to what geographer Jamie Linton (2010: 6, 7, 14) described as water’s inseparable ‘processual nature’ from human ‘social and ecological relations’. Linton (2010: 7, emphasis in original) argues that our modern existence depends equally on water’s ‘ecological dimensions’ in order to sustain ‘wealthy terrestrial, as well as aquatic ecosystems’, as much as on water’s ‘cultural dimensions, as in the myriad ways that water articulates with people to produce different meanings and different kinds of relationships’. Water is called upon in Garden for Living Images for its behavioural expressivity as a living social agent and biodynamic force that has the potential to bridge geographies and places collectively. Yet water also operates strategically, during periods of ecological crisis, as a physical border that displaces and dislocates resources and communities. Above all, water is manifested as a material trace embodying acts of mourning and memory. The landscape in Israel is a place strongly associated with heightened sociopolitical issues, often becoming Anavy’s point of artistic departure as a charged and marked site from which she attempts to redeem it from historical, geographical and ecological burdens. Her engagement with the landscape as a signifier of nationhood and the ideological struggles of Jewish and Israeli identity were profoundly informed by the ideas of anthropologist Zali Gurevitch. In his important essay On Israeli and Jewish Place, Gurevitch (2007: 14) espoused notions of Hamakom or place: A place is never neutral, it is soaked and charged with history and politics, with life stories. Even more so the Israeli place, which from its inception was largely organised by rivaling parties, wars, conflicts, Occupation, Hebraisation (of the land and its inhabitants, and of the language, the labor, the wilderness). From the outset Israel was a place of contention; an ideological, pedagogical place, connected to a history of occupation and settlement, where ‘writing’, ‘dictating’ and ‘revising’ a place not only occur within the realm of ancient faraway history, but are ongoing.

Affected by this implacable feeling of unease inseparable from the concept of the Israeli place, Anavy understands the battered Israeli landscape not for what it appears to be but for what persists beneath the surface as layers of history and as narratives and memories often only partially exposed from within.

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Through a related mode of ‘ecological thinking’ that underscores the interdependent geographical negotiations between place and space in the fraught political regions of Israel and the Middle East, Anavy’s art has thus broadly reflected the perpetual impact of humans on and of the landscape in the current geological epoch of the Anthropocene (Hamilton et al. 2015). By critically interrogating new territories and subjects, Anavy’s methods are in line with the approaches of cultural anthropologists summarised in the anthology Exotic No More: Anthropology for the Contemporary World. In her essay, ‘Toxic Life in the Anthropocene’, contributor Margaret Lock (2019: 225) writes that the ‘environment – nature – is exhibiting all the signs of stress, trauma, toxicity and abuse usually associated with suffering human bodies’, and that ‘a new geological epoch exists because humans are making over nature writ large to such an extent that it is irreparably transformed’. Comparably, the cultural historian Irit Rogoff (2015: 38–41) has proposed the theoretical framework of ‘exhausted geographies’ as those environments in societal and ecological crisis and conflict, such as the territories of the Middle East, whose historically manufactured and present-day political and economic structures are unsustainable. Astrida Neimanis (2017: 19), whose feminist analysis has expanded upon the interconnectedness of water, bodies and materiality, concurs metaphorically that in the Anthropocene, the ‘waters that we comprise are never neutral; their flows are directed by intensities of power and empowerment’. Following these positions, we may argue that Anavy’s artistic projects are working against such toxic ecological transformations through her own exploration of the ‘exhausted’ landscape, which serve as a dense capsule that propagate and manage the human stresses of this world. In so doing, Anavy’s art seeks to detoxify the place, whether Israel or the United States, in order to undo transnationally the dense capsule of landscape–place–environment from a different angle each time. She offers (2019), ‘I feel that I am consolidating a hybrid identity, which, along with my connection to the position of foreigner, affords me a different perspective on things from the place that I am in’. Through her artistic creation of ecological orders – cultivated artificial environments – we find Anavy’s feminist and material agency in the landscape.

Artificial Environments From the beginning of her career, the exploration of environments and ecosystems was a way for Anavy to contrast culture and nature by forming

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artificial natures without copying the ‘thing itself ’. In her early realistic oil painting series titled War Medals (2002), Anavy explored Israel’s contested narratives between humanity and the forested Israeli lands – sabra hedges, oak forests and olive groves, eucalyptus and pine trees – veiled with a semitransparent colourful layer veritably representing the military war medals of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), awarded to soldiers who participated in Israeli wars. Anavy interpreted the images as a symbolic allusion to the value ascribed to the conquest and occupation of the landscape, a visual conflation of military histories and nature enacted through the aggressive development of planted woodland forests of the Israeli territories and representative of the prosperity of the Zionist movement and its ecological zealousness, at the environmental cost of erasing the ancient dryland.2 For War Medals, Anavy claimed to perceive the scenery not as nature but rather as culture: ‘The scenery is a narrative of memory, of scars. I tread on the borderline between political art and escapism, endeavouring to offer the intermediate space in-between. This is the space where the viewer can confront topical-political issues alongside artistic-aesthetic questions pertaining to the history of the landscape and to the [oak] forest theme in art history’ (Maor 2003: 63). Spaces intended for pastoral recreation are thus indelibly connected to collective memorials. In her art the Israeli geography is a ‘landscape–place’ where the co-existence of beauty and pain, naïve yearning and longing, are in perpetual recalibration. Anavy has explored these liminal geographic spaces between political art and escapism since her earliest investigations as a graduate student at Haifa University, where she obtained her MFA in 2007. She examined the abstract patterns and ornamentation of the black-and-white checkered Middle Eastern headdress or ‘keffiyeh’, commonly associated in the media with images of Islamic terrorists, and correlated by the artist with the black vertical stripes of the tiger’s fur coat. Through this exchange between headscarf and bestial skin, Anavy created a new hybrid that investigated the powerful aesthetic of camouflage while positioning herself and her viewers in a delicate intersectional process of exploring the artistic ‘self ’ in relationship to the stranger and to the unknown. Anavy’s works have often exposed underlying power relationships in socio-political contexts. In an untitled installation from 2014 at the Ashdod Art Museum, Israel, Anavy filled a room with burnt hamra soil that turned from red to black, the type of soil once used to build homes in Israel that reinforced a connection to the country’s history, land and earth (Figure 9.1).3 She inscribed an intricately patterned design into the layer of soil in the form of a symmetrical Persian garden or rug, which also

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Figure 9.1 Keren Anavy, Untitled, 2014. General installation view, metal cutout, 180 × 90 cm, and soil drawing floor installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Meidad Suchowolski. Courtesy of the artist and Ashdod Art Museum, Ashdod, Israel.

conveyed the illusory arabesque impressions of a predatory tiger and the keffiyeh pattern that emerged through the light and shadow from an incised metal cutout set in the room’s window. These subtle structural juxtapositions – between surface and ground, textile and ornament, and beauty and distress – are fundamental elements of her projects that suggest the hidden ecological layers of memory as new bodies emerge from the earthly mixtures. Over the years, the concept of place has shifted and ‘transformed from a concrete place to increasingly fragmentary, universal and surrealistic environments’, Anavy suggests (Alon 2015). As her

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installations have developed, there became more subtle negotiations and shifts between the landscape and garden portrayed as an ecological microcosm. Anavy’s practice is likewise punctuated by collaborative projects with other artists, a feminist agency that inspires experimentation and the transdisciplinary development and exchange of ideas. She has partnered for over ten years with the artist Tal Frank (b. 1973, Israel, based in Mexico City), working together on gallery exhibitions, residencies and art programmes. Their exploration of the ideas of homeland and the inhabitation of different territories exists at the nexus of archival research and traditional painting and sculpture; together they produce spaces that appear as the interactions between the local and the global. As Aliza Edelman (2019) offers, ‘The relationship of Anavy and Frank emblematises the tumbleweed’s hardscrabble, zigzag course. Both artists envision the physical dimensionality of their artworks as wide networks that amplify and realign the shared topographies of Israel, Mexico and the United States. Their mutual practices map varying routes and entry points for coterminous landscapes and cycles of existence’. Hothouse, a joint installation between Anavy and Tal Frank at Dan Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2012, recontextualises a hothouse, typically designed to regulate nature and cultivate produce, newly envisioned as a fictive breeding ground for gems and artifacts. Their environment is a seductive ecological order producing objects of beauty that break a fundamental pact with nature by positing the landscape’s dense capsule as an illusory space rife with contradictions. Anavy’s monumental black ink drawings were inspired by the Ecological Greenhouse founded in 1977 by the artist and educator Avital Geva in Kibbutz Ein Shemer in northern Israel. Geva’s communal greenhouse, serving youths from a cross-section of the country’s population and Palestine, was realised as an interdisciplinary and experimental site for artistic, social and scientific research on environmental ecology and the agricultural challenges of sustainability broadly faced by Israel.4 Drawn by Anavy, the greenhouse architecture’s glass walls and roof hover above viscous ink pools of earth and diamonds, a confrontational geological arena where ink is tamed, governed and mastered to resist its natural fluid properties (Figure 9.2). In this artificial framework, beauty is interlaced with morbid overtones, a longing for a new order of things imagined via an unfounded utopia ‘housed’ in a diamond-like structure – diamonds thus representing unattainable ideals of flawless order and symmetry, felicity and wealth. Within the gallery’s pristine white walls, Frank complements and responds to these drawings by a gritty pile of burnt sand and aluminium orbs that foregrounds the greenhouse’s turbulent proposition, ‘a

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Figure 9.2 Keren Anavy, Hothouse (detail), 2012. Ink on paper, 150 × 450 cm. Photo: Yigal Pardo. Courtesy of the artist.

utopic site for controlled botany that, paradoxically, draws attention to our unbridled environmental stresses’ (Edelman 2019). Together, Edelman (2019) offers, these ‘visual relationships reveal the tenuous balance upheld by the ecological order’.

Garden of Living Images The subject of the garden as an artificial ecosystem takes centre stage in her installation in the Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill in 2018. It featured thirteen large-scale paintings (each 300 × 90 cm) executed on transparent Mylar, suspended from the ceiling, and partially inserted into ten polyethylene basins or small pools filled with water and ink. A connective holistic thread coalesces the individual material surfaces of fine pencil drawings, ink drippings and stains. These images resonate profoundly with the surrounding gardens at Wave Hill – trees, leaves, flowers and meadows – amplified by the scenery beyond the Sunroom’s large glass doors and windows. Concealing the windows with a

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transparent colourful vinyl, light spatially disperses and penetrates the paintings to appear visibly from the exterior grounds as an activated sacred space, a stained glass interiority or precious jewellery box (Figure 9.3). As in her installation Hothouse, there is no intention to deceive the viewer by way of trompe l’oeil optical illusions or to suggest an authentic greenhouse through the use of real plants. Rather the desire is to strip the garden down to primary compositional aesthetics of colour, form, light and shadow. Curated by Eileen Jeng Lynch, the accompanying exhibition text (Jeng Lynch 2018) states: Anavy’s artificial garden references hanging Chinese scrolls and the longing for an imagined territory, such as the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Interested in how gardens reflect the connections between nature and culture in Eastern and Western societies, Anavy explores the meanings and purposes of gardens as sites of reflection and retreat, ‘pockets of nature’ within urban landscapes.

Referred to as both a ‘conservatory’ made of abstract paintings and industrial materials, and as an artificially constructed site, Jeng Lynch further observes ‘the

Figure 9.3 Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images, 2018. Installation view (detail), ink and coloured pencils on transparent Mylar, polyethylene basins, water, ink, vinyl, dimensions variable. Photo: Stefan Hagen. Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill, Bronx, New York.

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relationship between decision-making and the natural and unexpected processes that occurs in a garden – a cultivated landscape’ (2018). Anavy further reflects on the power of nature’s cyclical forces in Garden of Living Images. Guided by her interest in botanical and cartographic resources, the Mylar paintings reference flora and fauna indigenous to the environment. As Anavy (2019) described her artistic approach: I studied the perennial flowers and plants growing at Wave Hill as I worked on the piece, visiting the place frequently, drawing, taking photos, speaking to the gardeners, and noting how the changing seasons affected the garden’s colours and patterns. Eventually I decided to focus on specific flora that grow in the fall – the time of the exhibition – as my point of departure. The late autumn plants were the basis of a scheme of complementary colours that appear in the paintings and inform the colour scale for the entire space. The plants I chose as my inspiration also bear characteristics that carry symbolic or metaphoric meanings, plants whose spread in the garden symbolises wandering and migration.

She was drawn to the burgundy colour of the pom-pom-like seed heads of the orange peel clematis (Clematis tibetana), a climbing vine in the Wave Hill flower garden, and how the clusters of seeds eventually break apart and drift away. The installation was accompanied by a visual guide showing the relationships between paintings and flowers, whereby visitors could compare the abstract paintings inside with the natural resources growing beyond the doors and windows (Jeng Lynch 2018). These additional layers and connections throughout the landscape build rhizomatically: from the interior and exterior realms of the Sunroom and grounds of Wave Hill to the ever-widening reaches of the Riverdale neighbourhood and onto the larger borough of the Bronx and New York City. At Wave Hill, Anavy sought to emphasise the garden as a place of tranquillity, a former private estate overlooking the Hudson River and cultural centre in the heart of the wealthy Riverdale neighbourhood surrounded by the Bronx. As an example of an ideal garden that functions as a natural pocket or ‘utopia’ in the fabric of a larger urban borough, however, the socio-political dynamics of environmental resources are often leveraged and excluded from inner-city areas.

Home and Shelter Even though the Garden of Living Images was imagined as a ‘garden within a garden’, a protective place, shelter, or oasis countering the disorder of the outside

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world, Anavy’s ‘conservatory’ of paintings was ineluctably conceived as a politicised space. Her aesthetic vision exploring the topology of the garden as an ever-shifting territory encompasses transnational notions of home and homeland, shelter and belonging. Her impressive site-specific installation House & Garden (2015; see Figure 9.4) at The Janco-Dada Museum in Ein Hod, Israel, explored the garden’s spatial complexities as a transnational site or capsule about the critical nature of home and shelter. For this solo exhibition, Anavy utilised intricately designed paper cutouts of imaginary plants and latticework wood cutouts to realise the abstracted interconnected spaces of a home and garden, one whose ‘paper windows and low ceiling overlook an exterior world of nature and fantasy. The cutouts exude a sense of temporariness accompanied by enchantment’ (Kraus 2015: 23). Light filtered through the fragile paper elements to induce hypnotically woven tapestries of an intimate house of sparse hallowed beauty. Anavy’s technical process of paper cutting, moreover, reimagines the geography of the home through an attentiveness to the raw materiality of the paper, utilised not as a surface but as a ‘building block’ to reconfigure boundaries and topographical perspectives (Gatenio 2017: 104). As the curator Ora Kraus (2015: 23) offers, this work raised important questions about the psychological significance of one’s ‘locality and the longing for unknown and imagined territory’. Notably, two layers of large wood cutouts, fashioned as a mashrabiyalike screen (a traditional Islamic ornamental screen or window on edifices typically featured in Arabic homes and made of wood), hangs predominantly on the wall at the entrance, ‘serving as a gate’ to the house that ‘appears to be made of light lace, with more holes than material’, and reinforcing the display’s ‘presence of emptiness and of absence’ (Kraus 2015: 23). Introducing a geographical perspective on home, Allison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2006: 2) argue that as much as home is a place, it is a spatial imaginary, ‘a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings . . . which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connect places’. The paper roof cutouts are also reminiscent of the structure of a Sukkah, a temporary home constructed of canvas or fabric walls with a canopy of branches or palm tree leaves, symbolising nomadism in Judaism, and designating a major Jewish festival and holiday commemorating the sheltering of Israelites in the wilderness; interestingly, Anavy moved to New York in the same year following this exhibition. Anavy repurposed many of the paper cutouts in House & Garden from an earlier exhibition called Southern Rose (2013–2014) at Rehovot Municipal Art Gallery, Israel. This exhibition integrated three galleries into a ‘virtual spatial

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Figure 9.4 Keren Anavy, House & Garden, 2014–2015. Installation view (detail), wood and paper cutouts, dimensions variable, The Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Israel. Photo: Shahar Tamir. Courtesy of the artist.

structure’ or ‘total environment’ filled with abstract paper cutouts, wood cutouts and large-scale ink-on-paper hanging scrolls based on stones and diamonds. As Kraus (2013: 10) recalled, the artist led the viewer on a journey through an abstract metaphysical field recalling plant roots and marine animals: ‘The exhibition’s center is the third space, which Anavy calls my cathedral. The room is composed only of white paper cutouts, which float like a screen above each room’s windows and serve as the virtual stained glass’.5 The installation’s centrepiece, Southern Rose, floats alongside the hanging paper cutouts. Constructed out of circular iron wrapped in paper, it is fashioned after a mashrabiya, consolidating her influences in stained glass, arabesques and the mashrabiya of Islamic architecture, the art of the East. Kraus further described the fragility and impermanence of Anavy’s ‘transient cathedral’ on the verge of collapse. The aesthetics of places such as Tel Aviv, Old Jaffa, Wadi Nisnas in Haifa and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem collate into a transnational mélange with the aesthetics of Western Africa, where Anavy spent part of her childhood.6 During this period she extensively researched the spiritual, symbolic and architectural elements characterising the histories of gardens. If the purpose of the garden, as Valerie Smith (2005: 13) summarises, is to “‘provide shelter . . . from

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the change and contradictions we feel in relation to nature and other humans” ’, then our impulse will be to create an idealised garden because the reality outside is too terrifying to contemplate.7 Perversely, to hold our interest, a garden must exhibit contrast and conflict, which is ‘guaranteed by the fallibility of humanity’. This tension embedded in notions of Paradise equally conveys the necessity for defence, Smith asserts, and plays with this idea of a ‘reconciliation of opposites’. Likewise, Vanessa Remington (2015: 10) identifies how signs of the earliest recorded desert gardens in Persia ‘established many centuries before the tradition of cultivation was established in Western Europe’, such as those of King Cyrus II (d. 530 BCE), featured ‘many of the elements that would come to define the idea of Paradise, including flowing water channels’. Roy Strong (2015: 6) clarifies further: Gardens belong firmly within the dialogue between art and power. The very act of creating one implies the subjection of the world of nature, firstly over the terrain involving the elements of earth and water, and then over the deployment of trees and plants in the form of their orchestration through placing and training. Time and again the garden, as it creates paradise on earth both within the Christian and Islamic traditions, comes to mirror the state.

Gurevitch (2007: 103–107) reinforces the idea that the question of ‘place’ began in Paradise, the paradisiacal creation of an interior garden from which Adam and Eve were expelled; by extension, the garden is an inner world or place among the larger world, a cosmos surrounded by chaos, but truth lies not in humanity’s assimilation within the garden but from a restlessness summoned through our expulsion from it, a prohibition on touching the tree of knowledge that inspires a deeper understanding and knowing of place. As Evan Eisenberg cleverly attests in The Ecology of Eden (1998: 94): Once, wilderness was our home. Looking back, we endow it with all the longedfor comforts of home. We see a garden: a place wholly benign, a place of harmony and plenty . . . We begin to destroy Eden, and thereby expel ourselves . . . Wilderness only becomes the earthly paradise when it is looked back upon as the point of origin.

Underscoring such dialogues about power and paradise, Anavy’s installations explore the garden’s precipitously artificial ecological balance between fantasy, sanctuary and turmoil. Alon’s (2015) critical summary of House & Garden points to its subtle imaginary dynamics, where ‘viewers feel that they are under a

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sheltering arbour, a soft canopy of vegetal elements’, while revealing the home and garden’s unstable buttressing and inevitable decline: The garden is an island enclosed in space, where a complex dialogue of nature– culture power structures is held. Whereas the garden represents a model of refined taste, of the cosmic order, it is bound to be disrupted by those who walk and play in it. Anavy’s gardens depict an accelerated process of decay: wild growth, putrefaction and entropy replace the garden of the delicate papercuttings she created with fluidity, ripping, slowly dissolving the meticulous order she constructed so laboriously, that now dissipates before our eyes.

Stressing its implicit artificiality, Anavy treats this temporary ‘fantastic cathedral’ of paper cutouts, born from the earlier crumbling cathedral of Southern Rose, as a potent symbol of yearning, a desire to belong to and imitate the Western European tradition and order, however unsuccessfully, while subsisting in the heart of the Middle East. Upon leaving Israel, moreover, Anavy’s practice turned symbolically to the disruption of the garden’s authentic utopian proposal, further conceived in Garden of Living Images as a transnational stage for choreographing and directing corporeal and geological bodies.

Utopia The presentation of Garden of Living Images included a collaborative performance and intervention called Utopia (2018) co-organised with the dance company Valerie Green/Dance Entropy, and performed in the Glyndor Gallery adjacent to the Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill. As an interdisciplinary work developed and presented at multiple venues throughout New York City, in addition to Wave Hill, Utopia (Figure 9.5) investigates embodied spatial movements and choreographic expressions to challenge the boundaries of shelter and refuge within an environment that is perpetually built and deconstructed;8 the garden as an ecological ‘utopic modus’ is a perception of place that further questions whether utopia exists as a concrete embodiment or as a psychological state of residence. Anavy adapted her large-scale scroll paintings into ten-foot cylindrical pillars manipulated by dancers acting as physical agents in a garden-in-motion, as images from the Garden of Living Images are simultaneously projected onto the floor. The dancers’ choreography organises the pillars in various balanced positions and kinetic shapes that symbolically recall sheltering forms and construct the painted rods as tree trunks (the realm of nature and forests),

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goddesses (realms of institutionalised and non-institutionalised violence), planks (building materials and scaffolding) and divine rods, such as Moses’s. In Anavy’s (2020) description: The Mylar painting scrolls, suspended in space like the fabled Babylonian Hanging Gardens, have become architectural elements or pillars. The piece is about creation and destruction in a utopian society. It refers to the perception of place, questions whether utopia might be an internal place, investigating intimate moments alongside social ones, and serving metaphorically for the sociopolitical status of destruction and creation. The notion of what it means to be safe persists within an environment, enhanced by structures that are continually built and deconstructed by the dancers as they move the painted pillars for the duration of the performance.

In the profound interrelationships between Garden of Living Images and Utopia, Anavy’s work proposes a liberating ‘bio anatomical-environmental awareness’ – demonstrating, in ways radically initiated by the groundbreaking choreographer and dance teacher Anna Halprin, an ‘ecological respect for how human beings move in natural and human-made space’ (Bennahum et al. 2017:

Figure 9.5 Keren Anavy in collaboration with Valerie Green/Dance Entropy, Utopia, 2018. Performance at Danspace Project, New York. Photo: Stephen Delas Heras. Courtesy of the artist and Valerie Green/Dance Entropy.

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17, 19). In Utopia, bodies migrate together and apart in constant flux, raising and collapsing shelters, borders and barriers, and reacting, like water does, to mobilise corporeally in order to resist, re-make and detoxify the social conditions of its exhausted landscape. As Neimanis (2017: 5) poetically confers, ‘Water extends embodiment in time – body, to body, to body . . . facilitative and directed toward the becoming of other bodies’. As figurative bodies of water, the dancers geologically traverse historical narratives of time and place, and manifest retaliatory and ethical forces set within the parameters of an artificial garden; their bodies allow the world to be taken apart and put back together ad infinitum. Taken differently, Anavy casts light on a special type of bodily presence that falls into the ‘ordinary’ social gesture or action, participating in the marking of positions each time we visit a garden, a botanical park or an exhibition, as we congregate, pause, observe and disperse across terrains.

Water and Mourning As much as Anavy broadly conceived of Garden of Living Images as a public stage for embodied movement through the landscape, it was also a privately baroque experience, a ‘melancholic’ play on mourning. Anavy has often turned to the theme of the garden at times of great distress in her life, and she was equally drawn to it as her plans in New York unravelled with her father’s death. Garden of Living Images may also be understood as the ‘work of mourning’, proposing meaningful questions about living after loss, and by extension what role water plays as part of the universal human experience of grief. Marking the stages of grief, the renowned psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969: 2) wrote it is ‘inconceivable for our unconscious to imagine an actual ending of our life here on earth’. Anavy’s creation of an artificial garden in New York was an abstraction of placeless burial markers for the one irreplaceable person in Israel, her father; and the garden at Wave Hill became a metaphorically private shelter for solace and restoration that signified her return to the homeland of her father. In Wilted Garden, Dark Summer Houses, the Israeli poet Israel Eliraz (2017: 33) expressed the slow ‘mourning work’ of the garden and the home as the work of life: Left and took a brush / sought to make a line / One hour passed then another / A day went by. No line / drew on the notebook, to / sketch / a little house /

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entered / and never left. I sat / to eat before the pile of light / picked an orange for its scent / and read. (in Yeo Tze): ‘She who lit my heart / is gone’.

Tending to the garden and home, the soil and plants, tends to the memory of the dead and invigorates the soul, an unremitting passage of time that brings forth vitality through our sensorial bodily responses to water and light. In the Sunroom of Wave Hill, a simple hydraulic delivery system was activated through the use of large basins: coloured ink dissolved in the water gradually seeped through the hanging Mylar scrolls, climbed and generated new material bodies in cooperation with the existing paintings. Water has its own bodily nature and extant life, and by encountering the original works reshaped them in unexpected and uncontrollable ways. As Neimanis (2017: 4) poignantly contends, ‘As bodies of water we leak and seethe, our borders always vulnerable to rupture and renegotiation’. The pools of fluid ink and hanging scrolls, the symbolic collection of tears, hardly contain the vulnerable work of mourning, but together they rupture spatially, untamed, as part of an affirmative life cycle that connects territories and bodies through the disintegration and rebirth of materials. In his daughter’s art, the death of the father materialises abstractly as an ecological body of water. Throughout the course of her career, Anavy (2019) has pursued water as a central ‘artistic subject charged with various cultural identifications related to architectural structures for different types of management’. In cosmopolitan Mexico City, Anavy’s immersive site-specific installation, Composition for Stones of Gold (2018), in collaboration with Tal Frank, investigated the archaeological ruins of historic water-related structures, in Mexico and Israel, to scrutinise the effects of long-term global water scarcity in both countries. This was visualised through the recreation in wood of a glorious sixteenth century Romanbased watercourse called Padre Tembleque, originally constructed in Mexico with Mesoamerican structural techniques; the structure also held symbolic associations with the Roman aqueduct in Israel.9 However, their wood armature was burdened under the weight of unhewn pyrite stones, known as fool’s gold, shining light on what was once a functional infrastructure for the passage and migration of water, now unsustainable. Anecdotally, water was always carefully conserved and protected in the public domain during the artists’ childhoods in Israel. Shlomit Dror (2018) analysed the disillusionment presented by the installation’s scattered raw stones across the floor and armature, conceived as a ‘shattered surrounding on the one hand, but also . . . the likelihood that one could build something from these fragments’. More than anything, Composition for Stones of Gold is about water without water in the era of the Anthropocene. As

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Jamie Linton (2010: 17) has argued, ‘The modern idea of water as an objective, homogenous, ahistorical entity devoid of cultural content is complemented by its physical containment and isolation from people, and reinforced by modern technologies of management that have enabled us to survive without having to think much about it’. While their exhibition underscored the ancient foundations of water transportation that connected humanity both socially and territorially, and which joins us still, it directed us further to contemporary climate crises and political disputes catalysed untenably by the toxic exploitation and exhaustion of global and regional resources in the Americas and the Middle East. In the philosophical lectures compiled by Emmanuel Lévinas in God, Death and Time (2002: 33, 37), death appears alongside the image of time as the ‘end of the duration of a being in the uninterrupted flow of time’: It is not possible to fail to read the end and annihilation in the phenomenon of death. But this end does not coincide with the destruction of an inanimate object or a living being of some kind, or with the erosion of a stone or the evaporation of a body of water, where there always remains some material after the destruction of the configuration, and where the destruction itself is placed between a before and an afterward that belong, along with the destruction, to the same time line, the same appearing, the same world. Does the end that is death coincide with the destruction of a form or a mechanism – or are we disquieted by a surplus of meaning or lack thereof, when man’s death is in question?

Following Lévinas’s ethical proposals, Anavy’s conjoined themes of death and water in the Garden of Living Images turn to questions of place and nothingness, an interrogation of what ‘being-in-the-world’ means where the annihilation and destruction of living objects and beings challenge the material trace and the infinite. Yet her study of the non-ending materialities of water, colour and light speak to her landscapes’ resistance to the ontological notions of death. Anavy’s living images in her garden at Wave Hill shine in the death glow emanating from the flickering of colours and shapes. Viewed externally from the grounds, the Sunroom reverberates with light like a colourful trove of jewels, reminiscent of emblazoned temples, a dynamic dance of abstract flowers and shadows. In Anavy’s hands, the ‘white cube’ becomes a paradise, a sanctuary, a metaphysical space that carries a heavy burden concealed as a powerful ecological agent: water. In Garden and Climate, Chip Sullivan (2002: 191) argues that ‘water is the final, but perhaps most important, element in Plato’s theories of “solids” that comprise the universe. As a conceptual model, the geometric figure representing water, the

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20-side icosahedron is capable of holding the other “spatial” configurations of earth, air, and fire, illustrating the independence of elements that constitute life’. Through an enduring enterprise to ‘grasp the meaning of life’, the creation of Garden of Living Images became a synergistic place, home and shelter – an ecological order that critically ruptures, re-organises and re-makes nature and culture (Francis and Hester 1990: 12–13). In the same way that the earth may be viewed as an interconnected system controlling and calibrating various geological and biologically scaled systems, the garden may be understood as its own worldly heterotopia. Anavy’s transnational ecosystems, which range from politicised paintings to hothouses and dry aqueducts, strategically calculate and circulate relationships between mastery and chaos, sustenance and exhaustion, seduction and disruption. In search of the meaning of place, her deep understanding of the ecological materialities around us inspire spatially immersive environments that cross boundaries and detoxify the dense anthropocentric capsule of our geographies. Above all else, Anavy’s transnational agency is embodied in Garden of Living Images through the sacred act of mourning, reflecting an ecologically feminist process of caring for the self, the home and the landscape, determining what awaits the living in our forced expulsion from the centres of paradise.

Notes 1 Keren Anavy (www.kerenanavy.com) was an international artist resident at The New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation, Brooklyn, New York, from October 2015 to March 2016. 2 Introduced in the 1960s, the forestation projects of the Keren Kayemeth LeIsraelJewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) is a current topic of environmental and political debate. 3 Curated by Yuval Biton and Rony Cohen-Binyamini, Until You Get Out My Voice at the Ashdod Art Museum addressed Mizrahi identities (‘Mizrahi’ is Hebrew for ‘Eastern’ and refers to Arab Jews from Middle Eastern and North African origin), ethnic groups historically and politically marginalised, forgotten and concealed in Israel. Postcolonial scholarship has granted greater focus and visibility to a Mizrahi aesthetic culture (Alon 2013; Dekel 2016). Anavy (of Eastern European or Ashkenazi Jewish descent) was the only participant in the show not from a Mizrahi background, a position from which she penetrated and exposed Israel’s implicit racism. In 1948, the State of Israel was born. From its very beginning, it was torn between its conception as a Eurocentric-Western state, and one that could

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simultaneously embrace a Middle Eastern heritage and culture. Endless studies have recorded the ways in which Jewish populations arriving in Israel from Arabspeaking countries (including from India, Iran or North Africa) were forced into lower socio-economic jobs and educational opportunities. The ‘melting-pot’ policy implemented by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, presented the ideas of merging diasporas, yet it was ultimately channelled toward a Eurocentric and Soviet-oriented culture. A kibbutz is a communal form of settlement unique to the Zionist movement in Israel, founded on socialist values of equality and the sharing of economic resources and ideas among its members. Avital Geva’s Ecological Greenhouse represented Israel in the 1993 Venice Biennale, curated by Dr Gideon Ofrat. The exhibition title, Southern Rose, comes from Anavy’s ongoing interest in the rose pattern used in medieval Gothic churches. The term ‘southern’ is also understood by the artist as a conceptual framework positing Israel’s ‘locational’ relationship to a Europeanised Western aesthetic culture. Anavy researched the art of Islam during her studies as an art history major at Tel Aviv University from 1996–1999. She was inspired by Islam’s rich visuality and use of art and architecture to convey political and social ideas. Valerie Smith cites the ideas of Evan Eisenberg’s important text, The Ecology of Eden (1998: 170). Utopia, choreographed by Valerie Green and performed by Valerie Green/Dance Entropy, is a collaboration with Keren Anavy presented at multiple venues, including the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York (2018), Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church, New York (2018), and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York (2019). The installation Compositions for Stones of Gold was exhibited at The Gallery of the Institute of Culture of Mexico Israel, Mexico City. The exhibition includes seven large monochromatic oil paintings by Anavy depicting roughly hewn stones from central Israel Modi’in, a biblical site thought to memorialise the Jewish revolt against the Greeks; and a video by Frank about the Judean desert, Masada, which marks a Jewish uprising against the Romans and mass suicide. Anavy and Frank continued their research on water and ecosystems at the Artist in Residence in Everglades Program (AIRIE), Everglades National Park, Florida, May 2018.

References Alon, K. (2013) ‘The Feminine Mizrahi Voice in Israeli Art: A Broad Cross-Section’, in K. Alon and S. Keshet (eds.), Breaking Walls: Contemporary Mizrahi Feminist Artists. Tel Aviv : Achoti (Hebrew).

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Alon, K. (2015) ‘The Garden, the Keffiyeh, the Tiger and the Diamond’. Erev Rav, 18 February. Available at http://erev-rav.com/archives/35664 (Accessed 5 April 2022) (Hebrew). Anavy, K. (2019) ‘Interview with Ketzia Alon’, 6 May, Tel Aviv, Israel. Anavy, K. (2020) ‘Interview with Ketzia Alon’, 19 July, Tel Aviv, Israel. Bennahum, N., Perron, W. and Robertson, B., eds. (2017) Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972. Oakland, CA : University of California Press. Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home. New York and London: Routledge. Code, L. (2006) Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Dekel, T. (2016) Transnational Identities: Women, Art, and Migration in Contemporary Israel. Detroit, MI : Wayne State University Press. Dror, S. (2018) ‘Compositions for Stones of Gold’. The Institute Culture Mexico-Israel, Mexico City. Available at www.tal-frank.com/compositions-for-stones-of-gold/ (Accessed 5 April 2022). Edelman, A. (2019) ‘Foreword’, in K. Anavy and T. Frank (eds.), The Nature of Things. Zurich: a/b books. Eisenberg, E. (1998) The Ecology of Eden. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Eliraz, I. (2017) Wilted Garden, Dark Summer House. Ramat Gan: Afik Books (Hebrew). Francis, M. and Hester, R.T. Jr., eds. (1990) The Meaning of Gardens. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Gatenio, A. (2017) On the Edge, Israeli Paper. T. Gerstenaber (trans.). Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum. Gurevitch, Z. (2007) On Israeli and Jewish Place. Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publication (Hebrew). Hamilton, C., Gemenne, F. and Bonneuil, C., eds. (2015) The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch. New York: Routledge. Jeng Lynch, E. (2018) ‘Wave Hill Sunroom Project Space. Keren Anavy: Garden of Living Images’. Available at http://kerenanavy.com/ (Accessed 5 April 2022). Kraus, O. (2013) Southern Rose. Zamenhof Translations Services (trans.). Rehovot Municipal Gallery. Rehovot, Israel: M. Smilansky Cultural Center. Kraus, O. (2015) ‘House & Garden’, in Cutout Line: Drawing with Scissors. E. Aid (trans.). Ein Hod, Israel: City Gallery Kfar Saba and The Janco-Dada Museum. Lévinas, E. (2002) ‘Dasein and Death’, in God, Death, and Time. B. Bergo (trans.). Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Linton, J. (2010) What is Water? The History of Modern Abstraction. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

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Lock, M. (2019) ‘Toxic Life in the Anthropocene’, in J. MacClany (ed.), Exotic No More: Anthropology for the Contemporary World. London and Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Maor, H. (2003) Marked Landscapes: Landscape-Place in Contemporary Israeli Art. Beer Sheva, Israel: Avraham Baron Art Gallery, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Meskimmon, M. (2013) ‘The Precarious Ecologies of Cosmopolitanism’. Open Arts Journal 1 (Summer): 15–25. doi: 10.5456/issn.5050-3679/2013s03mm. Meskimmon, M. (2020) Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections. London and New York: Routledge. Neimanis, A. (2017) Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Remington, V. (2015) Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden. London: Royal Collection Trust. Rogoff, I. (2015) ‘Oblique Points of Entry’, in H. Keshmirshekan (ed.), Contemporary Art in the Middle East: Regional Interactions with Global Art Discourses. London: I.B. Tauris. Smith, V., ed. (2005) ‘Heaven: Paradise’, in Down the Garden Path: The Artist’s Garden after Modernism. New York: Queens Museum of Art. Strong, R. (2015) ‘Foreword’, in V. Remington (ed.), Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden. London: Royal Collection Trust. Sullivan, C. (2002) Garden and Climate. New York: McGraw-Hill. Tchernichovsky, S. (1951) All the Poems. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing (Hebrew).

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Collective Agency: Creative Communities in Australian Feminist Art Rachael Haynes and Courtney Pedersen

Introduction This chapter considers Australian perspectives on belonging through feminist collective agency and creative arts practice. While Australia has prided itself on its strong contribution to Anglophone second wave feminism and feminist art, an intensifying upsurge in discourse and practice in Australian art over the past decade has called some of these historical achievements into question. This recent activity includes a number of curated exhibitions and independent projects (for example Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, a major survey held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne in the summer of 2017–2018); thematic conferences and symposia (such as Women, Art and Feminism in Australia, held in Melbourne in 2018, part of a significant project funded by the Australian Research Council); and special issues of art journals and magazines (including Artlink: Positioning Feminism, 2017). The concentration of these exhibitions and events marks a re-examination of Australia’s own feminist art history, in particular raising crucial questions regarding the limited focus of Western-centric Feminism and facilitating new understandings of Australian art’s relationship to the global turns of ‘feminisms’, as well as the importance of Indigenous perspectives. As Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt have explained, ‘transnational feminist movements are understood as the fluid coalescence of organisations, networks, coalitions, campaigns, analysis, advocacy and actions that politicize women’s rights and gender equality issues beyond the nation-state’ (Baksh and Harcourt 2015: 4). As a brief history of feminist art in Australia reveals, feminist artists craved international dialogue and exchange with artists, theorists and activists from elsewhere; however, more recent discussions regarding this history 201

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have called into question how well non-Anglophone perspectives were integrated into this quest for transnationalism. Corresponding to this renewed critical assessment of the intersections between feminism and contemporary art, Australian artists are investigating the dynamic, and at times fraught, relationship between feminist theory, art history, activism, communities and creative practice. As artists and academics who were involved in the feminist art collective LEVEL1 (2010–2018), we have actively engaged in many of these recent national discursive events and exhibitions. Inspired by the models of collective agency and collaborative art practices of second wave feminism, LEVEL operated as a ‘discursive space’, offering a critical engagement with female agency and social space. An open questioning of feminism’s accepted ‘rules of engagement’ was fundamental to this discourse. This chapter takes the form of an overview of current debates seeking to address the implications and intersections of these intergenerational dialogues in the current moment. It reconsiders collective agency through art practice in terms of the active negotiation of difference, within a philosophical framework of friendship, generosity and care as they have been debated in the Australian context.

Local Global: Reconsidering Australian Art and Feminism In her 2018 review of the exhibition, Unfinished Business at the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art (ACCA), the respected feminist curator, Janine Burke expressed her exasperation and confusion that feminist art activism was still required, fortyfour years after she first co-curated a feminist group show at Melbourne University’s then-radical Ewing and George Paton Galleries (Burke 2018). Her frustration at the unrealised promise of the 1970s channels through a discussion of the lost ground of the 1980s and 1990s, before wondering what new understandings a feminist exhibition of this type could offer well into the twenty-first century: What did this majestic range of art actually tell us? That women artists are numerous, various and highly talented? That they are, in the word of Kate Just’s 2015 neon sculpture, Furious? That Indigenous women are finally receiving some attention, being both respected for their own culture and included in large significant shows like Unfinished Business, staged by white culture? Balla, a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara artist, sounded a cautionary note: ‘Our shared womanhood does not make us sisters with white women’.2 Burke 2018: 47

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Burke’s brief mention of the relative invisibility of Aboriginal women in the arts activism of the 1970s hangs in the air,3 without further elaboration or contextualisation in this instance. As a key feminist curator during this period, some reflection on this absence from Burke would serve to assist our understanding of why feminism was not the great unifier its key protagonists expected it to be, and how contemporary reassessments of the transcultural promise of feminism in Australia contribute to our understanding of transnational feminisms. Hesitancy regarding white feminism’s benefit to Indigenous women is tackled head-on by Una Rey in her examination of the relationship between feminist curating and the rich development of contemporary Indigenous art through remote community art centres in Australia. According to Rey, largely unacknowledged ‘feminist relational action’ (Rey 2018: 41) was crucial to the recognition of Indigenous women artists in the 1990s. Rey also reminds us that Indigenous women artists were institutionally invisible, clearly not benefitting from the feminist push of the 1970s, when the country’s oldest art museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, could mount an exhibition called Aboriginal Australia in 1981 without a single woman included amongst the 328 artists represented (Rey 2018: 38). The mid-1970s exist as a fulcrum for the history of art and feminism in Australia. During this period, key exhibitions were staged that revisited the work of women artists of the past as well as advocating for the women artists of their time. Early exhibitions included A Room of One’s Own: Three Women Artists (1974) at the Ewing Gallery, University of Melbourne, co-curated by Kiffy Rubbo, Lynne Cooke and Janine Burke; Women Photographers (1974) at the Carlton Pram Factory in Melbourne; and Women in the Community, organised by the Sydney Women’s Art Movement also in 1974. In 1975 over ten significant feminist exhibitions were held around the country to coincide with International Women’s Year, including the significant historical survey, Australian Women Artists: 1840–1940. An emphasis on collaboration and collective agency would be apparent throughout many of the exhibitions that would follow 1975’s lead, however there is a discernible thread of concern that institutional exhibitions were largely unable to accommodate the more complex processes of feminist art. Burke bemoaned the inadequate inclusion of collective, collaborative and community-connected art projects in her summary of Australian Perspecta, a major survey exhibition of contemporary Australian art organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1981. As she pointed out, some of the key artists included in the show were poorly represented by individual art objects while the ‘political, community-based nature of their art is not seen to advantage or as one

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of its crucial, creative factors: yet the context of the work of these artists is the root of its vitality’ (Burke 1981: 378). Burke’s observation points to an invisible history of collective art in Australia, particularly with regard to the museum exhibition format, which would require rediscovery at a later point. By the early 1990s, the absence of Indigenous artists from major survey exhibitions like the Sydney Biennale (established in 1973) was an unavoidable topic of discussion. Vivian Johnson’s discussion of the relationship between Aboriginal art and artists and the museum in 1991 points to vacillating positions on the paradoxical role and significance of Indigenous practice to the category ‘Australian art’. The paradox being that Indigenous art, while being so firmly anchored in ‘place’ (the Country on which the artist was born, lived or made their work) was/is also, as Johnson points out, the ‘only internationally recognised art movement which Australia has yet produced’ (Johnson 1991: 19). The seeming incompatibility of a historical Australian feminist viewpoint and the strongly acknowledged contribution of Indigenous artists is also referred to by Susan Best in her review of the ambiguously received Contemporary Australia: Women exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane in 2016. In her article ‘What Is a Feminist Exhibition?’, Best makes the point that the curator Julie Ewington, another key figure in 1970s feminist art in Australia, had strategically enabled the substantial inclusion of Aboriginal artists in her ‘blockbuster’ by avoiding its categorisation as an explicitly feminist survey. As she says, ‘If the exhibition had been framed more tightly around the legacy of feminism, this important strand of women’s practice would most likely not have been included’ (Best 2016: 200). In the context of broader criticisms of unhelpful fixations on individual feminist artists and individual artworks, Ewington’s inclusion of three generations of Amata painters from remote South Australia allows for a ‘rich intergenerational collective art production [that] is surely unique to Australia’ according to Best (2016: 201). In the context of numerous large-scale feminist exhibitions occurring globally, such as Global Feminisms (Brooklyn Museum, New York) and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) in the United States (both 2007) and elles@centrepompidou at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2009, Australia’s revisiting of its own feminist histories seemed muted in the first decade of the twenty-first century. A relatively modest exhibition, A Different Temporality: Aspects of Australian Feminist Art Practice 1975–1985 was staged at the Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne in 2010 and the provocatively titled, trans-Tasman4 exhibition, Feminism Never Happened (2010),

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sought to ‘trouble [the] feminist framework’ (Leonard 2010) at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Rather than providing large, confident revisionist surveys of feminist art practice, the Australian response would generally be hesitant and ambivalent, as indicated by the title of the Unfinished Business exhibition at ACCA. As discussed earlier, the reasons for this tentative approach almost certainly have much to do with the complex relationship between Australian art and the nation’s Indigenous and multicultural histories. Central to the history of feminist art practice in Australia is an ongoing tension regarding the nature of the Australian identity and Australia’s possible contribution to global conversations regarding art more broadly. The provincialism and parochialism debates, as they would be typified (Smith 1974; Burn et al. 1988; McLean 2009), reflected Australia’s insecurities about its place at the supposed margins of the art world, a hunger for engagement with cosmopolitanism, while also acknowledging the important role that location plays in cultural production. Feminism tantalisingly offered the promise of a global belonging that could transcend national identity and the patriarchal dynamics that underpin nationalism. In 1970s Australia this was reflected in the enthusiastic reception for visiting American curator, critic and activist, Lucy Lippard in 1975, and in dispatches from local artists like Jenny Watson, writing about the feminist art scene in New York in 1977 (Watson 1977). The Anglophonic and Euro-American bias of many of these early engagements with international feminism would haunt feminist art history and practice in Australia through to the current demand for intersectional and decolonial approaches to feminist art practice, potentially abandoning the label of feminism altogether. While the 2018 curatorial project, The Commute (the first leg of a transnational First Nations exhibition held at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane) in Australia was assembled by a majority-female and/or queer collective of curators and artists5 from the Pacific region, and featured works that engaged with issues of gender and the dynamics of care (commonly associated with feminist practice), its guiding principles were much more about ‘the power that exists in the cultural practice of caring and customary lore of offerings when visiting the lands of other Nations’ (Cope 2018). While there is an ongoing battle to have feminist art’s contribution to the development of contemporary art appropriately acknowledged,6 exhibition projects like The Commute similarly argue for an acknowledgement of the debt owed to First Nations and Indigenous cultures’ millennia-long practice of care strategies, later adopted by feminists. The challenge that faces contemporary feminist approaches in the Australian context

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is resisting oversimplifications of Australian feminist art history, addressing the shortcomings and lacunas in the Women’s Art Movement of earlier decades, and finding productive and critical ways of incorporating the transcultural and transnational potential of feminism into contemporary art practice without recreating the colonial dynamics of an earlier era.

Feminism and Art in Australia: Creative Communities and Collective Agency The first section of this chapter outlines a re-examination of Australia’s feminist art history and raises questions about the limited focus of this historiography in relation to local Australian Indigenous perspectives and in terms of global feminisms. The conception of collective agency and a sense of belonging in relation to these national stories of feminist art can be considered through the focus point of large-scale, survey-style exhibitions such as Unfinished Business7 (2017–2018), held in Melbourne at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and in a Brisbane context the exhibition Contemporary Australia: Women (2012),8 held at the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art. Despite the differences in their curatorial framing, the first explicitly feminist and embracing of gender fluid artists, the latter formulated in terms of the diverse and distinctive art practices by Australian women – these exhibitions seem to offer a convenient local narrative against which artists can position themselves and their art practice.9 This section of the chapter considers in detail communities of feminist art practice that have emerged in an Australian context over the last decade. It reconsiders a sense of feminist belonging through the lens of intergenerational arts practice and explores a form of collective agency that may be forged through the connections shaped in unfolding and emergent creative communities. Art historians Catriona Moore and Catherine Speck have recently observed that feminism and art in Australia occupies an array of social spaces, where ‘personal-political analysis drives a “pop-up” arts pedagogy and political networking that are elaborated as performance, feminist “teach-in”, curatorial laboratory and as a form of contemporary art known as social practice’ (Moore and Speck 2019: 101). They contend that, in a contemporary Australian context, there is a lack of an organised feminist art movement. However, a flurry of feminist activity is taking place in Australian art practices. As Angela Dimitrakaki notes, in relation to the rise of female curatorial collectives in a global context, this activity

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is characterised by ‘energies of precarisation, flexibilization and feminization’ (2013: 220). This suggests that our understanding of collective agency as embodied in feminist art practices is ripe for reconsideration in the current climate – replacing the notion of a singular feminist art movement with a plethora of diverse activities, experiences and ideas. This renewal of feminist art practice and curatorial activity in Australia includes projects such as: SEXES , curated by Bec Dean, Deborah Kelly and Jeff Khan (2013); Backflip: Feminism and Humour in Contemporary Art,10 curated by Laura Castagnini (2013), the Future Feminist Archive11 by Jo Holder (2015), The F Word12 project by artist Caroline Phillips (2012/2015) and Femmo (2015) by artists Elvis Richardson and Virginia Fraser. Notably, feminist methods and approaches have also instigated artist-run projects such as the Countess13 (2008– present), Janis14 (2013) and LEVEL (2010–2018). Feminist art historian Louise R. Mayhew gives an account of ‘women-only’ collectives and collaborative art projects from 1970 to 2015 in a timeline format,15 aiming to locate contemporary practices within ‘a fertile landscape of women’s galleries, curatorial initiatives, publications, discussion networks and group art practices’ (Mayhew 2015: 33). It is essential work to document these activities and ensure their ongoing presence in Australian art history and visual arts practice. Art historian Anne Marsh16 argues that contemporary feminist practices in Australia would benefit from further socio-historical contextualisation, stating that ‘early activist platforms and models for the arts have yet to be thoroughly researched’ (Marsh 2017: 16). As Jo Holder and Catriona Moore have recently asserted, ‘intersectional feminist and decolonising curating has left a generative (though largely unacknowledged) historical trail’ (2018: 19). The contemporary art space and the large-scale feminist exhibition play an important role here, to support, document and resource grassroots activity. As Holder and Moore argue, when adequately responsive to grassroots feminist activity, the ‘femi-buster helps recalibrate the art institution by legitimating affirmative actions and critical analysis as well as cross-cultural ethics and protocols’ (2018: 18). In this account, exhibitions like Unfinished Business act to legitimise a diverse range of intergenerational and intersectional feminist art practices, while also providing a snapshot of current concerns and debates. Emerging within and contributing to this creative landscape, the Australian feminist art collective LEVEL was founded in 2010, responding to an imbalance in the professional opportunities available to women artists. This inequity was evidenced by the data gathering activity of Countess, documented on a dedicated blog, which found that while 73% of Australian art school graduates identified as

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women, the majority of art world honours were received by male artists, for example selective inclusion in art exhibitions, collections and prizes (2012). LEVEL initially operated an all-women gallery and studio complex in Newstead, Brisbane and, in this capacity, supported over one hundred artists, writers and curators. Over the next decade, LEVEL diversified its activities in response to a collaborative, reflective practice framework. During this period, the Countess Report (Richardson 2016) continued to highlight the inequitable gatekeeping practices of the contemporary art world in an Australian context. In the 2019 report, an additional category was included in the data analysis to account for non-binary artists (Prcevich et al. 2019), and Countess commissioned best practice guidelines, Clear Expectations (Messih and Barry 2019), for institutions, galleries and curators working with trans, non-binary and gender diverse artists. As a feminist art collective, LEVEL was inspired by the forms of collectivism engaged with in ‘second wave’ feminism and grassroots activism, such as Lip: A Journal of Women in the Visual Arts (1975–1983), the Women’s Art Register (established 1975) and the D’Oyley Show (1979) here in Australia, but also international models of feminist collaboration and examples of collectives such as the AIR Gallery, New York (founded 1972) and the Woman’s Building, Los Angeles (1973–1991). As Jo Holder and Catriona Moore note in relation to LEVEL’s activities, ‘The “personal is political” is again invoked as a form of arts activism: [as] semi-performance, semi-installation and semi-pedagogy’ (Holder and Moore 2018: 17). LEVEL investigated a contemporary incarnation of consciousnessraising through the staging of artworks in the form of public picnics and bannermaking workshops.17 Citing bell hooks as an influence, who stated, ‘consciousness raising groups, gatherings and public meetings need to become a central aspect of feminist practice again. Women need spaces where we can explore intimately and deeply all aspects of female experience, including our relationship to artistic production’ (hooks 1995: 130–131), LEVEL’s activities focused on using models of feminist politics to engage with collective agency in social spaces. In this context, ‘collective agency’ referred to the capacity for a diverse range of women and their allies to actively debate, negotiate and organise as a group, to imagine inclusive and just futures, and to have this work represented and recognised as generative and speculative forms of contemporary art. As Alison Crossley identifies, any contemporary collective feminist identity must be arrived at through a continuously interactional and relational process of negotiation (Crossley 2017: 93). Different events and locations formed the contextual framework for LEVEL’s work, and each of these constituted a unique set of negotiated collectivities.

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LEVEL’s aim was to activate spaces for public discussion and debate around gender and feminist practice in the arts, ‘LEVELing the playing field’. Through a series of curated projects that included panel discussions, annual International Women’s Day forums and artist talks, LEVEL offered a critical engagement with concepts of female agency and activations of social space.18 As Australian art critics observed in relation to LEVEL’s activities, this ‘convivium format emphasises collectivity and inclusion, in contrast to the art market traits of individualism, careerism and opportunism’ (Moore and Speck 2019: 100). The core concerns of collectivity and inclusion informed the design and curation of these events, which involved a number of established, inspirational Australian artists: Fiona Foley, Bonita Ely, Deborah Kelly and Lilla Watson, as well as more emerging practitioners, Cigdem Aydemir, Hannah Bronte, Megan Cope, Carol McGregor and Tyza Stewart. As artists and academics involved in collective activity, we have observed and participated in a number of feminist projects and exhibitions including Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism (2017–2018), held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (see Figure 10.1). LEVEL was commissioned by the curatorial team, Max Delany, Annika Kristensen, Paola

Figure 10.1 Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, 2017. Installation view at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.

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Figure 10.2 Sadie Chandler, The Weight of Images, 2017. Ink on paper, paste, 1120 × 420 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne. LEVEL, Right Now! 2017. Mixed media, 130 × 100 × 40 cm. Installation view at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis. Courtesy of the artists.

Balla, Julie Ewington, Vikki McInnes and Elvis Richardson, to create a participatory artwork for the exhibition, titled ‘Right Now!’ This artwork involved the deployment of ballot boxes and a specifically designed survey asking visitors to the exhibition to respond to questions linked to the Australian Human Rights Commission Act (see Figure 10.2). It was developed by Courtney Coombs, Caitlin Franzmann, Rachael Haynes and Courtney Pedersen in response to the insensitively handled 2017 Marriage Equality plebiscite in Australia, and reflected our collective concerns about the intersecting issues of gender, class, race, sexuality and ability. This work was quite dissimilar to previous LEVEL works, which had largely taken their aesthetic cues from second wave feminist art, and in fact, did not necessarily declare its feminist intentions at all. The decision not to perform feminism overtly in the work also reflected deeper concerns regarding how feminism was increasingly perceived as an oppressively white phenomenon by Indigenous artists and artists of colour, and the device of foregrounding Australia’s commitment to global human rights agreements could be read as an oblique reference to Australia’s chequered contributions to transnational feminist art activism. For some members of the

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collective, the work became a form of self-interrogation: were we doing enough to mitigate the colonial impact on Australian feminism and were we demonstrating adequate commitment to the transcultural and transnational potential of feminist collaboration and collectivity? Over 1000 surveys were collected, however the point of this artwork was not to collate or analyse the collected data as such. The purpose was to highlight observations about the survey mechanism itself, its political and ethical dimensions, to provoke awareness of positions of privilege and to increase empathy and action across our various communities. The exhibition Unfinished Business sought to situate new works by contemporary feminist artists alongside key historical works that continue to shape dialogues and debates in Australian art. This intergenerational approach of the exhibition was highlighted by the inclusion of key works by artists who instigated feminist art practice in the 1970s, 80s and 90s – Vivienne Binns, Linda Dement, Sue Dodd, Mikala Dwyer, Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, Fiona Foley, Maria Kozic and Frances (Budden) Phoenix, presented alongside works by early career artists such as Cigdem Aydemir, Archie Barry, Hannah Bronte, Megan Cope, Eugenia Lim and Salote Tawale. As Caitlin Patane observed, Unfinished Business showed ‘generations of artists telling stories of personal and collective experience and this chronology is underpinned by feminism’s more recent conditions of intersectional discourse’ (2018). Corresponding to this renewed critical assessment of the intersections between feminism and contemporary art, Australian artists are investigating the dynamic, and at times fraught, relationship between feminist theory, art history, activism, communities and creative practice. Artists are actively reconstructing the relevance of feminism as a critical and intersectional lens through which to survey and audit the current social, political and artistic context of the geographical south. For Millner, Moore and Cole, the impact of artists and initiatives such as these is that they ‘draw directly upon feminist art history and theory to drive their own innovative art practices and cultural critiques, and articulate the relationship between feminist art and activism as it responds to changing institutional and discursive conditions’ (2015: 144). That is, they are informed by the work of past generations, in order to reflect upon and respond to current debates and concerns including the intersections of gender with race, religion, class, sexuality and ability, and, indeed, to question any fixed understanding of gender. For Australian art historian Anne Marsh, the ‘intergenerational aspects of feminism and how this has been enacted in the visual arts in recent years represents a refreshing change from earlier perceptions of waves of feminist theory that tended

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to privilege the new’ (Marsh 2017: 8). The exhibition Unfinished Business provides a useful framework to question: what are the implications of intergenerational dialogues in Australian feminist art? As art critic Julie Shiels comments, this interconnection between past, present and future is crucial, as the exhibition ‘lays out key reference points from the past and provides a set of coordinates to guide current and future artists, activities and thinkers as they work out where this unfinished business goes next’ (2018). However, while this account suggests a structured flow from one work to the next, and affirms an Australian feminist historiography, the evident polyphony of the exhibition, and its curatorial team, highlight the importance of confirming dissent and difference as the foundations of feminist practice. As art historian Helen Hughes observes, this approach facilitated ‘internal dissent and even antithetical subject positions to emerge within the exhibition’ (2018: 204). The exhibition provides an analogy between the ‘major survey’ or the blockbuster exhibition, the ‘femi-buster’, that speaks to the past, present and future of feminist art practice, and the telling of a narrative of Australian feminist art – both of these monolithic structures reveal the polyphonic voices and diverse perspectives that need to be heard and accounted for. In the absence of a singular feminist art movement in contemporary art, we must pay heed to the multifarious activities occurring across collaborative art practices, curatorial projects, artist-run initiatives, publications and discussions. Collective agency, as embodied in feminist art practices, is a site of dialogue and resistance. Collective action can be characterised as fostering solidarity through the sharing of experiences and creating a sense of empowerment, as ‘individuals engag[e] with others to bring about radical, visionary change, standing and acting together’ (Sweetman 2013: 217). However, as Caroline Sweetman asserts, what is needed is both ‘solidarity and shared action which sees difference not as a challenge, but as an integral part – and further – a strength, of women working as a movement’ (2013: 226). Therefore, we can observe, record and interpret the ebbs and flows of convergence in feminist art; and concurrently, we need to actively recognise, respect and listen to diffusions or differences inherent in any understanding of feminist practice.

Conclusion While second wave feminism often aspired to a universal language of resistance that could break down the patriarchal constructions of nation and class, survey

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exhibitions like Unfinished Business provide clear evidence of the difficulty of this task. The significance of location never abated, and across time, the differentiating effects of race, class and sexuality become more apparent, often exacerbated by generational differences. As a discussion of the relationship between feminist art practice and scholarship and the rising profile of Australian Aboriginal art over the past fifty years indicates, these questions of difference were never adequately addressed, but neither were feminist practitioners and theorists oblivious to them. Rather than relying on a blunt dichotomy of the national and the global, contemporary Australian feminist artists and scholars are more eager to take their cues from the radical work undertaken by First Nations artists, defining new ways of understanding place that can cross national, language and generational boundaries. This chapter has outlined the current debates in relation to feminism and art in Australia, discussing the limited focus of Anglophone feminism in a national context and addressing the intergenerational dialogues raised in the survey exhibition Unfinished Business. This conversation is crucial for addressing the past, present and future concerns of feminist art practice in relation to notions of belonging, questions of Australian identity and the ability of feminism to embrace difference through an intersectional and decolonial lens. What we have learnt through our engagement in these dialogues is the importance of resisting oversimplifications of Australian feminist art history and reconsidering productive ways of incorporating transcultural and transnational approaches to feminist art practice. What we have observed is a renewal of feminist art activities – in the form of collaborative artworks, curatorial projects, artist-run initiatives, publications and discussions – creating an interrelated matrix of communities of practice. Our engagement with these practices enables a new understanding of feminist collective agency to emerge – one that is responsive and transformative, and informed by an ethics of care. This ethics of care can be characterised in terms of attentiveness, responsibility, compassion and nurturance (Tronto 1993: 3). As Joan Tronto contends, care is a fundamental part of life, which asserts the condition of interdependence of all aspects of life (Tronto 1993: 163), whereby the question of who cares for whom becomes a key political concept that identifies relations of power and the intersections of gender, race and class with caregiving (Tronto 1993: 168). Recently, Basia Sliwinska comments that feminist ethics facilitates social relationships ‘through care-fullness, caring structures, practising care and ontologies of becoming’ (Sliwinska 2019: 289), and asserts that care and

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action are linked together, such that ‘when we care we are connected’ (2019: 288). Thus, LEVEL’s experience of collective agency holds at its heart connections between us, forged through friendship, a spirit of generosity and a feminist ethics of care.

Notes 1 LEVEL was an artist-run initiative formed by three artists in 2010, Courtney Coombs, Rachael Haynes and Alice Lang. Its membership later included artists Caitlin Franzmann, Anita Holtclaw and Courtney Pedersen. See www.levelari. wordpress.com. 2 Quoted from the exhibition catalogue (see Balla 2017: 46). 3 While Australia had a vibrant feminist art culture in the 1970s, it was largely centred in the capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. 4 Including artists from both Australia and New Zealand. 5 Including artists: Natalie Ball (Modoc, Klamath, Black) www.natalieball.com, Hannah Brontë (Yaegel), Bracken Hanuse Corlett (Wuikinuxv, Klahoose), Chantal Fraser (Sāmoa), Lisa Hilli (Gunantuna) https://lisahilli.com, Carol McGregor (Wathaurung, Scottish) www.carolmcgregor.com.au, Ahilapalapa Rands (Kanaka Maoli, iTaukei Viti, Pākehā) www.ahilapalapa.com, and T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss (Sk–wx– wú7mesh, Stó:lō, Irish, Métis, Kanaka Maoli, Swiss). Curators: Freja Carmichael (Quandamooka), Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash, Chicana), Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoa, Irānzamin, Guangdong), Tarah Hogue (Métis, Dutch) and Lana Lopesi (Sāmoa). 6 See Heartney et al. (2007). 7 See https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/unfinished-business-perspectives-onfeminism-and-art/. 8 See Ewington (2012). 9 Hilary Robinson accounts for a number of feminist ‘big exhibitions’ in a global context and challenges the long-term efficacy of such survey shows, arguing that ‘unless there has been a deep, political change in approaches to the collection and curation of contemporary art in these institutions, it may well be business as usual after those exhibitions’ (Robinson 2013: 147). 10 See Castagnini (2013). 11 The Future Feminist Archive was part of the activities of Contemporary Art and Feminism. It is now archived in the Design and Art of Australia Online database. See the programme here: www.crossart.com.au/images/stories/exhibitions/caf/Future_ web_singlepg.pdf.

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12 13 14 15

See https://thefwordaus.wordpress.com/. See http://countesses.blogspot.com.au and also http://thecountessreport.com.au. Janis was a project by artist Kelly Doley. See www.kellydoley.com/JANIS-I-1. For an additional timeline of Australian feminist art history see: en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Australian_feminist_art_timeline. 16 See Anne Marsh’s Women, Art and Feminism in Australia since 1970 project: www. wafa.net.au/. 17 For a discussion of this series, titled ‘We Need to Talk’, see Haynes and Pedersen (2019a, 2019b) and Coombs et al. (2016). 18 For documentation of these projects see: www.levelari.wordpress.com.

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‘Woman Writing’ as a Curatorial Method: Narratives of Belonging in the Art Practices of Chantal Peñalosa and Bridget Smith Caroline Stevenson

On 8 March 2021, a banner appeared above the façade of the Hotel Condesa in Mexico City depicting a series of printed phrases organised in a radial pattern. The banner, created by the artist Chantal Peñalosa1 and titled Closer to the Disappearance, from the Eclipse, formed part of #NoVoySola, a non-profit art project in response to and in support of the feminist movement in Mexico.2 The radial design of the banner referenced an eighteenth century visual poem by Mariana Navarro titled ‘Acrostic Decimal’. On Peñalosa’s banner, she replaced Navarro’s words with a collection of phrases spoken to her by men in the art world.3 The phrases, radiating like a sundial into the streets below, included comments like ‘Piensas mucho’ (You think a lot) and ‘Te puedo hundir’ (I can sink you). Such comments reveal the complicated gender navigations that frame success within the contemporary art world, but also point to universal experiences and invisibilities of female work within the written histories of art. The original poem, by Navarro, was composed in the same radial shape for a public competition organised as part of a city-wide festival honouring King Ferdinand VI’s ascension to the Spanish throne in 1747.4 The competition, organised by a local university, encouraged members of the public to submit poems to the King. Navarro’s poem won second prize and, despite its long exclusion from Mexican literary history, it is now understood to be one of the first recorded visual poems with its origins in experimental literature in Mexico.5 Alicia V. Ramírez Olivares (2010) writes that the poem has existed only within the written histories and records of the festival, and therefore little is known about Navarro and whether or not she wrote with any consistency. Also, because of the radial design of the poem – in the shape of the sun – the poem has been dismissed as a simple visual 219

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image intended only to praise Ferdinand VI. Looking beyond the surface, however, Ramírez Olivares (2010) argues that Navarro’s poem holds a much deeper meaning. She draws on Julia Kristeva’s (1978) writing on linguistics to explain that the poem must be understood in relation to the social and historical context of its making. Therefore it is not simply a visual image in the form of a sun; rather it is a form of expression that allows Navarro to play with poetic and visual form. In an acrostic poem, the first letter of each line spells a word and that word is generally the subject of the poem. Navarro’s poem spells out the phrase: Augusto coronado del sol or Augustus crowned with the sun, the final letter ‘L’ appearing in the middle of the poem. Through its form, Navarro inserts her own female subjectivity into colonial society through the placement of the poem in a radial image suggesting that she herself controls the wheel of the circle, almost like a roulette; the woman has control of the world that includes the new king (Ramírez Olivares 2010). Navarro’s visual poem is an intimate and yet radical gesture performing female agency to make it visible and heard. Similarly, Chantal Peñalosa’s banner weaves the textual and the visual to demand recognition for female subject positions within multiple his-stories and to claim belonging in the public space of Mexico City and beyond. On one level it is demonstrative of the gender disparities within the contemporary art world, but on another level, the radial design inserts female subjectivity or agency, enabling women to control the circle and un-silencing their voices. This is a recurring strategy in Peñalosa’s work, where she carefully inserts her own experiences and observations into written histories and everyday life in her hometown of Tecate, Mexico. Over the last eighteen months, I have been in regular contact with Chantal Peñalosa through an email exchange. I got in touch with her after seeing her work on social media via the gallery that represents her: Proyectos Monclova, in Mexico City. The work I was interested in was a set of prints depicting clouds in the sky, with titles of places, dates and times underneath them. Through our email exchange, she told me that the photographs captured various cloud formations seen from the Mexican side of the border and then again from the American side. The prints reminded me of an exhibition I visited at Focal Point Gallery in Southend, UK by the British artist Bridget Smith.6 The exhibition drew on Smith’s childhood memories growing up in Southend-on-Sea, a seaside resort full of faded vestiges of escapism, fantasy and long summer nights. Similar to Peñalosa, Bridget Smith also uses images of the landscape to frame her experiences of home.

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Although Tecate, Mexico and Southend-on-Sea in England seem like an unlikely pairing, I was interested in the ways in which these artists activate female agency, via their creative practice, to open up spaces of belonging within everyday life, particularly in two locations marked by transitory populations and shifting identities. Similarly to Navarro’s poem, Peñalosa and Smith’s practices may be read via Kristeva’s (1978) concept of ‘woman writing’ as a subversive and regenerative force signifying traversal spaces for female agency. Chantal Peñalosa lives along the Mexican/American border, where life can change dramatically depending on the political situation in America. Bridget Smith is from an English seaside town, marked by regeneration and populations of summer revellers who inhabit the place during summer, and then vacate at the end of the holiday season. In her article ‘Transnational Embodied Belonging within “Edge Habitats” ’, Basia Sliwinska (2015) says that art practice offers a spatial figuration in which to think through ‘what it means to be at home and where this “home” might be’ (p. 306). Her article describes the practices of two artists who have moved from their homes into new cities, becoming territorially unfixed and carving a sense of belonging in a place that is not their own. Peñalosa and Smith also explore notions of home through their practices, although they are both rooted in the place they have grown up, and to the home that they know. Through my dialogue with them, I focused on drawing out the connections to home and place that form the basis for their work. Marsha Meskimmon calls these ‘epistemic locations’ (2020: 2) or places of knowing that emerge from somewhere, with their own particular politics. Both Peñalosa and Smith create ‘situated and embodied forms of critical and creative engagement that acknowledge epistemic location’ (Meskimmon 2020: 2) and in doing so, they forge new connections that extend beyond a simple geographic location or national identity. For Peñalosa, this means paying attention to the sensory and bodily rhythms of life and memory as they play out along the Mexican/American border. For Smith, it is occupying affective and nostalgic spaces within abandoned places of seaside reverie. This chapter documents the conversations between these artists and me, as curator. I think of these exchanges as an ongoing curatorial project with no exhibition, no catalogue, no opening and no closing. Rather, they are sets of exchanges that re-centre the role of the curator from an authoritative organiser to an interlocutor, a conversation partner, listener and addressee. Through the practice of ‘vulnerable listening’ (Meskimmon 2020: 2), I draw on histories of feminist curating to create meaningful connections between these artists’ practices that resist dominant hierarchies and geographies found in the globalised

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contemporary art world.7 Rather, I call these transnational dialogues, demonstrating fluid and non-authoritative understandings of belonging and home, and ‘a way of inhabiting the world in solidarity and kinship’ (Meskimmon 2020: 4).

Transnational Dialogues and Curatorial Practice The global turn in contemporary art necessitates careful use of the term ‘transnational dialogues’. As Quemin’s (2012) geographical analysis of the art world illustrates, the organisation of globalised contemporary art is driven by the art market, which tends to prioritise North America and Western Europe surrounded by semi-peripheries and peripheries. Furthermore – and as Meskimmon notes – both the global turn and the art market have ‘tended to occlude feminist theories and practices while reinstating Eurocentric hierarchies under the homogenising sign of “globalisation” ’ (2021: 5). In this context, transnational dialogues that connect and seek to understand difference have great potential to open up different typologies of art; however, the application of the term transnational in relation to multinational or global art shouldn’t serve to reinforce binaries between the USA/Eurocentric centre and the peripheries. As Meskimmon argues: Decolonising feminism’s approaches to art history and theory, and integrating the important insights derived from transnational thought and activism, means more than bringing art from a worldwide catchment into the Euro-US marketplace. Engaging with the multidimensional intersections between gender, sexuality, the global and the local (amongst other differences) requires a profound change of direction in the production of art’s histories and theories. 2021: 5

The curatorial project recorded in this chapter – one that prioritises vulnerable listening and conversation – evades traditional notions of curatorial practice grounded in authoritative communication and instead draws on decolonising forms of feminist curating. In written histories of curatorial practice (see O’Neill 2012), the role of curator is primarily that of mediation. It is a position that has accelerated rapidly in the last 30 years, from an unnamed carer of objects to an autonomous creative practitioner, working within and independently of the gallery or museum. Curation emerged as an authoritative means of mediation in the late 1980s and 1990s, in tandem with the global turn in contemporary art. It is here that the independent curator appeared and, by the middle of the 1990s,

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curating began to take central stage as a form of critical practice in its own right. Characterised by distinct styles of authorship, mainly through the production of group exhibitions with thematic narratives, independent curating set out to name, categorise, author and frame contemporary art and cultural production, often in relation to dialogues surrounding the global, the national and the local. The steady detachment of curating from the internal systems of museum custodianship resulted in a ubiquitous visibility of curatorial practice and curators holding the same position of authority as artists, often working as a co-creator or cultural strategist. In her article, Curatorial Materialism: A Feminist Perspective on Independent and Co-Dependent Curating (2016), Elke Krasny offers an earlier – and different – take on the history of independent curating. Going back to the 1960s and 1970s, she locates an emergent form of curating that went beyond the confines of the art world and into social and political contexts, resulting in the transformation of modern art into contemporary art. She points out that many of the curators working in this context who profoundly shaped new models of artistic production were feminists, feminist artists and female historians, activists, thinkers and public intellectuals. This, she argues, is fundamental to understanding the emergence of feminist curating which not only transformed the discourse of art history in the 1960s and 1970s, but also produced new modes of independent curatorial practice. Krasny (2016) defines feminist independent curating as a cultural practice synonymous with political and economic struggle. For her, independent curating foregrounds a relationship with the world, where the curator takes a counter position in relation to disciplinary discourse and dominant categorisations, producing trans-disciplinary cultural production that confronts the complex conditions and experiences of art world institutions. For Krasny, independent curating is intertwined with feminism’s legacy of struggle for political, social and economic independence. Feminist independent curating therefore is a strategy that intervenes in the methods of production and infrastructure of the art world, exposing its inner workings; its social relations, divisions of labour, inequalities, access to resources and the conditions and distribution of cultural production. And it is a practice that invests in the‘profound awareness’ of human co-dependence, emotional and cognitive labour that is involved in curatorial work. Feminist independent curating takes a multitude of forms. It doesn’t have a written history, rather it is practiced through shared sets of modalities, strategies and intentions that appear and intervene in the discourse of contemporary art.

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A feminist curatorial practice also seeks to carve out new spaces, or temporary spaces within established infrastructures, making visible these social exchanges. These opened up spaces can be understood as material and ‘emotional spaces, discursive spaces and spaces of emerging knowledges’ (Krasny 2016: 103) where curatorial practice is enacted within the networked and equal labour of exhibition technicians, researchers, archivists, historians, artists, funders, government officials and so on. She calls this ‘curatorial materialism’; a curatorial practice conceived within the material interactions and struggles inherent in contemporary cultural production. Returning to Kristeva’s (1978) concept of ‘woman writing’, the term ‘woman’ is understood as a heterogeneous space inclusive of individual difference. Woman writing, therefore, is ‘experimental political praxis’ (Meksimmon 2021: 6) unfolding in time, creating space for female agency and all of the ‘synergies, affinities and overlapping interests’ (2021: 6) contained within. My correspondence and dialogue with Chantal Peñalosa and Bridget Smith can therefore be seen as a form of woman writing itself; a transnational feminist approach to curating contemporary art that seeks to unravel, to connect and to intervene. In the following sections, I document my correspondences with the artists through a written conversation, revealing their ‘practices of knowing, imagining and inhabiting’ (2021: 2).

Chantal Peñalosa: The Border Is Also an Atmosphere Chantal Peñalosa is a Mexican artist who lives and works in Tecate and Tijuana, two cities located along the border of Mexico and the USA. In my first email correspondence, I asked about her photographs of clouds in the sky (Figure 11.1). She responded that almost every work she makes is the result of a performative act. The sky prints were a result of observing a cloud that passed through Tecate, Baja California and wondering how that same cloud would look on the American side of the border, in Tecate, California. She walked across the border, identified the cloud and photographed it. The sky prints are a series with variations: some days the waiting time to cross the port of entry at the border was longer due to crowding, some days it was shorter because there were fewer people. With these images, Peñalosa is interested in mutability, or whether the same thing looks different or not from one side of the border to another. The cloud is an object to test this mutability or to focus on a point of view between two countries that are in constant negotiation.

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Figure 11.1 Chantal Peñalosa, Untitled, 2017. Diptych of inkjet prints on photographic paper. Courtesy of the artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City. I guess this is one of the main characteristics about borders. When I referred to the border as an atmosphere, it was because the border cannot be reduced to the image of a wall or a line between two countries. There’s a more complex situation beyond this and it can be found in everyday life, it’s made up of culturally shared situations. Peñalosa 2020

Peñalosa’s art practice is comprised of small gestures that intervene in everyday life in border cities. In our email exchange, she told me that for as long as she can remember, she has felt the air change when she’s crossed the border. She set out to record this with the help of chemistry researchers at the University of Baja California in Tijuana. The researchers helped her detect the variations of chemical components present at the intersection of Tijuana and San Diego, and then developed a series of distillates with the information taken from the air. The scents they detected registered everyday aspects of daily life, spreading in both directions, from foods that are cooked and eaten to ways of treating the environment, and certain types of vegetation. That’s why I think that the border is atmosphere in both a literal and metaphorical way. Peñalosa 2020

Looking at her sky prints, I am reminded of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s opening line from her book elsewhere within here. ‘The time now is small, mobile, portable, I, light blue’ (2011: 1). She says that blue is the new colour of fear: a virtual boundlessness. But beneath this virtual boundlessness, this expansive sky, walls

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are being built, borders closed, movement curtailed and nations sealed. The idea of globalised, transnational expansiveness sits just above material and immaterial barriers of fear, insecurity and exclusion. I am intrigued by Trinh’s description of blue in relation to fear. Later in the chapter she writes about the American and Iraqi wall built in Adhamiyah to separate the Sunni and Shia Muslims. The wall was constructed by the Americans out of concrete blocks, but was quickly adapted for everyday use by the local inhabitants. Sections were moved to create passages to create more direct walking routes to the shops. And a group of artists – Jamaat al-Jidaar – painted sections of it blue, so it appeared as though one was looking through it to the sky beyond. Blue is the colour that lies beyond borders. I ask Peñalosa about her experiences growing up in a border city. My relation to the border has been very close since I was a child, the house in Tecate where I grew up is just three blocks from the border fence (now a wall), and all my life I have seen how this border has been modified, for example, since the 90s this wall has had variations in sizes and materials, but also the methods of surveillance and politics of deportation has been changing throughout the years. Those kinds of images and situations are common for me. I can say they are part of my imagery and I have a reflection about this in the relation to the kind of images I produce. As an inhabitant of the border I’m not very interested to replicate this in my work, because these are the same images you will find all the time in the news and the mediatic forms that are usually used to refer to borders. In recent years the interest in this border has increased because of Trump, so art functions as well as a political agenda. For me, it’s very clear when I see artists from other places going to the border to make projects or even when institutions talk about it in a very elemental way, as if life over there could be reduced to a few images. Sometimes. These images generalise a lot. Peñalosa 2020

She tells me that she is more interested in other images that speak to the complexities of everyday life along the border, which is in continuous flux depending on the relations between Mexico and the United States. It is in the everyday practices of life along one of the most contentious borders in the world where one can find the most poignant and volatile meanings.

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Sometimes minor objects can tell a major story. Peñalosa 2020

I ask her how she connects her practice to the history of Border Art, or the history of artists using their art as a political means to address the social and economic complexities of life in cities along the Mexican/American border.8 I am interested in the idea of time in relation to her description of life alongside the border and how so much of her work addresses the lived experience of time that never unfolds. The border is always in flux, but there is no end in sight. It will never stabilise. Does she locate her work in relation to those artists who have told similar stories through their work? She explains that her first encounter with Border Art was in her first year at art school where she was introduced to the binational event InSite, that took place between 1994 and 2005 around San Diego, Tijuana, Baja California and other places. Recognised artists converged to create projects that were later labelled as Border Art. Although she was too young to witness the actual projects, the organisers created an archive of the projects; one copy was to stay at the American border, and one at the Mexican border. Mexico is a very centralised country, and so shortly after the archive was created, the Mexican copy was transported from Tijuana and installed in Mexico City. This made Peñalosa think not only of herself and the influence and history of Border Art, but also of younger generations. What happens when artists can’t find traces of what has come before? What approaches must they create when that history is taken away? Travel to Mexico City from Tijuana is a three-hour plane journey and one must have special permission from a museum to see the projects. Peñalosa did this and photographed each one. She then placed the framed photographs alongside their title in several of their original sites and abandoned them. What I kept for myself was the documentation of the installed images, as a gesture to reactivate a history that I did not have the chance to witness. People have been writing about border art for over two decades, but this history has been mostly orally transmitted, tending to get lost and forgotten along the way. Peñalosa 2021

She recalls one day she was standing in her Aunt Lupita’s garage, gazing at all of the storage boxes inside, containing things like tools and Christmas tree ornaments – all the things that wound up there from some previous time when they were inside her house. It made her think of Border Art, particularly the art

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forms created on Mexico’s northwest border. They all have the appearance of garages. Last year, she decided to make her own garage with this history of Border Art (Figure 11.2). She invited students from the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California in Tijuana and worked collaboratively with them to study the art forms that make up the history of Border Art. For example, they looked at pre-Hispanic civilisation to see repeated elements that then became aesthetic tropes within Border Art. She explains that most houses on the border and in the United States have garages, spaces originally intended to store a car, but increasingly they are used to store objects that are not in use, or a place for objects that do not go inside the house. I used this metaphor where the ‘house’ functions as the official art history so, in my garage, remains fragments from the border art that remains in a stand by, waiting while history decides what will happen with all these pieces of work with a lack of recognition. This garage is a counter archive that questions or problematizes how the construction of art history is made with its criteria of inclusion or exclusion. Peñalosa 2021

In our most recent exchange, Peñalosa writes to me about her current exhibition at Best Practice, a gallery in San Diego. The exhibition contains a number of works made in relation to her life in Tecate. She says:

Figure 11.2 Chantal Peñalosa, Unfinished Business Garage I/V, 2019. Ceramic objects, metallic bookshelf, storage objects. Courtesy of the artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City.

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I think art is not a space to reproduce reality but instead a space to invent it. For example, a lot of projects I made are situated in Tecate Baja California, but I think that the place that I show as Tecate, is the construction I made of it. If someone travels to Tecate in search of the things I present in my work, they would probably not find it as they are, not in a literal way and maybe that person would end up disappointed. I like the idea of art as a place to re-signify what we usually see and know, so there are multiple levels of how work can be unrooted even from its reality where it came from. Peñalosa 2021

The exhibition, titled There’s Something about the Weather of This Place, speaks to the entanglement of politics with the air and the climate. Peñalosa writes that since she was a kid, she has heard people in Tecate say ‘Look, the Gringos are throwing ice to make it rain’ whenever airplanes would leave contrails in the sky. She tells me she remembered this phrase recently, and remarked on how it circulates as a colloquialism or a local politics, when contrails are actually a global phenomenon. The idea behind the colloquialism is that the US controls all of the power in the world, including the weather and the formation of the clouds. She also made a series of blank canvases during the wildfires in 2019 in California and Baja California. She tells me: There is a phenomenon of extremely downslope winds affecting this region during fall every year that causes a lot of wildfires, sometimes this wind carries out ashes from one side of the border to the other. I put white paint on the canvases and left them in my garden to keep some of the ashes flying in the sky over the fresh paint. Doing this project reminded me a lot of the beginning of our conversation and I guess this expanded the idea of why I mentioned the border as an atmosphere before. Peñalosa 2021

Bridget Smith: Blueprint for a Sea As mentioned, my first encounter with Bridget Smith was at her 2015 solo show at Focal Point Gallery in Southend, a seaside town along the Essex Coast in England. The exhibition, If You Want to Talk about Light You Have to Talk about Waves, coalesced around the colour blue, in the form of diminishing horizons

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and huge, abandoned spaces. Against the backdrop of the Southend pier, with its casinos, bars and fairground rides, Smith’s work was agonisingly nostalgic. In my exchange with Bridget Smith, I was most interested in knowing more about her relationship to the colour blue. Indeed, blue was the starting point for my conversations with both artists. I wanted to understand if colour could be used as an anthropomorphic material; if it could be invested with meaning across different places and contexts. Chantal Peñalosa’s sky prints speak to me of the same blue Trinh T. Minh-ha describes: a light blue fear. The blue in Bridget Smith’s work, however, is different. It is strange and unsettling, seductive and melancholy. The idea of using blue . . . it draws us after it. It has this sense of infinity. And I was interested in this idea of interior space reaching out into infinity. Colour is quite interesting because it does change over time. It changes its meaning over time. Blue has this push pull between dreaminess and reality. Smith 2020

In Smith’s work, blue speaks to the indeterminate. It’s a powerful and emotional trope within her work and it reminds me of Derek Jarman’s heartbreaking narratives in his book Chroma. Blue is the colour Jarman writes about as he is dying of complications as a result of the AIDS virus. His peripheral vision is diminished and he keeps seeing flashes of blue behind his eyes. ‘O Blue come forth, O Blue arise, O blue ascend, O blue come in’ (Jarman 1994: 197). He can feel the material decay of his own body, and he reaches out to the blue beyond. Bridget Smith’s work speaks to the universal and the expansiveness of lived experience. She grew up in Southend, a place characterised by economic decline and regeneration. As she explains, in this landscape, there are some things that change and some that stay the same. Growing up in such a place means that one is always stuck between changing seasons; between memories and anticipation of something to come. It is a transitory feeling or a feeling of being in two places at once. She tells me that when she was younger, she took a job as a ticket collector in a cinema. I saw the beginnings and ends of films and I saw the cinema with no one in it. And the curtain was like a colour field, almost like an illusion. An in between. There was this sense that something would be revealed, but it’s not revealed yet. I had a very strong feeling of being alone in these spaces and their scale and the aesthetics of these controlled environments. Smith 2020

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For Smith, the empty cinema stands in for a lot of narratives. It’s an abstract kind of space, or a space of reverie. And like Southend itself, it’s a space that exists between time. Colour, too, is something that exists in a transitory and transnational space. It can’t quite be pinned down, it depends on light and distance, and, while it is loaded with meaning, its meaning remains elusive. She explains that blue is perhaps the most interesting colour because blue is what happens in the earth’s atmosphere, before it becomes completely black. She uses colour to transport her viewers and to take them with her into the memories of these transitory spaces. The blue of her work is an attempt to capture their emotion and their seduction. She calls them: Sites to be transported and sites of transmission. Smith 2020

The first work of Smith’s I encountered at Focal Point Gallery was Blueprint for a Curtain, a series of fifteen, large cyanotype prints on sheets of curling paper cascading down the wall. Smith works carefully with photograph and cinematic processes, often exposing their technologies as if to puncture their capacity for illusion. Cyanotypes, a photographic process that has been in use since the nineteenth century, were initially used for the purpose of producing blueprints, notes and diagrams. The chemicals and light involved in the process results in a Prussian Blue colour field, embedded in the paper. Prussian Blue is a deep, visceral kind of blue. It doesn’t seem to have a beginning or end. Smith’s work is an attempt to make sense of this expansiveness. It almost feels as if she is trying to contain it, by bringing it into the interior spaces she inhabits: the empty cinemas and the seaside town. Blueprint for a Curtain (Figure 11.3) is a blue colour field with a ruched cinema curtain printed across it. It reminds me of my own childhood visits to the cinema, when the projector turned on at the start, throwing its light to the front of the room. The heavy, velvet ruched curtain would all of a sudden appear transparent in the light, before lifting to expose the cinema screen. In her other cyanotype prints, Smith uses the image of cinema seats (Figure 11.4). Both the curtain and the seats double as ocean waves; a dual reading of interior and exterior spaces and looking out at expansiveness from a material space. I am drawn to the way that Smith talks about her viewers. She mentions repeatedly what she wants her viewers, or ‘the viewer’ to see, or to feel. She tells me that she started off as a painter, but then came to the end of her painting and

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Figure 11.3 Bridget Smith, Blueprint for a Curtain, 2015. Fifteen cyanotype prints. Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Figure 11.4 Bridget Smith, Blueprint for a Sea (rising), 2015. Cyanotype print on aluminium. Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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Figure 11.5 Bridget Smith, Mechanical Wave, 2015. Still from video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

wanted to do something more figurative. I wonder if she means she wanted to do something more immersive, to create a different, more intimate connection with her viewer. The work that she creates now positions the viewer – me – as if I am the only person looking. It’s as if she wants me to stand where she has stood, at the back of the empty cinema, at the edge of the Southend pier, and feel the expansiveness and the emotion that she has felt. Her processes and her use of colour fix me, the viewer, in that space. Looking at her work in the gallery by the sea, I am aware that I’m examining the reverie, and her memory, of Southend. In the entrance to the gallery, two synced videos played a loop of a penny pusher arcade game. Titled ‘Mechanical Wave’ (Figure 11.5), the continuous hypnotic movement recalled the ocean and – similar to Peñalosa’s work – notions of delay and waiting. Peñalosa writes that Bridget Smith’s work reminds her of a fragment of The Mariner by Fernando Pessoa where the characters are having a conversation about the sea: FIRST – Outside of here, I never saw the sea. There, from that window is the only place where the sea can be seen, and you can see so little of it. Is the sea in other lands very beautiful? SECOND – It is only in other lands that the sea is beautiful. That which we see always gives us longings for the one we shall never see.9

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Conclusion I set out to create a curatorial project with no exhibition, no catalogue, no opening and no closing. I was interested to see what might transpire through the practice of ‘vulnerable listening’, rather than naming or authoring, and, drawing on histories of feminist curating, how a project might evolve through methods of friendship, dialogue and exchange. By doing so, I wanted to expand the notion of curatorship and its histories and methods, embracing heterarchical modes of organisation in the form of dialogue and written correspondence. Transnational, feminist dialogues in the arts – like the ones written in this chapter – have the potential to form new ‘epistemic communities’ (Meskimmon 2021: 2) that recognise multiple centres and move away from binary relationships between local and global, national and international. Epistemic knowing is embodied knowing; it is situated and informed by the politics of place, but mobile and transversal. Art practice offers up a space where the imagination can ignite knowledge, enacting and envisioning new ways of inhabiting the world. Within this space, it is possible to conceive of the curator as one who makes connections and seeks solidarity and friendship, rather than naming worlds and tying them down. Writing, with and through art practice, is one such method; ‘Woman writing’ (Kristeva 1978) carves a space for voices to emerge over time and across distance. In the process of writing the art practices of Chantal Peñalosa and Bridget Smith, I am connected to the sky, the sea and the land. I am reminded of home.

Notes 1

Chantal Peñalosa (b. 1987, Tecate, Mexico) studied fine arts at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California and the University of São Paulo. Her artistic practice uses small gestures and actions that intervene in everyday life, playing with notions of labour, waiting and delay. She uses repetitious actions to suspend time and create dialogue with histories, atmospheres and objects in her home town of Tecate, Mexico. Peñalosa’s work has been shown in Museo Jumex (2021) Mexico City; M HKA Museum, Belgium (2019); ESPAC, Mexico (2019); XII Bienal FEMSA, Mexico (2018); Museo Amparo, Mexico (2018); CCI Fabrika, Russia (2017); La Tallera, Mexico (2015); ZKM Center for Art and Media, Germany (2015); and MUAC, Mexico (2014), amongst others, and she was awarded FONCA Young Artist fellowships in 2013–2014 and 2015–2016 and the acquisition prize in the XIV

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Bienal de Artes Visuales del Noroeste. She is represented by Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City. www.proyectosmonclova.com/people/chantal-penalosa. #NoVoySola (I won’t go alone) is a collaborative project to vindicate the civil rights struggle of women and provide friendship and solidarity between female contemporary artists in Mexico. For International Women’s Day (8 March 2021), they organised a series of street protests in the form of artistic interventions. www.novoysola.mx/. The full list of phrases used in Chantal Peñalosa’s banner Closer to the Disappearance, from the Eclipse: Piensas mucho (You think a lot), Eres una mujer complicada (You’re a complicated woman), Ambiciosa (Ambitious), Sólo piensas en ru trabajo (You only think about your work), Me gustaría que trabajaras en La Parasina (I wish you would work in La Parisina), Que fueras como otras mujeres (You are just like other women), Aléjate de mi círculo profesional (Get away from my circle), Yo podría destruir tu carrera (I could destroy your career), Resultas interesante por ser de rancho (You are interesting for being from outside of here), Seguero alguien más hizo tu obra (Sure, someone else did your work), Te puedo hundir (I can sink you), Insufrible (Insufferable), Eres una trepadora (You are a climber), Dejaste de ser mujer (You stopped being a woman). The poetry competition was organised by university professors as part of a city-wide festival celebrating Ferdinand VI. Festivals were a defining part of life in colonial Mexico City. They were organised by the authorities in order to celebrate the expansion of European horizons and to glorify the Spanish Empire. Spectacle and government-sponsored revelry were used as colonising agents and as a way to bring diverse groups of people together to promote shared values. See Curcio-Nagy (2004). Women in colonial Mexico were not permitted to be educated. According to Alicia V. Ramírez Olivares (2010) women in colonial Mexico were simply ‘a subject without intelligence’ (p. 1). Intelligence was reserved only for males, and therefore an educated woman was seen as monstrous or anti-female. However, many women in religious sects, because of their close proximity to books and their ability to engage in self-reflection, ventured into poetry and it was these women who cemented a female presence within the genre. Much of this literary work was written anonymously, which explains Navarro’s exclusion from Mexican literary history. More information about the exhibition can be found here: www.fpg.org.uk/ exhibition/if-you-want-to-talk-about-light-you-have-to-talk-about-waves/. Bridget Smith (b. 1966, Essex, UK) is a British artist working with analogue and digital photography, video and site-specific installations that explore the real and imagined in social and architectural spaces. She creates spaces where the ‘unreal’ and fantasy emerge as intense aesthetic experiences, using light, colour, pattern and scale. Her work addresses our conflicted desire to feel connected and to be transported and she draws on her experiences growing up in a seaside town to make connections

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between society, the landscape and the wider universe. Smith’s work has been shown at the Victoria & Albert Museum (2013), Bromer Art Collection, Roggwil (2013), Stanley Picker Gallery, London (2012), Peer, London (2010), Two Rooms, Auckland (2008), Musée D’art Contemporain, Val de Marne (2007) and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2006), and she is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London: www. frithstreetgallery.com/artists/31-bridget-smith/. Alain Quemin (2012) notes that since the end of the 1960s the global art market has proliferated into a vast international network. He states that actors in this network consider national borders to be negligible; it is viewed as globalised, culturally diverse and invested in cultural debate. Through an analysis of artists exhibiting in major galleries, museums, biennales and art fairs from 1970–2010 Quemin reveals that, in fact, the geography of the art world has a clear ‘centre’, ‘semi-periphery’ and ‘periphery’. The ‘centre’ comprises the USA (and possibly Germany) and the ‘semiperiphery’ comprises much of Western Europe. The ‘periphery’, or those countries with the least representation, exists outside of the USA and Western Europe. Border Art refers to a contemporary art practice rooted in experiences of living along the Mexican/American border. It emerged as a term in the 1980s to describe sets of art practices that interrogate experiences of borders, ‘race’, ethnicity, national origins, surveillance, home and identity. Although artworks have been made in relation to many kinds of contested borders, the term Border Art that I use here refers specifically to the history of site-specific art made in relation to the US/ Mexico border. The Mariner (A Static Drama in One Scene) was written by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) in 1913.

References Curcio-Nagy, L. (2004) The Great Festivals of Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity. UNM Press: New Mexico. Jarman, D. (1995) Chroma: A Book of Colour – June 93. London: Vintage. Krasny, E. (2016) ‘Curatorial Materialism: A Feminist Perspective on Independent and Co-Dependent Curating’. On-Curating, 29: 96–107. Meskimmon, M. (2020) Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entaglements and Intersections. London: Routledge. Minh-ha, T.T. (2011) Elsewhere within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event. London: Routledge. Quemin, A. (2012) ‘The Internationalization of the Contemporary Art World and Market: The Role of Nationality and Territory in a Supposedly “Globalized” Sector’,

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in M. Lind and O. Velthuis (eds), Contemporary Art and its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Ramírez Olivares, A.V. (2010) ‘Mariana Navarro: Poesia Visual Femenina en el Siglo XVIII ’. Actas del XXXVIII Congreso Internacional del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Available at https://studylib.es/doc/8293448/mariananavarro-poes%C3%ADa-visual-femenina-en-el-siglo-xviii (Accessed 18 March 2021). Sliwinska, B. (2015) ‘Transnational Embodied Belonging within “Edge Habitats” ’, Third Text 29 (4–5): 287–309.

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A Smuggler, a Butcher and a Fairy: Doing Things with One’s Body Jana Kukaine and Jānis Taurens

Being a relatively small country with an art scene where ‘everybody knows everyone’, Latvia has always depended on its international friends, be they real or fake.1 One can say that the latter has played an even more significant role in the course of history – the Soviet occupation in 1940 with its policy of ‘friendship of peoples’ is a telling example.2 Latvia’s relatively small scale is making the country face an impossible dilemma: either to internationalise itself in order to promote transnational partnerships (who on earth would undertake learning such a complicated language that is used by approximately two million people?) or to focus on more separatist strategies (‘small but proud’) in order to enhance the national culture and preserve its identity. Similar questions are haunting the artists who are forced to decide whether to work for the ‘local’ art scene or to head for ‘the world’ in the West, repeating the scenario of a well-known Latvian fairy-tale where a poor but smart boy leaves his home in search of happiness – power, wealth and a princess. While the story is an example of the historical male privilege to travel and his entitlement to heroic deeds, it leads directly to the question of this chapter: what are the relations between transgressive motion and border-crossing and women as the agents of history, not its trophies? In other words, how to think through the political and artistic female agency for subversive and transformative engagements with the world? In this chapter, we focus on three contemporary Latvian women artists – Diāna Tamane, Rasa Jansone and Ingrīda Pičukāne.3 While Jansone and Pičukāne are artists whose careers started to evolve in the 1990s, which was a period of dramatic social and political change in Latvia, Tamane entered Latvia’s art scene a decade later, and, additionally, she is based in the neighbouring country of Estonia. Both Jansone and Pičukāne are currently considered to be the core of Latvia’s feminist art circle, while Tamane has not been explicitly associated with 239

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feminist aesthetics or ideas so far. Nonetheless, as we intend to demonstrate, the three artists share a common commitment to feminist agency for enhancing strategies of spatial and ideological rearrangement to challenge, disrupt and reconceptualise post-patriarchal politics of domesticity, docile femininity and especially the (semi-)public space – be it a cemetery, one’s kitchen or the forest. Each of these locations plays their own role in the life of a post-Soviet woman, allowing particular vernacular subjects to unfold: the Smuggler, the Butcher and the Fairy. By addressing the politics of hostility and marginalisation, as well as articulating intimate family histories, feminist kinships and solidarities, these modest and at the same time eccentric characters will allow us to approach the notions of female agency and transnational belonging from the perspective of Latvia’s multicultural heritage and entangled history. The figures of the Smuggler, the Butcher and the Fairy seem to withstand the common historical inclination to celebrate the heroic deeds of outstanding individuals, for example strong and remarkable rebel women. Our heroines are mostly everyday women who do not do anything extraordinary, except for their regular female duties of care work, social bonding and affective labour. However, at certain points these seemingly innocent and historically irrelevant actions become politically decisive and even transgressive. Thus, the objective of this chapter is to record these moments, to analyse their significance and make sense of their effects, relocating individual women within wider social networks – be it a family, kinship or community. Each artist examined in the chapter has elaborated a variety of strategies allowing them to ‘invert, invent and break old bonds, that create new subject positions’ (Bronwyn 1991: 50) while perceiving these positions as embodied, emotional and affective. Thus, the idea of agency as a result of rational decisionmaking and control is compromised by the emotional, random and allegedly ‘feminine’ subjectivity, embedded in the messy rags of everyday material life. In addition, the agentic subject does not engage in a struggle towards her individual personhood, but rather focuses on negotiating the array of interdependencies and corporeal vulnerabilities (Butler 2004, 2009), as well as emotional, affective and social needs that arise from her gendered body. While the capacity to suffer ‘is inherent in human embodiment’ (Mackenzie et al. 2014: 4), the prospects of suffering have a gendered character, exposing women to particular sorts of bodily injuries and risks. Thus, an account of female agency, while grounded in the commitment to ensure the survival of her community and loved ones, should also include concern for agentic self-care and preserving one’s corporeal and

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emotional integrity in the conditions of being susceptible to social or political wounding. In this sense we understand belonging as interpersonal and intercultural affection that reaches beyond legal or ideological borders. However, we are aware that the conception of belonging cannot be univocal. Instead, we want to pay tribute to at least two sorts of ambiguities that it comprises. The first addresses the specific positioning of feminism within postSoviet countries, while the second deals with the dialectics of belonging and non-belonging. The specific character of a post-socialist neoliberal condition transcends the dichotomy of ‘either’ (acting, belonging and transgressing) and ‘or’ (being dominated, rejected and acted upon), revealing a capacity to remain ‘in-between’ and at the same time to question and transgress the strict borders of classification. Art historian Māra Traumane suggests that this paradox can be explained by the urgency of coining local feminist traditions, while at the same time affirming both one’s belonging to and independence from transnational feminist currents (Traumane 2012). This peculiar blend of passion and ignorance, susceptibility and reluctance is exemplified by post-socialist feminist sensibility and its denial of ‘Western’ feminism while simultaneously embracing its agenda. Therefore, we find it especially helpful to relocate the post-socialist feminist position with its inherent contradictions within the framework of the hybridity theory of Homi Bhabha (2004) and other postcolonial thinkers. This approach emphasises the uncertainty and ambivalence as intrinsic characteristics of a space with multiple cultural borders, and ‘[r]ather than basing truth on authenticity, it valorises impurity and mixing’ (Sharp 2009: 121). This perspective on the Soviet and post-Soviet situation opens up more flexible and nuanced cultural horizons that are not stuck into binary oppositions. Likewise, if attending to Latvia’s culture, one can easily notice that there are much more inward contradictions and disparities than the traditional geopolitical juxtaposition of Eastern and Western Europe. Therefore, the feminist discourse in the contemporary art of Latvia undoubtedly carries a trace of hybridity, appropriation and mimicry. The second source of ambiguity is rooted in the dialectic character of belonging per se, its affective manifestation which ‘marks a body’s belonging to a world of encounters or; a world’s belonging to a body of encounters but also, in non-belonging, through all those far sadder (de)compositions of mutual in-compossibilities’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 2). By articulating scripts of ‘non-belonging’, as well as one’s vulnerability and traumatic gendered experiences, which have been profoundly overlooked in the dominant anthropo- and

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phallogocentric narratives, artistic practices succeed in materialising a complex net of transcultural belonging with vernacular knots made of the threads of the personal, the familial and the emotional, as well as the public, the national and the cultural. It allows for the ‘in-between’ situation also in our understanding of art which is a political act itself, while its subject-in-process exposes a multitude of disruptions along the lines of gender, ethnicity, language and geopolitical location. Perhaps, this approach leads us to conceptualise also our understanding of the transnational as a political act of reluctance to embrace or stay loyal to only one particular culture or historical perspective. Transnational critique therefore is for us a way of questioning one’s belonging, transgressing the borders illegally and consciously choosing to be on the ‘wrong’ or ‘other’ side. While such acts of resistance may be accomplished by using different strategies, in the chapter, following the analysis of the artworks, we will focus on agency as corporeal-affective means of doing things with one’s gendered body.

The Smuggler: Belonging as a Flash Let us begin with Diāna Tamane – an artist born in Latvia in 1986, currently residing in Tartu, Estonia and mainly working with photography and video in a manner which could be called anthropological conceptualism. She uses autobiographical and familial materials like letters and family albums both as a source for her work and the main object of her investigations. Often in the process of art production the artist vigorously involves her mother who is a truck driver, their collaborative authorship blurring the line between art and non-art professional. The artist describes her practice as an exploration of the places where she belongs, while focusing on ‘what is broken or not functional’ as well as everyday events and intrinsic inner conflicts (Tamane 2020). Thus, her art practice is also an exploration of non-belonging and its spatial arrangements. The series ‘Flower Smuggler’ (see Figure 12.1) consists of photographs and documents issued by the Federal Customs Service of Russia from 2016–2019, and allows the artist’s grandmother to reveal her transgressive agency when on 4 June 2015 she was accused of smuggling two pots of flowers over the Latvian/ Russian border. The grandmother, as Tamane recalls, intended to take the flowers to the grave of her grandfather in Pytalovo, previously known as Abrene. In 1945, the town of Abrene was annexed to the USSR, along with the rest of Latvian territory. In 1991, after Latvia restored its independence,

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Abrene remained part of the Russian Federation and nowadays requires a visa to get into. The flowers are also the main subject of my grandmother’s albums. Tamane 2020

A person who smuggles goods denotes a specific agency of crossing the border while carrying forbidden objects. The border, whose legitimacy the grandmother happened to question, is charged with historical violence, but is also an interface of post-imperial legacies and intercultural exchange, represented, for example, in the blue colour of the metallic fence around the grave that could indicate Orthodox cemetery aesthetics generally not widespread in Latvia, except for some of its eastern regions.4 Yet, when looking at the photograph with the old woman who is holding white artificial flowers,5 a more disturbing question arises: why is the artist’s grandmother headless? What could be the reason for the granddaughter to execute her loved one? A rather plausible reason might seem the artist’s intention to highlight the old woman’s vulnerability and the violence she had to endure in her long life. The image may also stand for the anonymity of women as agents of history in general: their work – be it domestic, civic or affective ‘maintenance’, to borrow the term from Mierle Laderman Ukeles6 – is often overlooked and unaccounted for. In this case, grandmother’s individual agentic capacity is denied – her agency to

Figure 12.1 Diāna Tamane, from the series ‘Flower Smuggler’, 2019.

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preserve the family’s memory and cherish social bonds when taking care of the dead and fulfilling one’s emotional needs.7 Finally, the body without a (visible) head can also be interpreted as an objectification of the female subject. Within the Cartesian worldview, which has had a profound influence on Western philosophy, human agency is located within the mind – which is imagined as residing in the head – believed to be the leading, the most valuable and perhaps the most human part of the person. The body, on the contrary, is relegated to ‘the brute material envelope for the inner and essential self, the thinking thing; it is ontologically distinct from that inner self, . . . [it] is, indeed, comparable to animal existence’ (Bordo 2003: 144). The active and creative mind, according to the philosophical tradition which stretches through the mostly phallocentric Western philosophy back to Plato, is associated with the masculine, while the inert and passive body with the feminine, making the Cartesian notions clearly gendered. Thus, while the whole story of Tamane’s grandmother – the denial of her individuality, autonomy and agency, that is, the rights to visit her grandfather’s grave – has a strong political and national aspect, it is also gendered. In the image, we can identify several conflicting agencies: firstly, that of an old woman which is acknowledged by official authorities only to accuse her of violation of the customs laws, therefore denying her the right to act in a particular way. Secondly, the impersonal and ideological authority of Russia’s state institution (the Federal Customs Service) that guards the national borders. And thirdly, ‘the catalytic agency’ of flowers to affectively speak for injustice and testify to the power relations of the situation.8 This perhaps can be better understood if we refer to the photo albums of the grandmother – carefully arranged, they unwrap the affectionate attachment to the flowers that the grandmother had grown in her garden or had received as a gift. Thus, these images, while employing the ‘kitsch aesthetics of the working-class’ (Tamane 2020), offer a testimony of bodily labour of maintaining relationships that are both interpersonal and transnational. The forced transition from natural flowers to artificial ones coincides with the withering of affective bonds and the increasing constraints on sustaining one’s emotional investment imposed by an authoritarian nation-state. The interplay of these conflicting agencies reveals several (her)stories arising from the centuries-long fight for the territory of today’s Latvia involving various military powers (German merchants and the Crusaders, Sweden and the Russian Empire, among others9). The gendered aspects of these narratives have been

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scarcely recognised by the prevailing tradition of historiography, and consequently it continues to reinforce and ‘naturalise’ the patriarchal power embodied in the figures of the border guards. The tension between the flowers in the hands of an elderly lady and the bureaucratic legal procedures managed by the armed and strong-muscled agents of the Federal Customs Service elucidates a dynamic of corporeal vulnerability and inequality which is not only gendered, but also anchored by one’s age, familial, economic and social status – and above all the geopolitical and affective location on the ‘wrong’ side of the border. Taking photographs of the confiscated goods becomes an act of critique and resistance – a symbolic withholding of one’s goods and a demonstration of the commitment to family bonds. It presents a troubling perspective on belonging as never being simple or safe. But does this mean it is unattainable? ‘Belonging is impossible. . .’ exclaimed the famous Latvian writer Nora Ikstena in a short description of her visit in 2006 to Latvian émigré poet, novelist and translator Dzintars Sodums, who at that time lived in Spencer, New York.10 This thought, as she recalls, occurred to her when driving from Spencer to Kennedy Airport and listening to Eric Bachmann’s song (‘Some people search every corner / To find a place where they belong / Many fall back out of order / And many more go down alone/’11). She proceeds: ‘it is a flash [only a moment] – as a white wall of Sodus’s lighthouse, as a black grass at the Užava seashore, a graffiti truth on the Brooklyn Bridge, as flowers on the wall of Sēļu manor’ (Ikstena 2019: 333–334). The peculiar condition of being split between two or even more cultures and languages (church Latin, German, Polish, Swedish, Russian) and religions (pagan, Western and Eastern Christianity, from the fifteenth century also Lutheran) is not new to the people of Latvia. A monocultural belonging to one place, one country and one language is unattainable for many reasons. It prompts a re-examination of the very understanding of belonging that resists the official notions of national citizenship which – as in the case with Tamane’s grandmother – permits only one ‘homeland’. The poetic juxtaposition of the places in the United States (Sodus Bay Lighthouse, Brooklyn Bridge) and Latvia (the seashore near the river Užava, a manor house from the sixteenth century) can support the view that belonging, in Ikstena’s words, is neither a national passport, nor a subtle feeling of patriotism, but manifests itself in an emotional engagement with the surrounding environment and the community. Therefore, the Latvian word mirklis in Ikstena’s text could be read not as ‘a moment’12 – which will inevitably pass – but as ‘a flash’, a kind of unexpected thought, an affective enlightenment. Being fragmented and

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of an unpredictable nature, it resists the pretentiousness of nationalist slogans and evades the inspection of the customs service, while promoting the transgressive sense of belonging that is ‘in-between’, simultaneous, agentic and hybrid.

The Butcher: Gendered Vulnerability One of the few artists in the Latvian contemporary art scene who has associated her work with the feminist agenda from the outset of her artistic practice is Rasa Jansone, born in 1973. This association has never been an easy one, since ‘feminist’ in the last twenty years in Latvia (and even within the educated art circles) has been perhaps one of the worst labels a woman can have – it was (and to a certain degree still is) widely used in a derogatory sense to indicate an angry, ugly and unfulfilled childless spinster. To trace the genealogy of the negative conceptions of the term one has to account for the presumed ‘gender equality’ that was believed to have been achieved in the Soviet Union and was often blamed for having produced a variety of social problems, the ‘feminisation of men’ and ‘masculinisation of women’ being some of them (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2007; Voronina 1993). Feminism, after Latvia regained independence, was accused of being aggressive and sexist, and the restoration of the traditional gender roles was perceived as a return to the modern values of the independent pre-Soviet Latvia.13 Thus, in an atmosphere of hostility to women’s rights and revival of traditional docile femininity, Jansone’s explicit identification with feminism has caused her a variety of issues, confrontations and, to repeat Gregg and Seigworth, ‘far sadder (de)compositions of mutual in-compossibilities’ (2010: 2) both in her professional and private life – these experiences are often reflected in her art practice. Jansone’s oeuvre consists of paintings and mixed media installations, the installation Ritual Place (2018–2019) being one of them.14 It is a set of wooden chopping boards – a common kitchen tool that is associated with domesticity, shared meals, well-being and family life. Rectangular or cut in the shapes of piglets and flowers, the most popular designs among Latvian craftsmanship, the chopping boards are printed with monochrome photos of varying origins: some snapshots from Jansone’s family archive, images by unknown authors found in antique shops or online, as well as the works of acclaimed Latvian male photographers Kārlis Lakše and Elmārs Heniņš (see Figure 12.2).

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Figure 12.2 Rasa Jansone, Ritual Place, 2018. Fragment of installation. Collection of Latvian Museum of Photography. Ash-tree chopping boards, digital print, iron hooks. Images from Elmārs Heniņš, archive of Latvian Museum of Photography, 1950s. Dimensions variable. Photo: Kristīne Madjare.

Most of these images had been made to achieve a distinct ideological goal. The photographs by Lakše taken during the independent Latvia of the 1930s idealised its nationalist and rural lifestyle, as well as boasted farmers’ power to tame and control nature and its beasts. Photographs by Heniņš, taken in the 1950s, supported slogans of Soviet agricultural productivity and promoted physical health and sport education among the young generation to fulfil the idea of strong and healthy bodies of Soviet citizens that are disciplined, obedient and strictly segregated by sex. The discoveries in antique shops feature images of a newlywed couple, dressed appropriately for the occasion, in the process of civil registration, since undergoing a marital ritual in church was condemned at that time. Finally, a famous portrait of Virginia Woolf and an image of a gorilla mother were borrowed from the internet, while the artist’s family albums lent some snapshots of her grandmother. These images had served peculiar political and economic regimes by not only shaping human bodies, their corporeal experiences and legal interactions, but

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also by determining their emotional and material needs in terms of domesticity, docile femininity and a heterosexual family. Jansone’s intention of relocating these ideological messages onto the smooth wooden surface of chopping boards (the woodenness of which already stands for national thoroughness and authenticity) evokes a critique of compulsory and nationalistic heteronormativity (Rich 1980) which is inscribed in the institution of the family – the only ‘sacred’, politically ‘correct’ and officially recognised legal form of relationships between a heterosexual woman and a man.15 Thus, gender is enacted as one of the most influential tools for social formation, prescribing the ‘rituals’ of the intimate body experiences and visceral feelings that can inflict covert anguish and suffering, as well as foster segregation, marginalisation and injustice. By challenging myths and common-sense opinions about falling in love, getting married, raising children and running one’s own household, the Ritual Place not only addresses the political challenges and social injustice inscribed in everyday ‘romantic’ practices. The installation also strives to break the historical silence surrounding the lives of our parents and grandparents by questioning the ‘official’ narratives that position them as sample citizens, loyal workers and happy family members. While navigating the ideological layers of the three political regimes – the independent state of Latvia during the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Latvia after the occupation of 1940 and finally the Latvia of today which regained its independence in 1991 – the artist reveals that regardless of the crucial differences of these historical periods, the underlying patterns of gendered inscriptions to some remarkable extent have remained unchanged. This might be a surprising discovery since the common attitude would most likely be to emphasise the progressive shift towards the gradual but irrefutable implementation of women’s rights throughout the course of the country’s history. The inherited images and narratives of gender equality seem to conform to this idea – at least, as long as they are displayed in a proper ideological framing. Thus, the artistic strategy of Jansone has several subversive effects: she succeeds in questioning not only the heteronormativity of the nation-state with its closed borders of familiar arrangements and the legitimacy of various gender regimes, but also the presumed history of women’s emancipation with its implied idea of progress. While some feminist accomplishments must be acknowledged, their impact will not suffice to solve the prevailing ideology of sexism nor will it be able to fully address the gendered vulnerability of women. Besides, it should be noted that women rights are never guaranteed, especially in the face of the growing impact of neoliberal policy worldwide.

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Yet one more peculiarity of post-socialist feminism must be taken into account: Soviet and post-Soviet sensibilities have never really exhibited a distinct need for a feminist struggle since equality and emancipation were believed to already be there – grounded by the basic principles of the Bolshevik revolution and allegedly achieved by forcing women into the labour market.16 In that sense, the neoliberal image of the superwoman of the twenty-first century who, by working hard and believing in herself, can have it all (or at least, so the popular narrative goes), does not drastically differ from the almighty Soviet she-hero of socialist labour, which, after a day of productive work of building communism comes home to embark on the second work shift.17 Jansone ironically refers to the superpowers of women in the image of the gorilla mother carrying a baby on her back as a conclusion of the sequence of staged photographs of married couples (see Figure 12.3). The lady in a white elegant dress and carefully manicured nails has turned into a wild and shaggy beast burdened with her reproductive function, while the groom with his polite smile has suddenly

Figure 12.3 Rasa Jansone. Ritual Place, 2018. Fragment of installation. Oak chopping boards, digital print, iron hooks. Images from Riga antique shop and the internet, authors unknown. Dimensions variable. Photo: Gvido Kajons.

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disappeared without a trace.18 The pure body of the heterosexual marriage has been disintegrated in a truly Cartesian manner, the masculine mind leaving its feminine part – the brute material envelope that has basically turned into animal existence. It is necessary to mention also the way Jansone’s chopping boards are usually displayed. To strip the heteronormative scripts of their authoritarian power, the artist has resorted to subtle formatting techniques to induce slight changes in the photographs. The very location of the chopping boards on the wall in their most usual position – on the kitchen hooks – makes the printed images tilt slightly, forcing the horizon line to float down. It produces the impression the world is about to collapse, fall apart and slide away, and the seemingly incontestable gender constructions will not help to sustain it. The sensation of tumbling, falling and going astray is troubling, yet also liberating. Perhaps, once the strains of gendered ideologies ease off, one is finally allowed to expose one’s vulnerability and articulate one’s emotional needs for mutual love, affection and care which might not be compatible with the roles assigned by either the she-hero of socialist labour, post-socialist docile femininity or the neoliberal superwoman. However, the price of traversing the rigid borders of controlled gendered identity is also evident: among the chopping boards a set of polished butcher’s knives – the ‘guards’ – is displayed, consisting of a pair of impressive rectangular cleavers decorated in traditional style. Due to their inherent structure, when they hang on the wall both cleavers (the exemplary couple?) topple slightly, forming a configuration which speaks of violence – one of them is constantly endangered by the other, revealing a hidden pattern of domination and submission. That is reminiscent not only of the scope of domestic violence that often goes unrecognised, is naturalised and silenced, but also speaks of the inherent power inequality not only among family members but also between women and the invisible power of the nation-state. Ultimately, in Jansone’s art a body is placed on a chopping board of ideology to produce culturally defined, gendered identity. While corporeal imprint thus produced varies geographically and culturally, Jansone’s work underscores its permanence – as a chopping board, it is part of our everyday life, and most women had to learn to cope with it. Perhaps interrogations into one’s gendered vulnerability and bodily needs while transgressing national, political and temporal borders can deliver political claims for a more inclusive, feminist social policy.

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The Fairy: Bon Voyage! Born in 1978, Ingrīda Pičukāne, the third heroine of our chapter, is among the most visible feminist artists in Latvia, known also as an illustrator and book designer. In her art practice she engages with subjects like embodiment, social constructions of beauty, emotional discharge and body-positivity. The work we would like to highlight is a comic book entitled Three Sisters (2015)19 that spells out the postcolonial cultural hybridity of today’s Latvia. It should be noted that historically, the territory of Latvia has been occupied not only politically and economically, but also linguistically and culturally. However, the aftermath of such occupation may result in a linguistic nationalism which, in fact, often continues the same principles of cultural hegemony, only in reverse. Some features of this reversal can be discerned in the cultural processes of today’s Latvia, often being put forward by right-wing nationalist politics. The underlying narrative of the Three Sisters is rather simple: three fairy-like young women go into the forest and discover a naked, possibly drunken man (see Figure 12.4). The sisters decorate him as in a burial ritual and put his body in the river. The characters speak in French and Russian (not a word in Latvian),

Figure 12.4 Ingrīda Pičukāne, from Three Sisters [Oh là là scene], 2016. Published Mini kuš! No. 38. Riga: Grafiskie stāsti.

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while the work’s title is Russian too – Три сестры (Three Sisters) – that is an obvious reference to the celebrated play of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Another reference is given to the famous Russian rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov and his song with the same title20 where he treats the sisters as if they were an irrational, mythological force which appears in the life of a man and changes its normal (‘light and lovely’) course. Finally, one more instance of the Russian language is found in the story’s male character’s speech which is full of swear words based on genitalia and sexual intercourse described from the standpoint of a man. The sisters speak in French only. The choice of the languages might be surprising: the second language for the Latvian speaking community historically has been German; after inclusion in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was Russian; then in the first period of independence (1920s–1930s) German revived in the circles of the educated Latvian elites; and in Soviet times again only Russian – while today Latvia’s culture has been at least partially colonised by English. However, the reference to Russian literature in the title of Pičukāne’s work invites us to remember that before the Russian Revolution the upper class often used French even in their everyday conversations as described, for example, in Lev Tolstoy’s novels.21 In addition, the play also provides a framework for examining female agency, taking into account that the three heroines of Chekhov – welleducated ladies thrown into the dull life of a provincial town – fail to embrace their dreams and are subject to the actions of others (their brother who suffers from addiction, the whims of his domineering wife, as well as other members of the hostile community). Thus, the play can be read as an inscription of feminine passivity and the malady of intelligent women who are unable to fight the brute world of a philistine society. Pičukāne, however, reverses this order by a sequence of feminist interventions that enables her to advance the notion of female agency based on sisterhood and collaboration in a corporeal-affective way. Pičukāne’s depiction of the three intellectual sisters is subtly ironic. In fact, they are attributed the traits of the ‘feminine frivolity’ – such phrases as ‘oh! un oiseau!’ (‘oh! a bird!’) or ‘belle! comme un petit soleil!’ (‘beautiful! like a little sun!’) – in contrast with the horizontally lying man’s body, deprived of the possibility of any action except swearing. Yet, his violent words are not implemented into action – on the contrary, the final scenes of the story feature the drunk man drowning slowly (the likeness to the 1988 film Drowning by Numbers directed by Peter Greenaway can be recognised) while the two sisters comment indifferently: ‘le voilà beau et calme. . .’ (‘here he is, beautiful and

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Figure 12.5 Ingrīda Pičukāne, from Three Sisters [Bon Voyage! scene], 2016. Published Mini kuš! No. 38. Riga: Grafiskie stāsti.

calm. . .’). The third sister pronounces with tears: ‘bon voyage!’ (‘good voyage!’); besides, the only piece of garment the naked man had had – a cap featuring the word ‘cool’ in English – is now worn by her that can be read as a symbolic appropriation also of his agentic power (see Figure 12.5). Thus the innocent, emphatic and child-like femininity in fact demonstrates an unexpected authority and is in the position to decide the fate of the masculine hero. The parallels to Chekhov again should be drawn, since perhaps the three sisters in his play have always secretly wished to implement agentic self-care, which implied liberating themselves from the patriarchal power of the brother who is gradually destroying their shared home and future perspectives. The power of sisterhood is enhanced by the two exclamations in the adjacent speech balloons – ‘mon Dieu!’ (‘my God!’) and ‘ma soeur!’ (‘my sister!’) that read together can mean God as a sister implying a perspective of feminist theology which undermines the patriarchal demand for the masculine Trinity. The reference to sea travel (the voyage) should be noted as well – the female characters here appropriate the traditionally male privilege, but they do so to serve their own subversive and transgressive interests. Therefore, the entertaining story of a funny misunderstanding between the characters in the forest

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illuminates the gendered aspects of linguistic politics, and all its narrative layers – from anecdotal to postcolonial – provoke reflection on the historical legacies of belonging and its underlying structures of power, at least in Latvia. The reference to power is made especially explicit by the images of the bear and the snake that are among the most important pictorial elements of the story. At first, the bear appears inspecting a pack of cigarettes – the environmental pollution can be associated with the social contamination produced by toxic masculinity. In the following scene, the sisters encounter the man lying in the forest meadow and they hold back the big animal (presumably from the naked body) with a preventing hand gesture. The snake has a graphical and colour likeness to the long brown braids of the two sisters (the third is a short cut blonde) that recalls an image of the Medusa and its feminist laugh (Cixous et al. 1976). The snake-braids however are tamed now, as the sisters inspect their discovery. Meanwhile, the bear alludes to the mythical Latvian hero Lāčplēsis (his name means ‘Bear-slayer’), at the same time evoking linguistic associations with a metaphoric phrase ‘a Russian bear’ that in Latvian denotes its powerful and dangerous neighbouring country. Finally, lācis (a bear) is also a family name of the well-known Latvian writer Vilis Lācis who after the Soviet occupation became the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, and thus is sometimes viewed as a political traitor. Taking into account these ambiguities, we can interpret the mutually discordant communication between the sisters and the Latvian hero as a critique of the idea of the glorious nation-state and one language model. Instead, a model of intercultural exchange and non-binary hybridity is proposed. And one last remark – the medium chosen by the artist is of great significance too. The texts in the speech balloons are connected with the female bodies which are set in motion (in contrast to the helpless and passive male character, thus again reversing the traditional gendered patterns of activity). The driving force of the narrative is grounded not so much in the utterances of the sisters (which to some extent conform to the norms of the stereotypical feminine language – polite, trivial, docile and harmless) but in their interactions with the agentic natural environment (the river and the forest) as well as human and non-human creatures (the bear, the snake and the drunken man who, contrary to the prevailing pictorial tradition in Western art, is depicted naked, thus stripping him from the symbolic association with cultural achievements, rationality and heroism). It leads towards a theoretical conjunction of posthuman corporeal feminism and postcolonial critique that views agency as an embodied strategy of

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doing things with one’s body and positions feminist sisterhood as a means of becoming a historical subject. The comparison of the three artists and their works demonstrates that agency is not a prerogative of a hero in the traditional sense of the word. Its most intriguing and subversive, as well as feminist and transnational, instances can be found in the most unexpected and undistinguished venues. Likewise, agency can manifest itself via trivial everyday objects and materials – like a bunch of artificial flowers or a chopping board – and be directed towards micro-goals like visiting one’s grandfather’s grave or arranging photographs of flowers in a family album. Additionally, agency can be shared with your loved ones, but these deeds may forever be concealed in the depth of one’s family histories or a forest, or might stay locked in the kitchen cupboard. By offering a glimpse into the agentic agenda of the three female protagonists – each of them of different age, interests and cultural location – the artworks examined in this chapter allow us to indicate vernacular strategies for negotiating, managing and overcoming one’s corporeal vulnerability and taking care of the social, emotional and affective bonds that unite and nurture women. The most surprising and at the same promising moment of these solidarities is their agentic ability to withstand the rigid national, linguistic and cultural borders, as well as the hostile forces of non-belonging that are striking their bodies, kinships and devotions. Commitment to transnational belonging is both embodied and affective, as well as undeniably gendered, aged and sexualised, always situated and inscribed in one’s particular vernacular settings. However, these traits do not encapsulate the agenic subject in her national history or environment, but allow her to move freely across the borders, languages and cultures, even if the act of transgression might sometimes be hazardous and lead to unpredictable results. While transnational critique is especially relevant for disentangling Latvia’s multicultural and hybrid heritage, the decision to consciously stay on the ‘wrong’ side of history might offer new possibilities for coining unexpected solidarities and building affective bonds across national borders.

Notes 1 The research for this chapter was supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation and the writing of the chapter was funded by the Ministry of Culture, Republic of Latvia, project ‘Cultural Capital as a Resource for Sustainable Development of Latvia’, project no. VPP-KM-LKRVA-2020/1-0003.

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2 There were several events leading to the occupation of Latvia and other Baltic states: the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939, usually referred to as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, with secret provisions regarding the Baltic states; the forced mutual assistance pact between the USSR and Latvia in October of the same year and establishment of Soviet military bases in Latvia; the ultimatum presented by the USSR to Latvia on 16 June 1940 and occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Army on the next day; and finally, the first mass deportations of Latvians to distant sites in the Soviet Union on 13–14 June 1941 that helped to strengthen the Soviet occupation (Purs 2012: 49–54; Plakans 2008: xxiii). 3 For more information see www.dianatamane.com/, www.rasajansone.com/ and Pičukāne’s artist page www.facebook.com/ipicukane/, as well as her Instagram account @ingrida_picukane_lv. 4 Different parts of today’s Latvia had been incorporated into the Russian Empire from the eighteenth century. 5 This photograph was taken four years later. This time, the grandmother took only a bunch of artificial flowers in the hope that their modesty and low value would not provoke the interest of the customs officers. 6 Ukeles coined the term ‘maintenance art’ in 1969 to refer to art practice that reflects on everyday care work activities done by women (and especially mothers), like cleaning, washing, taking out the garbage etc. Her own performances are well known examples of such art. 7 See also Nancy Fraser’s article on social reproduction (Fraser 2016). 8 The term ‘catalyst agency’ is borrowed from Adrian Piper’s Catalysis performances in 1970–1971. 9 At the end of the twelfth century the first German merchants appeared on Daugava River followed by German knights and Catholic priests that led to the triumph of a German military-religious order, known as the Livonian Order, in modern-day Latvia and southern Estonia; in 1563 the Livonian War began, involving Russia, Denmark, Sweden, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; in the seventeenth century there was warfare between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden, and between Sweden and Russia; in 1700 the Great Northern War started, involving the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden and Russia, which ended with the gradual inclusion of the territory of today’s Latvia into the Russian Empire (Plakans 2008: xvii–xxvii; Purs 2012: 25–33). 10 Sodums is known in Latvia as a translator of James Joyce’s Ulysses. 11 From Bachmann’s song ‘Little Bird’ (To the Races, 2006). 12 The first meaning of mirklis in Latvian-English dictionaries is ‘moment’, ‘instant’. 13 The denial of feminism and the widespread distortion of its ideas, including in the arts, is well examined by art historians Katrin Kivimaa (2009) and Māra Traumane (2012); see also Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell (2001).

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14 The installation has been on view in Latvia (in 2018 and 2019) and Lithuania (2019). 15 The years-long political discussions in Latvia about what counts as a family has not yet resulted in any tangible enhancement of the rights of non-binary people and same-sex couples, thus signalling a troubling level of homophobia and reluctance to embrace the standards of social inclusiveness. 16 The misuse of feminist slogans of equality and emancipation by Soviet official rhetoric has been described by researchers like Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina (2007), Olga Voronina (1993) and Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell (2001). Even today, many people from the former USSR block believe that the ‘women’s question’ has been solved long ago. It is curious to compare this attitude to the post-feminist sentiments originating in the ‘West’ in the 1980s. 17 While it is common to refer to domestic chores, childcare and emotional labour that women traditionally perform at home as ‘the second shift’, we must remember that the Soviet conditions of deficit added more obligations for the women – the challenge to ensure the very means of subsistence (such as food, clothes etc.). 18 Rasa Jansone is one of the few artists in Latvia who dares to address the theme of single motherhood. Even though the phenomenon is widespread, the stigma of being abandoned (and – implicitly – not good enough) is perhaps one of the reasons that the topic is kept away from public attention. 19 Three Sisters was an issue of Mini kuš! comics series in 2016 published by Grafiskie stāsti in Riga, Latvia. 20 From the album Navigator (in Russian, 1995). 21 Classical Russian literature was popularised and translated during the Soviet period – it was part of the official russification programme. Curiously, for some Latvian-speaking people it was the only acceptable and even loved part of the neighbouring culture.

References Baigell, R. and Baigell, M. (2001) Peeling Potatoes, Painting Pictures: Women Artists in Post-Soviet Russia, Estonia and Latvia: The First Decade. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press and Thejane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum. Bhabha, H.K. (2004) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bordo, S. (2003) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. 10th anniversary edn. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, London: University of California Press. Bronwyn, D. (1991) ‘The Concept of Agency: A Feminist Poststructuralist Analysis’. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 30: 42–53. Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso.

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Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso. Cixous, H., Cohen, K. and Cohen, P. (1976) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. Signs 1 (4): 875–893. Available at www.jstor.org/stable/3173239 (Accessed 23 November 2020). Fraser, N. (2016) ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’. New Left Review, 100: 99–117. Available at https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii100/articles/nancy-frasercontradictions-of-capital-and-care (Accessed 21 November 2020). Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G.J. (2010) ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in M. Gregg and G.J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Ikstena, N. (2019) ‘Viņpuse. Viņpusē. Viņā pusē. . .’, in Dz. Sodums (ed.), Post Scriptum. Riga: Dienas Grāmata. Kivimaa, K. (2009) ‘Private Bodies or Politicized Gestures? Female Nude Imagery in Soviet Art’, in B. Pejic (ed.), Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. Köln: Walther König. Lulle, A. (2020) ‘Latvieši Ārzemēs’. Nacionālā Enciklopēdija. Available at https:// enciklopedija.lv/skirklis/21049-latvieši-ārzemēs (Accessed 21 November 2020). Mackenzie, C., Rogers, W.A. and Dodds, S., eds (2014) Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Plakans, A. (2008) Historical Dictionary of Latvia. 2nd edn. Lanham, MD, Toronto, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press. Purs, A. (2012) Baltic Facades: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania since 1945. London: Reaktion Books. Rich, A. (1980) ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’. Signs 5 (4): 631–660. Available at www.jstor.org/stable/3173834 (Accessed 22 November 2020). Sharp, J.P. (2009) Geographies of Postcolonialism: Spaces of Power and Representation. London: Sage. Tamane, D. (2020) ‘Statement’. Available at http://dianatamane.com/statement/ (Accessed 21 November 2020). Traumane, M. (2012) ‘Women’s Art and Denial of Feminism: History of Exhibitions in Latvia 1977–2011’, in K. Kivimaa (ed.), Working with Feminism: Curating and Exhibitions in Eastern Europe. Tallinn: TLU Press. Voronina, O. (1993) ‘Soviet Patriarchy: Past and Present’, Hypatia 8 (4): 97–112. Zdravomyslova, E. and Temkina, A., eds (2007) Rossijskij Gendernyj Porjadok: Sociologicheskij Podhod. Sankt-Peterburge: Izd-vo Evropejskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge.

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Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes): A Collective Walk Reclaiming Female Bodily Agency through Transnational Solidarity Basia Sliwinska

Walking can be an act of resistance to the mainstream and has the potential to ‘reshape the world by mapping it, treading paths into it, encountering it’ (Solnit 2001: 276). I recall walking with others in London in response to the ruling of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal from 22 October 2020, announced in the middle of the Covid-19 health emergency, declaring that abortions in cases of severe foetal abnormalities are unconstitutional in Poland. Such persistent collective walking has the capacity to enact political agency through the bodily movement with/in space. Exercising the right to bodily autonomy, walking together ‘we’ formed alliances in different locations in Poland and abroad, through a transnational collective of bodies that assemble to resist and demand their rights. The ‘we’ emerged out of the ‘I’ related to others, an interrelational and interdependent assembly. One such walk titled Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes) took place in Warsaw, Poland in November 2020. This essay thinks alongside the action that has spread transnationally. My focus on this collective walk, enacted by persistent bodies emerging together, enables us to unpick the significance of transnational feminist discourse to activism concerned with women’s rights and female bodily agency. Meskimmon (2020: 1, emphasis in original) argues that: The entanglements and intersections that coalesce through transnational feminisms, transversal politics and art, thus foreground position, but challenge the essential authenticity of origin; if we all know from somewhere, we are also capable of imagining and inhabiting, with others, elsewhere.

Such positioning articulates plural ethical subjectivities that open up multidimensional dialogues across differences towards solidarities, and recognises heterogeneity and the necessity for all lives to be livable and recognisable. The collective walk of Queen’s 259

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Silent Robes imagines a transnational solidarity towards communal becoming and agentic belonging against oppressive national governments. Not only does the collective walk raise questions pertaining to local (in Poland) women’s reproductive rights, but by inviting other transnational dialogues and responses from beyond Polish borders, and planting seeds in other locations where collective walks started budding, it demonstrates how bodies excluded from hegemonic imaginings can become agentic and radically reshape politics via feminist solidarity.

Queen’s Silent Robes and Anti-Gender Rhetoric in Poland On 10 November 2020 at 5:30 pm twenty-six women all dressed in white robes with white floral wreaths on their heads and their faces invisible gathered in front of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland.1 They met to perform a choreographed collective walk in support of women’s reproductive rights in Poland. In silence and without any explanation, they appeared, coming out of the front door of the most symbolic landmark of Warsaw, Joseph Stalin’s gift to post-war Poland from the Soviet Union. The Palace in post-Communist but also currently post-democracy Poland has become a site of protests and a symbol in the struggle against the right-wing nationalist regime of Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS; Law and Justice) and its many retrograde anti-gender, homophobic, racist and misogynist initiatives. Elżbieta Korolczuk (2020: 165) argues that the anti-gender rhetoric was adopted in Poland around 2012 by the Polish Catholic Church and different ultraconservative organisations. Initiatives of the Polish government undermining democracy and human rights have triggered collective and individual actions, including protests and demonstrations, but also walking interventions such as the one engaged with here. One of the most shocking and heartbreaking actions was 2017 Piotr Szczęsny’s suicide by immolation, committed in front of the Palace, in political protest against policies imposed by PiS curtailing citizens’ freedoms. Murawski (2019: 276) suggests that in post-Communist Poland ‘the seemingly ultraphallic, domineering Palace could even be made to take on some feminist symbolic attributes’. The Palace has been an important spatial marker for Poland’s feminist Manifa demonstrations marking International Women’s Day, Pride Parades or more recently Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet (OSK; The All-Poland Women’s Strike)2 organising women’s protests since September 2016 in opposition to continuous proposals to institute a complete ban on abortion.3

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Figure 13.1 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), collective walk in front of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland, 10 November 2020, Warsaw, Poland. © Michał Walkiewicz.

In November 2020 the Palace became once again a political symbol in women’s struggles against misogynistic Catholic fundamentalists and the PiS crusade against women’s rights and their assault on bodily autonomy. The women, wearing white robes and with their faces covered, walked collectively, leaving the Palace front doors following a path of different geometric figures (see Figure 13.1). First, only a few women were visible lining up horizontally in front of the Palace. Then, joined by other women, together they walked towards Plac Defilad (Parade Square) situated in front of the building. Forming a letter ‘T’, then a triangle, bowing and curtseying, their walk was orchestrated by a woman at the front. She choreographed their standing closer together or further apart, their swaying and squatting. The concerted collective bodily activity circled the space finally invading it to move further down Plac Defilad occupied by the audience – mostly reporters, journalists and some passers-by. Women positioned themselves, turning their anonymised faces towards the Palace. While they began swaying, red liquid – blood? – began staining their white robes following a pattern of sharp cuts, as though made with a knife. The ‘blood’ was seeping then dripping to the surface covering the pavement. The organisers titled the

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intervention Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), which subsequently became the name of the collective which organised the event.

Transnational Vulnerability towards a ‘We’ The collective walk of Queen’s Silent Robes began with the anger of the ‘I’ becoming the anger of the ‘we’ that translated into the act of doing. Chi Chi Ude, a Polish-Nigerian fashion designer4 and one of the organisers of the event, imagined a garment that would enable clothed bodies to act in concert, visibilising Judith Butler’s (2018: 8) notion of the assembly, ‘a concerted bodily enactment’. Ude’s anger was shared with Julia Bui-Ngoc,5 Magdalena Karłowicz,6 Gabriela Wilczyńska and Anna Juniewicz. The ‘I’ and ‘you’ started budding into ‘we’ with the five women becoming the seed of a collective that initiated a transnational pollination of solidarity in support of bodily autonomy. There is a rich history of women’s organising that has its roots in women’s suffrage, and it is particularly women’s movements of the second half of the twentieth century that increased debates on women’s inequality in a global perspective and resulted in the formation of transnational networks and organisations.7 Since the event in Warsaw, Queen’s Silent Robes’ initiative has spread beyond Poland. It was performed in Brussels and there are other planned events suggestive of a budding activism ‘founded upon solidarity and agential collectivity’ (Sliwinska 2021: 46), raising consciousness of women’s situation in Poland but also spreading solidarity and support. Such budding activism is effective not because of militant and aggressive tactics but through its patience, persistent and insistent repetition, which in the case of the collective walk is achieved via transnational engagement beyond Polish borders. Such activism emerges with a seed – the ‘I’, the one – and evolves through the several, the many, towards the collective ‘we’. It persists through budding in the form of each iteration that follows. The notion of transnationalism, specifically with regard to the feminist framing of women’s agency and equal belonging within space(s), is particularly interesting when approached with regard to women’s rights and via the collective walk organised by Polish women discussed here. Adams and Thomas (2018) remind us that ‘Transnational activism around violence against women and women’s human rights has drawn persuasive and organizing power from its ability to frame multiple forms of gender oppression under a common umbrella that emphasises the similarities in women’s experiences’. This resulted in the

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implementation of different UN conventions, such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, against oppressive national governments. The concept of transnationalism is useful here, and it should be differentiated from the homogenising concept of globalisation, as it critiques violent and oppressive nation-state policies that result in some bodies being more livable and vulnerable than others. Butler (2018: 58) argues that precarity, bringing together minorities, including women, ‘is a social and economic condition, but not an identity’. The interlinked notion of vulnerability, particularly important to feminist theory and politics, demonstrates that ‘certain kinds of gender defining attributes, like vulnerability and invulnerability, are distributed unequally under certain regimes of power, and precisely for the purpose of shoring up certain regimes of power that disenfranchise women’ (Butler 2018: 142–143). What is important to emphasise is that ‘vulnerability and invulnerability are not essential features of men or women, but, rather, processes of gender formation, the effects of modes of power that have as one of their aims the production of gender difference along lines of inequality’ (Butler 2018: 145). Vulnerability can be mobilised via collective resistance when bodies deemed ‘disposable’ or ‘ungrievable’ assemble to exercise solidarity and demand to be visible against the limits of social recognition and to secure conditions of a livable life. Feminist transnationalism emphasises such strategies and methods of acting, the actual doing. It reconceptualises, as argued by Lock Swarr and Nagar (2010: 2), ‘collaboration as an intellectual and political tool to bridge this gap [between feminist theorisations of knowledge production across borders and imagining concrete ways to enact solidarity]’. Collaborative transnational dialogues, in the case of Queen’s Silent Robes enacted through a collective walk, intervene into the existing heteronormative and patriarchal neoliberal structures commodifying, monetising and institutionalising women’s bodies to radically rapture hierarchies and reclaim female voice, representation and agency. This collective subjectivity – the ‘I’ becoming a ‘we’ – imagines new forms of collective solidarity and collaboration that thinks and acts across differences towards communal becoming that is processual, signalling belonging across and beyond the global ways of being and producing knowledge. The collective walk of Queen’s Silent Robes opened up a space, first in Warsaw, then in Brussels and next in other locations to follow, to contest implicit and explicit power relations through an ongoing process of becoming an agentic collective body and reclaiming a collaborative praxis.

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Persistent Walking When Ude imagined the assembly of bodies, at first she thought about a silent dance, embodying connectivity, communality and shared experience of being silenced. This then led her to the idea of a collective walk with other womxn belonging to different social groups, of different professions and different ages, which would enable the sharing of anger and suffering and, in solidarity, express that which cannot be expressed with words and sounds. It is through the silence that the walk speaks so audibly. Walking and marching has a long history as a tactic for activists and social movements intervening into spatial politics to visibilise citizens’ efforts for social and political change and their involvement in national politics. Intersecting bodily movement with revolutionary performances and rhetoric, walking signifies a particular negotiation of space, which is experienced and communicated through persistence, determination and focus. Feminist walking engaging with spaces via the materiality of the body offers a specific way of producing knowledge, fostering personal and communal commitments and enacting change. The solidarity and endurance experienced while walking collectively serves to maintain the act of moving bodies forward, signalling the necessity for continuous and sustained work for the cause. There are different kinds of walking, ranging from a leisurely stroll, a relaxed and purposeless wander, a flâneurie taking ownership of space, to a persistent walk.8 Such a walk, performed by Queen’s Silent Robes, engages the rhetorical body to demand space and enact political agency even in the face of oppressive regimes taking away women’s rights. Rebecca Solnit (2001: 176) argues that ‘the streets are where people become the public and where their power resides’. Space has been historically gendered and divided into public/male and private/female spheres visibilising unequal relations of power and structuring systems of beliefs, discourses but also cultural meanings associated with lived grassroots experiences. These have a specific importance to women, who, as Solnit reminds us (2001), have often been intimidated or punished for even attempting to access the freedoms of moving in public spaces. Multiple women’s marches and protests employ tactics that destabilise such power relations. The collective walk by Queen’s Silent Robes foregrounds the practice of persistent walking to circumvent political forces. It is reminiscent of Michel de Certeau’s (1984: 93) walkers:

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The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the threshold at which visibility begins. They walk. . . they are walkers. . . whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen.

‘The threshold of visibility’ de Certeau refers to concerns not only representational structures but the power of the body to claim agency, ‘being somewhere, making sense of place and belonging’ (Sliwinska 2016: 29). Walking, central to Queen’s Silent Robes’ action, is defined by Solnit as a movement with/in space.9 She argues (2001: 9) that the sense of place can only be gained on foot, ‘on foot everything stays connected’. The sensual, intimate and slow process of immersing the body with/in space is an active participation demanding freedoms and/or pleasures which are often denied, as in the case of Queen’s Silent Robes’ intervention into the public space of Warsaw. Even though the action is referred to as a delegated performance (Araszkiewicz et al. 2020), I would rather call it a collective walk, imagined by Ude. This walk, ‘a bodily labour’, allowing ‘us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them’ (Solnit 2001: 5), set a collective of bodies in motion reaching to historical accounts of unequal gendered mobility within spaces but also claiming bodily autonomy and human rights. Solnit (2001: 176) aptly summarises that ‘Walking is only the beginning of citizenship’ and active participation in public life. The walk of Queen’s Silent Robes embodies female agency under threat. This collective of walking bodies is silently, slowly and persistently moving forward. First the one, joined by others, and then the many practise endurance. While watching the walk, we observe an emergence of a community, a mass movement capable of achieving concrete political outcomes.

Disruptive Collective Subject Ude (2021) told me that once the seed was planted, the project began budding in a very intuitive way. Even though she participated in multiple protests organised by OSK in response to the Polish Tribunal ruling undermining democratic freedoms and human rights, she explained that these did not offer her the intimate space she desired for an individual expression of grief, sorrow, pain and anger. The title of the collective walk – Queen’s Silent Robes – speaks to this experience. It is an oxymoron; how can a queen be silent? Ude explained that a woman in a position of power should have a voice and agency, be a political subject and not an

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object – an ornament dressed in luxurious and voluptuous robes made of rich fabrics and decorated with expensive rhinestones. Similarly, Polish women are not heard and their voices are neglected. Queen’s Silent Robes’ collective walk is a simple action, not only in its choreography but also formal qualities. Women, wearing white garments, are walking in silence. There is violence in their persistence; their bodies puncture and rapture the public space against the backdrop of the Catholic Church’s rules and legislations, its opulent, heavily constructed, ornate aesthetic; against putting women on a pedestal as goddesses and passive ornaments subjected to beauty ideals. On 10 November 2020 women renounced their domestic and professional duties and gathered in front of the Palace to express their anger and despair while walking together. An image of women silently walking in white robes is simple and yet powerful. Materialising the experience shared by women of different ages, ethnic background, professions and social roles, this action is a way of saying no, we will not. Julia Bui-Ngoc,10 a Polish-Vietnamese film director, sculptor, dancer and choreographer was responsible for the design of the intricate walk, following configurations of geometric figures. During the event she is visible orchestrating the movements and flow of clothed bodies, reminiscent of floating ghosts. Phantoms symbolise invisible women, Ude (2021) said, whose bodily agency is taken away. The imposed law and the cruel lived experience that comes with it directly targets bodily autonomy at a very intimate corporeal level. Ude admitted that this incites the desire to infiltrate spaces inaccessible to marginalised subjects and the need to be heard. This reminds me of poltergeist phenomena, which Paula Chambers (2020) discusses in the context of sculptural disruptive bodily expression manifesting feminine discontent. Poltergeist phenomena as ‘secular magic’, argues Chambers (2020), can serve as a tool to analyse the uncanny agency of supernatural disruption materialised by femininity. Ghosts of female subjects appearing in Queen’s Silent Robes signify not only such disruptiveness but also the absences of female agency and the denial of women’s rights. Ghosts appear in places filled with untold truths and haunted by trauma. They may be invisible but their presence is known. The collective walk calls out a system of oppression and violation of bodily autonomy and demands the recognition of women’s rights and acknowledgement of female subjects. Wilczyńska, who is a champion of floristry, drew on Polish secular and religious ceremonies and crowned the heads of women participating in the walk with floral wreaths woven out of white roses (see Figure 13.2). In Slavic tradition wreaths were often worn by unmarried women during celebrations and Eastern

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Figure 13.2 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), floral wreaths crowning the heads of women who participated in the collective walk, 10 November 2020, Warsaw, Poland. © Michał Walkiewicz.

rituals, rites and festivals originating in pre-Christian traditions, most of which were connected to Slavic celebrations of the summer solstice.11 A young woman wearing a floral wreath is also culturally significant in Poland, referencing an anthology of ballads written by the Polish poet and essayist, a representative of Polish Romanticism in literature, Adam Mickiewicz.12 The image of a woman wearing a floral wreath connotes innocence and youth; it is suggestive of virginity. And yet, in the context of the choreographed walk, this visual reference is rather uncomfortable as the walking women reference thousands of Polish women victimised by the imposed law and shamed. In patriarchal societies the culture of shaming has gendered consequences, as ‘gendered shame may form a disciplining device’ (Fischer 2018: 371). Shame is associated with femininity, the body, violence and power, and can be used as a tool to produce a particular masculinity and enforce structures and laws denying gender equality and undermining gender progressive politics. Ude carefully constructed the robes in a way that restricted the movement of arms. She wanted to express ways in which women’s bodies are kept within different boundaries – literal but also social, cultural and political; controlled

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and disciplined by hegemonic norms and patriarchal structures. She explained that, as ghosts, women remain invisible as women, deprived of agency and voice. The garments she imagined – repetitive in their shape achieved through a spiral sewn into the bottom of the robes – are meant for anyone who identifies with the affective message behind the performative walk. The construction of the robes enables anonymity and so offers protection to all participants. It also symbolises the silencing of women by the Polish government and a lack of acknowledgement of female subjectivity and agency. Ude did not want to visually reference a niqab, a face veil worn by Muslim women, and hence at the face level she inserted a vertical rather than a horizontal net, descending down to the belly button. Each woman could see another, which allowed for their moves to be coordinated, but their faces remained hidden. The covering of the faces in activist protests and marches is a strategy that is adopted by many activist and guerrilla groups such as Guerilla Girls or Pussy Riot. It emphasises the collective subject appearing together. Masked anonymity amplifies women’s invisible positions and silencing of their voices in contemporary post-democracy Poland. The word ‘mask’ has etymological connotations with the word ‘persona’, which intertwines the struggle for recognition with the struggle for the mask. However as Elsa Dorlin (2016: 238–239) explains, ‘this mask coincides with the “personality” that society recognizes for each individual. . . It is only from the latter [the identity of the individual] that the political history of the face could begin’. The covering of women’s faces participating in the collective walk creates a counter-narrative framing their agency within collective responsibility. The mask cannot be blamed as much as an individual person. The collective subject emerges via a multitude in revolt and in solidarity.

Catholic Immaculate Femininity The colours used for the robes complicate metaphors of purity and dirt. White symbolises innocence but also victimisation inherent in the trope of a pure and immaculate femininity emerging from patriarchal anthropocentric interpretations of the traditional Church doctrine. The sacred feminine is a consequence of Catholic negative gender stereotypes according to which women are subordinate, passive and obedient servants. This version of femininity, central to the Catholic female trope of the Virgin Mary – metaphorically represented through transitory rites of passage such as the First Communion or marriage

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when women wear white dresses, or a white bedsheet during a wedding night associated with the tradition of virginity testing – objectifies and victimises women. Marina Warner (1985: 284, 289) argues that, ‘In Catholic countries above all, from Italy to Latin America. . . the natural order for the female sex is ordained as motherhood and, through motherhood, domestic dominion’. Poland’s approach to national life and traditional family demonstrates an oppressive and violating politics directly affecting women’s bodies and rights. Ways in which the Catholic Church exercises significant control over reproductive rights can be currently observed in Polish protests against a complete ban on abortion in Poland that have been happening since October 2020 (and are still ongoing at the time of writing this text) that have spread transnationally. Michelle Bachelet (UN News 2020), the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, warns that women’s rights are still threatened and attacked across the globe, twenty-five years after the Beijing Declaration agreed a Platform for Action imagining a world where each woman can exercise her freedoms and choices. The Polish government’s violation of women’s rights is a relevant example. The country, together with a group of about thirty other illiberal and/ or authoritarian governments, in October 2020 co-sponsored the so-called Geneva Consensus Declaration (2020), which calls on states to promote women’s rights and health but without access to abortion. The Polish government and its nationalist and pronatalist discourses advocates for what it calls a ‘gender ideology’, which manufactures gender equality as a synonym for deviations and pathologies and a threat to the traditional Polish nuclear family. Family politics focused on protecting life from conception in extension erodes one’s right to their bodies and so human rights. Any non-heteronormative gender constructions are seen by the Catholic Church as a threat to Catholic values. Catholicism is a cultural marker in Poland pathologising gender and sexual identity. Poland’s approach to national life and traditional family demonstrates an oppressive and violating politics directly affecting women’s bodies and rights. The intertwinement between the Church and the State was sealed by the signing of a Concordat with the Vatican in 1993, which officialised and validated the cultural model of accepted femininity, namely being a mother, a saint and a martyr, which translates into women’s social roles reflecting domesticity, obedience, chastity and submission to a male patron (husband). Strategic and opportunistic campaigns of ultraconservative anti-gender groups in Poland incite hatred against women and the LGBTQI+ community who are supposedly destroying values promoted by the Catholic Church, the beating heart of the

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Polish nation.13 In this context the white robes mobilised through the collective walk may be seen as an attempt to disrupt women’s victimisation via embodied female agency. White, symbolising purity, was one of the Suffragettes’ colours (together with purple for loyalty and dignity and green for hope) and was often worn for demonstrations and marches, for example for the Women’s Sunday on 21 June 1908 in London. Hélène Cixous’s (2008) feminist metaphor of ‘white ink’ or écriture feminine is intimately connected to the female body and its agency, and the invisibility of female subjectivity. Women wearing white robes visibilise their agency and claim for their bodily rights.

Staining and Emancipatory Narratives In the collective walk, as part of the choreography, the white robes become permanently stained with red fabric dyes thanks to a spraying mechanism intricately designed by Karłowicz and installed into the clothing (see Figure 13.3). The clothes cannot be used more than once, which is part of Queen’s Silent Robes’

Figure 13.3 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), spraying mechanism designed to stain the robes of women who participated in the collective walk, 10 November 2020, Warsaw, Poland. © Michał Walkiewicz.

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strategy to visibilise the stains that cannot be washed off. The red, connoting bleeding, signifies a range of toxic cultural taboos on sexual reproduction, such as menstruation and other female bodily fluids, socialised into shaming, stigmatising, embarrassing and oppressing women’s bodies. The relationship between blood, (im)purity and pollution arises from Catholic gendered conceptions of cleanliness embedded in Mary’s lifelong virginity or the ritual of transubstantiation. Blood signifying life itself has many conflicting connotations such as brotherhood, race, passion, death, sacrifice, but also guilt, particularly represented through bloodstains. As a bodily fluid, blood is specifically associated with female mucous bodily activities and rituals that traverse corporeal boundaries. Rather than being the source of power, blood, as stain, visibilised for example through menstruation, justifies hegemonic masculine division of spaces into private and public. Viewed as dirty, vile and polluted (Douglas 1966), it solidifies gendered expectations regarding cleanliness and degrades women to ideals of pure, wholesome, closed bodies. Queen’s Silent Robes reveals the blood stains as a weapon of resistance, an act of disruption and empowerment of women taking control of their bodies to challenge the Tribunal’s ruling. Staining is often discussed in relation to practices of shaming. Sorkin (2000: 77, 78) argues that, ‘Stains mark the wearer: To be stained is to be dirty, messy, poor, and/or careless. It infers a variety of judgments. . . Stains are a record of what has been near, on, or is of the body’. Staining is aligned with inappropriate standards of appearance, humiliating conduct and behaviour; being outside of the prevailing norm. Stain suggests a disorderly subject and an uncontrollable abject body. Usually, stain stigmatises marginalised subjects, often female subjects. Sorkin (2000: 80, emphasis in original) further explains, ‘Stigma functions as both a form of reproach and silencing. . . Stigma protects the male perpetrator: In cultures socially and sexually oppressive toward women, the stigma is a natural extension of male tyranny, re-enforcing women’s errant status’. Red stains appearing in Queen’s Silent Robes (see Figure 13.4) are a visual metaphor of the perpetrator’s – the Polish government – attack on women’s bodily autonomy. They symbolise a fluid, blood, referring to a bleeding womb, but also, as explained by Ude (2021), a collective making of a red flag. This association between the red stains and blood was a radical gesture referencing the Polish flag, two horizontal stripes of equal width, the upper one white and the lower one red. White in heraldry alludes to purity, loyalty and nobility; while red, historically one of the most expensive dyes secreted of cochineal, connotes fire and blood, bravery, dedication and courage (Muzeum Historii Polski 2020).

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Figure 13.4 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), 10 November 2020, Warsaw, Poland. © Michał Walkiewicz.

The national Polish flag, in the context of the country’s history, is bathed in blood14 and when women’s robes turn red, they look as though wrapped in the Polish flag and covered in sacrificial blood. Queen’s Silent Robes’ intervention is a metaphorical take on wading in blood and sacrificing one’s body. The flag symbolises Polish martyrology, historical processes of domination and nationalist oppression but also national romanticism15 marked by a mythologised past and Poland’s ties with Catholicism deeply rooted in its history.16 Catholic notions of martyrology and salvation feed into the Polish national narrative and identity. Such a framework positions Poland as the ‘Christ of Nations’, suffering for a greater purpose of creating a better future for others. Szczepanski (2012: 273) notes that the figure of the Catholic Pole, ‘the ideal citizen’, embodies the concept intertwined with romantic martyrdom of ‘polskość’ (Polishness) built on homogeneity, exclusionary politics and marginalisation of any experiences that fall outside of heteronormative Catholic patriarchal structures. Subsequently, collective memory based on Catholic values creates a cultural framework that shapes narratives of belonging and exclusion via reclaiming national agency rather than engaging with transnational frameworks of global citizenship. If Polishness is approached via

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Freud’s (1917: 243–245) concepts of mourning and melancholia – the first referring to a process of healing after loss of a beloved object, person or some abstraction; and the latter defining a pathological inability to substitute an old object, person or abstraction with a new one – it becomes clear that Polish national identity, synonymous with having a state, is grounded in melancholic longing for unity mythologised by the past. In the Polish context Catholic practices and values are intertwined with national symbols, such as the national flag, reconstructing specific (selected) histories, which institutionally stabilised memory and crystallised national identity based on traditional heteropatriarchal family values. However, the flag may also signify Polish emancipation, resistance and fight for independence. The colour red can act as a release of pain and anger. Red lightning has become a symbol of OSK women’s strikes in Poland. It references abortion and menstrual blood, women’s suffering, but also the strength of womanhood and affirmation of female subjectivity and agency. Creed (1993) specifically links menarche with the possession of supernatural powers historically and mythologically aligned with the figure of the witch. Similarly, Russo (1997) discusses abjection and blood, and argues that the grotesque female body has the potential to be transgressive and subversive. Red stains on white Queen’s Silent Robes destabilise Catholic tropes of submissive femininity through associations between menstrual blood, staining and awakening, power and disruptive female agency. Visibilising and weaponising blood is an act of blatant disregard of menstrual etiquette (keeping it hidden) and a challenge to social norms disciplining and normalising the female body into a passive object embodying ideals of purity. Making blood visible and permanently marking white clothing is a subversive political act of reclaiming bodily autonomy.

Transnational Budding Via Facebook, the coverage of the collective walk reached feminist and women’s organisations beyond Poland. Agata Araszkiewicz from the Brussels association Elles sans Frontières17 contacted Ude requesting the walk to be re-enacted in Brussels on 25 November 2020, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.18 That day the European Commission (EC) and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy announced a plan to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment

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through the EU new Gender Action Plan. The date also marks the first day of the annual international campaign ‘16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence’.19 Finally, that day the European Parliament debated the motion for a resolution on the de facto ban on the right to abortion in Poland,20 which resulted in the EC adopting the text P9_TA(2020)0336. It reads that the EC condemns the Poland Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling, putting ‘women’s health and lives at risk’; it critiques the timing of its release coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic, which seriously undermined democratic processes; and supports Polish citizens who protest ‘restrictions on their fundamental freedoms and rights’ (European Parliament 2020). Ude responded to Araszkiewicz and offered to prepare the robes and send them to Belgium. Queen’s Silent Robes generously shared their initial idea, the seed that started pollinating beyond Polish borders and budding elsewhere – with the first bud blossoming in Brussels. The iterative nature of the project develops and grows via dialogic relationships and sharing. Its premise is grounded in budding, ‘a particular feminist organising structure, [that] is processually oriented. It is an archetype of gradual development, forming new life through maternal relationship of care. New organisms develop from the parent organism, allowing both to grow together’ (Sliwinska 2021: 53). Ude prepared a package with everything needed to enact the walk: the robes, floral wreaths, dyes, the spraying mechanism (for the staining) and choreography for bodily movements. Women discussed how to express their anger and pain; how to follow the figures in the choreography; should they remain silent? The collective walk in Brussels happened in front of the European Parliament building, in front of media reporters, journalists and European Parliament Members (see Figure 13.5). The breaking of silence was the major difference between the walks in Warsaw and Brussels, where women re-enacted #GlobalScream, an initiative of the activist group Dziewuchy Berlin (Berlin Girls),21 aimed at symbolically connecting womxn via a transnational action – a call for a one-minute-long scream at a time publicised via social media channels. It is ‘a female scream of rage, anger, grief or joy’ (Dziewuchy Berlin 2020). In solidarity with all womxn who have ever experienced violence, women walking the Queen’s Silent Robes in Brussels screamed ‘Wolna Polska Kolorowa’ (Free Multi-Colour Poland). Araszkiewicz (2020) told me that wearing the robes, being inside of the structure restricting bodily movements but at the same time comfortable, was transformative. Araszkiewicz et al. (2020), in their Facebook post commenting on the collective walk, refer to Poland, the homeland, craving women’s blood like a vampire; homeland, which inflicts pain on women by

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imposing on them patriotic ideals embedded in Polish martyrology and Catholicism; homeland which sacrifices them. ‘A cold, cruel, severe Polish fairy tale is women’s hell’ (Araszkiewicz et al. 2020). The suffering of women remains invisible to fascist politicians supporting fundamentalist ideas for women’s role in Polish society. The post ends with a hopeful call: ‘Despite everything, it is our dream for the blood of women victims to give political agency to women and thus full rights. Get the fuck out!’22 (Araszkiewicz et al. 2020). What Queen’s Silent Robes initiated in Poland, as a collective seed, was passed over to women in Brussels as an agentic gift to be handed over further to act for human rights, and specifically bodily autonomy. In Brussels the collective walk took place just before the aforementioned European Parliament debate concerning the abortion ban in Poland. The collective walk mobilised solidarity of women, communal belonging expressed via an anonymised visual intervention and the reclaiming of public space to visibilise women’s vulnerability, disregard for their rights and the violation of bodily autonomy. This collective walk embodies transnational engagement, not only via the complex ethnic and national identities of the first five women who imagined the event. The agentic, affective and communal embodiment spreads via sharing and

Figure 13.5 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), by Elles sans Frontières, 25 November 2020, Brussels, Belgium. © Sebastian Gojdź.

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circulation of ideas. The entanglement between the collective walk and transnational feminisms catalyses transformative politics marked by solidarity and recognition of human rights. It demonstrates, as suggested by Meskimmon (2020: 4), the possibilities offered by ‘embracing a politics of vision, hope and love’, a way of inhabiting the world in solidarity and kinship with ‘other Others’, a way of living that is critical, yet hopeful, courageous, yet attentive. Embracing the strange encounters of transnational feminisms is an intrinsic part of living a feminist life.

Imagined as a singular event, Queen’s Silent Robes became a seed and what I have once described as an agentic collective that started growing. It works through budding, forming new lives. The walk opened up a space of solidarity and togetherness for emergent and budding activism. ‘It is a pernicious and persistent collaborative act grounded in solidarity. It demands visibility for women and human rights, for all people at all times to be treated as equally and irrevocably human’ (Sliwinska 2021: 58). The collective walk embodied by Queen’s Silent Robes, grounded in persistency, sharing (of gestures, movements, sounds and silence), solidarity and collaboration, formulates transnational feminist alliances. Initiated in Warsaw, this bodily laboratory of affect keeps planting seeds (the next walk is planned in Madrid to coincide with International Women’s Day on 8 March 2021), engaging and encouraging different positionalities, and enacting accountability via sharing not only resources and strategies but inviting other audiences and accounting for local histories and needs. It embodies the feminist praxis, which according to Alexander and Mohanty (1997: xix) would involve ‘shifting the unit of analysis from local, regional, and national culture to relations and processes across cultures. . . we also need to understand the local in relation to larger, cross-national processes’. Collaborative cross-pollination that happens enables moving across and beyond the global and the local via sustained sharing and collective thinking ‘out of these crises’ (1997: xx). Assembling to walk together, Queen’s Silent Robes persists in calling for justice to be enacted. They demand what Butler (2018: 25) calls an equally ‘livable life’ exercising plural rights to bodily autonomy; from ‘I’, towards ‘you’, into ‘we’.

Notes 1 The recording of the performance can be viewed on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ watch/live/?v=1539157209626587&ref=watch_permalink.

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2 OSK is a women’s rights social movement in Poland established in September 2016 in response to a proposal for a total ban on abortion, submitted to the Polish Parliament on 5 July 2016 by The Ordo Iuris Institute, an extreme anti-choice Catholic fundamentalist network, and supported by the Roman Catholic Church (Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet 2021). 3 At the time of writing this text the ruling of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal from 22 October 2020 comes into effect on 27 January 2021. Despite a wave of mass protests in 2020, the biggest since the end of the Polish People’s Republic during the revolutions in 1989, the already ultra-restrictive law passed in 1993 is no longer binding. Poland’s abortion laws are among the most restrictive in Europe; terminations are allowed only in cases of rape, incest and where the woman’s life is at risk. Abortion had been legal and widely available during the Polish People’s Republic period. 4 See https://chichiude.com. 5 See www.buifilm.com. 6 See http://magdalenakarlowicz.pl. 7 For more see Adams and Thomas (2018). 8 For literary, historical and sociocultural examination of walking see Solnit (2001). 9 For my discussion on female active belonging within space and the concept of flâneurie see Sliwinska (2016). 10 Julia Bui-Ngoc is also a co-founder (with her sister Mai Bui-Ngoc) of the Bui Sisters cinematographic duet and a founder of the School of Dancing with Combat Fans, which draws on her experience of being three-time French gold medallist of the Chinese martial arts Wushu. 11 On the day of midsummer celebrations young women wore wreaths made of local plants and herbs, believed to have magical and protective powers. 12 In 1822 Mickiewicz published Ballads and Romances. One of the ballads, Świtezianka (translated as Nixie or the Naiad of Świteź), describes a water nymph, Świtezianka, seducing a young man to test his loyalty and faithfulness. 13 A similar rhetoric of protecting traditional family values was used by the US anti-gay rights campaigners in the 1970s. 14 Poland was subjected to numerous acts of violence, such as the partitions erasing the country from the political map of Europe; Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, followed by the Soviet invasion; the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1944; the Auschwitz death camp – the centre of the Nazi Holocaust. 15 Romantic martyrdom has its roots in nineteenth century nationalist ideologies developed as a consequence of Poland’s loss of sovereignty during the partitions and its struggles to regain independence.

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16 Under the partitions and communism the Church was a repository of statehood. The intertwinement of the Church and the State was validated by the Concordat. 17 Elles sans Frontières supported the founding of the centre Elles pour Elles which offers assistance to Polish women living in Belgium experiencing domestic violence. Elles sans Frontières also organises Kongres Kobiet w Brukseli (the Women’s Congress in Brussels), associated with Kongres Kobiet (The Congress of Women Association), the largest social movement in Poland and a non-governmental organisation established in 2009. 18 The recording of the performance can be viewed on Twitter here: https://twitter. com/mycielski/status/1331589093009059840?s=20&fbclid=IwAR2DMdJtBxhWbf3I0-UHHsc3qJDKTz4upHJ1QmqXF2ogIzSvTHSpO6W9Sk. 19 The campaign was initiated in 1991 by the first Women’s Global Leadership Institute, held by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University. 20 The motion can be accessed here: www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/ B-9-2020-0373_EN.htm. 21 Dziewuchy Berlin raise awareness on the political situation in Poland through diverse visual appearances and interventions, and in collaboration with other feminist groups in Berlin. 22 The swear word ‘Get the fuck out’ (in Polish ‘Wypierdalać’) has become the slogan for women’s strikes in Poland in support of women’s reproductive rights.

References Adams, M. and Thomas, G. (2018) ‘Transnational Feminist Activism and Globalizing Women’s Movements’. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. Available at: https://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-490 (Accessed 22 January 2021). Alexander, M.J. and Mohanty, C.T. (1997) ‘Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements’, in M.J. Alexander and C.T. Mohanty (eds.), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge. Araszkiewicz, A. (2020) Personal communication, December. Araszkiewicz, A., Brukselska, K., Bru, K., Kiejna, A. and Szkuta, K. (2020) Facebook post. Available at: www.facebook.com/agata.araszkiewicz/posts/10223760121007772 (Accessed 10 December 2020). Butler, J. (2018) Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press.

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Chambers, P. (2020) Feral Objects and Acts of Domestic Piracy: Sculpture, Secular Magic, and Strategies of Feminist Disruption. PhD Thesis, Middlesex University. Cixous, H. (2008) White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics. New York and London: Routledge. Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Abingdon: Routledge. Dorlin, E. (2016) ‘Bare Subjectivity: Faces, Veils, and Masks in the Contemporary Allegories of Western Citizenship’, in J. Butler, Z. Gambetti and L. Sabsay (eds.), Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Conceptions of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and K. Paul. Dziewuchy Berlin (2020) Global Scream. Available at www.dziewuchyberlin. org/2020/03/07/8-3-2020-globalscream/ (Accessed 1 February 2021). European Parliament (2020) ‘P9_TA(2020)0336. Abortion rights in Poland’. Available at: www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2020-0336_EN.pdf (Accessed 1 February 2021). Fischer, C. (2018) ‘Gender and the Politics of Shame: A Twenty-First-Century Feminist Shame Theory’. Hypatia 33(3), 371–383. Freud, S. (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in J. Strachey and A. Freud (eds.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (1957). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Geneva Consensus Declaration (2020) Available at www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/ geneva-consensus-declaration-english.pdf (Accessed 6 December 2020). Human Rights Watch (2019) ‘Oddech Władzy na Plecach’. Available at: www.hrw.org/pl/ report/2019/02/06/327241#7266e1 (Accessed 18 March 2020). Koroloczuk, E. (2020) ‘The Fight against “Gender” and “LGBT Ideology”: New Developments in Poland’. European Journal of Politics and Gender, Special Issue: ‘Rethinking the Ambition Gap: Gender and Candidate Emergence in Comparative Perspective’, 3 (1): 165–167. Lock Swarr, A. and Nagar, R., eds. (2010) Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. New York: SUNY Press. Meskimmon, M. (2020) Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections. Abingdon: Routledge. Murawski, M. (2019) The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw, and a City Transfixed. Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press. Muzeum Historii Polski (2020) Flaga Polski. Available at: https://muzhp.pl/pl/c/2224/ flaga-polski (Accessed 5 February 2021). Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet (2021) Available at http://strajkkobiet.eu/co-robimy/ (Accessed 21 January 2021). Russo, M. (1997) The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. London: Routledge.

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Sliwinska, B. (2016) ‘The “Aesthetics of Pedestrianism” and the Politics of Belonging in Contemporary Women’s Art’, in Flâneur New Urban Narratives. Lisbon: Procurarte. Sliwinska, B. (2021) ‘Activating Agential Collective: Anna Baumgart’s Table Talks – Her-Stories, Solidarity and Feminist Corporeal-Materialism’, in B. Sliwinska (ed.), Feminist Visual Activism and the Body. New York: Routledge. Solnit, R. (2001) Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso. Sorkin, J. (2000) ‘Stain: On Cloth, Stigma and Shame’. Third Text 14 (53): 77–80. Szczepanski, J. (2012) ‘Romanticising and Revising the Second World War in Polish Museums’, Museum Management and Curatorship 27 (3): 273–289. Ude, C.C. (2021) Personal communication, January. UN News (2020) ‘Women’. UN News, 25 February. Available at https://news.un.org/en/ story/2020/02/1058021 (Accessed 11 December 2020). Warner, M. (1985) Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. London: Picador.

Contributors The Editors Dr Catherine Dormor is an artist and theorist, currently Reader in Textile Practices and Head of Research Programmes at the Royal College of Art, London. Her research brings together textile materiality, imagery and language as a strategy of practice. Recent publications include: A Philosophy of Textile (2020), The Erotic Cloth (2018) and The Event of the Stitch (2018). Future publications include Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles; Volume 2: Wovens (forthcoming). She is Regional Editor (Europe) for Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture. Dr Basia Sliwinska is a Researcher at the Art History Institute of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa in Portugal, where she is also the Editor in Chief of the journal Revista de História da Arte. Her work is situated within feminist art history, theory and practice, focusing on visual activism and artivism within transnational global frameworks. Basia is also a Member of the Editorial Board of the journal Third Text. Recent books include Feminist Visual Activism and the Body (editor) (2021), The Female Body in the Looking-Glass: Contemporary Art, Aesthetics and Genderland (2016, 2018) and The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self (co-editor) (2018).

The Contributors (in order of presentation) Dr Flavia Frigeri is an art historian and ‘Chanel Curator for the Collection’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London. From 2016 to 2020 she was a Teaching Fellow in the History of Art Department UCL and continues to be a longstanding member of faculty on Sotheby’s Institute’s MA in Contemporary Art. Previously she was a Curator at Tate Modern, where she co-curated The World Goes Pop (2015), and was responsible for Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), among other exhibitions. Helena Shaskevich is a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she is writing a dissertation on 1970s feminist 281

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video art. She is currently a fellow at the Graduate Center’s New Media Lab. Her writing has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and is forthcoming in Camera Obscura. Dr Jane Chin Davidson is an art historian/curator whose research focuses on transnationalism in relation to performance, feminism/eco-feminism, and Chinese identity. Her recent publications include A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework, co-edited with Amelia Jones (forthcoming), and the monograph Staging Art and Chineseness: The Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions (2020). She was an ESRC Research Fellow and Postgraduate Getty Fellow, completing her PhD in Art History at the University of Manchester and her BA at Reed College. Dr Cristina Nualart is Adjunct Professor of Arts & Humanities at IE University, Spain. As a member of GIA (Grupo de Investigación Asia) at Complutense University Madrid, and of the VASDiV (Visual Activism and Sexual Diversity in Vietnam) Research Network (AHRC/GCRF grant, UK), she has authored publications on feminist and queer art in Vietnam. In Spain, she has delivered talks in several national museums, and developed courses on Asian Art for the public diplomacy consortium Casa Asia. Dr Aliza Edelman is an independent curator, art historian and editor. Her research interests span the modern Americas and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the art of the post-war United States and Brasil, the transnational histories of abstraction and concretism, and gender and feminist sexuality. Recently published essays are focused on Judith Lauand, Charmion von Wiegand, Eva Hesse and Eunice Golden. She is the co-editor of Woman’s Art Journal. She received a BA from Smith College and PhD from Rutgers University. Dr Margarida Brito Alves is an Associate Professor at the Department of Art History at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She is a board member of Instituto de História da Arte, where she coordinates the Contemporary Art Studies research group. She is author of O Espaço na Criação Artística do Século XX. Heterogeneidade. Tridimensionalidade. Performatividade (2012), and of different publications in scientific journals, edited books and exhibition catalogues. Dr Giulia Lamoni is an academic and researcher with a curatorial practice, and an integrated member of the Instituto de História da Arte of Universidade Nova

Contributors

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de Lisboa, where she coordinated the research project ‘Artists and Radical Education in Latin America: 1960s–1970s’ (2018–2022). Her texts have been published in journals such as Third Text, Manifesta Journal: Around Curatorial Practices and n.paradoxa international feminist art journal, in edited books and exhibitions catalogues. She recently co-curated Earthkeeping/Earthshaking: Arte, Feminismos e Ecologia (2020). Dr Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History at Wayne State University. She received her BA in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, CUNY, and her MA and PhD in Art History from Duke University. She has published on Black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text and Art Journal. Noël recently published the book Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (2021). Dr Ketzia Alon is an Israeli academic, social activist, Mizrahi feminist, art curator and critic. Alon is the founder, owner and editor-in-chief of Gama Publishing, and has written and edited over fifteen non-fiction books on literature and art. She was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literary Works (2017). Alon is one of the founders of the Ahoti for Women in Israel Movement, and was head of the Gender Studies Program, Beit Berl College. Dr Rachael Haynes is an artist and academic who lives and works in Australia. Rachael’s current research engages with feminist archives, collective agency and care ethics. Rachael was awarded a PhD in 2009 and is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts at QUT. Dr Courtney Pedersen is an artist/researcher and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory at Queensland University of Technology, with a research focus on feminist methods in creative practice research. Caroline Stevenson is a curator and writer, and Programme Director: Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. Her curatorial practice focuses on economies of exchange, and has been recognized through grants from Arts Council England and the British Council. Caroline is a member of the Centre for Fashion Curation at University of the Arts London, co-founder of Modus, an international network and curatorial platform for expanded fashion practice and co-editor of Fashion Practice: Journal for Design, Creative Process and the Fashion Industry.

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Jana Kukaine is a lecturer at the Art Academy of Latvia where she teaches feminist theory and aesthetics. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy (University of Latvia) and master’s degree in Arts and Heritage (University of Maastricht, Netherlands). Besides scientific work, Jana Kukaine is also an art critic, feminist art curator and author of the monograph Lovely Mothers: Women, Body, Subjectivity (2016). Dr Jānis Taurens has significant experience in interdisciplinary research using methods of linguistic philosophy and critical theory. His various publications and conference papers relate to urgent topics and problems in contemporary art, architecture, literature and philosophy. He holds the position of Professor and is Head of the Department of Humanities at the Art Academy of Latvia.

Index A Different Temporality: Aspects of Australian Feminist Art Practice 1975–1985 exhibition 204 A Room of One’s Own: Three Women Artists exhibition 203 Abakuá Secret Society 161–167, 173–175 abjection 271, 273 Aboriginal art 203 – 204, 213 Aboriginal Australia exhibition 203 abortion 259–260, 269, 273–275 absence 175, 189, 204, 266 absent 32, 36, 75, 112, 113 abstraction 143–146 action 3–4, 13–14, 17–18, 26, 104, 112, 124, 173, 194, 201, 203, 207, 211–212, 214, 240, 252, 259–260, 265–266, 269, 274 bodily 14, 244, 252, 259, 261, 264–265, 271, 274 collective 14, 113, 212 textile 17, 26 activism 4–5, 7, 9, 202–203, 208, 210–211, 222, 259, 274 budding 262, 276 decolonising 5 feminist art 202–203, 208, 210–211 transnational 222, 259, 262 aesthetics, feminist 4, 240 affect 1–2, 4, 7–9, 11–15, 18, 21, 32, 142, 150, 180, 221, 240–245, 269, 272, 276 agency 8–9, 11 corporeal-affective 14, 242, 266 labour 14, 240 locatedness 12 Agamben, G. 92, 93 agency 2, 4, 8–12, 14, 17–22, 26, 31–34, 36, 42–43, 45, 49, 56, 62, 76, 104, 119–120, 124, 128–129, 131–132, 135, 151–152, 157, 164, 182, 185, 197, 220, 240, 242–244, 254–255, 259, 263–266, 268, 270, 272–273, 275

bodily 14, 259, 266 collective 167, 201–203, 206–208, 212–214 female 2, 4, 8, 11, 17, 20, 22, 26, 34, 36, 42–43, 45, 55, 132, 152, 202, 209, 220–221, 224, 239–240, 252, 262, 265–266, 270, 273 see also affect Almeida, H. 150–152 Tela Habitada 151 America 10, 46, 59, 63–66, 71, 75, 82, 88, 122, 124, 145, 222, 226 Anavy, K. 13, 179–197 Composition for Stones of Gold 195 Garden of Living Images 179–180, 186–188, 192–194, 196–197 Hothouse 185–187 House & Garden 189–191 Southern Rose 189–190, 192 Utopia 192–193 War Medals 183 appear 82, 134, 135, 169, 185, 196 appearance 75, 90, 106, 113 architecture 22, 24, 123, 142, 144, 152–156, 190 archive 120–121, 124, 126, 128, 162, 165, 167, 173, 207, 227–228, 246, 247 see also Abakuá Secret Society Arendt, H. 17, 29–36 Asia 60, 63, 67–68, 71, 82–83, 88 asylum 19, 28–31 Australia 13, 201–213 Australian Aboriginal 213 Australian Perspecta exhibition 203 Australian Women Artists: 1840–1940 exhibition 203 avant-garde 62–75 Ayón, B. 12–13, 161–175 La Cena 174–175 Perfidia 162, 167–169 Resurrección 162, 171–173

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Babaie, S. 124–128 Balibar, E. 81, 84, 86, 95 see also ‘strangers as enemies’ Behbahani, B. 119–136 Behind the Mirrors 119, 128, 134, 136 Saffron Tea 119, 128, 132–136 Suspended 119, 128, 130, 132–133, 135–136 belonging 1–3, 5–14, 17–18, 20–21, 26, 28, 31, 33–36, 40, 47, 56, 59, 60–62, 69, 71–72, 76, 99–100, 102, 103, 106, 112, 114, 120–121, 129, 134–136, 14, 150, 157, 169, 179, 189, 201, 205–206, 213, 219–222, 240–242, 245–246, 254–255, 260, 262, 264–265, 272 affective 8, 11–12 collective 9, 13, 64, 275 equal 3, 263 modes of 1–2, 9, 67 spatial 8–11, 99–100, 104, 112, 221 Benjamin, W. 83, 89–93 Bhabha, H. 134, 241 blood 68, 261–275 see also stain bodily autonomy 13, 259, 261–262, 265–266, 271, 273, 275–276 border 1, 3, 5–8, 10, 12, 18, 20, 60–61, 75, 81–88, 94, 101–102, 119–120, 131, 134, 136, 151, 154, 157, 170, 181, 183, 194–195, 220–221, 224–229, 239, 242–245, 248, 250, 255, 260, 262–263, 274 see also reproductive rights border 2–17, 18–20, 60–68, 81–98, 99–114, 194, 220, 221, 224–230, 241–255, 260–274 borderlessness 3, 11, 76, 99, 108, 112–114 boundary 7, 65 boundary-space 32 see also border Brazil 12, 39, 141–158 Buarque, I. 12, 141–147, 149–157 Aqua-Limo-Semi-Sol 143 As Muralhas de Lisboa 147, 149, 151, 156 DROPS I 145 DROPS II 145 GirasSol-a-Sol 145

High Wall 145 Leitura e Contraleitura de um Espa.o Limite: Janela exhibition 141, 152, 154 Marrom-Bom-Tom 143 Os Defenestrados 153 Rolling Stock 143 Tátil 143 TriCôr-Círculo 145 Vibra-Verde 143 Watermelon-Melody 143 Bui, L. 11, 99–100, 108–114 Bui-Ngoc, J. 262, 266 Butler, J. 240, 262–263, 276 Cage, J. 62, 71 California 83, 224–225, 227–229 Cambodia 100–101, 104 capitalism 3, 82–96, 107 care 8, 13, 18, 32, 35, 102, 162, 170, 202, 205, 213–214, 240, 244, 250, 253, 255, 274 Catholicism 268–269, 271–273, 275 Catholic Church 260, 266, 269 Catholic imagery 263 femininity 268, 273 Polish Catholic Church 260 censorship 48, 65, 120, 124, 147 Chang, P. 10, 81–92, 95 China 71–72, 81–95, 111, 187 Chinese-American 10, 82–83 Chineseness 83, 86, 95 Chinoiserie 89 citizenship 2, 11, 81–83, 85–89, 94–95, 100, 102, 106, 245, 265, 272 heteronormative 83, 87, 89, 92–93, 95 see also cosmopolitanism cloth 18–36 clothing 100–115, 262- 273 collaboration 1, 8, 13, 27, 36, 39, 48, 50, 56, 62, 144, 150, 152, 157, 185, 192, 195, 202–203, 207–208, 211–213, 228, 242, 252, 263, 276 collage 71, 74, 104, 167 collagraphy 165–166 see also Ayón, B. collective 1, 3, 9, 11–15, 27, 40, 46–48, 50, 69, 107, 113, 119–120, 131, 133,

Index 150, 152, 157, 161, 167, 181, 183, 201–211, 213–214, 259–266, 268, 270–276 see also collaboration; solidarity; transnationalism colonial 6, 93, 112, 127, 142, 146–147, 156, 162, 206, 211, 220 colonialised 123 Colonialism 131 colonialist 162, 170 colonies 156 colonisation 5, 156 Commons 63, 76 community 1, 3, 8–9, 11, 15, 49, 61, 69, 74, 76, 84–85, 95, 100–104, 108, 113–114, 157, 163–164, 170, 203, 240, 245, 252, 265, 269 Contemporary Australia: Women exhibition 204, 206 cosmopolitanism 2–3, 6, 132, 205 craft 34–35, 44 Cuba 12, 161–164, 166–167, 169–171, 175 see also Abakuá Secret Society Cuban 12, 164, 166, 171, 175 Black Cuban 167, 169–171, 175 Cullen, D. 43 curating, feminist 203, 207, 221–223, 234 Debord, G. 92 Deleuze, G. 21, 49 democracy 156, 260, 268 democratic 2, 11, 95, 266, 274 democratise 63 democratised 76 denizen 121 Derrida , J. 86 diaspora 121, 129, 162 dirt 268, 271 see also stain displacement 6, 19–20, 30, 65, 59, 86, 93, 119, 134–136, 175, 181 see also place domesticity 17, 19, 22, 39, 46, 49, 54–56, 66, 109, 114, 120, 123, 131–134, 151–152, 154, 240, 243, 246, 248, 266, 269 see also home

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dress 39, 43–44, 99–100, 103, 105–108, 110–114, 135, 183, 247, 249, 260–262, 266–270, 272–274 Dziewuchy Berlin 274 Ékpè 162–163 see also Abakuá Secret Society Elles sans Frontières 273 England 106, 221, 229 Estonia 239, 242 European Union Gender Action Plan 274 exile 19, 82 exilic 132 fabric 5, 11, 18–29, 46, 99–100, 103, 110–120, 166, 188–190, 266, 270 Feminism Never Happened exhibition 204 First Nations 205, 213 flag 69, 271–273 American 69 Polish 271–272 Frank, T. 185, 195 Freud, S. 89, 134, 273 garden 12–13, 119–128, 130–132, 136, 147, 149–150, 179–180, 183, 185–192, 194–197, 229, 244 Babylonian Hanging Gardens 187, 193 Eden 191 generosity 8, 13–15, 31, 34, 107, 157, 202, 214, 274 Geneva Consensus Declaration 269 Germany 90 globalisation 1, 3–5, 7–8, 11–12, 14, 17, 34, 60–68, 74–76, 83, 94–95, 105, 107, 120–122, 124, 129, 132, 185, 195–196, 201, 204–206, 210, 213, 221–223, 226, 234, 262–263, 276 see also transnationalism Himid, L. 5 Lost Threads 5 home 6, 8, 13–14, 19, 22, 25, 46, 54, 56, 63, 69, 104, 109–110, 123–124, 128, 130–131, 133–134, 141–142, 179, 180, 183, 189, 191, 194–195, 197, 220–222, 234, 239, 249, 253

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homeland 6, 11, 89, 119, 180, 185, 189, 194, 245, 274–275 hybridity 12, 46, 49, 120, 156, 182–183, 241, 246, 251, 254–255 identity card 103 India 71, 74, 99 Indigenous 13, 45, 129, 201–206, 210 Indigenous art practice 13, 45, 203–204, 210 intersectionality 2, 4, 60–62, 68–69, 71, 127, 152, 165, 183, 205, 207, 211, 213 Iran 12, 27, 119–136 Iran-Iraq War 123, 125 Islam 84, 124, 129, 136, 183, 189–191 Israel 13, 179–185, 189, 192, 194–195 Jansone, R. 239, 246, 248–250 Ritual Place 246, 248 Japan 10, 59, 62, 66, 71, 75, 145 Judaism 189 Juniewicz, A. 262 Karłowicz , M. 262, 270 Katz, Z. 9, 18–20, 26–31, 33, 36 164 Nuits 27, 31 Kubota, S. 10, 59–76 An American Family 59, 64 Broken Diary 59, 64 Europe on ½ Inch a Day 64–69, 71, 74–76 Red, White, Yellow, and Black collective 69–70 Riverrun – Video Water Poem 69, 71–72 Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky 74, 70–76 Video Poem 60, 64, 66–67 labour 5, 6, 14, 17–26, 100, 134, 136, 223–224, 240, 244–252, 265 landscape 12–13, 18, 21, 32, 62, 65–66, 75, 119–120, 125–126, 128–129, 132, 134–136, 161, 165, 179–183, 185, 187–188, 194, 196–197, 207, 220, 230 Latvia 14, 239–248, 251–252, 254–255 LEVEL 202, 207–210

Marisol 10, 39–40, 42–45, 49–50, 55–56 The Party 39–40, 43–45, 55 marronage 170, 173 martyrology 272, 275 mask 9, 114, 268 memory 28, 45, 53, 93, 121–122, 128, 133, 179, 181, 183–184, 195, 221, 233, 244, 272–273 Meskimmon, M. 1, 3–6, 34, 121, 135, 180, 221–222, 234, 259, 276 metonym 11, 99, 104, 106, 113–114 Mexico 185, 195, 219–221, 224, 226–228 Middle East 120–121, 124, 132, 182–183, 192, 196 migration 5–7, 11–12, 19, 71, 82, 94, 102, 127, 141–142, 145–146, 156, 188, 193, 195 immigrant 2, 11, 29, 31, 60, 81, 88–89, 93–94, 105–106 migrant 2–3, 6, 19, 30, 88, 102, 106, 142, 157 Minujín, M. 10, 39–40, 42, 49–50, 54–56 La Menesunda 39–40, 43, 49–50, 53–56 Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad 50 mourning 68, 181, 194–195, 197, 273 nationalism 3, 49, 63, 82–83, 86–87, 89, 92, 94, 205, 251 ‘new nationalism’ 5 see also transnationalism Nguyen, T. T. M. 11, 99–104, 106, 113–114 Day By Day 101 ID Card 100, 103, 113 Shadow 100, 104–105, 114 Travels 100, 104, 114 Nicola L 10, 39–40, 42, 45–50, 56 Pénétrables 46 The Red Coat 39–40, 45–47, 49, 55–56 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes) 14, 259, 262 Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet (The All-Poland Women’s Strike) 260, 265, 273 Paik, N. J. 10, 61–66, 68, 74–76 Global Groove 61–64, 66, 74–76 Good Morning, Mr. Orwell 61, 76 TV Guide 75

Index ‘Video Common Market’ 63–65, 68, 74 Peñalosa, Ch. 13, 219–221, 224–230, 233–234 Closer to the Disappearance, from the Eclipse 219 performativity 10–11, 149 Persia 119–136 Pičukāne, I. 239, 251–252 Three Sisters 251–252 Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal 259 pornography 92 Portapak 40–59 Portugal 141–157 Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice) 260–261 Preciado, P. B. 2–3, 102, 114 reproductive rights 260, 269 responsibility 1, 5, 7, 36, 128, 145, 213, 268 secrecy 12, 161–167, 169–171, 173–175 see also Abakuá Secret Society shame 267, 271 Sikán 162–164, 167- 169, 173–175 see also Abakuá Secret Society silencing 11, 220, 268, 271 sisterhood 3, 252–253, 255 see also solidarity slavery 5, 161–163, 165, 167, 169–171, 173 Slavic celebrations 266–267 Smith, B. 13, 219–221, 224, 229–231, 233–234 Blueprint for a Curtain 231 Mechanical Wave 233 solidarity 1, 3–4, 6, 14, 18, 212, 222, 234, 260, 262–264, 268, 274–276 Soviet Union 166, 246, 260 post-Soviet 14, 240, 249 Soviet 59, 144, 239–241, 247–249, 252, 254 space 1–3, 6–7, 9–13, 15, 17–19, 21–22, 24–27, 30–36, 39–40, 42–43, 45–46, 49–51, 54–56, 66, 73–76, 81, 86, 93–94, 99–100, 102, 104, 108–114, 120–123, 127–132, 134–136, 141– 144, 147, 149–150, 152–156, 161– 162, 165, 169, 171–173, 179–180, 182–183, 185, 187–190, 192–193,

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196, 202, 206–209, 220–221, 224, 228–231, 233–235, 240–241, 251, 261–266, 271, 275–276 antispace 161, 171 environmental 179 fluidity of 10 gendered 131, 264 locatedness 11–12 place 3, 7–8, 11, 13, 17, 19, 24–26, 32– 33, 35, 43–45, 54, 65, 70–71, 76, 83, 85, 87–88, 93–94, 99–100, 103–107, 110–114, 128–131, 134–135, 142, 147, 149–152, 156–157, 161, 163– 164, 166, 171, 173, 175, 180–184, 188–194, 196–107, 204–206, 213, 219–222, 226–230, 233–234, 242, 245, 265–266, 275 placelessness 10, 12, 40, 49, 70, 194 politics of 1–2 practices 10, 161 public 10, 42, 54, 81, 110, 120, 220, 240, 264–266, 275 see also belonging; garden; landscape; secrecy; subaltern geographies Spivak, G. 18–22, 83, 86–89, 93 stain 126, 186–187, 261, 270–271, 273–274 see also dirt ‘strangers as enemies’ 81, 85, 94 subaltern geographies 161, 169 subjectivity 1–2, 4–5, 7–9, 26–27, 34, 36, 45, 49, 61, 82, 88, 92–94, 114, 120–121, 123, 129, 131–132, 136, 151, 162, 182, 212, 220, 240, 242, 244, 255, 259, 263, 265–266, 268, 270–271, 273 agentic 240 Black 162 Black Cuban 167, 169–171, 175 embodiments of 1–2 interrelational 1–2, 259 intersubjectivity 26–27, 32, 135 see also agency; Sikán 162–164, 167–169, 173–175 Sydney Biennale exhibition 204 Tamane, D. 239, 242–245 Flower Smuggler 242

290 The Commute exhibition 205 transnationalism 1–11, 13–14, 17–21, 26, 31–32, 34–36, 40, 42–47, 49–50, 55–56, 60, 62–64, 66–67, 81, 83, 86– 90, 92–95, 99, 101–102, 106–107, 113–114, 119–122, 124, 127–129, 131, 135–136, 142, 149–150, 157, 169, 179–180, 182, 189–190, 192, 197, 201–203, 205–206, 210–211, 213, 222, 224, 226, 231, 239–242, 244, 255, 259–260, 262–263, 269, 272, 274–276 see also activism; cosmopolitanism; solidarity Ude, Ch. Ch. 262, 264–268, 271, 273–274 Unfinished Business exhibition 201–202, 205–207, 209, 211–213 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women 263 Vieira, A. 150–152, 154 Caixa-Objectos 151 Figura à Janela 151

Index Vietnam 59–77, 98–114, 266 Virgin Mary 268 violence, gender 3, 66–68, 84, 89, 104, 114, 192, 243, 250, 262, 266–267, 274 vulnerability 1–3, 12–15, 35, 165, 175, 195, 241, 243, 248, 250, 263, 275 corporeal 14, 240, 245, 255 ‘vulnerable listening’ 221–222, 234 walking 14, 150, 226, 259–260, 264–267, 274 see also activism water 5, 10, 69–74, 82, 85, 90, 119, 121–122, 128, 130, 133, 163, 180–182, 186, 191, 194–196 Wilczyńska, G. 262, 266 Women in the Community exhibition 203 Women Photographers exhibition 203 Wong, A. M. 83, 89–92 yellowface 91–92 Zangewa, B. 9, 18, 20, 22, 24–25, 33, 36 An Angel at My Bedside 25 Cold Shower 22–23 Heart of the Home 23–24

Plate 1 (Figure 1.1): Billie Zangewa, Cold Shower, 2019. Hand-stitched silk collage. 42.13 × 39.76 inches / 107 × 101 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.

Plate 2 (Figure 2.2): Marta Minujín, La Menesunda, 1965, General view of the Neon Tunnel, Courtesy Marta Minujín Archive.

Plate 3 (Figure 3.4): Stills from Shigeko Kubota’s Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky, 1973, 31:56 min, b&w and colour, sound. Courtesy of Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation © Estate of Shigeko Kubota.

Plate 4 (Figure 4.1): Patty Chang and David Kelley, Shangri-La, video project, 2005 (photograph courtesy of the artist).

Plate 5 (Figure 5.1): Nguygˆ˜n Thi. Thanh Mai, ID Card, 2014. Heat transfer prints on recycled fabric, 348 pieces, 5.7 × 8.1 cm. Installation view of the exhibition Skylines with Flying People 3 at The Japan Foundation for Cultural Exchange in Vietnam, Hanoi, 2016. Photo courtesy of Skylines with Flying People 3.

Plate 6 (Figure 6.3): Bahar Behbahani, still from Suspended, 2007, singlechannel video (7 minutes), Tehran, Iran. © Bahar Behbahani.

Plate 7 (Figure 7.3): Irene Buarque, As Muralhas (The City Walls), 1975. Side view of the installation in the gardens of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon. 110 cm each (diameter), acrylic on platex. © Irene Buarque.

Plate 8 (Figure 8.3): Belkis Ayón, La Cena (The Supper), 1988. Collograph, 1370 × 3000 mm. Photography by: José A. Figueroa. Copyright © Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba.

Plate 9 (Figure 9.3): Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images, 2018, installation view (detail), ink and coloured pencils on transparent Mylar, polyethylene basins, water, vinyl, dimensions variable. Photo: Stefan Hagen. Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill, Bronx, New York.

Plate 10 (Figure 10.1): Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, 2017. Installation view at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.

Plate 11 (Figure 11.1): Chantal Peñalosa, Untitled, 2017, Diptych of inkjet prints on photographic paper. Courtesy of the artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City.

Plate 12 (Figure 12.4): Ingrīda Pičukāne, From Three Sisters [Oh là là scene], 2016. Published Mini kuš! No. 38. Riga: Grafiskie stāsti.

Plate 13 (Figure 13.1): Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes), collective walk in front of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland, 10 November 2020, Warsaw, Poland. © Michał Walkiewicz.