My time here has come to a close - and I spent the last weekend of my two and a half-month long jaunt across the Middle East in Dubai and Sharjah. Abu Dhabi is the capital of the UAE, and of course the site of my dissertation research, but ...there is something about massive cities in the desert where you drive fast with the stereo up loud and the cities are criticized for being modern and soulless, but they are places where larger-than-life dreams come alive. They are cities of possibility. Los Angeles is one of these, and I didn't expect to like it before I lived there and fell in love with it. Maybe that's why Dubai immediately felt right to me: I recognized the humming of energy and big dreams. Emily Dickinson said it best: I dwell in possibility.
The Burj Khalifa by night
I stayed at the Ramada Downtown Dubai, right next to the Burj Khalifa. It is the tallest building in the world, and it's really beautiful. The hotel was really great, too. It was a quick (but sweaty) walk to Ara Gallery around the corner, which had a really beautiful exhibition on Arabic calligraphy. If I hadn't been so desperate to see Rob, I might have pawned my ticket back just to buy something so beautiful to look at.
Ara Gallery, Downtown Dubai
Backstage
I also drove up to the Museum of Islamic Civilization in Sharjah. Getting there from Dubai wasn't a directionally complex story, but the roads got skinnier and the traffic didn't slow down accordingly, so it was a bit harrowing. And the signs didn't point to where they were supposed to, which is always disconcerting. I was really thankful I had paid $7/day for the GPS, it proved invaluable.
Sharjah, of all the Gulf cities, has the jump on museums. The government has about 16 of them, incorporating various facets of Gulf history and built heritage. Many of them are located along the Corniche in or near the Arts Area in the heart of Sharjah. The Museum of Islamic Civilization is located in a former souq, and it's a really long skinny building that's quite beautiful. Due to Ramadan, entry was free and there was free parking. Fantastic!
Museum of Islamic Civilization in Sharjah, UAE
The museum's ground floor is dedicated to temporary exhibitions, a hall on Islamic faith, and a hall about Islamic scientific and technological innovations. The display above was entitled "stretching assist." Uhm....what? When paired with the drawing behind the little mock-up, and the slicing & dicing tools in the foreground...call it what it is, folks!
Upstairs, the galleries attend to Islamic decorative arts chronologically. The museum houses over 5000 artifacts in total, and many of them are just stunningly beautiful.
After the museum, I headed to Maraya Art Center. I thoroughly enjoyed this place, even if I had to do some minor off-roading in my Mitsubishi Lancer (that's right!) to get there.
It's the Middle East, so yes, obviously it's about camels...
Installation from The Beginning of Thinking is Geometric
by Basmah Felemban
Both the exhibitions were excellent. The Beginning of
Thinking Geometric felt akin to exhibitions in New York & LA, big open
white cubes that are covered in various interpretive contemporary art. In a
different vein, the RE:Oriented exhibit of Arab modernists was
thought-provoking (even if there was only one female artist included). While
the security guard followed me around the exhibit, and I was the only one there
at the time, it wasn’t as awkward or oppressive as some similar experiences
have been (ie, Crafts Museum in Bucharest, Romania – that security guard takes
the prize for creeper guards). At the end, he handed me a pretty sweet canvas
tote with the exhibition catalogue and a bunch of swag inside. I’m a grad
student, so please understand I am extremely susceptible to being bribed with
free swag or food.
While in Dubai, I thought I’d check out Al Serkal Avenue,
which is a trendy new consortium of galleries that have set up shop in the warehousey,
industrial area of Al Quoz. Many galleries are closed or operating on
restricted hours for Ramadan & August (because, really, who leaves their
air-conditioned office, car or home during this heat? Really.). This crazy
girl, apparently. A half-block walk from where I parked into Ayyam Gallery had
me coated in a slick film of sweat, and I wished there were some way to
un-awkwardly hang out in the entryway and cool down sufficiently under the A/C
before any of the immaculate gallery attendants saw my pink face. Alas.
On Saturday, I visited a colleague at his university office
at Al Ayn. In two days, I put 700km on the rental car and visited 3 of the top
4 cities in the UAE – much more movement and activity than two weeks in Abu
Dhabi. I couldn’t help but think, at the end of my first research trip here
(inshallah, one of many, if I do my job well!)…I think we, Westerners who reside in the West, perhaps judge expats in Dubai and Abu Dhabi unfavorably at times. But this is a place where people who don’t belong anywhere can
belong, and as someone who belongs nowhere and cringes at the question “Where
are you from?” I understand the desire to live somewhere that question is
irrelevant. My professor friend here said that belonging and citizenship are
different things. They are. And one of my interviewees told me, “The great
thing about Abu Dhabi is that you come here, no matter who you are, and you are
accepted. It is open.” And it is incredibly diverse – more than just a lip
service diversity.* The UAE has made itself a land of dreams coming true, of
big aspirations, of grandiose plans, and a desire to shape the future. We can criticize the Gulf and its expats for this, but at
the end of the day… at least they’re going for what they want. They're doing. By putting it out there, they change the terms of the conversation and make it necessary to acknowledge them. And they may just represent
a post-nationalist way of belonging.
*To be clear, diversity does not always mean equality and
there are always discrimination and exploitation issues where migrant labor is
involved.
These days, there's a lot of waiting. I should be grateful for it, because it's a chance to catch my breath after going non-stop for ... well, a year. As my generous boyfriend never fails to remind me, it's been a busy year full of change (although I think he lets me off the hook too easy). I have never been one to relax well. It's an art, and I am a novice.
I'm here in Abu Dhabi, having put out feelers to all my contacts in the Emirates...just waiting for them to get back to me. In the meantime, it's also Ramadan - which means shorter working hours. Most places in the UAE follow the requisite 9a-2p workday, and since it's illegal to eat, drink or smoke anything in public places (including buses and taxis) during daylight hours in the UAE during Ramadan, you can't even go work in a coffeeshop for the afternoon. They're all closed. Things open up at night after evening prayer, and iftar, when Muslims break their fast. So the tea shop I'm currently sitting in is only open from 7p-midnight, daily. The weather in the evenings is nicer, a blistering 95 degrees instead of the 111 during the day.
Abu Dhabi's Corniche at dusk - today's mandatory "you can't stay inside all day alone or you'll go crazy" preventative outing
Another slight complication for my plans is that I don't have a keycard to get into the building I'm staying in, and security has to buzz me in every time I come back. Half the time they remember me and it's no problem - I've taken to trying to make eye contact and smile every time I exit the building to encourage friendly recognition - or asking questions I already know the answer to so that they remember talking to me. The other half of the time, we have an awkward conversation where I show my passport and the key and namedrop, attempting to communicate across multiple language barriers to the Filipina/Singaporean/Pakistani/Indian security guards that they should let me back in. It makes every outing an adventure. Can I go home again? Will I ever see my belongings again? Stay tuned!
I have been busy making plans, hoping that, as the Beatles song promises, life will start happening because I'm making other plans. I am interviewing the ED of the Tourism and Culture Authority tomorrow, and she has promised to put me in touch with her senior culture managers to interview them as well. Hopefully that starts the ball rolling. One of the artists I reached out to has responded to me. I have signed up for a couple of talks and workshops on Saadiyat Island, and looked up talks at the Abu Dhabi Art Hub. There are a bunch during Ramadan - and all at 10:30pm. I've been working my schedule sideways to accommodate Ramadan, but in general I don't like going out at night, and I definitely don't like going out alone at night via taxi. But I'm going to bite the bullet, because otherwise I'll just hide in my overly air-conditioned apartment and never get any actual research accomplished. And figuring out these sorts of logistical things are important - they are clues and indicators of how I'm going to have to structure fieldwork in the long-term. Important to know, but honestly, a pain in the butt and seriously outside my comfort zone. Is this what I signed up for? Oh. Yeah. I did.
Additionally, I made an executive decision to spend the last three days (2 nights) of my trip in Dubai. I want to check out the gallery scene in Dubai, as well as the museums in Sharjah, and connect with an NYU colleague who works for the Sharjah Museums Authority. Dubai is a 2-hour drive from here, so I wouldn't want to make the trip multiple times, and since everything is open at night, it makes sense to stay overnight rather than drive back to Abu Dhabi at 2am. In an odd way, I am looking forward to my little trip - I will have a key to my room and unquestioned access (!), wifi on my own computer (I have to borrow my host's because NYU, despite still taking chunks of my meager income for my MA degree, won't let me sign onto the NYU wifi WITH MY NYU LOGON), a car and the flexibility to go where I want when I want, and a pool. When I come back, I'll drive to Abu Dhabi to attend one final talk on Saadiyat on Monday evening, then go to the airport, turn in the rental car at 11pm, and (in sha allah) board a 2am flight to London, connecting to a 10am flight to Chicago O'Hare.
Raad placed colored dots over the bullet marks in buildings and the urban environment in Lebanon in the 80s, based on the tracemarks of the bullets which often etched various colors into the buildings.
He realized later that the color of the bullets corresponded to their country of origin, and he had created an archive of the countries that sold ammunition during the war.
More soon - on Raad, whose work has been a joyful discovery. So much to do, so much to prove, so little time.
Photographer Shadi Ghadirian lives and works in Tehran. Her series of Qajar photographs, mimicking standards of 18th and 19th century Qajar court photography, is framed in "Veil" as a thoughtful and witty retort to ethnographic Orientalist portraits and in "Unveiled" as subversive art worthy of a second look. Responses to her work vary. In an exhibition review, critic Olivia Hampton writes, “Qajar is a recreation of the photographic compositions and styles of the studio portraits that flourished in the Qajar dynasty, who ruled Iran from 1794-1925... But clear intrusions of modernity surface in the work, in the form of ghetto blasters and television sets.” Here we see a European art critic reading the work to be about modernity, and an “intrusion” into an idealized and Orientalized past. In a similar vein, “Unveiled” curator Lisa Farjam writes, “Ghadirian, who is influenced by Qajar traditions in Iranian photohistory, does not bow to the standard image of the darkly-clad Muslim woman; these veils are full of color and life.” Here, Ghadirian is presented as drawing from a traditional and Islamic past while infusing a modernity and vibrance. Farjam frames Ghadirian as breaking stereotypes of “the Muslim woman,” whose form, voice, and sexuality are cloaked and disappear with the veil.
To counter these views, fellow artist Jananne Al-Ani intervenes to clarify multiple readings by varied audiences, rather than assuming a homogenous and Western audience. She notes, “For an Iranian audience, the contemporary props are seen as ordinary objects in an extraordinary costume drama, whereas for a Western audience – with no knowledge of the history of Iranian dress – the contemporary props disrupt what appears to be a timeless ethnographic portrait of an Other culture.” Here, Al-Ani broadens the debate and the discussion of the work to include multiple perspectives, rather than presuming the work’s audience(s) will be culturally homogenous. Moore writes that Ghadirian's inclusion of Western electronics "raise pointed questions about the provenance of commodity culture and the different forms of fetishism that impact upon women transnationally.” Moore thus creates a productive channel into discussing how women’s bodies in representation have been historically used across many cultures for varying reasons. This call to a broader audience and shared commonalities reappears in Ghadirian’s more recent work, the “Like EveryDay” series, which highlights the quotidian nature of many women’s lives and the roles they perform. Ghadirian’s gallery labels the series, which was featured in the “Unveiled” exhibition, as “depicting anonymous chador-wrapped figures with kitchen utensils instead of faces. This simple, ominous collision of potent symbols – the veil and domesticity –parodies stereotypical understanding of women of the region and universally.” Most viewers imagine the veiled figures to be human, and Muslim women, given that resemblance to variations of the Islamic veil, but there are no discernible people in these photographs.
The immediate association for Western audiences is the equating of women as tools, implements, and as invisible as the household items of daily use; women are reduced to sexual tools in wearing the veil, could be an interpretation. In the photographs, there is no trace of a person visible except for one figure in a gingham flowered veil with a strainer over her face; here, the viewer can see traces of skin, a nose, and the tip of a finger, presumed to be feminine by the veil. Otherwise, the series portrays tools and veils, but not people.
Ghadirian works within Iranian political constraints, despite the potentially difficult interpretations of some of her works. According to Iranian law, “All images of women in Iran must be shown in hijab and instead of trying to escape this or seeing it as a constraint, Shadi Ghadirian has made it her theme as she continues to investigate the condition of women in her home country.” Much as Sedira pushes viewers to interpret, hold, and gather multiple viewpoints at once, Ghadirian works within and through her sociopolitical situation to create works that challenge easy assumptions and classification.
ZINEB SEDIRA Lately I’ve been working on a number of academic projects in addition to my job, and that has kept me from updating the blog. Rather than remain radio silent, I thought I’d share a snippet of the presentation I’ve been working on for the Middle Eastern Studies Association conference, which focuses on representations of the veil in contemporary art from the Middle East.
The photography and video installations of Zineb Sedira often focus on identity politics. Sedira has used her work to explore questions of belonging and ancestry; she was born in France to Algerian parents, and later moved to Britain. Her earlier work tended more toward the autobiographical, examining family dynamics, with more recent work focusing on the geographies and landscapes of identity politics. Silent Sight, 2000, is a video installation where the camera brackets a woman’s eyes, and a thin wisp of the Algerian haik (veil), so that they inhabit the entire field of view. The woman’s eyes blink, and look to the left and right, towards the frame of the white haik; the viewer immediately focuses on the woman’s eyes and the haik blends into the background. As “Veil” curators Bailey and Tawadros remark, “Here it is the woman’s gaze and the control of her own gaze that takes precedence, while the veil dissolves into a white haze.” Thus, the veil becomes invisible, not a hindrance or restriction upon the woman, and exists as one chosen element of a multifaceted identity as the viewers examine body language. Here the veil doesn’t cover but instead clarifies and focuses attention on the body (at least parts of it); and this focus is not directed to a gender-specific anatomy. The audio accompaniment to the video recounts this experience of limited visibility due to the veil from another perspective; the narrator, as a child, “struggling to interpret her mother’s feelings from beneath her haik. The spectator, who only has access to Sedira’s voice and eyes, is encouraged to replicate the process of establishing trust within a limited visual field.” The narrator recounts an experience from childhood when she failed to recognize her mother because the haik obscured her mother beyond recognition. Here the audio and the video reveal two separate and distinct subjectivities: critic Rachel Epp Buller describes, “The soundtrack plays on the emotion of this moment: sometimes Sedira’s voice shakes, or becomes strained or unclear...This random rhythm – eyes opening, blinking, then closing – matches the moments of silence and speech, white it is the gaze, fixed or lowered, that keeps us in the time frame of the video and in the present tense of its duration.” The narrator comments that she finally accepted the veil was her mother’s “home,” invoking images of domesticity and an almost Victorian “angel-in-the-house” perspective. Instead of unilaterally supporting this assertion, however, the young daughter’s inability to connect to her mother because of the veil could be read as the veil preventing feminine roles (that of motherhood) while simultaneously playing into them (socially respectable veiled woman). Critically, however, the important intervention made here is to reconcile two potentially opposing viewpoints (for and against the veil). The veil is not a symbol of feminine submission, or a backwards, “uncivilized” woman; it does not render a woman invisible, but acutely visible. In a single physical experience, the viewer’s senses recount different stories: the audio portion gently presents a story of frustration, difficulty and isolation in a relationship because of the veil whereas the visual portion affirms the agency and power that veiling can afford. The viewer’s senses are split and yet dually embodied. Sedira also explores the veil, and the question of anonymity and visibility, again in her photographic installation Don’t Do To Her What You Did To Me, No. 2, 1996 (above). This series of photographs shows Sedira in varied stages of veiling and unveiling, thus making the act of veiling visible and demystified, stripping it of mystery. Epp Buller further comments, “Using herself as the photographic subject, Sedira asserts through her series the individual identities of women despite their veils, which in turn combats Western mythologies about veiled women. As the artist herself asserts, ‘The unveiled woman is seen as an individual and civilized subject, a far cry from the over-represented and culturally constructed veiled woman, who is considered anonymous, passive, and exotic.’” In this installation, Sedira shows a woman in various states of veiling, performing multiple identities simultaneously, and thus breaking the dichotomy. Sedira has developed the metaphor of “veiling-the-mind” as she produced work questioning and probing the veil. This metaphor, she writes, explains “the (mis)reading of cultural signs; to counteract the Western view of veiling, I try not to resort to the literal veil in my artistic practice. Instead I refer to veiling-the-mind in order to explore the multiple forms of veiling in both Western and Muslim cultures.” Sedira uses her work as a space to explore and expand the definition of the veil, rendering it more catholic and philosophical and moving it to a mental, rather than physical, plane. Sedira also plays on the veil in another religious background. Sedira photographs herself wearing a haik in her Self-Portraits or the Virgin Mary series, 2000 (above). The title of the work blurs the Algerian haik with Christian veils, calling attention to the historic similarities in veiling practices between Christianity and Islam; it also highlights the sexualized nature of women’s bodies as religious saints, and perhaps alluding to the way women artists are similarly singled out for their gender. In this series, the veiled woman is visible, but barely; the photographs contain little contrast between the background the subject, the whiteness at once suggesting an ethereal invisibility, transparency, but also absence. Thus, Sedira employs a color that is the sum of all colors, with no discernible competition between different strains of light, hinting towards a synthesized, pluralistic approach; simultaneously, white references a disturbing colonial history and is evocative of absence, loss and invisibility. Commenting on her own work, Sedira writes, “At first sight, my artistic practice refers to the veil as a visual motif. But the veil is never purely a physical code, delineated and present; it is also a transparent and subtle mental code.” Here Sedira encourages the viewer to think of the veil as a subjective mental idea, unique to each wearer. She also notes in her catalog essay for “Veil:”
“The visual art in “Veil” has many readings, but I wish to foreground that of transgression. All the artists in this project communicate the personal and the collective, with photography, video, words, installations, and sound as their media of expression and inscription. My ambition for such a dialogue was, and still remains, the need for a critique that enables a renewed lexicon with which to articulate the complexities and subtleties - the ambiguities and contradictions, the generalities and specificities, the similarities and differences - of veiling...such a lexicon could then speak to and about the paradoxes of the veil.”
Sedira’s work transgresses stereotypes, shattering binaries by weaving them into rich tapestries of plurality and simultaneity. While her work references common assumptions and stereotypes, she toys with them to challenge them rather than submitting to them. Furthermore, Sedira’s work does not play into easy tropes of East/West distinctions. Her work has drawn on loaded imagery of the veil and women in domestic capacities, but the messages underpinning their presentations are complicating rather than essentializing. -Elizabeth Harrington, 2010
Last night E and I went to a concert at the Issue Project Room, a concert/installation space in a former can factory in Gowanus (also houses Valerie Hegarty's studio!). While I wasn't consulted about the kind of music I was going to hear prior to the event, I tried to retain an open mind. We walked in to pick up our tickets from Will-Call (E's name was the only one on the list), and then sat down in the space: a long narrow white-washed room, buttressed by white wooden pillars, with metal folding chairs facing the end of the room.
Gerritt Witmer took the stage first. After a brief intermission to rearrange the room into a crescent shape, with the chairs facing one long wall, Sissy Spacek came out to perform. The first piece consisted of a bandmember tying a bunch of gardenias to an electric guitar with tape, and then removing them. While it may sound like it would sound weird, the sounds produced by a gardenia brushing against a guitar string was oddly luminous, soft, angelic. The next bandmember played his electric guitar with a wrench and bunch of metal strips, producing a much more jarring sound.
This work, which offers the listener no comforting melody to rely on, no strain of recognition, challenges the listener to examine her expectations of "music." It made me more attentive to the sounds I was hearing, looking for where they were emanating from and imagining complex sound productions of diverse and distinct elements. Rosalind Krauss wrote on minimalist art and the future of museums that both profoundly decenter power: whereas previously, art consisted of representations easily identified in scenes that reified our values and civilizational understanding, minimalist art and experimental sound remove any stable foundation. They challenge expectations, and by refusing to give us melody or identification, allow the viewer and listener to bring herself to the work. We bring the meaning now, it is not produced elsewhere for us to consume. This makes art/music profoundly subjective.
While Sissy Spacek isn't something I could listen to on my iPod on the train - it is definitely performance art/music, I appreciated how Sissy Spacek forced me to examine my assumptions about what I hear, where those sounds come from, and the meanings that I search for in the world around me. After all, art is meant to challenge assumptions and speak to something deep, submerged, subjective, intimate.
Link to Issue Project Room's discussion of the event here.
This is pretty much as exciting as it gets: a documentary about art, theft, money, and court cases determining how culture gets managed. This is a story about the Barnes Foundation, whose owner arranged and created a museum and left legal instructions on the management of the institution and its operation. Unfortunately those instructions aren't oriented towards profit, or the "revitalization" of Philadelphia - so the wishes of the collector and owner have been overrun by trust lawyers, and other plans. Can't. Wait.
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