Widely recognized as the moment that ushered in the era of globalization, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 emblematized freedom and unity. The current global reality, however, is a far cry from the neoliberal promises of a globalized future marked by progress and prosperity. Technological advancement has radically transformed spatiotemporal boundaries, enabling unprecedented circulation of people, information, and capital. In an age of mass tourism, mass media, and mass markets, the world is united but under the subsumptive logic of neoliberal capitalism. Alongside paradigmatic shifts in identity and consciousness engendered by this increased permeability and fluidity, international security measures escalate, violent geopolitical strife persists, and rampant socioeconomic inequality proliferates.

This issue of Interventions takes the border as a means through which to investigate such contradictions of our global contemporary. As the structures and mechanisms of the capitalist system evolve to become ever more pervasive and ever less discernible, “Borders and the Global Contemporary” explores the ways in which contemporary artistic production engages the militarization, mediation, and commercialization of everyday life. The projects comprised herein examine art’s subversive capacity to destabilize dominant discourse and posit counter-narratives as well as its compliance with hegemonic forces. They also address the challenges of artistic production, dissemination, and exhibition in the face of current geopolitical conditions. The projects offer multiple ways to conceptually take on the border: to forge borders and to forget them, to elude borders and to elucidate them. With this issue, we hope to complicate the border and to contribute to an ongoing critical investigation and re-imagination of the global contemporary.

Carmen Falcioni, Carmen Ferreyra, and Cecelia Thornton-Alson

New York, January 2013

*Joaquín Barriendos is an instructor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, specializing in visual culture and contemporary art.  He has taught at the University of Barcelona, and was a visiting scholar in the Museum Studies Program at NYU and a research fellow at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. He has published extensively on the globalization of contemporary Latin American art as well as on the economic, aesthetic, racial, and epistemic asymmetries that give shape to the so-called global art world. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Global Studies and Contemporary Art and the director of Culturas Visuales Globales, an open forum that addresses visuality as a global-scale intercultural phenomenon and promotes theory-based reflection and problem-oriented research.

*Tania Bruguera is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in performance, installation, video, and behavior art. She trained at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, where she founded Arte de Conducta, the first performance studies program in Latin America; and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Bruguera has exhibited internationally and her work is part of collections in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. She has participated in Documenta 11 as well as biennials in Venice, Johannesburg, São Paulo, Shanghai, Havana, and Santa Fe. In 2010, Bruguera launched Immigrant Movement International, a five-year project that posits the immigrant as a unique, new global citizen in a post-national world.

*Deborah Cullen joined Columbia University this summer as Director & Chief Curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery. Previously, she served at El Museo del Barrio in New York for over 15 years. As Director of Curatorial Programs, her exhibitions include Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis and Arte (no es) Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000, for which she received an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. Cullen was Chief Curator of the 3rd Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan, which ran from April to August of this year; and she has recently been appointed Curator of the 30th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art, which will open next September. Cullen’s work on graphics stems from her long-standing affiliation with legendary Jamaican-American printmaker Robert Blackburn and The Printmaking Workshop.

*Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer and the current Director of Intermedia Initiatives at Parsons The New School for Design. She has performed, lectured, exhibited, and curated around the world for over two decades. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented at numerous prominent events worldwide, including biennials in New York, Sydney, Johannesburg, Gwangju, Mercosul, and Shanghai. She has published five books: English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas; Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas; The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings; Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self; and most recently, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, which along with a series of videos and performances, addresses the role of women in the War on Terror and the military’s use of female sexuality as an interrogation tactic against suspected terrorists.

We would like to thank Professor Kaira Cabañas, Deborah Cullen, and Professor Kellie Jones for their guidance and support in putting together this event; the staffs of the Visual Media Center and the Art History Department for their assistance; and guests Joaquín Barriendos, Tania Bruguera, and Coco Fusco for their engaging discussions.

                                            We can probably say that moral questions have always arisen when moral norms of behavior have ceased to be self-evident and unquestioned in the life of a community.

–Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 1963

The question today is how … to articulate intelligence and love.

–Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “Letter to a Friend,” 2011

1.

The main floor of the Fridericianum was a curatorial tour de force. The two ground floor-wings were basically empty (filled with Ryan Gander’s “gentle breeze”). As a result, when one arrived at the building’s rotunda the exhibited work emerged with an almost mysterious intensity. First in a viewer’s line of sight were Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes. For me, Morandi’s work responds to curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s desire for “a slower form of time—the time of materials”[1]. Morandi’s work allegorizes a phenomenological perspective, one in which the body informs perception but the object also acts upon the subject. His paintings perform this phenomenological constitution of worlds, while such a painterly conceit is simultaneously laid bare through the actual display of Morandi’s painted objects. The “Bactrian Princesses” (2500–1500BC) were equally compelling, bespeaking an ethics of care by virtue of their survival and the evocation of the body’s vulnerability through their precarious construction (the figures are made from stone elements loosely slotted in place). Other works and objects on display included several editions of Man Ray’s Object to be Destroyed and the remains of objects from the National Museum in Beirut. The curator called the space of the rotunda the “brain” of the exhibition, and indeed it offered a network of various conceptual and material genealogies and histories (often related to armed struggle) through which to think the other work on display and the exhibition as a whole.

dOCUMENTA (13), Fridericianum rotunda, 2012. Installation view. Photo: Cabañas.

Kader Attia, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, 2012. Installation view. Photo: Cabañas.

2.

The question of the body was addressed both obliquely and head-on in various works, often through the lens of traumatic history. Kader Attia’s Repair of the Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures presented a maze of repaired African artifacts, colonial texts, busts of disfigured faces, all juxtaposed to a slide show of World War I soldiers’ injured faces and mended African masks. The installation was a disquieting display of the body’s materiality and multiple significations: from art to scarification, from war to ornament. Other works, rather than refer back to historical trauma from the vantage of the present, were created in conditions of oppression and war. In this vein, the accumulation of apples painted by the Bavarian priest and gardener Korbinian Aigner are exemplary. Between 1912 and the 1960s, he created postcard-sized apple paintings; approximately 400 were included in the exhibition. Interned at Dachau due to his anti-Nazi beliefs, Aigner developed a new apple sort for each consecutive year of his four-year imprisonment. The work speaks to private commitment and resilience in the face of trauma, and it does so through formal and scientific means.  

Korbinian Aigner, Apples, ca. 1912–60. Installation view. Photo: Cabañas.

3.

What I found particularly recurrent in the work included in the exhibition was the question of the subject of ethics as a subject for art. Many works in dOCUMENTA (13) approached how a subject is instituted, what norms operate and inform behavior but also how certain norms define who is and who is not a subject. I am thinking here, in particular, of Javier Tellez’s Artaud’s Cave and Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theater, a choreographed performance in which he worked with mentally disabled actors from the Theater Hora in Zurich. Such works were also framed historically in relation to the history of an institution in Kassel: the nearby 12^th century monastery, Breitenau, became a concentration camp, a girls’ reformatory, and now functions as a World War II memorial site and psychiatric clinic.

4.

The question of what constitutes a subject brings me, albeit indirectly, to the performance titled Testimonio (Testimony) by Aníbal López. If the other works in the exhibition drew attention to frameworks of recognition about who qualifies as a subject, López’s work seemed at odds with such an ethical stance. For those readers who might not have heard about the performance (and, indeed, many colleagues that I spoke to were unaware of the performance), in it López interviews a contract killer from his home country, Guatemala, and then opens the performance to questions from the audience. The killer was veiled behind a screen and thus seen only in silhouette, while the audience was recorded in video and ultimately represented fully in view. (The video was subsequently installed in the Neue Galerie.) For me, the work (which I refused to see) raises challenging ethical questions. The performance constitutes a spectacle of confession in which the audience might condemn the killer’s actions, but due to the performance’s structure, at the same time displaces any recognition of his victims, who remain abstract. Moreover, one “lesson” contemporary viewers might take away is: “ah yes, contract killers are just par for the course in a place like Guatemala.” In the worst case, someone could actually be killed[2]. Testimonio’s inclusion in the exhibition evinces a failure on the part of the dOCUMENTA (13) organizers to think through how lives might be at risk. That is, there was a public, albeit small, from Guatemala who attended dOCUMENTA (13); each individual felt both appalled and threatened that the killer might identify them upon their return home.

Aníbal López, Testimonio (Testimony), 2012. Screen shot of performance available on YouTube.

It follows that the performance forgoes the demands of cultural translation and forecloses the recognition of common vulnerability through which we might—along the lines of a thinker like Judith Butler—begin to productively think forms of recognition and visibility in the age of globalization and within the frames of war. In the face of such a performance, perhaps we need to give an account of ourselves (to evoke Butler again) in order to question the self-evidence with which we accept as artistic practice what is introduced within its framework[3]. With Testimonio, it seems that a juridical framework would have been in order, rather than an artistic one, on whose private and public funding the success of the contract killer’s performance depended.

Anna Maria Maiolino, Here & There (Aqui & Lá), 2012. Installation view. Photo: Cabañas.

5.

And then there were the works by artists that I love to love: Hannah Ryggen’s anti-fascist tapestries, Anna Maria Maiolino’s serial repetition of objects and use of sound, Pierre Huyghe’s exploration of the natural and man-made, Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer’s The End of Summer installation, Tacita Dean’s chalk drawings, and Tino Sehgal’s variations in the dark.

Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, 2012. Installation view. Photo: Cabañas.

Bulletproof is a photographic series completed in 2008 by Peruvian-born and New York-based conceptual photographer Milagros de la Torre. The photographs—at once innocuous and foreboding—soberly document innovations in bulletproof clothing. Printed on soft cotton paper, the photographs display the relatively lightweight and flexible everyday designs initially developed for heads of state and now donned alike by ordinary citizens in crime-stricken cities worldwide. Suspended in vacant white spaces, the garments could have been plucked from any closet—only the title of the series indicates something is awry. Bulletproof signals the growing militarization of everyday culture—a global culture increasingly shaped by fear and the constant threat of violence.   –Interventions

Black Leather, Archival pigment print on cotton paper, mounted on aluminum. 39 x 39 in, 2008.

Guayabera, Archival pigment print on cotton paper, mounted on aluminum, 39 x 39 in, 2008.

Lady’s Suit, Archival pigment print on cotton paper, mounted on aluminum, 39 x 39 in, 2008.

T-Shirt, Archival pigment print on cotton paper, mounted on aluminum, 39 x 39 in, 2008.

*Milagros de la Torre is a conceptual photographer based in New York City.

 There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

–Walter Benjamin

Theodor Adorno directly addressed the ethics of aesthetic response to historical trauma, famously stating that “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”^[1] With these immortal words, Adorno is not condemning all aesthetic expression but rather the notion that art is transcendent and that traditional aesthetic forms can persist without acknowledging the occurrence of tremendous suffering, as represented synecdochically by Auschwitz.  Moreover, only art can adequately express suffering; the barbarity lies in works that transfigure or, worse, deny its occurrence. For Adorno, who developed his ‘after Auschwitz’ dictum over a nearly twenty-year period beginning in 1949, the past is only accessible through the lens of the present. Therefore, past and present, as well as history and memory, must always be constellated within the work of art in order to turn toward that suffering.

That being said, we must acknowledge that we now occupy quite a different present from the one in which Adorno was writing. Although Adorno’s “ethic of representation”^[2] has significantly informed aesthetic responses to catastrophic history since its initial postulation in the wake of World War II, Gene Ray’s paper entitled “Conditioning Adorno: ‘After Auschwitz’ Now,” notes the current “necessity of historicizing the category ‘after Auschwitz.’”^[3] That is, Adorno’s ethic was framed in response to a certain set of circumstances that are no longer consistent with the way in which traumatic events are received today: “Adorno’s ethic formulated an urgent response to catastrophic history in the context of European postwar reconstruction culture. But as history continues to unfold in a more intensely globalized context, this post-war response cannot be hypostatized or imposed indefinitely.”^[4] In this globalized context, both the volume of information and the speed with which that information is disseminated and consumed has increased dramatically. What we think of as traditional boundaries, whether national, linguistic, or otherwise, are no longer as relevant as they used to be. Technologies of digital reproduction and their multiple channels of distribution complicate visual representation to the point that we must approach Adorno’s question of ethics in a different way. This essay discusses the ethics of aesthetic response to mass trauma in relation to the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center of September 11, 2001,[5] which remain the most highly mediated event of this kind in recent history. I would like to suggest that, thanks to rapid digitization and globalization, the way in which trauma is experienced in the twenty-first century is fundamentally different from the pre-digital era; therefore its aesthetic expression must be considered differently. In particular, I turn to German conceptual artist Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 9/12 Front Page (2001) and discuss how this artwork constitutes an example of an aesthetic response to collective trauma well suited to the digital era, in that it assists viewers with organizing the cognitive disjunctures that arise as a result of 9/11’s hyper-mediation, rather than simply acknowledging their existence.

Trauma, in the psychoanalytic sense, is characterized as, “an event in the subject’s life defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization.”[6] The experience of trauma is most prominently characterized by incomprehensibility, disallowing the subject to accurately conjure a clear picture of the event or even to reconstruct its timeline. In creating his nine-hour film Shoah (1985), director Claude Lanzmann took as his ethical paradigm what he terms a  “refusal of understanding.”^[7] Although counterintuitive, Lanzmann explains that works seeking to engage with traumatic history must transmit the occurrence of that trauma without offering analysis because this type of event is fundamentally incomprehensible. Implicit in Lanzmann’s postulation is a direct connection between the acts of seeing and knowing: To see an image of the Holocaust is to claim to know it and, therefore, to deny its magnitude. However, Georges Didi-Huberman points out that for Lanzmann this approach functions both as ethical compass and as an operational reality because “there were no images of the specific—extreme—reality to which his film was dedicated.”^[8] As a historical event, the Holocaust was quite literally unimaginable due to the scant existence of photographic documentation.^[9] While the Nazis went to great lengths to suppress the visual imaging of the genocide they were perpetrating, by contrast, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were planned with media in mind. How, then, does the question of ethics change when we are able to so clearly conjure a picture of what was previously deemed too unfathomable to begin to imagine in any all-encompassing way? We have all seen images of 9/11, but that does not change the fact that it is a fundamentally incomprehensible event. Beyond proffering description, how can artistic output help us reconcile the disjuncture between memory, reality, and representation now—when the cognitive process of understanding has become untethered from the visual act of seeing as a result of our inundation with images?

Roughly two billion people, approximately one-third of the earth’s population in 2001, watched the 9/11 attacks unfold live and in real time via a diverse array of media.[10] It is a day remembered as much through amateur photographs and videos, taken on cell phones and other readily available devices, as through images captured by professional photographers and camera crews. Journalist David Friend points out that two new technologies implemented by the broadcast media around the close of the twentieth century enabled the rapid and detailed visual transmission of 9/11: “The first breakthrough was satellite newsgathering (via digital video cameras, space-based satellites, and fiber optics), linked to a matrix of local TV stations, and national and international networks. The second development was the rapid transmission of digital news “photographs.”[11] After the first plane struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., news crews immediately flocked to the site, so that by the time the second plane made impact at 9:03 a.m., cameras were rolling and aimed directly at the Towers. In an unprecedented turn of events, shocked news anchors provided live color commentary as the second plane hit.

Ruminating on the relationship between media and the attacks, Jacques Derrida speculates, “What would ‘September 11’ have been without television?… More than the destruction of the Twin Towers or the attack on the Pentagon, more than the killing of thousands of people, the real ‘terror’ consisted of and, in fact, began by exposing and exploiting, having exposed and exploited, the image of this terror by the target itself.”[12] The immediate broadcast of the attacks by its victims, he suggests, was complicit with the attacks’ core purpose of mass traumatization through unprecedented death and destruction. As the experience of trauma cannot be fully processed as it is lived, the typical response is to repress the memory of the traumatic event, whether in part or in full. In the Freudian schema, trauma is allayed through the tripartite analytic process of remembering, repeating, and working through. Yet, as suggested by Derrida’s comments, in the case of 9/11, the traumatic experience assumed a different structure thanks to its atypical immediacy.

In their book Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, which brings together a number of essays on this theme, Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg explain that “something particular to the visual experience of 9/11 was its instantaneity, meaning not just alacrity of perception but compression of narrative time into a much less elastic visual moment, namely, the immediacy of live television. What is distinctive here is the seeming disallowance of the deferral of experience.”[13] With 9/11, the event itself came to be inseparable from its visual representation. Saltzman and Rosenberg continue, “The key issue here is repetition as verification of the traumatic. Even before the repetitions of instant replay, repetition was the very logic of the event.” That is to say, when the second plane struck the South Tower, essentially a repetition of the strike on the North Tower 17 minutes earlier, it instantly became clear that the first crash was an act of aggression and not some bizarre accident. Therefore, Freud’s prescribed process of recovery through repetition—the aim of which is to allow the subject to eventually both fill in gaps in memory and overcome resistances due to repression[14]—is manifest in the event itself. Saltzman and Rosenberg conclude, “That we came to see this event over and over in instant replays of live television only further evacuated the very psychic possibility of internal representation through repetition compulsion so unavoidable to the registering of traumatic experiences. The unavoidability of the visual representations of the event drew repetition outward and made the very work of witnessing into the experience of trauma, as opposed to a mode of its therapy.”[15] That is to say, the experience of trauma on 9/11 is inextricably bound up with its visual transmission, executed in an ad hoc yet stunningly detailed manner. Typically, repetition is a key process for working through a traumatic occurrence—for giving it order and understanding—but in the case of 9/11, this possibility was abjectly abrogated.

Hans-Peter Feldmann, 9/12 Front Page, 2001. Installation view.

Feldmann’s 9/12 Front Page (2001) confronts this problem of immediate and incessant repetition head on. This installation brings together the front pages of one hundred newspapers from around the world from the morning of September 12, 2001, each bearing a headline and a photograph describing the attacks. They are presented perfunctorily, arranged in a grid, without any intervention or commentary on the part of the artist. Curator Nancy Spector explains, “the instantaneity between the catastrophic event and its broadcast worldwide disallowed the time lapse between perception and apprehension that is critical to the psychic process of registering and overcoming a trauma. This phenomenon is rehearsed in Feldmann’s extreme archive of on-the-spot 9/11 coverage.”[16] Although reported in a multitude of different languages, “picture after shocking picture reinstate the horror, collectively emulating the repetitious return to the original scene that the defines the effects of trauma.”[17] By means of the structure of the work, Feldmann enacts the repetition compulsion through which trauma is typically allayed. Whereas disparate media images viewed on the day of the attack may be fleeting, easily jumbled and confused in the minds of those watching, Feldmann confronts the viewer with the central fact—that the unspeakable has occurred—over and over. No matter the language, it is clear that all newspapers bear the same—previously incomprehensible—news. Okwui Enwezor suggests that the repetition of these images without commentary (framed within the context of news media) presents the viewer with more questions than it answers: “Have the images become emblematic more of the aftermath than of the event itself? How does one revisit, not the event itself, but its aftermath, its mediatized manifestation?” and “Do the fluttering sheets of newspaper illuminate the dark events of September 11, or do they banalize and ultimately diminish their projected impact? Is September 11 principally a media event for the global public?”[18] While these are questions that Feldmann does not intend to answer, asking them in the first place constitutes the more important gesture.

Hans-Peter Feldmann, 9/12 Front Page, 2001 (100 newspapers, dimensions variable). Detail.

Enwezor similarly situates Feldmann’s practice in general and this work in particular as being “concerned, first, with photography’s social and political meaning in the context of public culture, and, second, with the disjuncture between the ubiquity of the photographic image as it developed a private cult of commemoration, and the evacuation of meaning that ensued as photographic images become empty signs.”[19] That is to say, his work mines the way in which we receive images today in order to comment on society more generally. By mimicking the way in which news is received in the digital environment with 9/12 Front Page, Feldmann confronts the viewer not with the fact of the tragedy, but rather with its effects, thus successfully opening up a space for contemplation and, ultimately, working through.

T.J. Clark suggests that, in the twenty-first century what has traditionally been called ‘print capitalism,’^[20] or the streamlining of communication that originated with the invention of the printing press and made possible a new way of envisaging global and national networks, has been displaced by a new mode of ‘screen capitalism,’ in which “print and image and map and diagram are made available to individual users in what seems an equalized and immensely speeded-up field of symbolic production.”^[21] As a result of this new system, traditional categories of experience are broken down: “Screen capitalism is dissolving the very structure of private (public) being-together. It is wrecking the quiet simultaneity of clock-time. Atrocity happens NOW. The ‘now’ that language inevitably conjures away into repeatability and abstraction, the image preserves for ever in what seems to be its mere being.”^[22] One problem with this state of affairs that has yet to be adequately addressed is the state of apathy that often arises as the result of the constant barrage of images and their increased urgency.  Moreover, what of all the atrocities that we don’t see on television?  While the traditional boundaries to disseminating information might no longer be relevant, we are now faced with a new set of considerations in their place. Similarly, the question of ethics in respect to aesthetic response to these numerous collective traumas remains in flux. As Gene Ray suggests, the only answer might be a case-by-case consideration: “while general-level critical criteria are indispensible points of reference, the ethics of artistic practice [now] needs to be judged case by case, taking into account, as fully as possible, a work’s multiple and shifting contexts of reception.”^[23]

 *Jaime Schwartz is an art historian and curator based in New York City. She received her MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University in May 2012 and is a founding editor of Interventions.

We can’t literally go home again.

–Stuart Hall

As sociologists Riccardo Bocco and Daniel Meier[1] remind us, the notion of a border does not conform to a simple definition: it indicates an unstable zone that is conceptually, physically, and even legally indeterminate. The border produces dreams of transition, of instigating the very forms of transgression that its physical delimitation restrains. An uncertain space between territories, the border is the line beyond which “elsewhere” begins—to perhaps become “nowhere” through perpetual displacement and exile. So long as the gap between the West and the rest commands the global imagination, the dominant recognition patterns of otherness prevail within a conception of a world that remains secure.

Mass tourism, mass immigration, and globalized consumption have eroded the distinction between those who visit the world and those who make up the decorative backdrop of their travels. As Stuart Hall described, “We’ve never seen such unplanned movement of people across the globe as we are seeing now. Some of it is driven by civil war; some of it is driven by poverty; a large amount of it is driven by underdevelopment, but a lot of it is just driven by ‘Well, I don’t know if I should just live the rest of my life where I was born.’”[2] This accelerated movement touches all socio-economic strata of the population; however, the logic of globalized mobility (free trade, capital flows, and information flux) does not necessarily comprise the free migration of people. As Ken Loach has eloquently demonstrated in his film It’s a Free World, a quota of illegal immigrants serves to maintain pressure on the local workforce. However, while the legal workforce tends to be sedentary, a large number of nomadic workers work under precarious conditions. This is the hypocrisy of selective immigration. “Migration,” Hall writes, “is the joker in the pack of globalization. It is both part of globalization and what unhinges globalization from below. That is because it creates movement, fluidity and lack of control exactly at the point where globalization would like to constrain and control global movement.”[3]

If migration has always raised questions about the rights of citizens, it has likewise challenged the conception and representation of territories and borderlines. Traditional cartography cannot represent migratory states of existence. Hall explains that geography must thus be conceived similarly to culture—as a plural construct: “Pluralisation is one effect of understanding [geographies] as discursively constructed spaces and not literally permanent.”[4] Whereas geography, according to French geographer Yves Lacoste, serves primarily to “make war” (faire la guerre),[5] within the field of cultural studies, geographies—in its plural form—is a means of “decolonizing the mind.”[6] If conventional geography does indeed produce military action, and if the mental representations linked to it are mainly constructed by dominant societies, we must readily recognize the need for artistic positions that create alter-narratives in a guerrilla response to mainstream discourse. Popular narratives are increasingly formalized and disseminated through the professional channels of marketing and advertising, enabling these stories to saturate our cultural imaginary. Though these narratives are highly questionable, they are rarely questioned. We must consider strategies to combat these forces—tactics that will grant us, if not a ceasefire, then a moment of critical hesitation.  Mobility must be re-imagined beyond movement—as a paradigm shift, which deconstructs accepted conceptual frameworks and produces new imagery rooted in alter-narratives. Mobility thus becomes both the condition and the subject of artistic positions, in which pluralization opens up articulations of space and time.

Laura Waddington, Border (27 min. Digibeta PAL, colour, stereo), 2004. Video still.

British artist Laura Waddington’s 2004 video Border offers a productive investigation of mobility. It is a complex examination of what constitutes a border today. In 2002, Waddington spent several months with Afghan and Iraqi refugees in the vicinity of Sangatte, a former refugee camp in Calais, France, filming those trying by any available means to cross the Chunnel[7] into the United Kingdom. Filmed at night with a small video camera, using only ambient light, the video reveals the clandestine plight of illegal immigrants.[8] Waddington recorded groups of men in the fields and wastelands alongside main access routes (road and rail), demonstrating the brutal contrast between man and machine. Facing cars, trucks, and trains, these determined men endangered their lives for what they had once imagined to be a better life. Waddington’s video foregrounds the conditions of human mobility. Her use of slowed images poetically underscores the perilous months-long migration through different countries—weeks of anxious waiting and hiding. This mode of immigration violently contrasts the comfortable journeys of those who are passing by legally in cars or high-speed trains. “For the refugees,” Waddington explains, “these car headlights represented the people of France, with whom they had very little or no contact [...] There is a big contrast between the refugees, who are always walking, and the lights of the cars constantly rushing past.”[9]  Their wandering and waiting, however, also produces a contradictory space, whereby illegal occupation confronts domestic settlement. Waddington follows the refugees’ nightly attempts to leave the country—their continual search for the right moment for crossing. As the video’s voiceover informs the viewer, the majority of the migrants were continually arrested and brought back to the camp in the early hours of morning. This game of hide-and-seek continued for months; some migrants were injured and others died. Over the course of the filming, Waddington spent weeks living with the refugees, capturing images that function at once as individual portraits of courage as well as a reminder of our common humanity.

The Sangatte camp, built to house 200 people, was closed in 2002, at which point 1,600 refugees lived there. According to the Red Cross, over 67, 000 people had passed through the camp between October 1999 and December 2002; yet, the tragedies that took place there were all but absent from European consciousness. Though not explicitly concealed, the conditions of the camp were not widely discussed. It was not until the camp was dismantled that media began to address what had taken place there.[10] “The reality of poverty, war and chaos,” Belgian thinkers Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter note, “is not represented [in the Western imagination], it is ‘unimaginable.’ This is an infra-reality, where extremes are related: the more this infra-reality is gaining, the more we retreat into a hyper-reality, as Baudrillard said.”[11] Infra-real places such as the Sangatte camp are the hidden face of the global landscape.  With the dissolution of borders, they tend to enter into our popular consciousness as simulacra of the real, as the real itself is ‘unimagined,’ in spite of many films that question the human capacity to receive the Other.[12] According to the theorization of Giorgio Agamben, the camp exemplifies the reduction of life to ‘biopolitics’—the homo sacer, reduced to ‘bare life’ and thus deprived of rights. The camp—situated outside the nomos—constitutes the nomos of the modern, for the camp is the space that is opened in a state of exception. Agamben asserts, “The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet.”[13]  While prison is an extension of the law, the camp exists outside the juridical conception of crime. It is a space within which rights are suspended: it is the space of the banished.

Laura Waddington, Border (27 min. Digibeta PAL, colour, stereo), 2004. Video still.

Laura Waddington, Border (27 min. Digibeta PAL, colour, stereo), 2004. Video still.

Sangatte is no different from other buffer zones—from the zones d’attentes in airports, where the rejected wait before being deported. The exceptional conditions of these zones effectively suspend life; they produce a space that is ‘betwixt and between.’ Though they thwart the movement of immigration, the seemingly static space produced is in fact highly precarious, invoking Victor Turner’s theorization of the liminal stage in rites of passage. Liminality, Turner explains, occurs at the threshold of transition, during which a person “becomes structurally, if not physically, ‘invisible.’” He or she possesses nothing, “neither status [...] nor rank [...] nothing to stand structurally out from their peers.” Liminal individuals are “neither here nor there, they are in-between, between the positions assigned and established by law, customs, conventions, and cults.”[14] The inherent liminality of passage thus grants a socially and structurally ambivalent status. Waddington’s Border performs an aesthetic translation of this liminal space.

Waddington’s meeting with the migrants of the Sangatte camp and her denunciation of the inhumane situation turns into an alter-narrative that captures the dignity of men. The video’s spoken narrative carries its images, supplementing what the camera cannot or does not want to record. The complex interaction among images—at times frozen, sometimes blurred—pushes the perception of the visible towards abstraction, while the voice takes over, supplying the details. As Jacques Rancière writes: “Images of art are operations that produce a deviation, a dissimilarity. Words describe what the eye could see or express what it will never see [...]. This means two things. Firstly, images of art are inherently dissimilarities. Secondly, the image is not exclusive to the visible. There exists that which is visible but does not make an image, there are images that are made up entirely of words. [... Here] the image enacts the relationship between the sayable and the visible, an interaction that plays simultaneously on their similarity and their dissimilarity.”[15] The image immediately presents its alternative reality; its construction makes its otherness tangible. The image not only captures a reality, but also produces one. The work of art is not simply shown or said, but is a complex montage situated between ‘showing’ and ‘telling.’[16] Border shows the in-between as the human condition in an inhumane environment.

Ethnologist Michel Agier explains, “The social and racial fragmentation that subdivides ghettos, [...] the worlds of desolation formed by the construction of walls, fences and by the invention of permanent borders … this is the experience shared by all in one place or another in the world today: a fence, a camp, expulsion [...] In this way of life, the camp is the in-between, the zone d’attente of the banished, the unthinkable and unwanted, the corridor of the Moors.”[17] Paradoxically, this experience, though ubiquitous, is difficult to capture. Waddington captures clandestine images, an unimaginable infra-reality, and makes them visible within the constructed environment of her film. At points, the images are suspended, like time itself, so that the temporality of the camp becomes nothing but an ongoing present.

Laura Waddington, Border (27 min. Digibeta PAL, colour, stereo), 2004. Video still.

In this enduring present, it is the narration more than the images that carries the viewer forward. The images remain suspended, dissolved by extreme zooms, as color and time are pushed towards abstraction. This treatment of the image as well as the video’s spatial projection heighten the viewer’s immersion. The becoming of color, this transformation of recognizable pictures into purely visual images, produces an overexposure to the real and gives a new dimension to the political tragedy that has taken place here. In her beautiful text “Abdullah and the Fireflies,” Laura Waddington shares her experience of reading Georges Didi-Huberman’s book Survivance des Lucioles, in which he portrays the war of light between “the ferocious projectors of the society of control versus the glimmers of Pasolini’s disappearing fireflies.”[18] The book ends with a description of Border and the violent glare of police torches and helicopter beams, pointing their spotlights on men hiding in the fields. The light that shone on the refugees and the artist was so harsh, she explains, that it burnt the pixels of her camera, producing tiny flickering light-spots on her images, which the artist later corrected one by one.

Laura Waddington, Border (27 min. Digibeta PAL, colour, stereo), 2004. Video still.

Laura Waddington, Border (27 min. Digibeta PAL, colour, stereo), 2004. Video still.

In Border, this violent light is contrasted with the story of a Kurdish boy dancing in the wind, unseen by the police, in the sheltering darkness. As Didi-Huberman writes: “The most ‘obscure’ inner experience can appear as a glimmer to others from the moment it finds its just form of construction, narration, transmission.” The condition of the migrants in Border is condensed into a narrative that itself oscillates between absence and presence, darkness and light, neither completely there nor here. The manner in which Border is presented and constructed rejects ‘live’ capture and simple documentary in order to reveal another mode of disseminating reality—image. As a work of art, producing contextual shifts in view, these images of displacement “cannot be separated from cultural interaction and cause us to reassess the basic notions of identity.”[19] Identity, however, Stuart Hall recalls, is “not only Being but is Becoming,”[20] a becoming that oscillates between territories and temporalities. We understand that the border is both concrete and abstract, a line to be crossed as well as a moving space. We are aware that the fireflies still exist—even here—that they surround us and become visible if we pay attention, if we shut down the burning lights of control. The torches and beams are eluded, in effect, by the fireflies that flicker like the surviving spark of an alter-space and a counter-power.

Links

Artist’s site: http://www.laurawaddington.com

Laura Waddington,
 Abdullah and the Fireflies: On reading Survivance des Lucioles:

http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=558

The author would like to thank Laura Waddington and Colette Bernard for their generous help.

The medium of the constructed body—the heart of Patrizia Guerresi Maïmouna’s creative practice—functions as a site for both contested and contesting identities. Assembled from diverse religious, cultural, and ethnic iconographies, the female bodies in Maïmouna’s work blur boundaries and create slippages between historically fixed binaries such as Africa and the West, Islam and Christianity, and black and white.They reflect the thrust of contemporary global culture toward a template for modern identity increasingly informed by a melding of diverse social, cultural, and political paradigms via the implements of modern technology. In her work, Maïmouna—a native European who has ‘Africanized’ herself through baptism, religious conversion, marriage, and maternity—disrupts traditional racial and geographical categorizations of the body. The concept of identity, traditionally defined, has arguably become obsolete and is in need of a certain retooling to accommodate new divergent global parameters. How, then, do we create a discursive framework for the investigation of contemporary identity that effectively accounts for its current conceptual fluidity? The danger lies in the possibility that bodies could be set adrift within a vast global sea, unanchored to any dominant point of origin and perpetually subject to the ambiguity, tension, and contradictions of modernity.[1] In response, this essay proposes an alternative investigative approach to the contemporary body—one that posits fabrication as a new type of authenticity, hybridity as a point of origin, and assemblage as a natural state of being. Maïmouna’s work illustrates the value of this approach, recognizing the medium of the body as a physical, social, cultural, and spiritual construct that has habitually been employed as a template for identity and now functions as a medium for its renovation. The surfaces of Maïmouna’s bodies reflect a métissage of conceptual systems that both collaborate with and contest one another within a single individual, offering a blueprint for the body as a fluid construct within contemporary global reality.[2]

Adji Baifall, Minaret, 2004, Lambda print on shaped aluminum

The body, both as object and idea, has provided perhaps the longest-standing framework through which humankind has attempted to plot perceived cultural conditions of various populations over time. The notion of the non-Western Other, in particular, was the surface onto which Western imperialist agendas were often inscribed in order to construct digestible, thoroughly pathologized foreign bodies for European consumption. At the height of the European colonial project, the African female body was the focus of intense Darwinian scrutiny, as figures like Saartje Baartman (also known as the Hottentot Venus) became signposts for the exaggerated sexual characteristics Europeans typically ascribed to Africans. The African female body was conceived, as curator Barbara Thompson writes, as a “counterpoint to Western ideologies of white female beauty, womanhood, morality, and civilization.”[3] Under the Western gaze, the African female body became a perverse and unsanitary object, representative of all that was primitive, savage, gratuitously sexual, and unceremoniously ‘other,’ effectively positioning the African feminine as a trope for the exotic unknown. Such interpretations often directly collided with conventional African conceptions of the female body as a symbol of fertility and nurturance as well as a powerful vessel of community and continuity.[4] Over time, these opposing discourses imbued the African female body with competing narratives. This immanent dialectic persists in contemporary representations of the black female body, exemplified by Lyle Ashton Harris’s and Renee Cox’s Hottentot Venus 2000, and speaks to its still-shifting visual, conceptual, and cultural manifestations.

Lyle Ashton Harris and Renee Cox, Hottentot Venus 2000, 1995

Yet, the instability in these more contemporary visualizations is arguably the result of a new desire to ‘liberate’ the African female body from its past—a challenge ironically enhanced by the fact that these bodies can no longer be so neatly defined, constructed, and controlled by an essentialist gaze. As they have become increasingly hybridized, multinational, transcultural, transgendered, and multiracial, the categorical determinations of previously marginalized bodies like the African female have become lethargic and non-functional.

Fathima, 2000, Lambda print

In her work, Maïmouna attempts to stabilize this increasingly fragmented body through the mobilization of a series of African female icons, whose basic components have been culled from a vast pool of religious, cultural, and ethnic forms and assembled as a “new, transcultural expression” intended to present a “hybrid reality, consisting of Eastern and Western cultural references.”[5] By integrating the Euro-Christian visual tradition and Afro-Islamic female forms, Maïmouna creates a community of hyper-spiritualized matriarchs whose layered iconography attempts to transcend the sum of its parts towards the realization of a new collective spiritual reality.[6] However, Maïmouna also generates (intentionally or not) a degree of instability by collapsing these traditions within the space of a body already encumbered by conflicting social, political, and cultural connotations, challenging the body’s ability to maintain its conceptual clarity within the context of her work.

Maïmouna’s series of lambda prints, completed over the course of seven years, depicts towering female icons whose bodies accommodate hollows, voids, and grottoes—the womb-like spaces connoting refuge and nurturance. Although men are included in the series, the evocative niches identify the figures as sexually female. These spaces, in turn, transform the figures into a series of anthropomorphic sanctuaries waiting for a congregation to quicken them with the spirit of faith. Some of these voids appear to have borne spiritual fruit; however, most remain hollow, perhaps indicating that their primary purpose remains unfulfilled. In recalling the antiquated view that a woman’s utility lies in her womb, these figures complicate Maïmouna’s proposed transcultural expression and universal spiritualism.

Binah, 2004, Lambda print

Gold Door, 2012, Lambda print

Kalindi’s Dream, 2011, Lambda print

In a subsequent sculpture series, Maïmouna integrates overtly Christian and Islamic paradigms with indigenous African spirituality. The tension generated by this iconographic interaction is embodied in the female forms, which either erupt screaming, thrashing, and fragmented from the walls or stand passively as veiled, ghostly, anonymous figures fixed in space and perhaps tradition. Do these women struggle against the smothering veils? Or have their bodies incorporated rigid religious doctrine to the point of total confinement? Cloistered in private, empty, two- and three-dimensional spaces, the figures meet like ships passing in the night, subtly gesturing to one another, suggesting a desire for connection.

Fathimas, 2002, resin

Predicazione, 2005, Lambda print

Maïmouna’s figures are heavily informed by her own identity. Born Italian and Christian, Maïmouna married a Senegalese national and converted to Mouridism, a Senegalese Islamic movement based on the teachings of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba.[7] Maïmouna was adopted into her husband’s community through ceremonial baptism and given the name of her new mother, Maïmouna, which means “the woman who brings good luck.”[8] Maïmouna has two daughters, one from this union and one from a previous marriage. Their fathers are of different nationalities, religions, ethnicities, and cultures. In Maïmouna’s work, images of her daughters Marlene, who is of European Christian descent, and Adji, who is of African Islamic descent, act as “a metaphor of two worlds that are different but spiritually similar, which create dialogue in an improbable yet real family union.”[9] Through her daughters, whom Maïmouna conceives as “representations or extensions of [her own] spirit,”[10] Maïmouna has arguably achieved the very transcultural expression that she seeks in grafting foreign elements that do not ‘belong’ to her onto her own cultural template. The notion of alterity is important here, as it encompasses questions of origin, belonging, and the right to claim membership. Much cultural gate-keeping stems from early anthropological theories on cultural authenticity that linked geographical location and cultural identity. This “fetishism of boundaries,”[11] as Philip Feifan Xie describes, was not only about physically demarcated space but “ways of producing rights to seeing.”[12] By trespassing into cultural and ethnic territories where she does not belong and appropriating iconographies befitting her particular vision, Maïmouna could be considered a type of cultural tourist, using a touristic gaze to create a mélange of visual and ideological simulations to which she has assigned a particular conceptual and aesthetic capital.[13]

Maïmouna’s Family, 2006, Lambda print

Problematic as Maïmouna’s work may be, it is at the intersection of various religious, cultural, and political frontiers present in her work that a dialogue concerning the fabrication, assemblage, and hybridity of identity must begin. The current global circulation of physical, conceptual, and aesthetic bodies via the networks of tourism and digitized visual and textual media promotes an increasingly open system of cultural definition. One can manipulate the contours of their identity, and in some cases create a new identity altogether, by accessing a variety of experiences and ideologies through technological advances in travel and communication. The processes of cultural transformation are increasingly surpassing geographically based concepts of community and nationhood, and redefining cultural ‘membership’ along new paths of mobility and contact.[14] These avenues connect peripheral, diasporic, and mixed populations to an imagined center. In place of essentialized categories of culture, ethnicity, and race, they redraw territorial lines of membership and community that can be “negotiated, emerged, hybridized, and syncretized,” shaped from within as well as from without.[15]

While Maïmouna’s iconographic elements occasionally seem trite, their visual and conceptual fluency across numerous social, political, and cultural borders lends them a type of authenticity bred from accessibility.[16] The legibility of Maïmouna’s constructed females bodies, however, positions them in a perpetually interstitial zone. An “erosion of boundaries” that previously served as identity markers such as race, ethnicity, and religion has caused new hybridized cultural geographies to take shape, in which “identities are forged through [...] mobility across space, rather than within a bounded space.”[17] This liminal space, or third space, as Homi Bhabha puts it, lies “in between the designations of identity [and] prevents identities at either end from settling into primordial polarities,”[18] thus ensuring the continuous development of meaningful spaces of identity over time. In such space, identity is inherently hybrid, a product of the continuous interaction and collaboration of various cultural paradigms.

The notion of geographically bounded and culturally autonomous space has eroded the recognition that neither people nor places created in isolation has become commonplace. Complex assemblages of political, social, economic, and cultural flows give rise to new spaces, themselves fundamentally unfixed and dynamic.[19] Through these processes, both places and people become liminal entities engaged in ongoing economic, social, political, and mnemonic transactions towards the constant cultural production of units and subunits of identity. Through the constant circulation and interaction of iconographic forms, any dualisms in Maïmouna’s constructed bodies, Francesca Alfano Miglietti observes, “are slowly resolved through their re-absorption into a unity, as though a tangible yet immaterial, internal and external, spiritual and symbolic union of opposites were possible, and in this way a single configuration comes about.”[20] The intentionally paradoxical significations embodied by Maïmouna’s forms illustrate the contemporary global reality, in which people, places, and paradigms have become fundamentally unfixed. As Maïmouna plots a conception of identity defined by spiritual universalism[21] onto the marginalized, objectified, and appropriated African female body, the body becomes a productive surface on which to lay out, “the cultures of the world, permeating and becoming entangled with each other.”[22] Maïmouna’s bodies function as a series of ‘border zones’ or contact sites—embodied landscapes of contemporary identity, continuously renovated and reassembled into meaningful space.[23]

Funding for this project was generously provided by the Mary Anne Bours Nimmo Graduate Fellowship Fund at Stanford University.

Late Edition is an additive work, which I have been working on for a month. I burn copies of the New York Times and add them to the work daily. Formally, this piece creates negative and positive spaces.  The ashes around the stacks of paper remain stubborn traces of the past while the newspaper, ephemera of everyday urban life, connotes the experience of our historical present.

Late Edition, Newspaper and ash, 2012.

Late Edition, detail.

Late Edition, detail

Late Edition, detail

Late Edition, detail

Late Edition, detail

Late Edition, detail

Late Edition, detail

*Jin Joo Chae is a second-year MFA student at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Geopolitical tension pervades the Israel/Palestine region. Within the art world, this strife dictates the who, where, and how of exhibition practice. Since the 2004 launch of the Cultural Boycott of Israel, many Palestinian and Arab (as well as other international) artists refuse to exhibit their work in Israeli institutions or at events coordinated and run by Israeli organizations. These conditions present a significant challenge for Israeli cultural practitioners trying to put together exhibitions or events with an inclusive international roster of artists without having participants effectively abandon their opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories—a stance that may be shared by the organizers themselves.  One innovative solution is to seek out extraterritorial spaces in which to display the work of Palestinian and Arab artists (as well as other artists in zones of conflict). Exterritory Project, conceived in 2009 by Israeli artists Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir, provides one such model. For Sela and Amir, these spaces provide “new meeting points positioned outside the boundaries of any clearly defined place which have the potential to evade the imposition of any specific ideology or language.”[1] Further, extraterritoriality is defined as “the condition of being considered outside the territory of the state in which (a person) resides, and therefore of not being amenable to its laws.”[2] This essay presents Exterritory Project as an attempt to evade the juridical and geopolitical confines of the boycott, and, by extension the geopolitical conditions of any particular nation.

Initiated in Ramallah in 2004, The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel asked the international community to:

comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions until Israel withdraws from all the lands occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; removes all its colonies in those lands; agrees to United Nations resolutions relevant to the restitution of Palestinian refugee rights; and dismantles its system of apartheid.[3]

According to its guidelines, the cultural boycott includes projects or events “commissioned by an official Israeli body or non-Israeli institution that serves Brand Israel or similar propaganda purposes.”[4] The “Brand Israel” campaign promotes a positive image of Israel internationally through cultural programming, such as food and music festivals featuring Israeli products and performers.[5]  As with most state-sponsored propaganda, it seeks to replace the negative associations held by the international community toward Israeli policy with positive cultural associations (for example, the idea of the occupation supplanted by a lingering memory of delicious falafel).

Moreover, guidelines stipulate that the boycott extends to projects or events that are “partially or fully sponsored or funded by an official Israeli body or a complicit institution,” and those that “promote false symmetry or ‘balance’ […] between the ‘two sides’ in presenting their respective narratives […] based on the false premise that the colonizers and the colonized, the oppressors and the oppressed, are equally responsible for the ‘conflict.’”[6] Any project or event that includes both Israelis and Palestinians must acknowledge where each is situated within the conflict (occupier and occupied), and must not attempt to portray a sympathetic view of the Israeli occupation as a counter-narrative to that of the Palestinians. In other words, all such projects must acknowledge the occupier/occupied relationship, as even the desire to achieve a kind of “balance” would necessarily be unbalanced.

Since the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948 and the ejection of Palestinian residents from the new country, the Israeli state has continued to expand and expel. During the Six Day War of 1967, East Jerusalem was annexed and the Golan Heights region was captured. Continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the construction of the “security fence” barrier wall violate the boundaries demarcated by the Green Line—the border established by the 1949 Armistice Agreement following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.[7] Participation in Israel’s cultural system within these contested boundaries may be considered not only an affirmation of the State of Israel and but also a legitimization of its actions as occupier.[8] Consequently, many artists refuse to exhibit their work both within the disputed territory and Israel’s institutional framework.

Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir initiated the Exterritory Project in 2009 to coincide with the Tel Aviv International Biennial (Art TLV 09). The project aimed to exhibit the work of Palestinian and other Arab artists and stage a series of discussions among an international group of cultural practitioners (such as curators and writers) outside the national boundaries of any country, in order to enable participation while honoring the boycott. Naturally, such an exhibition could not have taken place at any of the Israeli sites hosting the Biennial; Sela and Amir looked for a space without national ties, where they could screen videos by artists from throughout the Middle East that responded to the questions of boundaries and hyper-national claims central to their own artistic practice.[9] By situating the exhibition in such a space, the project refuted the practice of categorizing artists by nationality and encouraged critical examination of the promotion of nationalism ingrained in the art world.[10]  As Sela and Amir explain, they were “searching for a location to screen a video compilation […] which articulated these questions in a neutral space, unsaturated by any national preconditions.”[11]

Sela and Amir located the screenings in the international waters off the coast of Tel Aviv. Their statement explains, “the exterritorial waters, a space located only 11 kilometers from the shore, served as an autonomic area that can bypass laws of territory and can allow at least temporarily the postponement of arbitrary stipulations.”[12]  Within this nautical space Sela and Amir projected the video series entitled Wild West —comprising the work of artists from throughout the Middle East—onto the sails of a boat, viewed by both spectators onshore and those who ventured out into the waters on inner tubes, boats, and other flotation devices. They were also successful in leading a series of discussions about national identification and geopolitical borders, particularly with regard to the difficulties surrounding the presentation and dissemination of artwork.

Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir, Exterritory Project, 2010

The Exterritory Project boat was privately donated and the project was not funded by any national sources.[13] Sela noted, “We found no financing for the project, which is a good sign because it means it’s not serving anyone’s interest.”[14] However, despite the removal of geographical and financial ties (and thereby obligations) to national interests, Sela and Amir were unable to foster a completely protected neutral zone, evidenced by the fact that they could not release the names of the Palestinian and Arab artists who participated in Wild West, due to fears that this would create problems for them in the regions in which they live their daily lives.[15] Though the project took place outside the State of Israel, as the boat set sail from Israel, the organizers were Israeli, and the project ran parallel to the Tel Aviv Biennial, participation in the project—though not a violation of the boycott—could easily mar an artist’s reputation and affect their ability to continue to exhibit and make a living in his or her own country. (The names of some of the Israeli artists who participated were published, including Keren Cutter, Sharon Zargari, and Shay-Lee Uziel.)

The geopolitical challenges of exhibition practice were addressed in the discussions that took place on the boat among cultural practitioners including Paul Schimmel, then Chief Curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; independent curator Manon Slome; Ruba Katrib, then Associate Curator of the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art (and now Curator at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City); Galit Eilat, Director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art; and Lisa Freiman, Senior Curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Eilat, for example, shared the experience of Palestinian artist Jumana Emil Abboud, whose work, owned by the Herzliya Museum in Israel, was exhibited without her knowledge or consent in a collections show in celebration of the 60^th anniversary of the establishment of Israel. Abboud was very upset that she had been unwittingly implicated in such a celebration.[16]

The following year, Sela and Amir launched the second iteration of Exterritory. This time, three boats left the shores of Israel and made their way to Cyprus; in the exterritorial waters of the Mediterranean, more than 50 artworks and curated programs examined the notion of exterritoriality via various media, including performance, sound, installation, and video.[17] Mirelle Borra’s video Walls of Separation, part of a series organized by independent curator Chen Tamir, was fueled by the Dutch artist’s frustrations with her visa while living in the United States. Borra began to consider the restrictions to mobility placed on all of us—“some more than others,” the artist notes.[18] She traveled to and photographed boundaries throughout the world: the West Bank barrier wall between Israel and Palestine, the Tortilla wall between Mexico and the United States, the Peace Lines in Belfast, and the Berlin Wall.[19] These photographs served as material for her video. For another project in Tamir’s series, the curator invited three artists to create editioned artworks to be thrown overboard in bottles in hope of reaching someone on the nearby coasts of Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, or Israel.[20]  Tamir aimed to make accessible the works of these artists (whose nationalities are not identified) to an audience that would likely otherwise not see them, and to enable dialogues limited by geopolitical restrictions to travel.  Tamir’s ambition, however, functions largely as a symbolic gesture: even if the work were to reach someone who would not otherwise have seen it due to geopolitical restrictions, the exposure would end there. Facilitating such an international exchange more formally—in an exhibition, for example—would be confronted by the geopolitical restrictions that exist between these countries. This “message in a bottle” method of communication conjures the image of shipwrecked castaways isolated on an island. Tamir’s project is thus perhaps best understood as an emblematic call for communication among nations.

The next installment of the Exterritory Project is slated to take place in the Salt Desert on the border between India and Pakistan in January 2013. As part of their continued investigation of geopolitical conflict zones and international artistic exchange, Sela and Amir are currently putting together a book on extraterritorial epistemologies. The artists describe the book as a “collection of essays on extraterritoriality and a series of interventions which explore the implications of new advanced technologies that in varied ways attempt to provoke new understandings of extraterritorialities.”[21] As examples abound of global exploitation of territory in order to expand power, elude legal jurisdiction, and violate rights (Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, tax havens, maritime boundary disputes over resources), artistic practice such as that of Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir work to produce spaces of international cooperation and exchange.

*Sascha Crasnow is a second-year doctoral candidate in Art History, Theory & Criticism at the University of California San Diego. 

In a sociopolitical context where national legislation heavily mediates the private and public sphere, how do art and curatorial practice intervene to both convey and resist the limits set on the circulation of art in public life? How does the social impact of art manifest itself within a space of regulated spectatorship? And how does a deregulated form of spectatorship engage with the art conceived in restricted environments? This inquiry examines these questions relative to current art practices in Iran and their transnational circulation, cross-examining variances of presentation and representation in different contexts in Iran and the United States.

Notably, the ideological standoff between these two states following the Iranian Revolution of 1979 chronologically parallels the evolution of postcolonial discourse (Edward Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978). Michel Foucault articulated the inextricable relationship between power and knowledge in a theoretical formula that has since become a cornerstone of postcolonial theory: “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”[1] These lines appear in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, published in 1975, just before their author hailed the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran.[2] Soon thereafter, revolutionary intellectuals filled its prisons.

Figure 1. Evin Prison, Tehran, 2012. Photo by Author

Figure 2. Azadeh Akhlaghi, Barbad Golshiri, Farzaneh Taheri, and Rahman Bouzari

Evin Prison looms large in the everyday life of Tehran—its reinforced walls block sightlines and obliterate large swaths of urban terrain. The daily threat of imprisonment prods individuals towards normative self-presentation in public in every sphere of daily life, from the dress code to art production. Yet, within the sociopolitical consciousness in Iran, the prison is also a public space that acknowledges opposition by means of legislated punishment: paradoxically, through imprisonment, dissenting opinions become public. Via imprisonment and release, not only do dissenting thought-acts become public, but also comings and goings of prisoners of conscience are suffered and celebrated in a community of friends and supporters.[3] The two photographs above (figs. 1 & 2) illustrate the dialectic between public and private modes of dissidence. The first photo was taken outside the Evin Prison in Tehran on August 15, 2012, when more than fifty political prisoners were freed before Eid al-Fitr, the religious holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Among them was journalist and translator Rahman Bouzari, who is pictured in the second photo, celebrating his release with friends.

Disturbing public opinion

Just as the space of protest can be both private and public, so too is the space of a work of art. The creative act, as defined by Marcel Duchamp in his eponymous 1957 lecture,[4] cannot fully be realized in the absence of spectatorship. Thus, the ability to be public and produce a public is the lifeline of contemporary art, and enables it to be a vehicle for critique.  However, its public nature also means that artistic action can be legislated and is punishable by law.  Governmental restrictions of cultural production render contemporary artists susceptible to being charged with disturbance of the public sphere.  Artist and writer Barbad Golshiri plots the ideological structure of the socially engaged art world in Iran in a diagram entitled Disturbing the Public Opinion (fig. 3).  It takes as its starting point, “Disturbing public opinion,” which opens onto three avenues: “Disturbing the public opinion as charge,”  “Disturbing the public opinion as disturbing the doxical,” and “Disturbing the public opinion as transitory legislation.”  He then examines how and to what extent these tactics can elude ideological control and produce dissent within Iran’s legislated public space.  Golshiri’s chart provides a framework for the commentary that follows, which examines an array of transgressive art practices and their transnational states.

Figure 3.  Link to Barbad Golshiri, Disturbing the Public Opinion, 2011:

http://arteeast.org/content/files/userfiles/file/03_Disturbing%20Public%20Opinion.jpg

Indeed, artists in Iran are commonly charged with disturbing public opinion. As anthropologist Talal Asad perceptively expounds in his discussion of Islamic legislature, the sociopolitical governance includes the political subject’s belief system.  However, thought-acts are only deemed transgressive (and therefore punishable by law) when they become speech-acts:

Insofar as the law concerns itself with disbelief, it is not as a matter of its propositional untruth but of a solemn social relationship being openly repudiated (“being unfaithful”). Legally, apostasy (ridda, kufr) can therefore be established only on the basis of the functioning of external signs (including public speech or writing, publicly visible behavior), never on the basis of inferred or forcibly extracted internal belief.[5]

Accordingly, art is rendered political less by its creator’s intention than by the context in which it is viewed; that is to say, by the social politics of the consummation of the creative act via spectatorship. A work’s transgressive capacity is thus determined by the context in which it is received.

The primary task of governmental restrictions in a totalitarian state is to limit the public space of spectatorship or the cultural content available for consumption in public environments. Artist and art theorist Bavand Behpoor describes his experience of the atomization of cultural production for the generation born in Iran after 1979:

The outside world was blocked away with a screen full of images. A sophisticated image translation machine was and still is at work. International movies could be watched on national television, but the films were translated into new narratives. The image produced of the world, of the society, and of citizens was and still is unbelievably phantasmagorical. The images of private life do not match what anybody has seen in private, and every possible effort is undertaken to make sure no image in the public realm communicates anything from one individual to another. However, it is ok if such communication happens in private. [...] This is a system that dissects thought and tears apart expression not only by removing words or images through their abundance, but also by destroying their reference points. One can form his own private image (scraps gathered from the public realm), but cannot make this private image public.[6]

Politically engaged art has become critically dull within a Western context, where social change occurs through other channels.  However, its relevance cannot be taken for granted in environments where public speech is regulated, and, as a result, a separation of public and private realities persists. This is to say, society as presented or represented by the government is divorced from the private, lived reality of its subjects.  Politically engaged art is conceived in such schisms; it thrives on incursions on the public by the private.  To paraphrase one of Golshiri’s theses, “introducing a cluster of legislations from one context to another”—from public to private and vice versa—“could function as alteration, subversion, inversion [or one reality for another]” (see fig. 3).

In addition the contemporary art scene, because it engages with a global market and depends on spectatorship, inherently contradicts a society in which public expressions are restricted. As artist and writer Hito Steyerl notes,

Articulation of protest has two levels. On one level, the articulation entails finding a language for protest, the vocalization, the verbalization, or the visualization of political protest. On another level, however, the articulation also shapes the structure or internal organization of protest movements. In other words, there are two different kinds of concatenations: one is at the level of symbols, the other at the level of political forces. The dynamic of desire and refusal, attraction and repulsion, the contradiction and the convergence of different elements unfold on both levels. In relation to protest, the question of articulation concerns the organization of its expression—but also the expression of its organization.”[7]

Thus, art production in a totalitarian state becomes politically engaged by default if, due to its inherently public nature, a work of art confronts the legislation of the public space. But does (and if so, how does) this inherent agency translate to other, largely unrestricted environments? From Tehran to Paris, New York, or Berlin? Asad’s definition of translation as “at once a sequence of human acts and a narrative recounting it, both being and representation”[8] also applies to transnational curatorial practice—the work of art exists in its “being” and its subsequent representations. How does a work of art manifest in its original site of presentation versus another? Further, what is the relationship between the two?

Presentation of Contemporary Art in Iran

Since 2009, most “public” displays of politically engaged contemporary art (understood as conceptual, contextual practices) in Iran are in fact semi-public, as they have been relegated exclusively to the private sector of commercial galleries and a very small number of non-profit, intermittently run artist spaces. (Public institutions such as the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and the artists’ societies no longer exhibit any overtly sociopolitical artworks due to the more restrictive governmental policies implemented since 2009.) Private galleries negotiate the limits of permissibility, counting on censors’ ignorance to the complex signifiers embedded in the works of art and their accompanying texts.[9] A lack of information on gallery websites and publications, such as images of artworks as well as exhibition opening dates, is commonplace and oftentimes intentional. This information could risk exposing the exhibiting venue to government oversight, resulting in non-renewal of the gallery’s license and other restrictions. Instead, information is shared via social media sites such as Facebook or through private communication. Artists, curators, gallery-owners, critics, and audiences engage in conscious risk-taking, hoping to evade censorship and experience a moment of collective freedom in the public display of defiance. To outsiders, such scenes look like typical gallery openings:

Girls in heels, their headscarves slipping back to reveal fantastical upsweeps, hipster boys in skinny jeans and gray-haired intellectuals who look as if they’ve just stumbled out of the smoke-filled back rooms of a French café mingle and discuss the art that surrounds them.[10]

However, this scene of private-public display that occurs every Friday in Tehran, even if superficially observed by the occasional visitor, is part of a subliminal system of codes established outside the doxical, momentarily transporting the public from an overtly regulated public space into another, public/private domain.

Public gathering is highly regulated in Iran, and thus art production has taken a decidedly inward turn.  Most art events take place in private spaces, indoors, where they are shielded from unwanted oversight. Artists who take their work to the streets in the form of performances, events, and other interventions take serious risks.  Increasingly, those artworks still presented in public have become more concerned with individual gestures. Jinoos Taghizadeh, an artist living in Tehran, provides one such example. In her public performance Nazr, which took place in Isfahan on September 7, 2003 (fig. 4), she offered seven boxes of pears and a public performance as nazr[11] a type of ritual pledge–in front of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque. Though passersby were at first hesitant to approach, they soon came forth with questions, and shortly thereafter, the spread had been cleared of fruit, thus completing the performance and the nazr.   Those who partook in the ritual bore witness both to the enacting of one pledge and the undoing of another by using a private act of devotion to create a public sphere.  In addition, by appropriating a ritual for artistic action, this performance confused the boundaries between religious actions endorsed by the state, and the secular world of performance art.  Lastly, because the terms of the nazr remain secret, the critical stance of the work remains ambiguous, and thus, protected.

Figure 4. Jinoos Taghizadeh, Nazr, 2003. Image courtesy of the artist

Virtual Walls and Loopholes in the World Wide Web

The specter of the Intranet haunts the Internet as its birthright.[12] Though seemingly open, the worldwide scope of the Web can easily be curtailed by national legislatures.  In Iran, the reaches of the World Wide Web are identified on the interface of your personal computer whenever access to a state-censored site is attempted:

Figure 5. Screenshot, Tehran, August 2012, taken by the author

Bill Nichols and other pioneering theorists of cybernetic systems have noted the tension between “the liberating potential of cybernetic imagination and the ideological tendency to preserve the existing form of social relations.”[13] The apperception of the cybernetic connection can bolster a sense of social collectivity, and the possibility to connect provides an alternate means of evading or overrunning political control. But more recent developments, such as Alexander Galloway’s book Protocol, problematize issues of connectivity, collectivity, and participation. He shifts emphasis from “networks” to “protocols” in which the systems of TCP/IP and DNS operate as “political technologies,” and echo Foucault’s description of latter-day systems of control:

Power relations are being transformed in a way that is resonant with the flexibility and constraints of information technology. The Internet is not simply “open” or “closed” but above all the form that is modulated. […] Information does flow, but it does so in a highly regulated manner. […] Viewed as a whole, protocol is a distributed management system that allows control to exist within a heterogeneous material milieu.[14]

Indeed, the relative freedom of this ‘heterogeneous material milieu’ exists not only with regard to transmissions across space, but also to the potential of subverting the global economy of time.  Current Web technologies such as Skype and Facetime, among others, allow the momentary collapse of multiple time zones via live-stream. Due to their ability to interrupt the flow of historical time and reconfigure it into an approximation of a Bergsonian durée[15]digital transmissions effectively circumvent the economy of timed/denominated transactions, determined by a capitalist economy based on linear time.

The acronym PPP aligns “point-to-point protocols”[16] with “purchasing power parity” (an economic condition whereby different currencies have the same purchasing power in different countries). Both acronyms stress the means by which the disengagement from one determinate point of origin forces a negotiation of parity (purchasing or otherwise) and has the potential to disrupt ideological and economic relations. Placeless time is free; and, as Boris Groys aptly puts it in his study of politicized religion in the digital age, all resistance is ultimately resistance against time.[17]

The first Skype transmission from Iran within the context of visual art was conducted on July 11, 2008 by the artist Sohrab M. Kashani from the rooftop of his home in Tehran. In it, Kashani trained his camera onto the sun and followed its movement across the sky in Tehran, while the transmission was simultaneously projected onto the exterior wall of the Machine Project in Los Angeles (fig. 6). During this event, “universal” time associated with the movements of stars and planets collapsed into virtual time as determined by the Network Time Protocol (NTP).

Figure 6.

Figure 6. Sohrab M. Kashani transmitting from Tehran, for A Practical Demonstration, a project by Jon Rubin and Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA, July 11, 2008

Skype, live-streams, listservs, social media, and other channels of content sharing via the Internet have become predominant forms of cultural exchange between restricted environments (between Iran and the US, for example). Virtual exchanges have been initiated by artists and curators worldwide and conducted in collaboration with independent producers in Iran, such as Parkingallery (www.parkingallery.com), founded and directed by Amirali Ghasemi; and Sazmanab Platform for Contemporary Arts (www.sazmanab.org), founded and directed by Kashani, both in Tehran. Such exchange of life’s activities via live-stream is demonstrated by projects like Kubideh Kitchen: Live Skype Meal between Pittsburgh and Tehran (fig. 7). The meal was simultaneously shared among diners in the two cities on April 28, 2012. Joined via webcam, guests sat around long tables and shared Persian food and conversation.

Figure 7. Kubideh Kitchen: Live Skype Meal between Pittsburgh and Tehran, April 28, 2012. Photo by Setareh Soheili, courtesy Sazmanab Platform for Contemporary Arts

As Trebor Scholz notes in his essay on immaterial curating, “The Participatory Challenge,” such “extreme sharing networks are conscious, loosely knit groups based on commonalities, bootstrap economies, and shared ethics. They offer alternative platforms of production and distribution of our practice.”[18] However, many questions remain: Are these practices simple solutions, enabling us to overcome restrictions? Or do they indicate a larger paradigm shift in our conceptions of time and space as nationally governed entities?  Further, can we, through such immaterial labor, create and sustain semi-autonomous, alternative worlds?

Representations of Contemporary Art of Iran Elsewhere

When contemporary art from Iran is exhibited abroad, mainly under the radar of both the Iranian and local government, and generally evades severe censorship. In many cases, politically engaged art only becomes widely publicized if the artists themselves choose to leave the country. Greater artistic freedom is acquired at the cost of political agency—as Tehran-raised and Dallas-based artist Morehshin Allahyari notes, “the less I censor myself, the further I remove myself from my country.”[19]

The importance of context to the efficacy of art calls for a consideration of the repercussions of exhibiting art that originates in an ideologically restricted environment outside the operational boundaries of these restrictions. Exhibitions of art from Iran abroad fall into two main categories—those that are explicitly framed as “Iranian” and those that are not.[20] Within this, there are, of course, varied scenarios, including: artwork created by an artist living in Tehran shown there and abroad; work created by an artist living in Tehran cannot be shown there, but can be shown abroad with caution; work created by an artist living outside Iran can be shown abroad and in Iran; work created by an artist living outside Iran can only be shown abroad; and work created by an artist living in Iran that cannot be shown anywhereas long as its creator remains in Iran. Most frequently, the agency, or what Asad names the “being” of an artwork, is lost in the translation of transnational representation, and artists are afforded exposure and recognition within a systemic cycle of dominance that still regulates entry into “modern world culture” and the majority of contemporary art world institutions. This persistent situation warrants a comparison to Asad’s commentary on literary translation:

Why are they not translating my work?” says the colonized writer: “Am I not inventive in the way modernity values inventiveness? Do I not demonstrate the sensibilities that modern culture requires? Can I not criticize everything even as moderns do?” (The non-colonized writer asks no such questions.) Literary subversion cannot constitute an adequate response to the colonized writer’s (or critic’s) discontent because its effectiveness is a matter of canonical judgment, and he or she has no authority to make that judgment. The structures of power the colonized writer confronts are institutional, not textual. [21]

Another set of conditions informing the production and reception of work by Iranian artists includes those of exile, diaspora, and transitory existences, which are becoming increasingly more common. Monira Al Qadiri, a Kuwaiti artist raised in Japan who lives in Kuwait and Beirut and exhibits internationally, states, “I feel we have to come to terms with this fluid loss of identity.”[22] Artists in the diaspora may address their heritage and personal histories in their work, but, for better or worse, their address is remote.

Current proliferation of multiple, transitory, often collective identities allows for existing signifiers to be reassembled into new iconologic puzzles. Speaking in tongues both native and learned, these kaleidoscopic reconstructions negotiate past and present realities simultaneously. In their project Reverse Joy, the artist collective Slavs and Tatars reactivates the mystical dissent of the Shi’a religious tradition through a fountain spouting blood-red liquid that derives from the religious tradition of Muharram.  The piece reappears in Jerusalem, a contested site between Israel and Iran (fig. 8). While the fountain itself is plugged into its immediate and mediated context, knowledge of its creators’ backgrounds builds the viewer’s awareness of additional signifiers embedded within the piece. This multiplicity results in a hybridity that regenerates new meanings from existing signifiers. An artist’s background, religious iconography, and site all relate to one another to form new constellations of meaning. Nevertheless, each aspect must also retain its specificity, lest the work of an artist born in Kaduna and residing in Memphis be overly homogenized as “informed by a broad range of practices, techniques, and materials, among them the artistic traditions of the Middle East, colonial and sub-Saharan Africa, and the European traditions of figure drawing and painting.”[23] Which artistic traditions? Which Middle East? Which Europe? These are the questions to be addressed by curators and exhibitions.

Figure 8. Slavs and Tatars, Reverse Joy, public intervention at Under the Mountain festival for new public art curated by Omer Krieger, Jerusalem, 2012. Courtesy the Artists

Exhibitions that feature “Iranian” artists must consider the difference between art practice in Iran and a representation of “Iran” manifested as a result of diaspora. For example, Iran Inside Out: Influences of Homeland and Diaspora on the Artistic Language of 56 Contemporary Iranian Artists, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City in fall 2009 featured thirty-five artists from Iran and twenty-one from the diaspora. [24] This exhibition is an exception to the rule:  a great majority of exhibitions framed as “Iranian” (or “Middle Eastern”) and presented in the United States rely heavily on the artists from the diaspora. More recently, The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society, a multi-site project by Rutgers Institute for Women and Art directed by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, presented in fall 2012[25] featured twenty-four artists in the core exhibition program, only six of whom currently reside in the “Middle East.”[26]  Though the exhibition’s press release promises to challenge Western stereotypes, the artist roster suggests a Western adaptation of “Middle Eastern” art production—rather than a complicated diversity of positions, streamlined viewpoints and languages in translation ultimately reduce the artists’ voices to a politely accented English.

Representations of Iran emerging from the diaspora are often mnemonic, metaphoric, and nostalgic, and are thus considered more “universal,” or more broadly intelligible. They generally engage not in the production of knowledge but rather prioritize translation from one context to another, limiting the scope of meaning to what would be intelligible in a different context. Let us compare Shirin Neshat’s photographic series Women of Allah, 1993-1997 (which can be viewed on the Metropolitan Museum’s website[27]), and Jinoos Taghizadeh’s performance For Forugh, 2004 (fig. 9).  In these two works, both artists address the figure of Persian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967) and refer to her texts. In Neshat’s well-known series, Farrokhzad’s poetry becomes exotic ornamentation covering the paper skin of Neshat’s veiled women.  The poet’s words have become images, cyphers for audiences who cannot read them.  Those who would read cannot because of superfluous and incorrect diacritics, and those who already cannot read the language believe they are missing meaning.[28]   The appropriation of Forugh’s texts turns her words from poetry into ideological signifiers for an “Iran” to which she does not belong. These “words,” though unspeakable, continue to signify “a Persian poet.” Empty words in Neshat’s photographs paradoxically reinforce the idea of the “silent women” of Iran by silencing one of its most distinctive voices.

Taghizadeh, on the contrary, inhabits Farrokhzad’s world, and, through a performative action, shares this world with her fellow citizens in a public celebration. On the poet’s birthday, the artist walked from a bookstore in Bagh-e-Ferdowsi in northern Tehran to the poet’s grave in Zahir od-Dowleh Cemetery. On walls, street posts, and sidewalks along the way, she attached posters with photocopied images of Farrokhzad and pages from her books, sometimes overlaid with the artist’s own hands opening or turning the pages. According to the artist statement,

People gathered, started reading or checking it out. The elders, the same ones who for a lifetime had forbidden Forugh to their sons and daughters, quickly recognized the face and the poetry—perhaps in secret many had read her. And the younger people seemed to have seen her before. You may refuse to accept Forugh but you cannot ignore her. In a politicized city such as Tehran, many quickly connected her to the current political issues. Here and there they stood around the pictures in discussion. During a three-hour-long walk, the route was filled with posters, even though twice the city workers and police tore the papers off the walls and took away the glue and brush with threats. But in the afternoon, if you would follow the images here and there, you will reach her grave, under the light snowfall of which a small crowd had celebrated her birthday with a small cake.[29]

The cake was as large as a gravestone and covered it completely, its sugary slab in the winter’s snow overlaying the white marble inscribed with the poet’s name. It was cut into pieces and shared among the people who gathered around the grave, as the poet’s words were shared with passersby. A communal bond was created both because of the poet’s status as a cultural symbol and through her actual poetry. In addition, the procession produced a social space for mournful celebration. Though a disturbance of the everyday, it honored Forugh through a gesture of inclusion, rather than “reinforce their identical positive identities by stigmatizing others,”[30] as with Neshat’s Women of Allah.

Figure 9. Jinoos Taghizadeh, For Forugh, 2004 (performance documentation). Public performance, Tehran. Courtesy the Artist

Figure 9. Jinoos Taghizadeh, For Forugh, 2004 (poster). Public performance, Tehran. Courtesy the Artist

The pervasive impact of globalization on art practice is evident here. Beyond the immediacy of artistic praxis, art practices—including socially engaged art, performance art, curation, and site-specific installations—also engage neoliberal capitalist exchange. Golshiri’s chart outlines how this unified neoliberal art system operates: “In auction houses, governmental exhibitions and many mainstream events held by world-famous institutions, the audience and supporters of arts created within ideological maxims and/or of aestheticized stereotypes recognize themselves; they reencounter their over-digested ideas, a set of ideas that are not produced in collaboration with those works of art, but have already been there as common knowledge” (fig. 3). Ultimately, presentations of art under Iran’s national banner or within the framework of geopolitical interests connected to the financing pipelines of art institutions private and public and/or operating under the auspices of nation states and their legislatures subsume the potential of art to subvert the doxical and to reach the viewer across boundaries.

To engage sociopolitical doxa via art practice, the art-agent would have to first inhabit it in order to inhibit it. Thus, in a totalitarian state, a degree of opacity may be a strategic choice by the artist. In such a context, opacity that would otherwise be enforced by state censorship becomes an ironic exercise of free will by the artist.  This self-censorship announces itself in the artwork via “unfamiliarity, impenetrability, complexity, diversity and sophistication” (Golshiri, fig. 3). By extension, curatorial practice must continue to look for opportunities to produce a liminal space for the work of art, to build ephemeral publics outside the sanctioned identities via perpetually fungible art exchanges.

*Sandra Skurvida is an independent curator and scholar based in New York City.