Liquid, Figurative Borders: Identity, Art, and Social Division in the Gallery
This article was first published for Syrup Magazine in 2017.
In a rapidly shifting global climate, we are urged to reflect, re-evaluate and re-imagine recent and not-so-recent socio-political issues in order to move forward. Increasingly, international art institutions, biennials and organisations are taking a step back, adopting art as the ultimate ground for reflection, individual expression, and freedom as way to answer fundamental questions.
Art has the power to embrace life, to open up to a wider discourse and make us think in periods of seeming global disorder. The global anxiety acts like a domino effect: it is difficult to comprehend that the fear of terror, migration, or the “other” is in truth not directly associated with a clearly defined material threat. In his book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, Dan Gardner argues that terrorism poses ‘an infinitesimal risk’ to the lives of residents in Western countries. [1] Supporting Gardner’s statement, recent data gathered by the Cato institute compared to the threat posed by refugee terrorists suggests that the typical American is 6 times more likely to die from a shark attack or 6.9 million times more likely to die from cancer or heart disease.[2]
In times like these, contemporary art and visual art practices play a significant role as a way to explore wider sociological and geo-political discourse. The experiences of diaspora, borders, multiculturalism and exodus have been actively theorised over the years in contemporary art context. Mona Hatoum’s internationally recognized Measure of Distance (1998) video for instance, reveals the impossible intimacy of the London-based artist’s long-distance relationship with her Palestinian mother living in Beirut. The visual layers of the photographs of her mother’s naked body taken by Hatoum during her visit to Lebanon, shown together with the letters they exchanged during the time Hatoum was in exile, adds to backdrop of sound. The taped conversations in Arabic between mother and daughter, in which her mother speaks openly about her feelings of sexuality, and her husband’s objections to Hatoum’s intimate observation of her mother’s naked body, are intercut with Hatoum’s voice in English reading the letters.
Similarly, Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s video titled Liminal Crossing (2009), which is also based on the artist’s personal experience, is a reenactment of the migration exodus of ethnic Turks from Bulgaria to Turkey in 1989. The film itself underlines a sense of demarcation, dislocation and reinterpretation by depicting the sheer near-absurd discrepancy of rolling a piano across the border between two states with the effort of a small group of people. Without explanation, reason or aim to these narratives, labour is exposed as a constant: behind, underneath, permeating through the reflective meditations that depends upon such work but looks to find its meaning elsewhere. Presented as a two channel synchronized HD video installation, Liminal Crossing is carefully composed with charged images and highly choreographed camera sweeps that include theatricalized staging of discourses of experience.
The Road to the Tate Modern, a looped video executed in 2003 by the two Kurdish artists Şener Özmen & Erkan Özgen, plays with irony and the impossibility of reaching to a place. The two artists dressed wearing suits in the style of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, stray through the desolate mountains of Anatolia asking everyone they encounter for directions to the Tate Modern in London, one of the most important institutions of the Western art world. In this work Özmen and Özgen not only question the physical borders but also the figurative borders of reaching to the West in the form of a search for an unreasonable objective.
In her earlier looped video work titled Carpet (2006) Taus Makhacheva constantly rolls in and out of an old Dagestani carpet, known as a kilim, playfully engaging with the idea of cultural heritage, belonging by using her own body. Similar to The Road to the Tate Modern, there is a play of humour and irony in this simple act.
The Belgian-born conceptual artist Francis Alÿs’s video titled Watercolour (2010) is a little more than a minute long representation of where time and distance have been so compressed into filmic space that the water lifted from the Black Sea at the beginning is deposited into the Red Sea seconds later. A camera is fixed on the beach, pointing out to sea where a small fleet of cargo ships sits at anchor in the middle distance. A man in dark clothes carrying a red plastic bucket appears and fills his bucket, moments later he walks back out of the pictureplane. The screen then cuts to black and then we seem to see the same male figure in his dark clothes, red bucket now entering the picture plane from the right and tossing the water load into what is identified as the Red Sea at Aqaba, Jordan.
Again, in what it seems to be a simple act of liquid transit, Alÿs touches upon many complex histories. The video Nation Estate (2009) by Larissa Sansour is a 9-minute sci-fi short and photo series offering a clinically dystopian, yet humorous depiction to the crisis in the Middle East. With an amalgamation of computer generated imagery, live actors, and an arabesque electronica soundtrack, the film explores a vertical solution to Palestine’s statehood.Absurdity is present in Nation Estate, where Palestinians have their state in the form of a single skyscraper. One colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population — now finally living the high life.
Different forms of borders are tested and explored in all these examples by internationally acclaimed artists. The use of one’s body, one’s own experience, one’s personal history with the play of fiction is almost universally present. While Alÿs and Machacheva take on simple acts to investigate wider concerns and responsibilities, Çavuşoğlu’s and Hatoum’s carefully edited and composed videos focus on both historical and personal events. Sansour’s extraordinary sci-fi film similar to the irony of Özmen & Özgen’s short video loop, is produced in an efficient manner like Cavusoglu’s production.
When examining the mentioned artists’ choice of medium, it is clear that despite possessing different ethnic, cultural and sociological backgrounds, all the artists chose film to convey their personal interpretation of the term ‘border’ and what it means to them. Living between London and Istanbul, I face similar frustrations with my own identity not only as a woman, but also as a muslim woman, as my own Turkish identity card reminds me every day, regardless of my own beliefs. Through my work as a researcher and curator, I explore issues such as: diaspora, identity, nationalism, belonging, memory, and nostalgia. Art may not necessarily change the political issues that surround identity conflict, or extreme rightist movements, but it does have the power to foster awareness and act as mediator. Creative expression continues to define physical borders, as place and identity become more liquid than ever.
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[1] Gardner, Dan. 2008:300. Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear. Toronto: McClelland and Steward.
[2] Gould, Dave Mosher and Skye. “How Likely Are Foreign Terrorists to Kill Americans? The Odds May Surprise You.” Business Insider. Business Insider, 01 Feb. 2017. Web. 08 Mar. 2017. <http://uk.businessinsider. com/death-risk-statistics-terrorism-disease-accidents-2017–1?r=US&IR=T>.
