“Safar / Voyage”

On the rainy Tuesday afternoon I visited “Safar/Voyage,” an exhibition of contemporary art by 16 Arab, Iranian and Turkish artists, the place was filled with docents from the Vancouver Art Gallery. Not so unusual, except that this was the UBC Museum of Anthropology, internationally renowned for its collection of historic Northwest Coast First Nations art. Still, this crossover audience could not have been more appropriate: a number of visitors had been asking, “Why this show, here?” With its performance-driven photographs and videos, its text-based installations and its neon-lit sculptures, many wondered why Safar would have landed at a museum of anthropology and not at a gallery of contemporary art.

The short answer to this question, cheerily provided by Jill Baird, MOA’s curator of education and public programs and Safar’s coordinating curator, is “Why not?” Our initial puzzlement arises from fixed perceptions and long-standing associations. In Vancouver, we have been conditioned to see the Arthur Erickson-designed museum as a spectacular framing device for the material culture of the Aboriginal peoples of this region. However, not only does MOA boast large collections of art and artifacts from around the world—its holdings are drawn from Asia, Africa, Europe and the South Pacific as well as the Americas—it has also been showing contemporary art since it opened its doors in 1947.

Since 2010, when the museum reopened after an extensive renovation and expansion project, the focus of its temporary exhibitions has been world art and culture. (At the same time, and not incidentally, the VAG has been generating shows of First Nations art, past and present). “We’re trying to be an institution that is adaptable, experimental, fluid, as opposed to predictable or even traditional. It opens up more spaces in institutional practice,” Baird said, “but also more spaces for visitors to reconsider things.”

In the case of “Safar” (which is both the Persian and the Arabic word for “voyage”), the artists are from a part of the globe that we are accustomed to calling the “Middle East.” That is a term that Baird and the show’s guest curator, Fereshteh Daftari, are at pains to avoid. They argue it is a geo- political construct—a Eurocentric and essentially colonial invention. No artist in this show would identify himself or herself as “Middle Eastern,” Daftari says. Many of them, in fact, are transnationals, working across borders, between their birthplaces and the cities in which they have established their careers. Taysir Batniji was born in Gaza and lives in Paris, Ali Banisadr was born in Tehran and lives in New York, and Adel Abidin was born in Baghdad and lives in Helsinki. Of the two best known artists in the show, Kutluğ Ataman was born in Istanbul, educated in art in California and divides his time between London and his native city, and Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, studied art in London and now divides her time between that British city and Berlin. A number of Safar’s artists cite travel—the voluntary kind—as a source of creative energy, imagery and inspiration.

While one of the arguments put forward here is that borders are permeable and art is global, most of Safar’s artists are strongly identified with their cultures of origin, although not necessarily with an overarching religion. Daftari also avoids the words “Islamic art,” which she regards as reductivist. The term, she writes in the exhibition catalogue, “is enmeshed in a colonial history that homogenized the artistic production of an area stretching from Indonesia to Morocco, from the seventh century to modern times.” Faith, or lack of it, does not define the work on view, she insists, while also pointing out that we don’t describe contemporary art from Europe and the Americas as Judaeo-Christian.

Whatever the national origins of the artists and however much travel is vaunted as productive, “Safar” is informed by a powerful sense of displacement, a longing for home and a feeling of loss. There’s also real anger here, often related to neo-colonial wars and occupation. The show’s theme of voyage is both philosophical and actual, shaped by poetic metaphors and lived experiences. Issues and references range across cultural identity, forced migration, rites of passage, gender roles, ancient sites, shifting borders and civil war.

Hatoum’s Hot Spot is a large sculptural representation of the globe, in which steel ribs suggest parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude, and fiery orange-red neon tubing outlines the planet’s land masses. The work is physically imposing and politically challenging, critiquing our news-based assumptions about the world’s “hot spots,” the distant places where we believe wars, violence and civil unrest are concentrated. What Hatoum’s work tells us is that the entire planet is in a state of unrest, of heated emergency, a condition that may be read in three ways, I believe. The first is that the political and economic ambitions of wealthy and powerful nations are played out in certain strategically placed Third World countries, which means that we’re all implicated when a drone attacks a village in Afghanistan, a car bomb explodes in Baghdad or chemical warfare is deployed in Syria. The second is that terrorism and the so-called war on terrorism know no national boundaries—they are horrifyingly ubiquitous. And the third is that the entire world is an environmental hot spot, cooking in greenhouse gases. A subtext here is that wars in oil-rich countries and denial of global warming reside on the same military- corporate spectrum. Hatoum’s neon buzzes ominously, amplifying the tensions created by her brilliant and unsettling work.

Loss and forced migration are explicitly articulated in Ayman Baalbaki’s Destination X, which consists of a rusty old car whose roof and trunk are impossibly heaped with the belongings of an unseen and emblematic refugee family. Bedding and baskets, washtubs and table lamps, pots and pans, cheap furniture and rolled-up carpets all suggest the uprooted lives of those fleeing war, persecution and sectarian strife. Baalbaki, a Lebanese-born artist who continues to be based in Beirut and who is also pursuing a PhD at the University of Paris, points out that the floral cloth of the bundles tied to the car’s roof is a metaphor for the post-colonial loss of regional traditions. Machine-printed, mass-produced, globally traded fabrics have replaced locally embroidered textiles, whose folk and floral motifs can be seen as evoking an agricultural “paradise,” now lost. And “X” is the unknown, the place and condition to which this stateless family is fleeing.

Hannoun is a mixed-media installation completed through a performance that Batniji undertook in the first few days of the exhibition. The work consists of an open-faced room or workspace with a large photograph of the artist’s Gaza studio on its rear wall, and rounded, red-rimmed pencil shavings carefully scattered across the raised floor, to evoke a field of poppies. During his performance, Batniji sharpened boxes and boxes of red-coloured graphite pencils to realize this effect, one that alludes to his childhood habit of sharpening pencils as a way of avoiding homework. This activity suggests both a form of resistance—a refusal to accommodate the demands of authority—and a lapse into a dreamy yet impenetrable space. The poppy is also a metaphor of resistance, alluding to graveyards and those who have died in the Palestinian cause. Certainly, the image of Batniji’s dusty and unoccupied studio communicates neglect and abandonment. Between June 2006 and January 2011, when the Gaza border was closed, the Paris-based artist was unable to return there to work.

On the dust cover of the exhibition catalogue is the image of a black-clad, barefoot man wandering blindfolded across a desolate, desert landscape. This still from Ataman’s video installation, Strange Space, part of his “Mesopotamia Dramaturgies” series, explores our understanding of certain histories and cultures. Ancient Mesopotamia—one of the cradles of civilization—occupied the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Ataman tells us, an area now divided between modern day Turkey and Iraq. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Anatolia, where Ataman’s video was shot, was the site of considerable territorial dispute: regional and global wars, dissolving empires, shifting allegiances, the redrawing of national borders and the realigning of nationalities. And Turkey itself is tugged—blindly, Ataman’s video seems to suggest—between the claims of Europe and Asia. Between the demands of history and modernity, too. Blindfolded, arms outstretched, the artist walks away from the camera toward the dry and distant mountains, until he disappears from view.

Some of the art in the show, such as Susan Hefuna’s Women Cairo 2011, is extremely subtle and understated. The artist has worked the title words of her piece into a mashrabiya, an intricate wooden screen of the type used in architecture in parts of the Arab world. Sometimes seen as the architectural equivalent of veiling, it is associated with women and domestic space, but has been used by Hefuna to mark the participation of women in Egypt’s Arab Spring, a movement both public and male-dominated. In the aftermath of that revolutionary series of demonstrations and the removal of a despised leader, the screen poses a question about how significantly women’s rights and status may actually have been altered. The screen remains.

Other works here, such as the video installation Abidin Travels, are brutally ironic—and I do mean brutally. Abidin slugs us in the gut with his posters, brochures and fake tourism video, whose over-narration enthusiastically proclaims the exciting and “action-packed” sites visitors to Baghdad must see, while its visual component delivers actual footage of war, terrorism and their attendant violence and destruction. We are given a montage of nauseating images: bloody and shattered bodies, blasted buildings, burning cars, looted museums, mass graves, mourning women, blindfolded prisoners and the too-real execution of a kidnap victim. Not exactly subtle—but then neither is war. Abidin, it seems, wants us to witness what has become of his native land, to squirm and wince with horror before driving our petroleum-fuelled cars back to our comfortable homes.

The exhibition’s overarching intention is to open new spaces for understanding, to challenge the complacency that distance has afforded us, to journey to unfamiliar places and to participate in a 21st-century dialogue of equals rather than in a 20th-century monologue of Western domination. ❚

“Safar/Voyage” was exhibited at the Audain and the O’Brian Galleries, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, from April 20 to September 15, 2013.

Robin Laurence is a Vancouver-based writer, curator and Contributing Editor to Border Crossings.