The LIP: Where is Africa Now?

Jasmine: It’s difficult for me to answer the question from a personal perspective. I know the reality of South Africa now and I know the history of South Africa then and tidbits about the rest of the continent from books, television and friends who, like me, were children taking it all in as uncritical observers. I ventured to the Wild Coast region of South Africa once in 2002 on a pilot research trip with a tourist camera and open mind. The trip changed my life.

On one school tour, I walked into a dilapidated classroom and witnessed a group of children, none older than 10, huddled over a self-made fire of broken school desks and chairs. While my research trip took me to South Africa’s most cosmopolitan cities, as Countee Cullen notes in Incident, “Of all the things that happened there / That’s all that I remember.” I could not stop thinking about the rural school.

My experience of Africa was of an unequal and bifurcated place with opulent haves and desperate have nots. When I returned in 2003, I was armed with a research agenda, a professional camera and a discerning eye. Little had changed. Within one week, I was listening to women crying about not having food and two days later I was careening up a mountain side on a motorbike to a million rand mansion in Hout Bay. But when I had my camera, I saw another side, beyond the binary of Black and White, beyond the binaries of colour (ngaphaya kwebala), and beyond the binary of rich and poor. When I aimed at my subjects they shot back with tenacity and uncompromising hope. I can say that my experience of Africa now is one of a people pushing to break free of the chains of history. Through my camera lens, I saw a powerfully hopeful future waiting to happen.

1. The Ilitha Project aims to infuse resources into the under-served rural Ilitha Junior School. The project leaders are looking for partners and new fundraising opprtunities.
2. Jasmine Waddell is currently seeking a publisher for her collection, ‘Explorations and Connections: Reflections of a Black American in Post-Apartheid South Africa.’ If you believe you can help her in any way please contact editor@theLIP.org for more information.

Yael Bartana’s video projection, ‘Trembling Time’, is an eerie film, depicting traffic passing under a flyover in Tel Aviv, periodically slowing to a halt at the sounding of a siren marking the commemoration of Soldier Memorial Day, a state sanctioned ritual in honour of Israel’s war dead. Her focus is on collective experience, her attention drawn to ritualised acts intended to strengthen national identity. ‘Profile’, another video installation, follows an anonymous female soldier repeatedly firing a rifle during target practice, a very different ritual which echoes the memorial for those who fell in battle. Killing and mourning form part of the same, ritualistic, painful cycle. The soldier’s anonymity is crucial for Israeli-born Yael; ‘For me, that soldier becomes a symbol that reflects my own feelings and emotions about the situation.’ Questions are fundamental to her work; ‘In what kind of place did I grow up? How long will this country continue the patterns of ignorance?’

Palestinian artist Emily Jacir has questions of her own. For her, art is a provocation, a force which can be used to ‘pollute’. Her piece ‘Sexy Semite’ hijacks the medium of the printed press to question Israel’s law of return policy. Emily ran personal ads in New York’s Village Voice seeking Israeli mates for displaced Palestinians, ‘so they could return home utilising Israel’s law of return.’ Its humour is one with a bitter aftertaste. Adverts for a ‘Dusky Eyed Beauty …no fatties’ sit uncomfortably next to the overtly political, ‘You stole the land, might as well steal the women. I’m ready to be conquered by your army.’ As well as questioning Israeli policy, Emily is questioning the role of art by challenging a crucial given; that of context. Her newspaper ads are in people’s houses, in their shops, on their subway trains. When we see the adverts framed alongside the speculative news articles which they provoked in the safe-haven of a gallery, the cycle is completed. The lines between humour and pathos, art and life, never appeared so indistinguishable.

Yet it is another of Emily’s pieces which is most striking, ‘Where We Come From’. She asked a number of Palestinians ‘If I could do something for you anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?’ The granting of the exiled Palestinians’ wishes is facilitated by her possession of an American passport allowing freedom of movement. The result is heartbreaking. Faced with the chance of one wish, the simple desires of the people are laid bare. Alongside photographs illustrating the fulfilment of their wishes, are transcripts of what was requested, in English and Arabic. ‘Go to my mother’s grave in Jerusalem on her birthday and put flowers and pray’ requested Munir, born in Jerusalem, now living in Bethlehem, unable to return. When Emily went to fulfil Munir’s wish she was perplexed by the crowds around a neighbouring grave. When they cleared she was able to read the name on the headstone: Oscar Schindler. Jihad’s request could not be more moving, ‘Visit my mother, hug and kiss her and tell her that these are from her son. Visit the sea at sunset and smell it for me and walk a little bit…enough. Am I greedy?’

The parallels between Emily and Yael’s work are clear enough, though it is important not to assume that the two artists are addressing two sides of the same coin. Whilst Emily’s work is filled with a longing for a return to normality, to home, Yael’s representations of supposed normality through tradition and repetition are equally unstable and alien. Less obvious is the relationship with the third artist exhibited alongside the Israeli and the Palestinian, Lee Miller. Lee remains unique in her field. Moving from high fashion photography she found herself on the frontlines in the Second World War covering allied progress for Vogue. The influence of Man Ray, for whom she modelled, leaves a clear surrealist impression on both aspects of her work. The blurring between the glamorous world of haute couture Paris and the terror of wartime Europe is most clearly illustrated in ‘Fire Masks, Hampstead, London 1941’ a surreal image of models wearing protective military equipment. It is through these juxtapositions that the links between her and the other two artists emerge. Lee, like Emily, plays with the audience’s reliance on a familiar context by juxtaposing suffering and beauty, and like Yael, betrays a fascination with individuals and communities caught up in events beyond their control.

For all three artists, art is itself a questioning force. It asks who we are, what we want and how we can achieve it. This exhibition forces us to think about both where art belongs in our society and where society belongs in our art. There might not be a right answer to either question.

The mainly landscape photographs are striking for several reasons. The sand-castle like buildings are thrown into relief by the ochre coloured light at sunset, and the deep blue expanses of sky create geometric compositions which look as reminiscent of a George Braque canvas as they do of a photo on the pages of National Geographic; it is with a true artist’s eye that Elhum has captured the winding cavernous streets of Bam and its ancient architecture.

But it was not just a city that was destroyed in the earthquake. Over 41,000 lives were lost, and this exhibition aims to keep those innocent victims in mind as well. The Persian people are incredibly proud of their cultural heritage, it is relatively unknown to the West and is an important part of the individual’s identity; by keeping the memory of the city alive, the spirit of the people who lived there will live on too.

Uncomfortably juxtaposed with the beautiful images of the ancient city are the front pages of the Iranian newspapers. ‘Death Toll Mounts’, reads the front page of Iran News, photographs of a very different kind illustrating suffering in the rawest of forms; rude heaps of bodies, dejected rescue workers, families grieving. Fatemeh, age 35, burying her two children. ‘I am burying myself in this grave’ she explains.

The proceeds from the exhibition, which is running for a limited time at St Anne’s College Oxford, are being donated to the Popli Khalatbari Charitable Foundation – Bam Earthquake Fund, as are the profits from the sale of the works themselves. ‘This place was incredible, and now, it’s not there any more. I want to make people remember that, I want to make it a reality’ Elhum says of the project. The reality may be a painful one, but the memory is beautiful.

Prints and posters of the exhibition are available for purchase. For more information contact Elhum Shakerifar, Wadham College, Oxford OX1 3PN or visit: http://surf.to/bamexhibition.

The development of museums is inextricably bound to the creation of nation states and cultural identity. To display an object in a museum is a political, message-bearing act. During the era of colony and empire, the creation of Western cultural identities was invariably at the expense of colonised peoples, unifying imperialist elites against conquered races by labelling the latter as ‘primitives’, displaying their cultural artefacts and even human remains. The unparalleled collections in the British Museum and the South Kensington enterprises were a declaration that Britain occupied a large part of the world, and was now busy classifying it. During the 1848 Chartist marches on Parliament, British Museum staff were sworn in as special constables, the authorities fearing that the building and its contents would be seen as an institutional embodiment of the philosophies and doctrines of the ruling classes.

Saddam claimed ownership of Iraqi history and constructed a national cultural identity. Palaces were built next to significant historic and archaeological sites, and the bricks of the rebuilt Babylon inscribed with ‘Saddam Hussein, protector of Iraq, rebuilt civilisation’. Al-Serai Palace in Baghdad contained a museum devoted to showing how Iraq triumphed over the Allies, and Saddam’s image looked down on some of the world’s oldest artefacts throughout the Baghdad Museum. It is clear what the political agenda for these museums was. Perhaps that’s why they became a target. They were an institutional embodiment of an Iraqi history as defined by Saddam.

Thankfully, an unofficial amnesty on the return of stolen artefacts seems to be paying off, with dozens of objects being returned daily – including a seven-thousand year old Mesopotamian vase – no questions asked. It often takes time, but evidence would show that nations invariably come to the realisation that for political independence to be meaningful, it has to be buttressed by a programme of cultural identity, once intentionally erased by colonial or oppressive regimes. Disempowered indigenous populations have pursued such programmes with museums most energetically. This is a direct consequence of years of silencing and suppression of cultural identity (but also a promising sign that democratised modern museums now enter dialogues that result in partnership or direct repatriation).

Following crisis and destruction, there is a psychological and social need to find continuity between past and present, to create a sense of sequence that will enable us to cope with the chaos. This healing and impulse for preservation is a means of conceptualising and dealing with loss… which is where museums come in. The museum can offer people tangible manifestations of their identity and confidence in the value of that identity.

The imperative now is to reclaim, restore and reinterpret as many artefacts as possible, and to rebuild Iraq’s museums as democratised institutions of participation and education. Appealing to a sense of cultural identity and nationhood pre-Saddam, symbolised in the ancient artefacts of their history, may be a vital contribution to establishing a sustainable democratic future for the people of Iraq.

To help please visit www.baghdadmuseum.org.

Eleri Lynn works for English Heritage

Like midwives & paediatricians, or architects & structural engineers, the two professions, though indispensable to one another, maintain a level of separation, competition and mutual distrust.

Even outside the two industries the relative importance of art versus design is hotly contested, aesthetes and cultural commentators tending to favour the former in terms of significance. The contemporary artist is mandated to perpetuate public interest in the arts, to inflame public sensibilities if necessary – especially when interest is dwindling – and to challenge aesthetic and cultural prejudices. The designer, on the other hand, is perceived as a parasite on society, feeding off cultural icons and undertaking a cutthroat campaign of visual commercialisation.

Yet, in order to be successful – and to justify the invoice at the end of each project – the designer must be both challenging to, and embracing of the culture in which s/he works. The self-conscious designer who is serious about their place in design history, fears nothing more than producing generic work, but the greatest modern designs (and I’m talking products like Emigre, Ray Gun and I. D. here), not only embrace their cultural context and design heritage, but enhance it. They must be quintessentially of their time, to an extent that even artists rarely are. This overlapping of life and art describes truly contemporary graphic design, and if you want to see a culture describe itself at the most organic level, you should observe the design and not the art.

A glance at Alan Fletcher’s magnum opus The Art of Looking Sideways – a cornucopia of found art objects, provocative quotes, insightful remarks and seminal designs – instantly reveals an insight into not only the workings of his mind, but into the many and diverse cultures from which its fragments are drawn. For the secular among us, Alan’s book occupies the same intellectual void as the Bible – reassuring us that there is hope yet for humanity.

Of course, the reputation of designers was marred by the universalisation of the tools of their trade. When Apple released the Macintosh computer in 1984, it seemed that suddenly anyone could produce industry-standard graphic work. As well as implementing the digital and information ages in popular cultural history, the spread of home computers also spawned a new breed of designers, referred to posthumously as ‘graphic radicals’. These ‘radicals’ broke the two-decade long hegemony of the ‘Swiss School’ of design which had been led primarily by Massimo Vignelli, and was characterized by refined typography, grid-driven composition, and an obsession with the golden section. Layering icons and text, sometimes to the extreme, defying legibility and design common sense, the diverse work of the radicals had only one thing in common: the clear belief that design carries the message. Slowly, the Western cultures from which these designers emerged have caught up with, and begun to appreciate their contribution to the aesthetic world in which we all live.

The film industry has experienced a similar challenge with the advent of consumer-priced, high quality digital video equipment. The associated low costs of digital filmmaking have allowed practitioners to take risks without fear of marring their career with multi-million pound abject failures. While this has facilitated some astonishing artistic achievements from leading-edge directors like Mike Figgis and Lars Von Trier, it has also made possible production of the most shockingly sub-standard cinematic spectacles in history.

Heralded – like the Internet – as the ‘new medium of democracy’, there is a huge onus on it to behave in a self-regulatory fashion. Although I don’t want to align myself with the familiar refrain of the NRA, I am a strong proponent of the idea that cameras don’t kill films, but the people behind the viewfinder. If we have been presented with a new democratic voice, it is up to us to use it wisely. Sadly – and the parallels with the Internet are even more blatant here – any creative and intellectual developments have been grossly overshadowed by its exploitation by the pornography industry, a million-and-one cheap flesh-fests hitting the shelves each year. The moral? Give ‘the people’ a new medium of expression, and the majority will (literally) fuck it.

However, a growing number of filmmakers and moving-image practitioners have begun to make creative breakthroughs in their work using digital video, mainly by identifying and exploiting its unique attributes. From documentaries to Dogme films, it has made possible the previously impossible.

A new media project centred around the February 15th ‘Stop The War’ march in London has set out to reclaim the title ‘medium of democracy’ from its abusers. The project, devised by Chris Clarke and produced collaboratively by Fifty Nine Ltd and Level Productions, enlisted the help of over 30 filmmakers – some amateur, some professional – to record the demonstration using a variety of techniques, from 8mm cinefilm to broadcast-quality video. Now being compiled and edited, the finished product will be a documentary in the purest sense of the word: one event perceived from many views, in many styles, defying the linear narrative style propagated by the BBC and its rivals.

If, as the march organisers believe, the Britain of here and now is where future world history is being decided, then this defining moment deserves to be recorded. Do not sit back and allow the global media to homogenise the hell out of our experiences. We must go out of our way to make sure we leave a historical legacy we can be proud of, one defined not by the academic commentators of posterity, but by our innovators and pioneers.

This puzzling inscription found graffitied on a crumbling church wall provides the title for Joellëe Tuerlinckx’s new installation and a loaded introduction to the international contemporary art exhibition Documenta XI. Calling into question the inter-dependent systems of religion, culture and history, the inscription does more than to revel in the flux of post-modern fragmentation; but rather de-stabilises the very foundations on which Western structures of thought have colonised and prospered. If religion, culture and history have been reduced to ‘nothing’, then how does the individual construct and affirm an understanding of their own identity? This crisis in the role of the individual in a world determined by the aftermath of colonisation and the impact of globalisation forms the central tenet for Documenta XI.

Documenta is a contemporary visual art exhibition held every five years in the German town of Kassel. Since its inception in 1955, it has grown to become arguably the world’s most important exhibition of contemporary art, commenting on and often setting future cultural agendas in visual arts practice. First conceived by artists Arnold Bode and Werner Haftmann, Documenta is rooted in a spirit of German post-war idealism. With an original intention of re-introducing a culturally isolated Germany to the most recent developments in international contemporary art, Documenta has become a platform for exploring the notion of art as global culture.

Early in its development, the artistic direction of Documenta was influenced by German artist Joseph Beuys, whose practice fused together shamanic systems of thought with a radical political agenda. Joseph’s synthesis of Western rationalism with Eastern spiritualism set the tone for an exhibition format that would mutually respect ideas of inclusivity and difference. His influence on the political and cultural agenda of Documenta was to challenge the Euro-centric bias in the visual arts, exposing the reality that when we speak of ‘high culture’ or the ‘fine arts’ it is actually a tradition restricted to a European cultural experience about which we refer. How to effect an exhibition ‘platform’ that supports cultural representation on a global scale has since been the pre-occupation of many artists, curators and art producers alike.

This year the challenge has been fittingly taken up with the appointment of the first non-European, black artistic director; Okwui Enwezor. Okwui’s Documenta XI questions how contemporary art, as a ‘material reflection’ on the world, confronts the spectres of ‘unceasing cultural, social and political frictions, transitions, transformations, fissures and global institutional consolidations.’ In the face of such global conflict, Okwui’s outlook is strikingly utopian, firmly believing in the purpose of art today as ‘knowledge production’, informing the shape and dynamics of the post-colonial world. Eschewing aesthetic debate in favour of global politics, Okwui’s ‘multi-cultural Documenta’ is one in which the role of the artist as social commentator, anthropologist and politico-agitator takes centre stage.

If Okwui’s ambitious project has any unifying aesthetic experience it is one firmly rooted in the documentary tradition. Photography and video are prioritised as Okwui uses an intelligent combination of the archival and the contemporary to throw into sharp relief current political tension.

Amar Kanwar’s film A Season Outside (1997) documents the public display of national identities on the Indian-Pakistan border crossing at Wagha. The film bears witness to the ritual opening and closing of the border performed by soldiers in an elaborate choreographed dance. Amar’s document of the performed confrontation situation explores the relationship between the construction of national identities and masculine bravado.

The transgression of geographical, cultural and political borders becomes a re-occurring theme. The beautifully crafted Shoes for Europe by the Moldavian artist Pavel Braila addresses a conceptual and historical fault-line separating East and West in the small frontier town of Ugheni on the Moldavian-Romanian border. The artist has covertly filmed the routine procedure of changing train wheels from the Russian gauge to standard gauge used in Romania and Western Europe – a discrepancy of 80mm. Providing an historic strategic juncture for the Soviet military, Ugheni today becomes a symbolic flash point for cultural and economic access to Western Europe.

Closer to home is the presentation of Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs (1986). Almost an hour in length, the film documents the riots that took place in Birmingham in the Thatcherite 80’s. The collage of disturbing scenes of violence and inner city poverty has been collated from existing newsreels, interviews and dramatisations. The film is a retrospective reclamation of Black history in Britain, an attempt to refute the received history mediated through institutionalised racism.

Okuwi Enwezor welcomes the implications and questions raised by presenting such archival work within the context of a contemporary art exhibition. That such inclusions disrupt the expected make-up of an international exhibition bears testimony to Okuwi’s belief in de-stabilising and breaking down the mainstream cultural experience. Referring to the classic novel of pre-colonial Africa Things Fall Apart (1958), Okuwi’s Documenta XI is one of cultural ruptures, breaks and fractures in which art becomes a force for delineating a post-colonial identity in a world after imperialism.