Moira Roth's Gleanings

GLEANINGS #26: SAILING ON THE MARI NAWI AND LISTENING TO JONATHAN JONES, Part 1, 11 September 2012, Berkeley, California

Dear Gleanings readers,

This will be the last of my Gleaning series – which consists of twenty-five ‘Gleanings’ exchanges with the curators and selected artists in the 18th Biennale of Sydney, plus two multi-sectioned ‘Reflections’.

All of these can be found on the ‘Gleanings’ archives of the Biennale website:
http://moirarothsgleanings.tumblr.com/archive

This Gleanings project has deeply engaged me since November of 2010, when I was invited to write an ongoing blog for the 18th Biennale of Sydney, curated by Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, who are responsible for surely one of the most extraordinary and original of all the international art exhibitions that have ever taken place.

I composed the Gleanings and Reflections texts in both California and Australia, as well as on a three-week ship voyage from San Francisco to Sydney.

Yesterday, I finished ‘Reflections from Cockatoo Island,’ a 12-part series, drawn from the notes I took while staying on the island for a week at the end of June during my second visit to Australia.

Moira Roth on Cockatoo Island, 2012

Moira Roth’s notebook. Photograph: Moira Roth

Earlier this year, while sailing on a cruise ship called the Aurora – a voyage that lasted three weeks (January–February 2012), with stopovers in Hilo, Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji and New Zealand – I wrote a 22-part ‘Reflections from the Aurora.’

Moira Roth on the Pennant Bar deck, The Aurora. Photograph: Robin Sequeira

My Aurora ship journey took me literally through colonial history, and in my two stays in Australia I have continued to reflect on this history.

Almost immediately upon my arrival in February, while staying in the Rocks area of Sydney, I met Binowee Bayles of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, who asked me if I would like to come on the Mari Nawi (‘Big Canoe’) boat for a private outing with some 15 invited guests. This old wooden ferry had been purchased by the Tribal Warrior Association (her uncle was the head of the TWA), and refurnished with the intention of giving its passengers a sense of the original presence in the Sydney Harbour of the Eora, Cadigal, Guringai, Wangal, Gammeraigal and Wallumedegal nations.

Read more about the Tribal Warrior Association here: www.tribalwarrior.org

It was a deeply informative and moving experience.

Now, months later, on my second visit to Sydney, I had found another guide to this history: Jonathan Jones (born 1978 in Sydney, where he still lives), a member of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations of southeastern Australia.

In his Biennale of Sydney catalogue essay, Gerald McMaster discusses Jones’ powerful contribution to the Biennale of Sydney:

In Australia, the mixing and crashing together of Asian with European and Aboriginal cultures has been a constant narrative, but only now can it be suggested there is an emergence of a new Australian culture. This is the subject of Jonathan Jones’ midden installation of British-style teacups with a mass of Sydney rock oyster shells, a new work that he calls his monument to discursive engagement.

On his artist’s page on the Biennale website, I read a statement by Jones himself:

Warrane, or Sydney Harbour, is the site of one of the most important historical meetings – the collision between the British Empire and the Eora, representatives of the world’s oldest living culture. Some 220 years ago, this encounter marked the start of Australia’s ongoing colonisation, a process that attempts to raze Aboriginal culture.

Yet within this reign of terror, intelligence, strength and flexibility all persevere, and these qualities have come to define many of our Aboriginal leaders: Woollarawarre Bennelong (c.1764–1813), a Wongal man from the southern shores of Sydney Harbour, emerges from Sydney’s history as a brilliant leader, diplomat, and visionary.

Bennelong was first forcibly kidnapped in 1789 under the orders of Governor Arthur Phillip (1738–1814), then sought a new life within his rapidly changing world. He astutely assimilated the new power structure into his own, referring to Phillip as ‘father’ and developing a deep relationship that saw Bennelong and his family dine nightly with the governor. In 1790, Phillip constructed Bennelong a stone home on the point that today still bears his name. In 1792, he and his kinsman, Yemmerrawannie (c.1775–1794), became the first Aboriginal people to visit England. Bennelong shaped Aboriginal identity. His astute and charismatic nature found new ways of operating within a colonial paradigm and paved the way for future generations.

During my week’s stay on Cockatoo Island, I often wandered slowly through the Jones’ iridescent world in Tunnel 1 on the lower level of the island.

Tunnel 1, Cockatoo Island. Photographs: Moira Roth

Jonathan Jones, untitled (barra), 2012. Installation view of 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) on Cockatoo Island.

And even more frequently sought out his mysterious midden outside the tunnel.

GLEANINGS #26: SAILING ON THE MARI NAWI AND LISTENING TO JONATHAN JONES, Part 1

Jonathan Jones, untitled (oysters and teacups), 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) on Cockatoo Island. Photographs: Moira Roth

Before leaving for Australia in June, I had seen Jones’ online call for contributions to his midden of shells and teacups, and so I had brought with me my contribution - a precious teacup, carefully wrapped, that I had had for years - to leave on the pile.

Moira Roth’s teacup. Photograph: Moira Roth

Studying the midden reminded me of the time I had seen Jones’ work during my first visit to Sydney.

On a day in late February, I wended my way through the nearby Royal Botanic Gardens to the Art Gallery of New South Wales where I had come only to see his work. Ignoring the big Picasso ‘Masterpiece’ exhibition, I walked down to where his four graphite-charcoal drawings (all untitled, as were the Cockatoo Island pieces) were hung. I asked the gallery guard for a chair and he produced a high stool-like chair that I sat on. As the hour went by, I begin to sense the enormous complexity of Jones’ drawings, their hidden depths, pools of silence, and elusive calligraphic messages. I begin to see them as mysterious windows, dark mirrors and abstract maps.

Here on Cockatoo Island, I found myself again immersed in the ‘hidden depths’ of Jones’ art and thinking.

Now, back in California, while looking at his page on the Biennale website, I have just found his ‘The Avant Garde Diaries: Dialogue for the Future.’ In this short video, Jones speaks with intense and articulate passion about the erasure of Aboriginal history and presence on Cockatoo Island that led him to create his midden and fluorescent tunnel pieces there.

This video seems to me not only an appropriate ending to my Gleanings overall but in particular to my ‘Reflections on Cockatoo Island.’

SHARE |

21 Sep 2012

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #1

Arrival, 21 June 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

Early this morning I fly into Sydney from California, and take the ferry to Cockatoo Island, the largest island in the Sydney Harbour.

Cockatoo Island. Image courtesy Airview Online

Here I have been allocated a room in one of the upper island’s Heritage Houses, where a group of Biennale artists are being housed while they complete their installations for the opening of the 18th Biennale on 27 June. I had requested that I stay on the island as I want to understand more fully about why the Co-Artistic Directors, Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, have chosen it as such a key site for their Biennale.

The ferry takes me past the famous Sydney Opera House that opened in 1973.

View of Sydney Opera House from ferry. Photograph: Moira Roth

And under the Sydney Harbour Bridge that opened in 1932.

View of Sydney Harbour Bridge from ferry. Photograph: Moira Roth

Within a short time, I arrive at Cockatoo Island

Parramatta Wharf, Cockatoo Island. Photograph: Moira Roth

and make my way to the upper island - with its array of dilapidated buildings and renovated ‘heritage’ houses - where I find myself immediately immersed in the Island’s earlier history.

For this history, see www.cockatooisland.gov.au/about

In 1839, Cockatoo Island was established as a penal settlement where the prisoners were housed and worked under appalling conditions. Then it was used briefly for a reformatory school and orphanage and reverted back to a jail between 1888 and 1908.

As a lad of ten years of age, I well remember the place with its gloomy prison buildings perched high upon its treeless sides, the even-pacing, red-coated sentries, the sonorous clang of the prison bell, and the long line of wretched convicts marching to and from their toil in the dry dock or among the sandstone quarries. - Louis Becke, 1899

Over the last century, Cockatoo Island became Australia’s biggest shipyard - building ships and repairing them, modernizing submarines, etc. - until the shipyard was closed in 1992.

In 2010 UNESCO chose Cockatoo Island as one of its eleven Australian World Heritage sites to represent ‘surviving examples of large-scale convict transportation and the colonial expansion of European powers through the presence and labor of convicts.’

And now, in the winter of 2012, the upper and lower parts of Cockatoo Island - with their Convict, Docks, Historic Residences, Industrial, and Ship Design Precincts, and Powerhouse and Northern Apron areas - are the home for an amazing group of installations and performances as part of the 18th Biennale of Sydney, which the two Biennale curators have selected for the Island’s exhibition theme of ‘Stories, Senses and Spheres.’

In the Biennale Guide, I read that:

‘Stories, Senses and Spheres continues many of the ideas explored in other Biennale venues by opening up the senses to water, wind, earth and their embedded meanings, in collaborative and interactive projects that have shared storytelling and caring at their core.’

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #2, Part 1

Cecilia Vicuña and Ria Verhaeghe, upper island, 21 June 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

I spend the day wandering around in a daze caused not only by jetlag but also by being overwhelmed with the magnificent displays of art concealed in these upper island historical buildings.

With Cecilia Vicuña, I visit her Quipa Austral in Building 19, a two-storey structure of 1916-17 that was used for stowage and seasoning of timber.

Read more about Cecilia’s work in my Gleanings #25: http://moirarothsgleanings.tumblr.com

Building 19, Cockatoo Island, with Cecilia Vicuña’s Quipu Astral, 2012. Photograph: Moira Roth

We climb its stairs to the second floor and wander through the Quipa Austral installation, touching the strains of wool and listening to the sounds.

Cecilia Vicuña. Photograph: Moira Roth

Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Astral, 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) on Cockatoo Island. Photographs: Moira Roth

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #2, Part 2

Then I walk over to the chapel of the old Convict Precinct, where I watch Ria Verhaeghe completing her installation of Living with Cuddles.

Ria Verhaeghe and Living with Cuddles, 2012. Photographs: Moira Roth

We talk briefly, but mainly I admiringly watch.

I know from studying her webpage (www.riaverhaeghe.be/biography.php) that Verhaeghe was born in 1950 in Belgium, and had had a career in welfare (nursing). Then in 1988 she decided to dedicate herself fully to her art practice, and started on a huge project of ‘assembling an alternative image bank’ of some 25,000 digitally accessible images, ‘ordered by keywords, colours, dates and groups, in an attempt to measure another dimension of newspaper pictures.’

I recall too that on her artist page on the website it explains that in Living with Cuddles ‘her use of protective materials, such as cotton, hair, cloths, newspaper and latex … refer to her experiences as a nurse. Her installation in the chapel of the old Convict Precinct on Cockatoo Island includes “threads” and “cuddles” made from piles of newspapers, consisting as a kind of recuperation act, which in a sense tries to save what vanishes between the folds of existence, rehabilitating what is lost, what is overlooked, set aside – an unrecognised present. Covered with latex, her long threads can be seen as a kind of prayer that connects the installation with the webwork of the world.’

I resolve to come back in a few days to see the finished version of Ria Verhaeghe’s imaginative and poignant installation.

Ria Verhaeghe, Living with Cuddles, 2012, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Cockatoo Island. Courtesy the artist

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND # 3

Dawn, 22 June 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

I wake up at dawn, and stand on the balcony of the Heritage House, looking at the sunrise, experiencing a slight wind, and listening to the cries of birds.

It reminds me of my solitary experiences of dawn on the Aurora ship voyage of this year from San Francisco to Sydney in January/February, and of my encounters on this voyage with water, sky, earth and history that I wrote about in a 22-part series called ‘Reflections from the Aurora’ (http://moirarothsgleanings.tumblr.com/archive).

And now, here I am again musing on water, sky, earth and history on Cockatoo Island in Australia, and wondering what today’s wanderings will bring me.

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #4, Part 1

From the upper to the lower island, 22 June, 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

In the morning I sit writing in my notebook outside the Heritage House, where I am staying, and then wander, in a rather dreamlike state, down the stairs from the upper island to continue my search for the island’s ‘Stories, Senses and Spheres.’

Moira Roth and stairs to the upper Island, Cockatoo Island. Photographs: Moira Roth

I make my way to the Turbine Hall, pausing to study Catherine de Zegher’s Biennale catalogue essay in which she writes that:

‘The immense Turbine Hall at the centre of the industrial shipyard complex can be see as an axis in the overall Biennale project, as a space where all senses assemble and participating voices gather in a theatrical composition initiated by Craigie Horsfield and realised with Reinier Rietveld - its title Confusion (2012).’

I enter the Turbine Hall to find Reinier Rietveld and Craigie Horsfield at work on their Confusion installation.

The Turbine Hall, Cockatoo Island. Photograph: Moira Roth

Read more about Confusion on the Biennale website: http://bos18.com/artist?id=86

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #4, Part 2

Fujiko Nakaya is equally hard at work on her huge Living Chasm – Cockatoo Island installation, and I go to stand outside the building to admire its billowing ‘fog’ clouds.

Fujiko Nakaya, Living Chasm – Cockatoo Island, 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) on Cockatoo Island. Photograph: Moira Roth

Read more about Living Chasm – Cockatoo Island on the Biennale website: http://bos18.com/artist?id=26

I wander through the spaces beyond the Turbine Hall and come across many other artists at work, with their installations in various stages of completion.

Among them is Monika Grzymala (a Polish-born artist, now living in Berlin), who is absorbed in the finishing touches of The River.

Monika Grzymala. Photograph: Moira Roth

Grzymala created this huge site-specific installation, composed of cotton rag paper, branches, grass and vine, in collaboration with Euraba Artists and Papermakers - a group of Goomeroi artists in Boggabilla, who specialize in handmade paper.

Monika Grzymala, The River, 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Cockatoo Island. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Moira Roth

For more information and photographs of The River, see the Biennale website:

http://bos18.com/artist?id=51

Monika Grzymala, The River, 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Cockatoo Island. Courtesy the artist.

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #5, Part 1

Khaled Sabsabi, 22 June 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

Cecilia Vicuña and Khaled Sabsabi. Photograph: Moira Roth

In the Biennale office on the lower island, Cecilia Vicuña introduces me to Khaled Sabsabi, with whom I have already had a series of email exchanges. He was born in 1965 in Tripoli, Lebanon, and, at age 12, immigrated with his family to Australia to escape the Lebanese civil war that had begun in 1975. For many years he has lived in Sydney, although he also travels abroad frequently.

For more information about the artist see: http://bos18.com/artist?id=97

http://eastsidefm.org/2012/02/interview-with-khaled-sabsabi-18-january-2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMwQJWgG-3M

We decide to spend the afternoon together, which will begin with his showing me his two video installations on the island. (There is a third work by him, Air Land, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia).

First we seek out Nonabel, 2006 (a single channel, 3-minute video) in Building 34, which has ‘Air Raid Shelter’ inscribed on the door - an example of one of the many of the island’s historical buildings.

Building 34: Air Raid Shelter. Photographs: Moira Roth

But technicians are setting up the equipment here, so we wind our way up the island to Biripi in Building 11, which consists of a ‘bunker room’ with literal bunk seats in it.

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #5, Part 2

Building 11: Free Overseers Quarters, with Khaled Sabsabi’s Biripi, 2011. Photographs: Moira Roth

We sit watching the exquisite dance ceremony in red, black and yellow (the colours of the aboriginal flag) and listening to the powerful didgeridoo music.

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #5, Part 3

After this we have a long talk, sitting on a bench that faces the Sydney Harbour Bridge, on the upper island, near the Heritage Houses.

Photographs: Moira Roth

Here Sabsabi tells me about the circumstances of creating this 2011 single-channel Biripi video.

He had been invited by the Biripi Nation people, who live in New South Wales, to make the video after he had met Auntie and Elder Louise Davis during a residency there. (The two artists exchanged presents – she gave him a painting.)

When Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster saw the video, they immediately wanted to include it in the Biennale of Sydney. Sabsabi’s reaction to this, however, was that he must first meticulously check to see if he had approval from the Biripi Nation, and so went back in person to the area to seek this permission - which was gladly granted him.

This leads us to a rich conversation about trust and its role in other examples of Sabsabi’s work in different communities, notably, since 2010, with Sufi practioners - men, women and children - in both Australia (Sydney, Brisbane and Tasmania) and with his cousin in Tripoli, Lebanon (Sabsabi has also filmed footage in Cyprus and Turkey). As we talk, I think about his far-reaching travels, exhibitions and collaborations in different parts of the world (e.g. Berlin, Shanghai, Beirut, Poland, Argentina, Colombia and Lebanon) and how deeply rooted he is, despite this, in the local community of Sydney.

I am also stuck, yet again, generally by the themes of not only storytelling but of trust between Biennale artists and cultures different from their own, witness Khaled Sabsabi and the work between Monika Grzymala and the Euraba Artists and Papermakers. It reminds me too of two Gleanings exchanges I have had: with Bouchra Khalili (the Moroccan-French artists who worked with illegal immigrants in five countries) and Arin Rungjung (the Thai artist who worked with children in Rwanda, orphaned by the civil war there).

Bouchra Khalili, Gleanings #20:

http://moirarothsgleanings.tumblr.com/post/24454865722/gleanings-20-bouchra-khalili

Arin Rungjung Gleanings #10, Part 1 and 2:

http://moirarothsgleanings.tumblr.com/post/15535119029/gleanings-10-part-]1-arin-rungjang-and-catherine-de

http://moirarothsgleanings.tumblr.com/post/16026593924/gleanings-10-part-2-arin-rungjang-and-catherine-de

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #6

Daan Roosegaarde’s Dune Xi, 25 June 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

My wanderings (usually alone) on the island continue. Today I have set aside the morning for the lower island and the afternoon for the upper island.

Dog-Leg Tunnel, Cockatoo Island. Photograph: Moira Roth.

On the lower island near the Industrial Precinct is the Dog-Leg Tunnel, an air raid shelter, complete with a first aid station, built in 1942 during World War II. Here Dune X by Daan Roosegaarde (born 1979 in the Netherlands, and now living in the Netherlands and China) is being installed. On Studio Roosegaarde’s website, the Dune X installation is described as ‘an interactive landscape of light.’ (http://www.studioroosegaarde.net/project/dune-x/)

In the tunnel, I talk with Christiaan Jansen, the studio’s Head of Design, and he tells me that 41 computers are to be used to run the Dune technology. He is involved in the finishing touches on the installation, and shortly Biennale visitors will be able to activate (through their movements and sound as they walk down the long tunnel) Dune’s lights and sounds, creating ‘a true performance of techno-poetry.’

Daan Roosegaarde, Dune X, 2007–12. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Cockatoo Island. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Moira Roth

For more information on Dune X, see the Biennale website: http://bos18.com/artist?id=93

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #7

Ewa Partum, Prison Courtyard, upper island, 25 June 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

In the early afternoon I watch Ewa Partum (born 1945 in Poland, and now living in Berlin) perform as she scatters letters in the courtyard.

Ewa Partum, Installation Metapoetry “A la recherche du temps perdu” according to Marcel Proust, 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Cockatoo Island. Courtesy the artist.

I watch knowing the magical background of this simple action, a background that is described on Partum’s artist page on the Biennale website: http://bos18.com/artist?id=45

‘The interactive Metapoetry of Polish artist Ewa Partum is based on Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). As Partum selects letters from the book’s pages and enlarges them so as to scatter them around the Prison Courtyard of Cockatoo Island, she encourages passers-by to collect the random letters and to form new words and phrases in an act of ‘linguistic liberation’, giving new meaning and context to the literary work in the present. Together with the artist, visitors can discern a connection in a fluency of words.’

Later I return to the courtyard. The artist is gone, but the letters remain for the visitors to do as they wish with them.

Ewa Partum, Installation Metapoetry “A la recherche du temps perdu” according to Marcel Proust, 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Cockatoo Island. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Moira Roth

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #8

Jananne Al-Ani’s Shadow Sites II, upper island, 25 June 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

I sit in the bleak space of Building #5 with Jananne Al-Ani (born 1966 in Iraq, and now living in England), as we watch her mesmerizing film, Shadow Sites II with its relentless slow imagery and sounds. It stirs up in me so many memories of and questions about wars - from one that I have personally experienced literally overhead (the bombing of London in World War II) to the many wars that have been physically far away from me (among them wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq).

Jananne Al-Ani, Shadow Sites II, 2011. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Cockatoo Island. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Moira Roth

Later in the day, I reread Al-Ani’s powerful artist statement on the Biennale webpage:

http://bos18.com/artist?id=14

My early work focused on orientalist representations of the Middle East in western visual culture and particularly of enduring myths and fantasies surrounding the veil.

Since 2007, I have been developing a new body of work, The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People, which explores the disappearance of the body in the contested and highly charged landscapes of the Middle East. The project includes single screen films Shadow Sites I (2010) and Shadow Sites II (2011).

Frequently depicted as a desert, an exotic place with no history and no population, the Middle Eastern landscape has become familiar to westerners as the blank backdrop to military action. In response to the use of aerial reconnaissance and satellite navigation devices in the 1991 Desert Storm campaign and the 2003 Gulf War, both films adopt the vantage point of such missions, while taking an altogether different viewpoint of the land surveyed. Scanning the surface or burrowing into the earth, the films excavate what cannot otherwise be seen on the ground. Landscapes disappear and reappear as one image slowly dissolves into another, like a mineshaft tunneling deep into a substrate of memories preserved over time.’

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #9

Khadija Baker, upper island, 25 June 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

I continue my slow wanderings on the upper island. I visit the haunting two-room space of Khadija Baker (born 1973 in Syria, and now living in Canada) accompanied by my friend, Maura Reilly, the art historian and curator.

Khadija Baker, Coffin-Nest, 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Cockatoo Island.  Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Sebastian Kriete

In one room is the sculpture of a pregnant woman whose shadow on the floor is made out of white wool.

Khadija Baker, Quand vous réveillez les esprits, 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Cockatoo Island. Courtesy the artist. Photographs: Moira Roth

Maura Reilly and Khadija Baker. Photograph: Moira Roth

In the other room are clothes scattered around the floor. I know that Baker had been inspired to make the first version of the Coffin-Nest (2004) installation, with its scattered clothing, by seeing a documentary about a mass grave exhumation in Iraq. I had read on the Biennale website that its ‘items of clothing were the only means of identifying the dead. Collecting clothes from friends and family in Syria and Montreal, Baker symbolically wove them into a nest-shaped coffin for herself.’

For more information about Khadija Baker and to see a video of her performance, see the Biennale website: http://bos18.com/artist?id=19

Now on Cockatoo Island, the three of us stand talking for a while until we fall silent, listening to the message of the two rooms. Then Baker tells us about the silent performance, that she is about to create for the Biennale.

Postscript, email from Khadija Baker, July 12, 2012

[BECK – I will send these images to you in separate emails. AK]

Khadija Baker, My little voice can’t lie 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) on the Biennale Free Ferry. Courtesy the artist. Photographs: Khadija Baker

‘Through this performance the action of recycling appears, similar to most of my works. In addition to materials, I recycle sound, stories, and feelings. Through this action, I wish to explore the relation between personal and common memory space that is usually accumulated within time, and I work on this shared space of memory that everybody might share. I suppose that connection and communication had already started in the past in many ways before technology, through war, travel, or immigration. However, the way they are translated is through memory, which is more intense now. Common memory is much more present, and sharing it is much faster. As a result, awareness of this memory is more available, and the space of common memory is intensely present.

My little voice can’t lie is a performance based on spoken words, in which I perform a silent moment, where I stand and let people listen to spoken text through my braided hair. After collecting stories of displaced women I wrote a text based on their stories including myself.

I performed on the Biennale Free Ferry, sitting and sharing the story for six days and three hours every day and every time was a different experience; sitting still and statuesque, I awaited listeners to collect part of the experience. Who will choose to take a moment to listen? Do the stories embedded in my hair actually have an impact if nobody listens to them? I had moments when no one would listen, then I was very connected to the surrounding and more aware of what I was holding and the need to be shared increased.’

REFLECTIONS FROM COCKATOO ISLAND #10

Nadia Myre & Convict Precinct, upper island, 25 June 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

I continue to wander through the Convict Precinct, and visit Nadia Myre’s two rooms.

GLEANINGS #25: CECILIA VICUÑA

June 22, 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal, Cockatoo Island

Yesterday I flew into Sydney from California and am now staying on Cockatoo Island in the Sydney Harbour in one of the ‘Heritage Houses’ – temporarily rented by the Biennale for a group of its artists, who are exhibiting on the Island.

For the last few weeks, Cecilia Vicuña has been staying here too. When I arrived, we immediately fell into a series of rich and complex conversations, and also made several visits to her Quipu Austral installation that is housed nearby.

Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Austral, June 22, 2012. Photograph: Moira Roth

Cecilia Vicuña in her Quipu Austral, June 22, 2012. Photograph: Moira Roth

Fascinated with her art and life practices, I have suggested to Cecilia that we take the ferry from Cockatoo Island to the nearby Sydney suburb of Balmain, and find a comfortable Internet café or shop in which to sit and conduct a Gleanings exchange based on our conversations and visits to her installation, while these are fresh in our memories.

June 23, 2012 - Email exchange between Cecilia Vicuña and Moira Roth, Balmain Convenience Store

Moira Roth

Let’s begin with a factual description of your Quipu Austral installation on Cockatoo Island.

Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Austral, 2012 (detail). Photograph: Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña

The installation is on the south-east corner of the upper island and faces the sunrise. It is on the top floor of Building 19, a dilapidated timber drying facility, with no walls, that was used during the Island’s shipyard building era. It is composed of two elements: unspun wool tied to the cross beams in ‘quipu’ knots and a sound recording of my voice chanting my poems, coming out of four loudspeakers placed on the high cross beams.

Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Austral, 2012 (detail). Photograph: Moira Roth

Moira Roth:
Perhaps an impossible question, but what were your intentions in making it?

Cecilia Vicuña

I intend it as a prayer for the union of the world, emerging from the commonality of world views of the ancient peoples of South America and Australia who created societies based on the beauty of exchange, in other words relationships based on equality and freedom. In 2011 I commissioned a wool producer from Tasmania to prepare the long unspun streams - which vary from five to two metres long - of sheep’s wool, dyed to my specifications. The colours were inspired by the palette in Aboriginal paintings and range from pale yellows to the colour of red earth.

Moira Roth

How does it connect with your past work?

Cecilia Vicuña

I began making these ‘quipu’ knots as a teenager living in Chile.

‘Quipus’ are a system of ‘writing’ with knots and coloured threads that was created in the Andes, more than 5,000 years ago, (which makes them perhaps older than writing). It was in use until the Spanish Conquest of South America in the 15th century. Soon after, it was abolished. So, for me, it was an act of rebellion to begin again the process of speaking through the threads. I felt passionate about ancient art around the world, especially admiring the rock paintings of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, which is some of the oldest art on earth.

I called my Cockatoo Island installation Quipu Austral to emphasize the connectedness between the arts of the Southern Hemisphere, which share a metaphysical orientation.

The quipu had a virtual counterpart: the ‘ceqe’ which means line in Quechua, an Andean language. It was a concept connecting all communities to the sacred sites in the land, usually water. I was struck by the parallels between the ‘ceqe’ and the Dreamtime songlines of the Aboriginal Australians. Both these oral traditions imply an ethical and aesthetic way of being that sustains the fertility of the land. As we are now pushing the earth to a very dangerous unsustainability, it is time for us to hear the ancient voices in a new way.

Moira Roth

Could you expand on this a little in terms of the theme of the 18th Biennale of Sydney: ‘all our relations.’

Cecilia Vicuña

For me, it was like a dream come true to be part of an exhibition with such a name!

I have written many times before that all people cared for around the world were to be treated right. Everybody wants to have beautiful, fair relationships with each other and this should be the basis of all exchanges. If art is understood as an expression of this deep desire, it can become again, as it was in the past, an ethical model, a place for reflection.

Moira Roth

And another question relating to this is I am curious to know a little about your connections with Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, the Biennale’s two curators. When and how did you meet them?

Cecilia Vicuña

I met Catherine de Zegher in l990, when she was part of a group of curators-explorers from Belgium who travelled around Latin America searching for its hidden arts. They created an exhibition, America, The Bride of the Sun, in Belgium in l992, focusing on the relationships between the arts of Europe and the Americas after the ‘Spanish Conquest’. I was included in that exhibition and shortly after that Catherine wrote a book about my work.

I first knew Gerald McMaster as an artist, and then later heard from Catherine that they were working together as co-curators on the Biennale project. He came to my studio in New York in 2011 and we had an extraordinary conversation about the quipu and its implications. Both he and Catherine felt my work ‘belonged’ to the exhibition, as I had been exploring the concept of the ‘quipu’ for over 40 years.

My ‘quipu’ is a poem in space, unlike any ‘quipu’ that existed before. It is constructed with unspun wool which symbolises the ‘not yet’ state from which everything is born. When people walk through it, they themselves become the ‘knots’, the carriers of memory.

Moira Roth

I was so struck by the unpredictable impact of wind and light in Quipu Austral as I stood in the space yesterday.

Moira Roth in Cecilia Vicuña’s Quipu Austral, June, 2012. Photograph: Cecilia Vicuña

I kept imagining how the installation would look in different times of the day and night, in sunlight or rain, or if there were harsh winds sweeping through those long hanging wool threads.

Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Austral, 2012 (detail). Photograph: Moira Roth

Cecilia Vicuña

The wind and sunlight move through the installation interacting with the unspun threads. As the piece is slowly destroyed by the elements, the prayer is activated. This is why it is a participatory piece. There is no outside or inside, but rather all is intertwined in a constant exchange. For example, when we first installed the threads a violent southerly wind came, pulling fragments of wool onto the floor and thus creating new patterns. This was not planned, but it greatly increased the beauty and power of the piece.

Moira Roth

As you know, I was alone in the space for over an hour, and so I was able to listen to the whole of the 45-minute sound recording. Tell me a little about how that was made. I know you worked in collaboration with your friend, José Pérez de Arce, the Chilean musician-musicologist, and that you made the recording together when you visited Chile earlier this year.

Cecilia Vicuña

In January, while I was in Chile, I asked José Pérez de Arce to record me as I chanted and improvised sounds that spoke to water and threads. In the Andes, thread is a metaphor for water, the thread of life. The sources of fresh water are drying up all over the world, therefore the ‘Quipu Austral’ prayer. I also asked José to include his voice, responding to my chant, and ambient soundscapes of Chile.

Moira Roth

As we draw to the end of this rather magical and intense Gleanings exchange – sitting at our adjacent computers in this Balmain Convenience Store – I keep thinking of the different times and the different contexts and places in which we have seen one another since we first met in the 1980s in the USA.

Cecilia Vicuña, Balmain, June 23, 2012. Photograph: Moira Roth

We have mutual friends (ranging from Catherine de Zegher to the poet Jerome Rothenberg) and overlapping interests and passions. From the start, I have always admired the ease with which you move in so many different circles (art and poetry and song) and spaces, including now living in New York City (since 1980) and yet maintaining such close ties to Chile (where you were born in 1948 in Santiago).

Yesterday, sitting in the kitchen of the Heritage House on Cockatoo Island, we talked about your family background in Chile, about the fact that both your mother and grandmother sang, about your grandfather, the brave lawyer, and about your early adult life that involved living in the UK, where you had not only your first solo show in Europe in 1973, but were also the inspiration for that extraordinary ‘Festival for Democracy in Chile’ in 1974, held at London’s Royal College of Art.

Can you tell me a little more about your early encounters with art in Chile.

Cecilia Vicuña:
I grew up in a very traditional family of artists of mixed European and Andean ancestry. Our home was filled with books in many languages and fantastic art books and encyclopedias which I devoured. My education was thoroughly European, but there was another side to the story.

I felt that even the European side of my family had become attuned to the Andes, after being there since the 17th century. As a result I read the European avant-garde, especially Dada and Surrealism, as a confirmation of the power of poetry to reconnect people to the ancient memories of the land. As an artist-poet I began working in Chile in the mid l960’s, creating precarious works on the beach that disappeared with high tide, under the combined influence of the Andes and Dada.

June 30, 2012 – Moira Roth’s journal, Cockatoo Island

I am still in a daze from the afternoon’s performance presented jointly by Cecilia Vicuña and Alec Finlay, another Biennale artist-poet, who is also staying on Cockatoo Island. At the beginning, Vicuña sat silently in the back of the audience while Finlay spoke, and then she began to chant (something she learned to do in Chile in her late thirties, suddenly and unexpectedly). Slowly she moved to the front, and – after wrapping strains of wool around the audience – she and Finlay conducted a haunting back-and-forth series of exchanges.

July 25, 2012 – Moira Roth’s journal, Berkeley, California

I returned to California from Australia on July 7, and since then have been, almost obsessively, reflecting on the Biennale of Sydney and its personal, as well as artistic and political impact on me. Among my most vivid memories are those about Vicuña – seeing her art, listening to her voice and talking with her.

Today, holding strains of wool that she gave me as a present while we were in Australia – I sit at home at my computer, watching Cecilia Vicuña perform in a 2010 video (recorded at the Native Spirit Festival, held at Amnesty International in London) that I have just found on the Internet.

As I listen to her voice, I keep musing on her wise advice to us that ‘as we are now pushing the earth to a very dangerous unsustainability, it is time for us to hear the ancient voices in a new way.’

SHARE |

19 Aug 2012

GLEANINGS #24: JUDITH WRIGHT

5 June 2012 – Moira Roth’s journal

Judith Wright and I have set aside time for our Gleanings’ exchange tomorrow and so I have spent today immersed in her world, trying to understand the mysterious and beautiful work that she is to show in the Biennale.

The overall beauty – together with its complexity – of her work obviously attracts beautiful and complex responses by critics, witness the rich collection of texts about her (for example, Michael Wardell’s ‘Judith Wright: An Alchemical Journey’ and Suhanya Raffel’s ‘One Dances’) on the artist’s website, an excellent overall source: http://www.judith-wright.com/welcome.html

On the Biennale of Sydney website, I read that:

Judith Wright came to her career as a visual artist from a background in dance, having performed with the Australian Ballet. Her work encompasses video, installation, painting and works on paper, and is often stark and minimalist in appearance. Wright’s imagery is personal rather than cultural. She employs a few selected symbols, which are used and reused. Closed and open forms reference landscape as well as female and male identities. Hands, feet, shoes, torsos and heads – the body is perennially cited. Over her career, an iconographic evolution has taken place, granting these body signs greater realism in the videos and abstracting them in the paintings. This reference is unavoidable, says Wright, ‘our body is the vehicle with which we travel through life’. The power of Wright’s work derives from the psychologically charged projections of inner self.

Read more here: http://bos18.com/artist?id=96

I play over and over again a short clip of a poignant and mysterious scene of a hand slowly caressing and turning a sculptured head. It is from The Stager, one of the three videos that Wright is showing on Cockatoo Island.

http://www.videoartchive.org.au/jwright/giftstager.html

Puzzling over its meaning, I find a partial answer in curator Rachel Kent’s insightful description:

Wright’s most recent video The Stager (2008) presents Dame Margaret Scott alone on an empty spot-lit stage at the National Theatre, caressing the mannequin with a tenderness that is improvised yet theatrical. The elderly woman communicates silently through touch and smile; and as the curtain slowly descends, both figures sit hand-in-hand in matching red costumes. Living and lifelike, ageing and timeless, they capture the frailty of human existence and inevitability of death. A cycle is completed through this work, and time moves on.

http://www.grantpirrie.com/content/gallery1/73/catalogue/GRANTPIRRIE_Wright_AContinuingFable.pdf

Judith Wright , The Stager, 2008. Courtesy the artist; Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne; Jan Manton Art, Brisbane; JENSEN, Sydney; and FOX/JENSEN, Auckland. Photograph: Peter Wright

6 June 2012 – Email exchange between Judith Wright and Moira Roth

Moira Roth

I keep thinking about your work in the Biennale – seeing it literally and metaphorically like a ‘journey’ that will take us (your audience) by ferry from the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s installation, A Journey, to Cockatoo Island, where three of the videos from your ‘Seven Stages of Desire’ series are shown, including The Stager.

I am intrigued by the description of your work’s ‘journey’ that I find in Catherine de Zegher’s Biennale essay: ‘…a journey through the underworld, with a little girl leading the procession, and the band of characters following her could be many: travellers, refugees, immigrants, as we are in a strange land.’

Could we start now with The Stager video?

Judith Wright

The sculpture in The Stager is a found object – she is a French antique artist’s model that I bought in Sydney, and I had used her earlier in One Dances with my son Luke, and Between with my friends Janet Vernon and Graeme Murphy (with whom I have studied and worked). In a sense she represents the child. The Stager video is set on a stage and is – roughly speaking – the teacher giving the mannequin a lesson – on movement, on life.

The ‘Seven Stages of Desire’ videos created over the course of seven years (2003–10) are about the imagined life of a lost child. In these, I have involved two of my three sons, both behind the camera and in front of it, together with friends and people I worked with in my earlier career as a ballet dancer.

Moira Roth

And how does this video series link to your two recent figurative installations, both made in 2011: A Journey (to be shown at the Biennale) and A wake (currently showing at GOMA, Brisbane)?

Judith Wright, A Journey, 2011. Courtesy the artist; Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne; Jan Manton Art, Brisbane; JENSEN, Sydney; and FOX/JENSEN, Auckland.

Judith Wright, A wake, 2011 (installation view). Courtesy the artist; Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne; Jan Manton Art, Brisbane; JENSEN, Sydney; and FOX/JENSEN, Auckland

On the Internet, I found a tiny video in which you talk with mesmerizing clarity about A wake

Watch online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PDw1lu56BE

The idea of A wake comes from a couple of different sources. It is the imagined life of a lost child, that is my entry point … this is just my way of making real some kind of content that is important to me … A wake, a celebration of that life. It is the moment before the music begins. I have collected over time old musical instruments. I am not interested in what they can do, but in what they used to … in the fact that they are now silent, but have this implied memory. I find that fascinating … Two specific myths, Plato’s myth of the cave, and Pliny the Elder’s interest in shadows … allowing/inferring another reality – taking one away from the here-and-now into somewhere else.

What is the history of the evolution of these two figurative installations, and their relationship to one another? Can visitors wander around within the installation? What sort of lighting did you choose?

Judith Wright

In 2010 I was awarded a fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts and began to study the works of Plato and Pliny the Elder. I was particularly interested in Pliny’s myth of the origins of art, and Plato’s myth of knowledge - the allegory of the cave and how both deal with shadow. For me the idea of shadow, though originating in a real presence, transcends that reality to allow an alternate reading – a doubling – an absence.

The shadows are of vital importance in both installations. It was the shadows in the myth of the cave and the shadow being drawn on the wall in the room of the Corinth potter’s home that led me to the understanding of the shadow as absence and its affinity with silence. This was the beginning for these figurative installations.

I started by making small hand-sized objects out of Plasticine (a brand of modeling clay) and had them cast in bronze - the tactile quality and scale of these are important. I called them ‘Propositions’ and they were installed on a bench and lit theatrically. Over time the scale, however, has shifted a great deal.

The objects in A Journey and A wake are now life-size – I have used some of the mannequins that previously featured in the videos. A wake is installed on a stage, so it can only be viewed from the front at the moment before sound begins. Audience members cannot touch the instruments, although they will be able to walk down each side of A Journey but not through it. In both installations the lighting will be theatrical with strong shadows, spotlit from the floor and above in a darkened room.

I had most of the instruments for A wake already and some of the mannequins and masks, so it was only a matter of putting them together! Mostly I had to hunt about, however, for the objects for A Journey.

Moira Roth

Do you have a studio at home? And where did you make your videos? Do you have plans for more?

Judith Wright

I have a studio under my house. The videos have been made all over the place – for instance, I did an earlier series in India, Japan, Germany and New York: a ‘veil’ series in which I covered the camera lense with fabric bought on site and pertaining to the video’s content.

Watch online: http://www.videoartchive.org.au/jwright/veil.html

I made the first of this ‘Veil’ series in Calcutta in 1996 (the context was an artist’s exchange project where an Australian artist was paired with an Indian artist). I covered the camera’s lense with a red sari and walked through the streets of Calcutta, so the camera sometimes focused on the fabric and sometimes on the landscape. At the time I was thinking that as a tourist in a foreign country one sometimes thinks one understands and sometimes does not. The second ‘Veil’ series (1998) was made in Frankfurt: in a church (cover mantilla) and a red light district (black lace). Veil 111 was shot in Tokyo: a shopping mall (scarf bought on location) and during a holiday celebration (child’s plastic balloon). And I shot Veil lV in the subway in New York (with a scarf bought on the street).

No, I don’t have plans for any more videos at the moment, but I am making the third and possibly last figurative installation. It is called Destination (working title).

Moira Roth

On the Biennale of Sydney website, there is an interesting description of ‘Possible Composition’ – the loose ‘theme’ chosen by Gerald McMaster and Catherine de Zegher for the Biennale artists whose work will be shown in the MCA: ‘…artists who have made works by bringing together disparate elements, or reassembling disjointed parts, to create a new heterogeneous whole from what was broken and scattered. Where there has been separation and fragmentation in all aspects of life, there is now a profound desire for composing and recomposing together’.

Does this description feel the right one to you for A Journey?

Judith Wright

Yes, I think it describes A Journey very well.

Judith Wright installing A Journey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, June 2012

SHARE |

19 Aug 2012

GLEANINGS #23: ZOE KERAMEA

30 May 2012 – Moira Roth’s Journal

Born in 1955 in Athens, Greece, Zoe Keramea now lives and works in Athens and New York City.

Browsing through the rich material of her elegantly designed website www.zoekeramea.com, I sense the complexity of her work with its wide range of media (sculpture, prints, drawings, ceramics and artists’ books) and their multiple sites that transform their meanings.

I keep returning, for example, to her love of the ‘ringknot’ pattern. In 1994 she first wove The Beginning and the End – A Ringknot on the beach of Agriolivadi on Patmos, a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea.

http://www.zoekeramea.com/main/the-beginning-and-the-end-a-ringknot-1994

Zoe Keramea, The Beginning and the End - A Ringknot, 1994, manila rope, 300 cm in diameter. Courtesy the artist

In 2006, just over ten years later, she was invited to create a second much larger one, with the collaboration of the public, in a huge outdoor performance festival (‘The Big Draw’) in the metropolitan art centre, that of New York City, which later ended up displayed in a gallery.

Zoe Keramea, The making of Ringknot - A Woven Line at South Street Seaport in New York, September 2006. Courtesy the artist

Zoe Keramea, Ringknot - A Woven Line, 2006, manila rope, 700 cm in diameter. Courtesy the artist

Zoe Keramea, Ringknot – A Woven Line at Milk Gallery, New York, November 2006, manila rope, 700 cm in diameter. Courtesy the artist

Email Exchange between Zoe Keramea and Moira Roth, 31 May – 5 June, 2012

Moira Roth

In my October 2011 exchange with Catherine de Zegher (Gleanings, #4), we talked about her concept of the Moebius Strip as a ‘model for experiencing the unfolding of the Biennale’ in its various sites.

Image courtesy Paul Bourke (http://paulbourke.net/)

She explained then that you ‘will be developing a virtual journey online for the Biennale. It will allow us to see the pathway linking all the venues of the Biennale’.

And there you are with your Journey Lines that has been part of the Biennale’s ‘creative’ campaign; always present and always changing.

Journey Lines by Zoe Keramea as part of the 18th Biennale of Sydney creative campaign.

For months I have looked at it daily, admiring its mysterious twisting-and-turning lines drawn in four colours (to correspond to the four main venues of the exhibition), a mysterious journey line that rotates and loops upon itself – rather than having a clear beginning and end.

Zoe Keramea

When we walk we create a line, a path in space, a journey in time and space.

This journey can be a knotted path that intersects with others, a ‘journey line’.

We can view a moebius as a journey line as well.

If you start drawing a line on a moebius strip, you will realise that you return to the point you started from. The two surfaces of the paper are shown to be one. In other words, what seemed to be a linear journey is a journey in space without beginning and without end.

In 1994 I did a series of graphite drawings, ‘Knots I – X,’ that were very long and narrow like pillars. Each drawing is included in the next one and intertwined with it in a mental space created for the drawing.

Zoe Keramea, Knots II, IV, VI, VIII, X, 1994, graphite on paper, each 244 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy the artist

It is not a representation of real space, but an illusion of it. There is tangling, looping, knotting, mirroring, superimposing, intertwining – all on an underlying structure of carefully worked out ratios and movements, like a musical phrase and its restatement with something added to it.

Catherine de Zegher had chosen five of these drawings for inclusion in ‘Geometry of Paradox,’ my show that she curated at the Drawing Center in New York in 2005, and a detail of Knots X was printed on the exhibition invitation.

Zoe Keramea, Knots X, 1994 (detail), graphite on paper. Courtesy the artist

In the Drawing Center exhibition, the Knots were in black and white, not in colour, but for the Biennale journey line they needed adjustments in order both to function in colour and as a graphic image.

When the Biennale and the designers at Collider asked for one particular detail from Knots for their ‘creative’ campaign, I had to draw out from the old work a new one. I had to adjust the weight and balance that colour would give to the composition in such a way that it could be rotated into different positions.

I thought the lines should represent the different pathways, one for each venue of the Biennale with an individual colour code. The continuation of colour on each line had to be clarified in four different drawings, with the lines separated to reduce the positional ambiguity in the final colouring.

Zoe Keramea, Journey Lines, 2012, graphite on paper, 45 x 36 cm. Courtesy the artist

Zoe Keramea, Line 1 of Journey Lines, 2012, graphite on paper. Courtesy the artist

Zoe Keramea, Line 2 of Journey Lines, 2012, graphite on paper. Courtesy the artist

Zoe Keramea, Line 3 of Journey Lines, 2012, graphite on paper. Courtesy the artist

Zoe Keramea, Line 4 of Journey Lines, 2012, graphite on paper. Courtesy the artist

Zoe Keramea, Journey Lines, 2012. Rough sketch for colour indication. Courtesy the artist

The intertwining and knotting suggest the way our individual encounters with art and each other set us off in new directions.

Moira Roth

When did you meet Catherine de Zegher?

Zoe Keramea

I first met her when she came to my studio in New York, after a postcard depicting the detail of my sculpture Rolling Column had come to her attention.

I was fascinated, however, with her work before we actually met – with the very particular and original way Catherine curated and installed her shows at the Drawing Center in New York.

She suggested, for example, that in my 2005 show one of the three walls in the gallery be painted black. A radical choice, which pulled the space together and really brought out not only the five long drawings but the rest of the works as well.

Installation of ‘Zoe Keramea: Geometry of Paradox’, The Drawing Center, New York, 2005. Courtesy the artist

I found out at this time that our journey lines had somehow intertwined earlier in life – before we met – as she came south from Northern Europe and at the same time I went north from the southern part of the continent. She to spend time as a student of archaeology with the ‘Belgian Archaeological Mission in Greece’ at Thorikos, in Lavrio, outside of Athens – one of my favourite ancient sites – while I went from Athens to Berlin where I studied at the School of Arts (Universität der Künste).

Moira Roth

I see that for the Biennale exhibition you will be showing a selection from the series ‘Moths’ together with your work Nine Blocks at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

I read in an online description of Nine Blocks that these are nine cubes and that each of the wooden blocks is inscribed with a painted black ribbon on the surface. ‘The idea is that viewers are encouraged to arrange the blocks in order to attempt to create a continuous line’.

Can you tell me what inspired you to make these, and how often have they been shown? What reactions do you get from viewers? Do people wait in line to play? Does a wall label give viewers guidelines?

Zoe Keramea

The Nine Blocks will be displayed on the MCA floor. They are quite sturdy and the public is invited to move them around and play with them. They are like children’s building blocks, but many times that size. It is a work that can be transformed constantly by the public.

The viewer is invited to rearrange them in any constellation, trying always to have a continuous line on all their visible surfaces, but with absolutely no suggestion or necessity of a particular arrangement.

Players are not bound by any particular set of rules, and they can make their own up as they go along. They can discover numberless individual solutions. Several players may collaborate.

I first showed the Nine Blocks for three months in 2008, at a small lobby gallery in New York City’s Tribeca. People interacted with the blocks at the opening night and throughout the time they were on display. Adults were intrigued as well as children.

There was a simple sign by the Blocks saying: ‘You are invited to gently rearrange the Nine Blocks to connect as many strands of ribbon as possible’. People did not wait in line to play, but rather surrounded the work watching until there was an opening.

And here, to give you a sense of their scale, is a photo of myself carefully rearranging the Nine Blocks on a loading dock in Tribeca.

Zoe Keramea and Nine Blocks, 2008. Courtesy the artist

Moira Roth

And the ‘Moth’ series of 2009?

See more here: http://www.zoekeramea.com/main/moth-i-2009

Zoe Keramea with White Moth, 2012. Courtesy the artist

Moths are emblems of transformation from the earthbound to the ethereal. They are very fragile creatures as perhaps we are.

They are nocturnal insects drawn to the light.

In Greek we call a moth a ‘psyche’, which means ‘soul.’ The word is personified in the ancient Greek myth of Eros and Psyche.

The transformation (metamorphosis) in these works is also literal as they pass from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional existence. Surface is turned into space. A flat strip of paper is enfolded into a hexahedron (triangular dipyramid) and joined to hundreds of others with thread to become a ‘Moth’. The ‘Moth’ itself can be folded inward as it has now become a flexible structure, which can exist in any number of different states.

Zoe Keramea, White Ribboned Moth (two states), 2011, hand-folded Aqaba paper and thread, 39.5 x 59 - 18 cm (variable) x 15 - 3 cm (variable). Courtesy the artist

The ‘Moths’ are labour-intensive to make but they are delicate and extremely lightweight. They are named after the real moths they faintly resemble. I have been working on modular sculptures made out of stainless steel wire-cloth and paper since 1997.

Moira Roth

What draws you to these ongoing concerns and subjects of lines, space, geometry, constructions, and interactive components?

Zoe Keramea

It was my early training in music that made me aware of line: line in space, exercises in mind space, proportions and relationships between objects and shapes, juxtapositions and dreaming about it all.

Also my printmaking training and the long experimenting with intaglio techniques led me to explore ways to enfold the surface and to try to create the illusion of a more dimensional space.

Dissatisfied with the boundaries of the plate surface (a kind of proscenium arch around the image), I tried to lead the composition outside this image with the series christened ‘zoetypes’ by my art publisher in NY in 1992.

The etched surface is transformed into line and seems free to swoop around and even behind a printed plate: http://www.zoekeramea.com/main/large-zoetypes-details-1991

In the interactive works and games, time and a multiplicity of possible states and solutions become increasingly important to me (see: Twisted, limited editions, scroll drawings, leporello books, Nine Blocks, etc. on my website http://www.zoekeramea.com/main/).

The multiplicity of states and interactivity are seen in the App for the iPhone and iPad, Mandala Memory, as well: http://www.zoekeramea.com/main/component/content/article/149-mandala-memory

And now, let me suggest a Heraklitus quote to end our Gleanings exchange with:

‘The hidden harmony is stronger than the visible.’

SHARE |

19 Aug 2012

SHARE |

31 Jul 2012

GLEANINGS #22: PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT

3 June, 2012 – Email from Moira Roth to Phaptawan Suwannakudt

Yesterday I spent an intense, fascinating and very productive day researching your work and life on the Internet and printing out various texts and lists.

You were born in 1959 in Bangkok, and your father, Paibon Suwannakudt (Tan Kudt) was not only a famous muralist, but also a dancer, choreographer and writer.

http://www.anu.edu.au/culture/abstractions/artists/essays/phaptawan.pdf

I grew up and spent part of my childhood with my brothers and sisters in a Buddhist temple in Thailand in which my father conducted his mural painting projects. My father worked for the temple voluntarily and in return he got free lodging and food for his team and for his own children. Although training the new generation was part of my father’s practice he never trained his own children.

It was during the few last years of my father’s life, when he was terminally ill, that he started including us in his team. In 1982 my father died. I took over the team and carried out mural projects in Buddhist temples and hotel spaces throughout Thailand for the next fifteen years.

- Phaptawan Suwannakudt

I try to imagine what an overwhelming undertaking this must have been for you, beginning at age twenty-two, to run the Tan Kudt Group and design and supervise the mural paintings with teams of six to ten artists.

I also try to imagine the rare situation of being a woman in this, as you explain in your 2005 MA thesis text that traditionally all Thai mural artists were men. Most monks started as novices in childhood and learned to read the Pali text in preparation to becoming monks at twenty. Artists were supposed to be able to read and have a thorough knowledge in Buddhism.

http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/1101/2/02whole.pdf

There is no evidence that women got involved in temple painting. A girl can neither become a novice nor can she get ordained as a monk. In fact a girl cannot be part of a temple whatsoever. Until the establishment of modern education around the 1860s, girls were excluded from the school system, which was temple-based … When my father passed away, I contradicted the tradition by becoming one of the first women to paint Thai temple murals.

Wat Srikhomkam 1990, Payao, Thailand. Photograph: John Clark

Wat Jaksa Patararam, 1992–3, Uthaitanee, Thailand

I read with great admiration, but not surprise that in 1997 you co-founded Womanifesto, a series of bi-annual activities in Bangkok in which international woman artists were invited to participate. In this first Womanifesto show, five Thai woman artists and writers exhibited their work at the Concrete House Art Centre, an NGO activist group in Northern Bangkok which worked with prostitutes and AIDS victims.

http://www.womanifesto.com/about

(I also note that your participation in the 2008 Womanifesto International Residency was the first time you had created studio work in Thailand since you had left the country.)

What a transformation it must have been thus for you to come to Australia in 1996, to work alone, and with small canvases not huge murals and with a more personal iconography.

You continued, however, to be highly active as an artist, exhibiting extensively, as well as working on your 2005 MA from the University of Sydney – producing a thesis in which you intriguingly analyze your own work, and place it in the context of Australian art history.

http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/1101/2/02whole.pdf

Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Under the Lotus Shelter, 2001

Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Walking Home at Dust, 2001

Phaptawan Suwannakudt, ‘The Elephant and the Bush’ series, 2003

Phaptawan Suwannakudt, An Elephant Journey, 2005

3–4 June, 2012 – Email exchange between Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Moira Roth

Moira Roth

I suggest that we now jump to the present and discuss Not for Sure, which you have just completed for the Biennale. In your artist’s statement on the Biennale website, you discuss this project, and how it relates to the 18th Biennale’s theme of ‘all our relations.’

After fifteen years as a Thai mural painter, I left Bangkok to come to Sydney in 1996. Here, people asked about my origin: ‘tell me where you come from, so I can understand you’. If I went back, they stated: ‘you don’t understand us, since you no longer live here’. The dialogue presented in the group of works Not for Sure starts here.

It explores how humans connect by the process of writing text onto fabric paper made from Thai plants and herbs. The texts include excerpts from Thai books. These stories are written on top of each other … It creates layers that make the context illegible … The illegible context further challenges the human need to discover and to relate. These texts cannot be decoded in a narrative form, rendering their presence anonymous and unknown. The process of writing by hand and the selection of books suggest personal concerns. – Phaptawan Suwannakudt

Read more here: http://bos18.com/artist?id=110Phaptawan Suwannakudt

This Biennale artist’s statement is an outcome of many conversations with Catherine de Zegher regarding how we relate to people and the world we live in. I find Catherine and I relate to things in life with common concerns of feeling and compassion. My process of physical marking while writing text, concealing (by illegible context) and revealing personal context (the language I use) at the same time represents the relation we all make contact (physically and mentally) to others.

Not for Sure consists of four freestanding wall pieces, composed of collage on open cardboard boxes and eight hanging scrolls, made out of paper, architect-drafting film, fabric and silk. When hung, the scrolls can be seen from either side, which creates the effect of semi–transparency. I began to make these in October of 2011, and they are now waiting in my studio to be picked up next week.

Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Not for Sure, 2012 (details)

Moira Roth

What inspired you to give this project the title of Not for Sure?

Phaptawan Suwannakudt

Not for Sure is the English translation of the title of two talks by the Venerable Monk Ajahn Chah Subhaddo (1918–92), the founder of Theravada Buddhism, whom I was introduced to by my father when I was 19 years old.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai/chah/not_for_sure.html

In these texts he explains how unsettling the ‘mind’ can be and how to deal with it. The ‘mind’ can wander off, bring both expectations and disappointments.

This is my interpretation of Ajahn Chah’s teachings: how you can devalue un-useful thinking by not becoming attached to it.

The focus in my studio practice in recent years has shifted toward materialising the notion of ‘being conscious of what your mind is doing.’ To do this, painting is not a painting of a subject, drawing is not a drawing of a subject, making is not making an object. It is rather the process of making things that you are reacting to, responding to what arrives in your ‘mind.’ My artwork now identifies a message I have to communicate.

Communications need a receiving end.

Not for Sure is what I propose to my audiences and I expect responses from them. I want to open room for conversation through the embedded texts of Ajahn Chan’s Not for Sure, and the two others that I selected, which are both by Kularb Saipradit (1905–74).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulap_Saipradit

Kularb was among the first Thai students to study at Melbourne University in 1949. After his return from Melbourne, he worked as a journalist in Thailand, then was imprisoned for five years, and died sixteen years later in Beijing as a political exile.

In As I have witnessed, a collection of Kularb’s essays, he compares Thai and Australian cultures, and his short novel, Till We Meet Again, is about a Thai man living in Australia.

These two books by Kularb and Ajahn Chah’s Not for Sure reflect my own experience inside and outside the culture I came from. In my Not for Sure project I intended for the context and the process alike to explore the sense of being in the in-between space and the in-between time.

Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Not for Sure, 2012 (detail)

Moira Roth

What happened during the process of actually creating the work?

Phaptawan Suwannakudt

It began with my reading these texts, and then selecting from them, sentence-by-sentence, ones to copy.

However daily life fed into the process as time progressed.

For example, I was working in a studio away from home when there was an unexpected gusty wind followed by a brief rainfall. I noticed the splashed watermarks on the paper scroll I was working on, made from the rain, which had forced its way up underneath the joint gable roof of the studio.

Incidentally I was in the middle of several phone calls with my family in Thailand, who were dealing with the devastating flood there. I was informed that my work (installed in a gallery in Bangkok) was threatened, and that there were no plans for evacuation in the senior home in which my ailing mother lived.

I climbed up and poured masking fluid from the top of a scroll to run down to the bottom, creating tracks to resembling the marks, which could have been made of rain leaking from the roof. Then I wrote the text on top of this in several layers in order to conceal the tracks only to be exposed after the writing on the surface was completed. After this I started pulling threads out of a fabric scroll, creating a gap through which I slotted a printed picture with a written text on the back.

Moira Roth

Do you have any last reflections about Not for Sure, now that you have completed it? Do you speculate about possible responses and questions about it when it is exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia?

Phaptawan Suwannakudt

This is a good question although I always treat my complete work as a starting point for another journey. Once I deliver an artwork it does not belong to me. It may be a footprint, which made its mark, and I have needed this one step to make another step.

But to answer your question more specifically!

I speculate responses and questions would be about the material I used. Why the choice of these books? Why Thai language? Normal questions. I anticipate the Not for Sure audience will go on the journey with me – not me as a person but as fellow travellers in the same space and with whom they have something to share. However what I usually find at such events is that everyone is always quiet. Not that the message has not been received, but I think people who have viewed the work and listened to my thoughts are then left with a kind of contemplation of their own journey.

SHARE |

25 Jul 2012

GLEANINGS # 21, Part 2: EVERLYN NICODEMUS

Email Exchange between Everlyn Nicodemus and Moira Roth, 24–25 May, 2012

Moira Roth

In 2001 you wrote a much-acclaimed essay, ‘Modernity as a Mad Dog: On Art and Trauma’; in 2004 you exhibited Reference Scroll on Genocide, Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing in Brussels for the first time; and in 2007 you exhibited this work, together with the ‘Bystander on Probation’ series, in the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendall in Northern England.

Everlyn Nicodemus, Reference Scroll on Genocide, Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing, 2004 (installation view at C. C. Strombeek, Brussels, Belgium), stitched linen columns with digitally printed texts, 1600 x 147 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Isabelle Pateer

Could you tell us (myself and readers of these Gleanings) a little about what it is like to go back and forth as an artist and a theorist in the context of the evolution of the ‘Bystander on Probation’ series?

Perhaps we could begin with your Reference Scroll on Genocide, Massacre and Ethnic Cleansing (2004)?

In your online dissertation (in a footnote to chapter 4, ‘Extending Trauma Studies As Visual Arts Practice’), you describe this huge scroll of printed text.

The title is printed at the beginning of the scroll with the following presentation: ‘Visual presence of human memories and traumas.’ Where not otherwise noted, my source has been The Encyclopedia of Genocide, editor Israel W. Charny, whom I thank for his support.

Everlyn Nicodemus, Reference Scroll on Genocide, Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing, 2004 (detail), stitched linen columns with digitally printed texts, 1600 x 147 cm. Courtesy the artist.

It was exhibited at C. C. Strombeek, Brussels, at 198 Gallery in Brixton and at the Brewery Art Centre in Kendal, where the exhibition that was built around it had as title and theme ‘Bystander on Probation’ referring to the ethical problem of passively witnessing atrocities, something that with modern global media is becoming the problem of everybody.

Everlyn Nicodemus

Here is a photograph of visitors studying Reference Scroll in Brixton (in the exhibition I also had a digital projection so that visitors could read the texts on a screen with a sound composition).

Viewers studying Everlyn Nicodemus’ Reference Scroll of Genocide, Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing, 2006, 198 Gallery, Brixton, England, 2006. Photograph: 198 Gallery.

Moira Roth

How did you come upon the idea of making this huge 16 metre long scroll with its texts drawn from Israel W. Charny’s two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide (1999)?

Everlyn Nicodemus

The Reference Scroll on Genocide, Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing established the context and final interpretation of the Bystander figure. The scroll is indeed a main part of the history of the Bystander series, but I am not sure that it really started with Charny’s genocide study.

What happened was that I was in the midst of preparing a major exhibition (‘Crossing the Void’) in Brussels that was going to summarise my artistic and theoretical research into psychological trauma. By 2004 I had already written several relevant texts (for example, you mentioned my ‘Modernity as a Mad Dog’ study), and created works of art such as Birth Mask.

Everlyn Nicodemus, Birth Mask 3, 2002, assemblage with Bedouin dress, metal netting and sisal on canvas. Courtesy the artist

And I was planning a video on post-traumatic stress disorder to be called Beyond Depiction.

All this was based on my own personal experience of being traumatised through persecution and harassments as a black artist in the European diaspora. This tended, however, to make the exhibition self-centred in a way I did not intend. The question was: how to introduce a wider perspective?

It was then that I happened to read a review of the Encyclopedia of Genocide.

What! An encyclopedia, not a pamphlet?

I ordered it, read it, and decided to use its knowledge to widen the concept of my exhibition.

The rest is history.

I wrote to Professor Charny asking for his permission, and I got his blessings. That was necessary because I knew I would be treating his encyclopedia in a rude way, i.e. editing and cutting pieces from it, supplementing it with texts from other sources including from my own research. I pointed out to him, for example, that I missed the history of my own native country, Tanganyika (today’s Tanzania), where the German barbaric repression after the 1905–07 Maji-Maji uprising included scorched earth tactics that diminished the population by two thirds. Professor Charny agreed that this should be counted among genocidal catastrophes and could be included in a future edition of his Encyclopedia.

It took me a long time to make preparatory research, to get the texts digitally printed on linen and to stitch the pieces of linen together to a sixteen metre long scroll.

The work has been very differently evaluated. One art historian hesitated to discuss it in aesthetical terms, whereas the eminent Indian art historian Partha Mitter talked about ‘Everlyn Nicodemus’s profoundly moving representations of global genocide.’

Moira Roth

You showed The Reference Scroll twice in the UK, the first being in 2006 at the 198 Gallery in Brixton in South London, where it was accompanied by a symposium on trauma and art at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts).  http://www.198.org.uk/pages/historyandmission.htm

And then in 2007 at the Brewery Arts Centre in Northern England, the Bystander made its appearance alongside The Reference Scroll.

What caused this?

Everlyn Nicodemus

The multiple genocides on my scroll called for the presence of a third category beside victims and perpetrators – the onlookers. I decided to surround the scroll with images of this timeless non-actor. The Bystander on Probation series was the result.

In all there are thirty multimedia Bystander drawings, and twenty-seven of these will be exhibited in Sydney, plus three early versions of the Bystander, made in 1997: three canvases called Space.

For practical reasons, I have numbered the Bystander on Probation drawings, although this does not indicate a ‘reading order’ as I see the series as a flock rather than a narrative.

I showed the series in 2007 at the Brewery Arts Centre within the context of a Women’s Arts International Festival. Until the Biennale, this will have been the only time the drawings have been shown.

The Bystander figure himself, however, appeared a decade earlier in these Spaces canvases, but at that time he was simply a sighted person marking space with his gaze. He has since, however, taken on a more problematic significance.

Everlyn Nicodemus, Spaces III, 1997, multimedia on canvas. From Displacements catalogue, Sala de Exposciones, University of Alicante, Spain, 1997

What was he looking at?

The Kendal exhibition provoked a lot of questions and discussions. I had, of course, certainly anticipated one question: the question about our guilt or non-guilt as onlookers. And so had came up with my exhibition’s title, ‘Bystander on Probation’, in order to hint to it being an open question.

Moira Roth

I suggest we end our Gleaning with some of your thoughts about ‘the bystander.’

What drew you to this subject?

Everlyn Nicodemus, Bystander on Probation No 14, 2007, mixed media drawing on rice paper with stitching, 50 x 35 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Isabelle Pateer

Everlyn Nicodemus, Bystander on Probation No 30, 2007, mixed media drawing on rice paper with stitching, 50 x 35 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Isabelle Pateer

Everlyn Nicodemus

There are two ways to answer your question.

The one – and the most urgent one – is about ethics. How to deal with the problem of being bystanders and perhaps accomplices?

The other is about aesthetics. How does visual art function?

Let me be very concrete.

Humans who lived in the vicinity of Auschwitz could see the smoke, could watch the goods trains arrive at the camp, could smell the stench from the ovens where corpses were burnt. Most of these people seem to have managed to stay indifferent. We tend to consider them implicated as passive bystanders in the ongoing barbarity, even as accomplices.

Now let us change the situation into that of our own living room.

We are watching the tellie. Something horribly inhuman happens before our eyes. By watching it, are we in the same sense bystanders? Is the only difference perhaps that we don’t smell anything?

On 11 September 2001 a majority of us were reminded of the true meaning of ‘real time’, to watch something occurring at exactly the same moment as we watch it. How it blows away any distance, putting us at the scene of the crime, wherever it takes place. Since then we cannot avoid the question.

Can we, seated in front of the screen, end up in a potential ‘bystander’ situation?

Finally it is about empathy, about the capacity to identify with others and to feel for their sufferings. And that takes me to Emmanuel Levinas’ thoughts about the I/Thou relation

(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/) and to Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics.

Levinas insists that the true responsibility for our neighbour, for fellow humans, can only take place in close vicinity, face to face. And Bauman widens this reflection to a crushing postmodern dilemma for our time.

As close communities, where everybody knows everybody, become exceptional, and as we more and more live with abstract and anonymous relations to our contemporaries, empathy and feelings of moral responsibility get increasingly obstructed.

I don’t think this exculpates anything. It only stresses how difficult the question has become.

And now about visual art.

Can a work of art in any way be of help in this human dilemma?

Among the unwritten rules hidden in the theoretical box about how art functions, one of the most basic principles asserts that art’s limitations outside its own domain are definite. And I will not gainsay.

I don’t believe a work of art can deliver an answer.

But, maybe it can sometimes deliver a question in such a way that it forces us to come back to it and to work with it?

That was what happened to me in the case of the evolution of the ‘Bystander on Probation’ series. And that is what I hope may happen to its viewers too.

SHARE |

17 Jun 2012

GLEANINGS # 21, Part 1: EVERLYN NICODEMUS

19 May 2012 – Moira Roth’s journal

In preparation for our Gleanings exchange, I read Everlyn Nicodemus’ powerful 2008 essay, ‘The Ethics of the Wound’ (in Intercultural Aesthetics: A World View Perspective): http://www.scribd.com/doc/71762719/Nicodemus-The-Ethics-of-the-Wound

Then I study her online account about the ‘Bystander on Probation’ series and its position in her oeuvre. The series, created in 2007 and made of rice paper with stitchings, will be shown this winter in the Biennale of Sydney.

I have preferred to work in mixed media for the last fifteen years, sometimes in books of handmade paper, sometimes as stitched collages on linen. There is a parallel between mixing techniques in my visual production and my crossing between different disciplines such as producing visual art including videos, writing poetry, publishing theoretical essays and making art historical research.

From 2000 on, I began focusing on art and trauma both in my visual production and in research and writing. In my own visual works I studied how trauma interferes in the creative process, and I could thereby and by theoretical research develop a theory about this complication of the process. This represented an innovative contribution to international trauma studies, documented in my doctor’s thesis ‘Modern African Art and Black Cultural Trauma (2011).

An extensive exhibition in Brussels, ‘Crossing the Void’ (2004), combined with an international symposium, presented my trauma-related works and a spectrum of theoretical papers by participants in the symposium coming from the UK, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Australia. The symposium, including my paper ‘The Ethics of the Wound,’ was published in 2008 by Springer Science.

A central work in this 2004 ‘Crossing the Void’ exhibition was the 16-metre long Reference Scroll on Genocide, Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing, around which I built consecutive exhibitions in Brixton (2006) and Kendal (2007). The scroll was the context in which ‘Bystander on Probation’ was conceived in its final interpretation. – Everlyn Nicodemus

Read the full text here: http://www.creativeafricanetwork.com/attachment/45759

20 May 2012 – Email from Moira Roth to Everlyn Nicodemus

You are an amazingly original artist, internationally exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions – beginning in 1980 in Tanzania in East Africa (where you were born in 1954) – and will now be showing your work on Cockatoo Island during the Biennale, in a selection of the exhibition that the Artistic Directors have subtitled ‘Stories, Senses and Spheres.’

Map of Tanzania

Equally you are acclaimed internationally as a major theorist and art historian.

Readers of the 18th Biennale catalogue will be able to study your essay, ‘Art – A Dialogue Beyond Reason and Discourse?’.

They will be challenged with the text’s profound questions when confronted by the ‘Bystander on Probation’ series.

How are we to judge our own contemporary role as passive bystanders in situations where we via modern media and in real time witness human catastrophes and inflicted suffering occurring somewhere in the world? Are we all accomplices? Or? The jury is out.

That was why the series was given the title ‘Bystander on Probation’.

Does he represent all of us?

– Everlyn Nicodemus, ‘Art – A Dialogue Beyond Reason and Discourse’

After you moved from East Africa, when you were 19 years old, you first studied in Sweden (from 1973 to 1987), and then resided in Belgium until 2008, when you moved to the UK where you now live in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Map of Scotland

In 1980 you began to make art, and in the 1990s you plunged into writing and almost immediately your ideas had an enormous impact.

Indeed, Jean Fisher, in her Artforum review of ‘Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa’ (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1995) describes this as the first exhibition ‘to attempt to provide a historical context for African Modernism,’ and states that ‘this was largely due to the writings of artist Everlyn Nicodemus … [who] points out that by the early 20th century cultural exchange between Africa and Europe was a two-way process.’

Catalogue for ‘Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa’, which includes an essay by Everlyn Nicodemus

GLEANINGS #20, BOUCHRA KHALILI

24 April, 2012 - Email from Bouchra Khalili to Moira Roth

I’m back in Berlin after a few days in Paris where I was exhibiting a new series of videos. Now I’m installing a solo show in a gallery here.

1 May, 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

In preparation for the Gleanings exchange tomorrow, I study the Galerie Campagne Première’s press release about the forthcoming exhibition of Khalili’s Mapping Journey Project - a project made between 2008–11 that traces, through a series of videos, the journeys of eight illegal immigrants in five countries: France, Italy, Palestine, Spain and Turkey. Khalili videoed the immigrants telling their stories as they marked their zigzagging routes on a map. (In the video only the map and their hands are visible, but never their faces.) Read the press release here

The first time all the videos were shown was in 2011 in the United Arab Emirates at the 10th Sharjah Biennial.

Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project, 2008-2011 (installation view), 10th Sharjah Biennial, 2011. Photograph: Haupt & Binder

I also reread Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s Frieze essay in which she describe how:

‘… Khalili travelled to Marseilles, Ramallah, Bari, Rome, Barcelona, and Istanbul – the arteries of trafficking and trade … She didn’t go searching for her subjects but rather waited for an occasion to meet them. “Sometimes they find me rather than I find them,” she says. “The encounter occurs from the moment I accept to get lost in a city. And from that moment, there are lots of conversations. Sometimes they have nothing to do with the project. The approach I have developed over the years to avoid pathos and sentimentality is listening. I only ask a few questions, but they are always factual and precise.”

In each of the videos teased from Khalili’s encounters, the subject describes his or her journey and draws its shape. Some have the arc of the epic. In Mapping Journey #5 (2010), a young man, dreaming of Italy, zigzags from Dhaka to Delhi, Moscow to Skopje, back to Dhaka and then, trying again, to Dubai, Mali, Niger and Libya, eventually washing up on the shores of Lampedusa, Sicily, five years later.’

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/focus-bouchra-khalili

Bouchra Khalili, Mapping Journey #5, 2010

‘Other journeys are brief and stunted, such as the short, ungainly curve a young man follows from a fishing city in Algeria to Marseilles (where he is now stuck with no money, no job and no prospects), or the circuitous route another young man makes from Ramallah to East Jerusalem, a trip that would take no more than 15 minutes were it not for the distorted geography of occupation.’

Bouchra Khalili, Mapping Journey #3, 2009

2-3 May, 2012 - Email exchange between Bouchra Khalili and Moira Roth

Moira Roth

As you know we have set aside a couple of hours this morning (2 May) to begin our Gleanings exchange, taking into account the time difference between Berkeley, 10:00 am and Berlin, nine hours later.

Here you are in Berlin with your Mapping Journey Project - composed of eight videos and eight silkscreen prints (The Constellations series) - which just opened on 28 April at the Galerie Campagne Première.

Bouchra Khalili, Mapping Journey #2, 2008

Bouchra Khalili

The work had never been exhibited before in Germany, so it has been a great opportunity to show it in Berlin as I start my Daad (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst/German Academic Exchange Service) residency here.

http://www.daad.de/portrait/wer-wir-sind/bkp/08942.en.html

Moira Roth

Let’s begin our exchange with The Mapping Journey Project, which will shortly be exhibited again in the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of the 18th Biennale of Sydney. http://bos18.com/artist?id=67

My first question is why did you choose Barcelona, Bari, Istanbul, Marseilles, Ramallah and Rome in which to record these immigrant ‘maps’?

Bouchra Khalili, Mapping Journey #7, 2011

Bouchra Khalili

I chose those locations because they are less borders than transitional areas, transit zones on the contemporary migratory roads. In each city I walked around with a bag filled with maps and permanent markers - reactivating the methodology of ‘derive’ as Guy Debord defined it in his essay about psychogeography.

http://imaginarymuseum.org/LPG/Mapsitu1.htm

Moira Roth

What was the experience like of installing The Mapping Journey Project in Berlin?

Bouchra Khalili

In installing such a project, it is always a question of rethinking and re-shaping according to the space and its specificities. My installations are never reproduced exactly as they were previously, but rather I rethink them each time because my work is strongly connected to installation. Each exhibition space becomes a kind of editing room from which new connections between the space and the work emerge. Each new exhibition space is also very important to me because it allows a new form of navigation for the viewer.

Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project, 2008-2011 (installation view), Berlin, 2012

In the Galerie Campagne Première, the videos are exhibited all together in one room, and their various sizes and heights intensify the principle of scale in terms of space and time, as it appears in each video. From what I could sense, the audience reacted very well, even if the subtitles were in English.

I installed The Constellations in another room - less to oppose than to articulate their distinction from the videos.

When I exhibited The Mapping Journey Project in Sharjah, I had not yet made The Constellations prints. They were exhibited for the first time later in the year in the near east, in the ‘Locus Agonistes,’ exhibition, curated by Okwui Enwezor, at the Beirut Art Center.

Bouchra Khalili, The Constellations (installation view, Beirut, Lebanon, 2011)

Moira Roth

What inspired you to create the Constellation prints?

Bouchra Khalil

I knew from the beginning of the project that the maps that I used would never be exhibited, but that at some point ‘paper’ would have to ‘reappear’, to take its place in this project.

Bouchra Khalili, Mapping Journey #3, 2010 (installation view at Iniva, London, 2010)

But I waited to finish producing all the videos before thinking about how to interpret and define the status of the map as a printed object.

Looking at all the videos, and drawing the setup of the installation, I then realised that I was producing a very specific kind of ‘constellation’, and so decided to translate each drawing produced by the exiled people, who participated in the project, into constellations of stars.

A constellation refers to a cartography that makes visible location points in a space that is literally without landmarks, just sea and sky.

It is a utopian cartography that erases boundaries, and then produces a map based not on arbitrary borders but on peculiar paths and trajectories which are originally clandestine, but that now become the unique point of reference in the space.

Moira Roth

I understand that since 2002 you have produced some twenty videos about the subject of migration.

What draws you to this subject?

Bouchra Khalil

Well, with the five new ones I have produced this year, the number is now up to twenty five.

http://www.latriennale.org/en/artists/bouchra-khalili

I would not say that my work is about migration, but more about how minorities experience geography and its borders, about their languages, the discourses they produce about their experience, about clandestinity and the way it reveals the power used to control bodies, discourses, and lives.

Ultimately it is about all those very complicated things that for an artist can be a way to rethink the status of the narrative, the image, and the relationship between documentary, conceptual, and fiction practices. The relationship and interrelation of art and reality.

Thus I try to explore the questions that arise from those articulations.

How to produce an image of what is situated on the edge of the visible?

How to recount human experiences?

What is the status of speech and language in relation with these issues ?

Moira Roth

As I reflect on your wonderful Mapping Journey Project, I also imagine a complex ‘map’ that could be created about your own life.

A map that would chart your life’s journey from Casablanca, Morocco (where you were born) to live in Paris – although you clearly keep your Moroccan connections including in 2006 co-founding the Cinémathèque de Tanger in Morocco, a non-profit organization dedicated to presenting and fostering Arab and innovative international cinema.

http://www.cinemathequedetanger.com/texte-22-3-2.html

Over the years, you have traveled extensively while both making and showing your work.

Right now you are in Berlin with the Daad residency and also you have a two-year Vera List Center Fellowship in New York.

http://www.newschool.edu/vlc/subpage.aspx?id=15792

How do you think this ‘traveling’ life of yours influences you, and in what ways?

Bouchra Khalili

I was born in 1975 in Casablanca –and thus come from what I call the ‘Atlantic side of the Mediterranean.’ My family moved to Switzerland for a couple of years when I was a kid, went back to Morocco again, and then moved to Paris in the mid-eighties. Since then it has been a continuous back and forth travel between Europe and Morocco.

My work and my own life are essentially nomadic, articulating my own journeys with my art practice.

6 May, 2012 - Email from Moira Roth to Bouchra Khalili

Let’s return as we end out Gleanings to your ‘nomadic’ Mapping Journey Project. Do you think it is read by its audiences differently according to where and when the exhibitions are held?

Will today’s French Presidency election impact attitudes to immigration, legal or otherwise? The previous president (Sarkozy) wanted to half the number of legal immigrants yearly entering France, but the new president, Francois Hollande, intends to keep to the current figures.

9 May, 2012 - Email from Bouchra Khalili to Moira Roth

I would not say that the Mapping Journey Project is read differently by a western audience than a middle-east audience, because I truly believe that the more a story is specific, the more it is universal. It is, however, interesting for me, to observe an audience which does not necessarily have an easy access to art reacting to my work.

About the elections in France?

I don’t think the French government policy towards immigrant will radically change. For a long time now, Europe (like the US) has entered an era of intolerance about immigration and immigrants But at least, by electing Hollande, the French people has kicked out Sarkozy, which is still good news.

That’s what is meant by this cover of the Libération, a paper that I have been reading daily for almost twenty years.

Cover of Libération, 5 May, 2012

10 May, 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

Libération, a French daily newspaper, was founded in Paris by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in 1973.

SHARE |

5 Jun 2012

GLEANINGS #19: LEE MINGWEI

11-17 April 2012 - Email Exchange between Lee Mingwei and Moira Roth

Moira Roth:

I had been listening to the audiotape, made at Lombard-Freid Projects in New York, where you performed The Mending Project in the autumn of 2009.

artonair.org/play/9149/show/lee-mingwei-the-mending-project

After hearing your voice, I can imagine more vividly - in a couple of months time - you sitting in the renovated Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in the Rocks in Sydney, conversing with the visitors who bring you damaged textile articles to mend.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Lee Mingwei, The Mending Project, 2009

Nearby will be ‘cone-shaped’ spools of brightly colored thread (I know that for The Mending Project in 2009, you had 400 of these.)

Lee Mingwei, The Mending Project, 2009

And, as time goes by, the ‘mended’ textiles will accumulate in the gallery.

Lee Mingwei, The Mending Project, 2009

How long will you stay in Sydney for The Mending Project?

Lee Mingwei:

I will arrive on 18 June, and start mending as soon as the project is ready to go.

I have asked the staff to bring clothes for me to start mending so when the show opens on the 27 June, there will already be mended cloth items on the table, with the threads still attached to them. My last mending will finish on 5 July, and then the volunteer menders will take over from that point onward until the show finishes in September.

Moira Roth:

On your artist page on the Biennale of Sydney website, I read your artist’s statement about The Mending Project which you describe as an ‘interactive conceptual installation … an act of sharing between a stranger and myself’.

I imagine these strangers, one by one, and somewhat ceremoniously, bringing their damaged textile articles to you, choosing their colour for the ‘mending’ thread, and then sitting there, watching you mend.

You write: ‘Unlike a tailor, who will try to hide the fact that the fabric was once damaged, my mending is done with the idea of celebrating the repair, as if to say: “something good was done here, a gift was given, this fabric is even better than before.”’

Am I right that the first time you worked with this concept was in Liverpool, England, in 2006? Fabric of Memory took place at the Tate Liverpool, and was part of the Liverpool Biennial of that year.

Lee Mingwei, Fabric of Memory, 2006 (detail)

tate.org.uk/fabricofmemory

Lee Mingwei:

The Fabric of Memory and The Mending Project - although both use textile articles as the main medium - are quite different in their spirit.

The original idea of Fabric of Memory came from finding out the early history of Liverpool during my site visit there.

The city was an important industrial port, which benefited much from trades of slaves, cotton and textiles.

Slave trade in Liverpool

Moira Roth:

What memories stand out most for you in that 2006 Liverpool performance?

Lee Mingwei:

I remember one of the objects was a very old-looking handmade doll that one of the participants had brought me.

The doll was passed down through generations of women within her family.

She was told the original doll was made by her great-great-great-great grandmother who had made it for the daughter when she came over to Liverpool on a slave ship. I was so moved, holding the doll in my hand, while listening to the story told to me by this elderly lady.

Lee Mingwei, Fabric of Memory, 2006 (detail)

Moira Roth:

And have you in some fashion ‘repeated’ Fabric of Memory since then?

Lee Mingwei:

Yes. Fabric of Memory was shown again the next year (2007) at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art. The project stayed relatively similar, but the objects were, of course, very different, as were the stories. However, each of these Fabrics still moves me as they come from different people and different cultures.

Lee Mingwei, The Fabric of Memory, Taipei, 2007

The Fabric of Memory will be presented for the third time this year in Tokyo in August at the Shiseido Gallery. I am very much looking forward to this. The curator and I have been sending out requests for participation from the Tohoku Earthquake area.

Tohoku Earthquake, 2011. Image: Reuters

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tōhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami

Moira Roth:

How do you contact people for submissions to Fabric of Memory?

Lee Mingwei:

When we did Fabric of Memory at Liverpool, we sent out the invitation by posting requests on the Tate Liverpool website and received about 250 submissions. The curators and I went through each of these submissions and selected 21 of them to be included in the show. The textile articles were returned to the owners along with the wooden box, which contained them during the exhibition.

As for Fabric of Memory at Shiseido Gallery for August of 2012, we are now finalising the web invitation and should be sending it out in about mid-May.

Moira Roth:

And what inspired The Mending Project?

Lee Mingwei:

The idea of The Mending Project came from my experience of 9/11.

September 11, 2001, New York City. Image: Reuters

My partner, whose office was on the 89th floor of the North Tower, lost 400 of his best friends and colleagues that morning. All I could do for the next few days was to mend our old clothes in order to keep myself from bursting into tears. It was eight years later that I was able to turn this dark memory into something positive.

18 April, 2012 - Moira Roth’s Journal

Early in the morning I begin to ‘glean’ yet again from Mingwei’s elegant and informative webpage that includes sections on all his major ‘projects’ (a term he appears to prefer over that of installations and performances).

http://www.leemingwei.com/projects.php

I think about his early life, and varied cultural and religious encounters.

Mingwei, age 4, first day at Kindergarten, Taipei, 1969

Born in 1964 in Taipei to political dissidents, he spent his summers in a Chan (Zen Buddhist) monastery. He then moved to live in the Dominican Republic for two years before immigrating to the USA with his sister, where they attended Catholic schools in California. He received his BFA in 1993 (CCA, California College of the Arts, where he studied textiles), and his MFA in 1997 (Yale University, New Haven, specialising in sculpture and ‘new genre’).

I play the concise (10-minute) yet deeply informative and subtle video on the Montalvo Art Center website.

http://www.montalvoarts.org/agency/lee_and_freid/

Here, Mingwei talks about how he sees himself as an artist (‘a social conceptualist …my work is commercial unfriendly’), about artists who have influenced him (from Joseph Beuys to Suzanne Lacy), and about two major projects, both created in Australia: the Bodhi Tree (2008) and Guernica in Sand (2006).

A statement that Mingwei made recently keeps echoing in my head:

‘Most of my practice is about hospitality, generosity and sharing.’

http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2011/1221/The-chef-s-art

It was in 1995, in his first year at Yale that he created The Dining Project, which began a long series of projects about ‘hospitality, generosity and sharing’.

‘Feeling isolated, I posted hundreds of posters all over campus, inviting anyone interested in “sharing food and introspective conversation” to contact me. By the end of the first day, I had received approximately 45 responses to my invitation.’

Lee Mingwei, The Dining Project, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1998

(The Dining Project was recreated this year in a group exhibition called ‘Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art’ at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum).

Public interest and recognition of Lee Mingwei escalated rapidly in response to his highly imaginative and varied projects. In 1998, only a year after he graduated from Yale, New York’s prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art gave him a small solo exhibition, ‘Lee Mingwei: Way Stations,’ where The Dining Project was presented again, together with a new work, The Letter-Writing Project.

http://www.leemingwei.com/projects.php

Lee Mingwei, The Letter-Writing Project, 1998

Shortly after this, the public became intrigued by his mysterious Male Pregnancy Project (a collaboration with Virgil Wong)…

Then 2003 saw The Tourist, which received a review from the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter. Read the review here:

The morning is over, as I finish my travels with Mingwei by musing on his 2010–11 Travelers Project which began in New York (it ended almost like a global ‘chain letter’) when he gave out one hundred blank notebooks (which he had designed), asking the recipients to write a personal story about ‘leaving home’ and then to pass these books on.

I, who love to travel, wish I had participated in this.

http://aaartsalliance.org/events/lee-mingwei-s-the-travelers-and-the-quartet-project

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/us/2011-10/28/content_13995647.htm

18 April, 2012 -Letter from Moira Roth to Lee Mingwei

I have a suggestion as to how we might end our Gleanings exchange.

Would you like to handwrite a few lines (as poetic as you would like, could be in half sentences, could be a poem, a letter…) in response to this question:

Are there subjects/themes/concerns that you think about now that you might want to realise as projects in the future?

p.s. You could write this on the train returning to New York City from Baltimore - that might be lovely, going by the Hudson River.

19 April, 2012 - Email from Lee Mingwei to Moira Roth

I will do that this afternoon! I hope you don’t mind but I have decided to write in Chinese, as this is the language that I feel most comfortable with!

20 April, 2012 - Letter from Lee Mingwei to Moira Roth

20 April 2012 - Email from Moira Roth to Lee Mingwei

I have one last suggestion! What about if you and I write one another a short handwritten letter, and put it in the regular mail on the same day.

22 April 2012 - Email from Lee Mingwei to Moira Roth

I love the idea of a handwritten letter! I will send it off to Berkeley first thing in the morning.

22 April 2012 - Email from Moira Roth to Lee Mingwei

And I promise I will write you a letter tomorrow morning as I sit in my Nabolom café!

#Lee Mingwei

SHARE |

3 Jun 2012

GLEANINGS #18: ALAN MICHELSON, Part 2

Email from Moira Roth to Alan Michelson

As more and more time passes, I keep imagining the opening of the Biennale in June and both the artists and the public visiting its various sites.

For example, I can imagine just focusing on your work: spending a long time in the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW)…

Art Gallery of New South Wales www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

… standing in front of your Prophetstown paper models of log cabins - transfixed by their compelling retellings and questionings of traditional American history…

Alan Michelson, Prophetstown Cherokee Printshop, 2012

… and then later on taking the ferry

Free Ferry to Cockatoo Island

…to Cockatoo Island

Cockatoo Island

… and seeing your Mespat video projected on a large screen made up of white turkey feathers.

Alan Michelson, Mespat, 2001

Equally, I can imagine studying the Prophetstown cabins in the context of other work in the AGNSW, and the Mespat video in the vast range of work on Cockatoo Island.

I am curious about your own experiences over the years of seeing your work in solo versus group exhibitions.

15 April, 2012 – Email from Alan Michelson to Moira Roth

Generally speaking, in a solo exhibition one sees one’s work in relation to itself - whereas in a group exhibition one sees one’s work in relation to the work of others. But only, perhaps, in a literal or explicit sense, because one’s work is never entirely singular or unique - a lone planet - but a world in constellation, in relation to other worlds large and small, which is the theme of this Biennale.

This constellation effect is more apparent in group exhibitions, but is also present in solo exhibitions, in which the orbit and trajectory of an individual artist’s experience within larger systems is expressed and presented.

One can view the placement and juxtaposition of works within an exhibition - group or solo - as a form of art in itself, something akin to montage, and the exhibition, with its catalytic opening, catalogue, essays, talks, reviews, and responses as a gesamtwerk.

It can really be profound.

I believe that the seasoned Biennale Co-Directors - Gerald McMaster, with his distinguished career both as artist and curator, and Catherine de Zegher, with her poetic and integrative curatorial approach - are creating just such a work in ‘all our relations,’ one that breaks ground and casts a wide inclusive net.

I will be coming to Australia, to Sydney for the Biennale, and to Brisbane for my show with Judy Watson at the Milani Gallery, and very much look forward to returning after my first visit last year for Brenda Croft’s ‘Stop(the)Gap’ exhibition, another outstanding example of curatorial art down under.

SHARE |

25 May 2012

GLEANINGS # 18: ALAN MICHELSON, Part 1

Moira Roth’s journal

A Mohawk member of the Six Nations of Grand River, Michelson was born in 1953 in Buffalo, New York State. He lives in New York City, and has shown extensively in the US and abroad, in countries including Brazil, England, Canada and Australia.
http://alanmichelson.com/biography/

Looking at his superb website http://alanmichelson.com I see he divides his work by media: installations, video installations and public art.

Alan Michelson, Earth’s Eye, 1990

Alan Michelson, Permanent Title, 1993 (detail)

Alan Michelson, Of Light After Darkness, 2007

Alan Michelson, Shattemuc, 2009

Alan Michelson, Third Bank of the River, 2009

I watch a 2011 interview with Michelson filmed in Australia in the context of ‘Stop(the)Gap: International Indigenous Art in Motion’, curated by Brenda L. Croft, an international presentation at the Adelaide Film Festival of indigenous artists from Australia, Canada, USA and New Zealand.

Michelson speaks eloquently and analytically about his own work and generally about how indigenous artists are creatively ‘filling the gap’ left by the official histories of white settlement in North America and Australia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mXCRxKF8f-w

On Michelson’s website, he describes his work TwoRow II (2005) which was shown in ‘Stop (the)Gap’:

Alan Michelson, TwoRow II, 2005

‘A monumental, panoramic video installation of the two banks of the Grand River, which divides Six Nations Reserve from non-native townships in Ontario, Canada. The design is a synthesis of two sources: moving panoramas and the Two Row, an historic Iroquois wampum belt.

Two Row Wampum Belt

Woven of purple and white shell beads, the belt signified - through two purple rows alternating with three white rows - an early treaty of respectful coexistence between the Natives and Europeans. The rows symbolized the parallel paths of an Iroquois canoe and a European ship, and their respective laws and customs, which were to remain parallel and inviolate. A sound track combining a Canadian cruise boat captain’s official narrative on the river with Native elder narratives complete the work.’

http://vimeo.com/27453827

7 December, 2011 - Moira Roth’s journal

I receive an email from the Biennale of Sydney staff telling me that Michelson finds my forthcoming ship ride from California to Australia intriguing: ‘I have always wanted to make an ocean voyage like the one Moira is about to undertake, and wish her safe journey.’

10 December, 2011 – Email from Moira Roth to Alan Michelson

I am not surprised - given the deeply poetic as well as political nature of your work over the years, and the frequent appearance of water references (rivers) to address history - that you too are drawn to the idea of an ocean voyage.

5 April, 2012 – Email from Moira Roth to Alan Michelson

As you know, for the last couple of months I have been away: first travelling from San Francisco to Sydney by ship and then travelling within Australia.

Now settled back in California, I would very much like to work with you on a short Gleanings exchange.

My first question is - what are you showing at the Biennale?

5 April, 2012 – Email from Alan Michelson to Moira Roth

I am showing a new work, Prophetstown, and an older work, Mespat, at the Biennale. Both are part of my ongoing exploration of the North American landscape. But landscape in context, grounded in specifics: I practice a site-specificity in my work in which the spatial is connected with the temporal and history comes into play. I am Grand River Mohawk so my takes on history reflect that perspective.

For Mespat (2001) I got into a boat and shot - in a continuous, unedited take - all three miles of the shoreline of Newtown Creek, the heavily industrialized and polluted stream dividing Brooklyn and Queens (two areas in New York City) - and projected the video onto a large screen of white turkey feathers.

Alan Michelson, Mespat, 2001

Excerpt from Mespat: http://vimeo.com/27454176

The prophetic Lenape name of the area is Mespat (‘bad water place’). Mespat was also the location of one of their villages prior to their violent eviction by the first European settlers of Queens in the mid-17th century.

The feathers reference local birds and wildlife, in particular a white egret I encountered in the creek on two occasions, which appears in the video.

The format references the proto-cinematic moving panoramas of nineteenth-century travelogues painted on large, long scrolls mechanically unspooled for paying audiences, creating the illusion of moving down a river or through a landscape.

Prophetstown was inspired by a visit I made in April of 2010 to the site of Prophetstown, a large, multi-tribal (Ho-chunk, Piankeshaw, Kickapoo, Wea, Potawatomi, Shawnee, and others) town on the Wabash River in what is now Indiana in the USA Midwest.

Founded in 1808 by Tenkswata - known as ‘The Prophet’, brother of Tecumseh - Prophetstown was a centre for Native people, some of them refugees, who wanted to unite to resist further land incursions and return to traditional ways. It was destroyed (burned to the ground) by American troops in the War of 1812.

It got me thinking about another form of space or landscape, dwellings and architecture, and ultimately about the iconic American log cabin - those log cabin houses literally constructed from the landscape, in most instances contested landscape.

The format for Prophetstown is mixed, drawn equally from architectural models and museum dioramas, the kind in natural history museums that represent Native dwellings.

It will consist of eight ¾-scale paper models of log cabins presented in museum vitrines. Half of them are based on fictional models drawn from painting, cinema, and spectacle, and the other half on historical models.

Here are two fictional examples:

The first is a model based on the log cabin in Thomas Cole’s Home in the Wilderness painting, printed with the Treaty of Fort Wayne - one of the unfair treaties Tecumseh petitioned to rescind, which ceded some three million acres of Native land to the USA - on it.

Alan Michelson, Prophetstown - Home in the Wilderness, 2012

The second is a model based on the burning settler cabin feature at Tokyo Disneyland, which I’ve rigged with a faux flame device.

Alan Michelson, Prophetstown—Western, 2012

And here are two historical examples:

The first is a model based on Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden, printed with pages from his Civil Disobedience essay, which inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Alan Michelson, Prophetstown—Henry David Thoreau Cabin, 2012

The second is a model of the log print shop at New Echota in which the Cherokee Nation published the first Native American newspaper in the Cherokee language and syllabary from 1828 to 1834, printed with pages from 17 December, 1831, in which events leading to the Cherokee Removal from their homeland were reported and addressed.

Alan Michelson, Prophetstown—Cherokee Print Shop, 2012

SHARE |

23 May 2012

GLEANINGS #17: POSTCOMMODITY

1 April 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal

There are four current members of Postcommodity, a collective created in 2007: Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist live in Phoenix, Arizona; Raven Chacon lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Nathan Young currently lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

From left to right: Kade L. Twist, Cristóbal Martínez, Nathan Young, Raven Chacon

I spend some time browsing through their individual webpages:

Raven Chacon (b. 1977): http://theendofbeing.com/raven-chacon/

Cristóbal Martínez (b. 1974): cristobalmartinez.net

Kade L. Twist (b. 1971): nativelabs.com

Nathan Young (b. 1975): peyotetapes.com

Postcommodity. Photograph: Laura Ortmann

And I watch a recent video made in Sydney for the Biennale, of the collective describing their work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YvKlhq7HtWg

1 April, 2012 - Email from Moira Roth to Postcommodity

While studying your collective website http://postcommodity.com, I discover that in May of 2007 the founding members of Postcommodity had a residency in the Czech Republic, and worked there with the activist poet Ivan Magor Jirous resulting in a collaboration: ‘the first of its kind between a Czech underground artist and American Indians.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=l7yavWhVePk

Then I see that two months later, in July of 2007, Postcommodity performed a ‘Broom Shaman Ritual’ in Tucson, Arizona.

And in February-March of 2012 you took part in the ‘Time-Lapse’ exhibition (Santa Fe, New Mexico) that was inspired by an early project by the well-known U.S. conceptual artist, Seth Siegelaub.

www.sitesantafe.org/exhibitions/exhibitfr.html

Clearly you separately and collectively move in many different worlds.

The media and thematic range of the individual members of your collective, and the range of contexts in which you have shown as a group since 2007 is dazzling.

Postcommodity, Repellent Eye, Winnipeg, 2011

Postcommodity, Worldview Manipulation Therapy, 2009. Photograph: Jason Grubb

Postcommodity, My Blood is in the Water, 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2YMeS4-Q0cU

And now this June in Sydney for your Biennale contribution, Do You Remember When? - which is described as a reworking of your installation in Arizona from 2009 - you plan to make a ‘portal’ hole in the floor of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, emitting ‘from the exposed earth… an audio recording of an Aboriginal song.’

Gleanings #16: Gerald McMaster

Email exchange between Gerald McMaster and Moira Roth, April, 2012.

Moira Roth:

How did the idea of collaborating with Catherine de Zegher come about? I know that you had met earlier, and worked together on co-curating a 2001 exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York (where Catherine was then Director): Draw & Tell: Lines of Transformation by Norval Morrisseau/Copper Thunderbird. Then later you were both at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where you are the Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art, and Catherine was the Director of Exhibitions and Publications.

18th Biennale of Sydney Artistic Directors Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, Sydney, 2011

Gerald McMaster:

A few years ago Catherine and I began to discuss working together on something really ‘big’—something that would have a true impact, something larger than what we had already worked on together, something that would require a true collaboration.

In my own practice, for at least the past twenty years, I’ve been used to working collaboratively. There have only been a few instances when I have worked exclusively alone. Thus I have a good idea about what it’s like to work with others.

Moira Roth:

What do you think has drawn you so easily to a collaborative working method?

Gerald McMaster:

There are probably a few reasons why I’m structured this way.

I’d say first that when I was younger I played only team sports where you quickly learn your role and responsibility, without which everything becomes uncoordinated and frustration sets in.

The second reason is that I come from an area of Canada that is geographically quite large but sparsely populated; thus there’s a reliance on each other for support.

Moira Roth:

How did you and Catherine set to work on conceptualizing the 18th Biennale of Sydney?

Gerald McMaster:

When Catherine and I began talking about an exhibition such as the one we’re doing now, I knew immediately that this was the right one. That we came from two completely different backgrounds didn’t deter us. In fact, we have talked about these differences for years, but it was only by curating this Biennale exhibition that we could really conceive ways of making connections.

Thus, from the start, we talked less about what we were going to do in such a project, and more about how we were going to go about making linkages. So, without preconceived notions of such things as a theme—from which we would choose artists to fit the model, so to speak—we began with the simple premise that if we looked at art by visiting artists, curators, dealers, collectors and so on we would know what we were looking for. This is not the usual practice in planning such a large international exhibition.

Usually curators are more than likely to begin creating a theme with set objectives and then proceed towards the results. We didn’t want to do this; instead, we considered a more organic process where we had to find our own way. We needed to have frequent discussions about whom we visited, what kind of art we saw, and only then did we begin drawing certain inferences.

The entire process took about a year from the time we made our first to our final selection of art and artists. It was both daunting and exciting as a process —daunting in a sense that there’s so much art and so many artists that you’re not sure what path to take; but it’s equally exciting in that you come across an artist who surprises you. I am certainly thankful to all the kind folks along the way who participated in such a conversation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_ObVF2pKIIE

Gerald McMaster, Allen W. Root Contemporary Art Distinguished Lecture, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 18 November, 2011

Moira Roth:

I imagine that many interesting narratives and myths have been evoked during the course of conceptualizing the 18th Biennale of Sydney. Yes?

Gerald McMaster:

There is a wonderful story about when the world was formed—as Mircea Eliade would say “ab origne,” meaning at the beginning of time or the origin of the world—there is the story of the Culture Hero, Wîsahkêcahk.

Because he had magical powers, he was able to create wondrous things. At the beginning of time, all the world was covered with water. The animals were swimming around with no land in sight so they called upon Wîsahkêcahk to do something about it.

Wîsahkêcahk then summoned various animals to swim to the bottom of the ocean to search for a handful of earth from which he could create an island. Many animals tried and eventually the lowly muskrat was able to bring up a handful. From this Wîsahkêcahk placed it on the turtle’s back and blew his breath into it; everyone watched as it expanded quickly.

The Creator then asked Wîsahkêcahk to walk around the island to see how big it was, which he did. Four hours later the Creator showed up, but it wasn’t big enough, so the Creator blew once more and Wîsahkêcahk was asked to go around again, four days later he showed up and still it wasn’t big enough; once again, now it was up to four months but still it wasn’t big enough; finally Creator took one deep breath and blew and the island grew and grew and Wîsahkêcahk was asked to go out.

All the animals got tired out waiting and they left. Years went by and after four years Wîsahkêcahk shows up and asks if it’s big enough, to which the Creator replies, yes, it’s big enough.

What we eventually find out was that all the years he was gone he had experienced many things and met many, many characters.

Wîsahkêcahk translates to “bitter, aching soul,” meaning that he is always trying to find a balance to his soul. He lives on the edge of society; so we take from this that we, too, as humans must find our balance that was so elusive to Wîsahkêcahk. And, somehow, in this Biennale project —one that has progressed in various ways, meeting many people —I have come away with many, many stories that will help me find a balance once it’s all over.

SHARE |

1 May 2012

ABOUT GLEANINGS