Liminal Identities in the Global South

(3 August 2021 to 26 February 2022)

Liminal Identities in the Global South formed part of JCAF’s first research theme: Female Identities in the Global South. The second of three exhibitions in this theme explored hybridity and resistance in the artistic practices of seminal women artists from Latin America, alongside artists from the MENA region, the African diaspora and South Africa. The exhibition considered heterogeneous forms of expression across art, architecture and music, from the 1960s to the present. The artists and architects included: Jane Alexander, Lina Bo Bardi, Lygia Clark, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ana Mendieta, Lygia Pape, Berni Searle and Sumayya Vally/Counterspace.

Given the impact of Covid-19, the pandemic body was a second curatorial thread running through the exhibition. The pandemic had many of us in a state of limbo or liminality, so that we were caught between a pre-Covid-19 world and one in which we imagined a better future. Liminality can be understood as a rite of passage akin to being in an intermediate state or phase. The disruption caused by Covid could be understood as an “event” that signified a rupture in the normal run of things. Our normal daily reality was challenged to the degree that an ontological shift occurred, affecting how we perceived the world we engage in.

The exhibition was divided into five areas: Prelude, Requiem, Movements I, II and III, each conceptualised according to a musical tempo, either moderate, fast or slow, denoting a time-based experience of the exhibition.

Prelude

Andante (moderate) | A time of becoming

The exhibition began with a Prelude, an archive that included the concept of “anthropophagia” (cultural ‘cannibalism’ or assimilation) developed by Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto Antropófago (1928), and embodied in the painting Abaporu (1928) by the painter Tarsila do Amaral. In the 1970s, architect Lina Bo Bardi developed a quintessential Brazilian architectural language derived from indigenous vernacular expression. These concepts resonate with contemporary South African society, which is engaged in asserting itself against Western postcolonial cultural domination through various decolonising movements.

Requiem

Lacrimoso (tearfully) | The event of the pandemic

Within the liminal state brought about by Covid-19, the exhibition reflected on previous pandemics such as the Black Death (bubonic plague) (1346–53) and the Spanish Flu (1918–20). The Covid-19 pandemic could be understood as an “event” – a rupture in the normal run of things. According to philosopher Slavoj Žižek, an event can refer to, “a devastating natural disaster or to the latest celebrity scandal, the triumph of the people or a brutal political change, an intense experience of a work of art or an intimate decision”.¹

Movement I

Allegro (lively) | The present time

The pandemic body was alluded to in the masks that appeared in the works. We live in a time of masks. They serve several purposes, from protecting people from Covid-19 to concealing the identities of protestors in the streets of Hong Kong or Paris. In the past, they have been associated with groups such as the Islamic extremist fighters of Daesh (ISIS), with police in riot gear all over the world, and with the prisoners of Abu Ghraib. In early cinema, villains often wore masks. The ubiquity of the mask in our time is at once ominous and comforting. Masks filter the air we breathe, helping to prevent infection and possibly death. Breathing is a basic bodily function, yet it is through breathing that we can be infected with air-borne viruses like Covid-19.

Movement II

Lento (slow) | The temporal nature of things

Our lives are temporary. They pass away, leaving memories and traces. This section of the exhibition explored the precarious nature of life through images of the female body in the landscape, rituals performed by women, and bouquets of flowers that decay over time. The passage of time, which encompasses death, ritual and trace, points in turn to liminality. Flowers, often used in ceremonial events such as funerals, symbolise a movement from one social or religious state to another. Several works suggest physical death, the leaving of an old state and entry into a new one.

Movement III

Grazioso (gracefully) + crescendo | Eternal time

During afflictions and disasters such as the Covid-19 pandemic, we discover our “radical vulnerability” and the need for grace. As Achille Mbembe points out, “Such is for many, the terror triggered by confinement: having to finally answer for one’s own life; to one’s own name.”²

Mbembe’s statement suggests that there is someone to answer to, that there is an explicit self and an implicit other. As Ruud Welten explains, “The face is not a mediation of the other. Neither is it a ‘persona’, a ‘mask’, nor a ‘picture’: the face is what Levinas calls transcendence.”³

In this section eternity was represented by the colour gold and by luminescence and reflection. What was implied here was that human actions have eternal consequences, and that the political and the poetic are inextricably connected.

SCENOGRAPHY

Envisaged as a pilgrimage or labyrinth, the LIGS exhibition consisted of a physical, temporal journey and an inward, reflective and transformative peregrination. Incorporating archival and non-art materials in dialogue with late-modernist and contemporary artworks and architecture, the exhibition began with the natural world and moved toward the transcendent.

Traditionally the curator is perceived as an author who conceives of the exhibition and tells its story by configuring the narrative. For the LIGS exhibition, the curator was more akin to a conductor and the exhibition analogous to a symphony in which there are different movements, tempos and harmonies. In this way, each chapter of the exhibition became a movement, with a specific tempo. Musical terms were used to describe each section of the exhibition in poetic phrases: this had the effect of amplifying the emotional register of each section, through each tempo. One section might have suggested a subdued feeling whilst another perhaps embodied an epiphanic experience. Lina Bo Bardi’s articulation of time is relevant here: “Linear time is a western invention; time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement where, at any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning and end.”⁴ Seen in this way, time is not an objective measurement, but rather functions subjectively as a progression of various tempos throughout the exhibition, each with their own pace or rhythm. The hoped-for result was a harmony and balance between the various aspects of the exhibition (images, objects, lighting, colour, spatial elements).

The post Curatorial Statement: Liminal Identities in the Global South appeared first on JCAF Journal.

The first published declaration, or manifesto, of the Crystalist school appeared in the arts section of Khartoum’s al-Ayyam newspaper on 21 January 1976.¹ Signed by artists Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, Muhammad Hamid Shaddad and Naiyla Al Tayib, as well as Hisham Abdallah and Hashim Ibrahim, it delivered aesthetic commentary on such weighty categories as time, knowledge, the measurement of space, language, beauty, and the contingency of the elements of plastic art.

The typeset manifesto filled nearly a full page of al-Ayyam, and it matched its bold occupation of space with the impudence of its pronouncements. The Crystalists not only characterised their project as liberal (at a time when Sudan followed a version of socialism as official policy), but they also characterised the world as infinite and unbounded; sought to claim pleasure as a means to uncover truth; understood appearances and perceptions of solid objects to be mere suggestions rather than denotations; and embraced an unorthodox materialism based upon mutual contradiction. As such, the manifesto bucked two prevailing ethoses in the Sudanese modern arts, that of the hybrid expressions of heritage forms associated with the senior faculty at the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum, and of the popular cultural activism favoured by leftist critics (holding strong even after the military regime of Colonel Gaafar Mohamad el-Nimeiri began to suppress the activities of the Sudanese Communist party, its former ally).²

By 1976 Shaddad was already a controversial figure in his own right, having captured attention as an art student in the years 1970–1974 with his John Lennon glasses, interest in Happenings and conceptualist experiments, and his antipathy toward Marxist-Leninist thought.³ Perhaps not surprisingly, then, given Shaddad’s early reputation as a nonconformist, the cultural journalists at al-Ayyam – a leftist-oriented group headed by Hassan M. Musa – opted to preface the Crystalist manifesto with a brief statement of skepticism mixed with tolerance. Commending the artists’ ambition but (implicitly) criticising their failure to ground theory in praxis, they contextualised the manifesto for readers in the following way:

It is an artistic document of the group of plastic artists and non-artists comprising the effort to adumbrate a new understanding of art, beauty, and form, etc. That is, a “Crystalist” understanding, to use the expression of its founders. The Crystalists, as a school, as a trend, as a new aesthetics – we are still waiting for its greater explication and presentation. We will be satisfied at the start with tracking the inquiry, its value as rebellion against us, in position among the remaining schools and tendencies in aesthetic practice, its social content, prospective horizons, etc. In short, we extend an affirmation of good faith . . .⁴

The volume Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), edited by Sarah Rogers, Nada Shabout and myself, features an English translation of the full Crystalist manifesto of January 1976, rendered with great sensitivity and care by Nariman Youssef.⁵ Of all the texts we selected for the anthology, the Crystalist manifesto is perhaps the most exemplary “primary document”. Not only does it articulate a series of artistic positions that were then in the making, but it also seems to aspire to historicity by outlining principles for future action. The Crystalists never made good on the “faith” the critics of al-Ayyam extended to them in the sense of organising energies around class struggle or rural development, but they did enact a lasting legacy. Wielding a set of commitments to novelty, invention, and atomic and space-age practices, they proposed some wholly new directions for art in Sudan. For Shaddad and Al Tayib, many of their innovations took form via their critical use of the exhibition space. Consider how later in 1976, Al Tayib organised an unusual exhibition titled Ordinary Mirrors, an installation of fragments of mirrors, in which the gallery space itself became artistic content.⁶ Or how in 1978, Shaddad organised an exhibition of a stacked construction of ice blocks surrounded by plastic bags that he had filled with coloured water, which constituted a physical exploration of such Crystalist themes as transparency and dualism. These events may be understood as provocations to a variety of institutional systems, not least of which the niceties of a local art scene that catered to the diplomatic corps.⁷

“Wielding a set of commitments to novelty, invention, and atomic and space-age practices, they proposed some wholly new directions for art in Sudan.”

Throughout this period of Crystalist activities, Ishag, Shaddad and Al Tayib were operating as a school only in the loosest of senses. Ishag was the senior member and taught painting at the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum, and her career followed a different trajectory than that of her students Shaddad and Al Tayib. She faced fewer accusations of dilettantism, most likely because her work retained many of the themes for which she was already known: tales of spirits in Sudan learned at the knees of the “grandmothers”, inflected by a pedagogical interest in translating Sudanese cultural forms into artistic use.⁸ The appeal of the Crystalist platform, for Ishag, was the feminist element of its effort to instantiate an alternative kind of interior knowledge.⁹

Once joining the Crystalists, Ishag made paintings depicting women suspended within transparent, immaterial, cubes of glass. Existing in contingent, crystal space, they opposed – or at least troubled – the masculine empirical world view that established the norm. If taken as a group, then, the Crystalists are seen as delivering a riposte to the 1960s-era Khartoum school and its emphasis on heritage explorations (as had been implemented with greatest success by artists Ibrahim El-Salahi and Ahmed Shibrain). But Shaddad and Al Tayib also took the riposte several steps further. Not only did they abandon the cause of appealing to an imagined Sudanese everyman and demand sophistication from visitors, but they also waged Dada-like attacks on the very same exhibition system’s claims to civilisational edification. They even published criticism of the al-Ayyam critics and the latter’s archaicising power structures. Famously, Shaddad and Al Tayib once published a letter addressed to Hassan M. Musa, Abdallah Bola and the other “nomadic tribals” of the plastic arts.¹⁰

In terms of historiographic legacy, the Crystalists represent one of the first episodes in Sudanese modernism to be entered into the annals of global contemporary art, entering via the art fairs and biennials of the 1990s and 2000s. As far as we have been able to track, the majority of modern art historians in the North Atlantic universities first became aware of the Crystalists around 1995 or so, when prominent Cornell professor Salah M. Hassan wrote about Sudanese arts in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, the catalogue for the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of the same title, and translated a Crystalist text for the volume’s appendix.¹¹ In this initial introduction, Hassan emphasised the Crystalists’ sophisticated engagement with international currents and their implicit critique of Khartoum school tenets. By the end of the decade, in turn, analysis of the Crystalist oeuvre gained another dimension via a growing discussion of “African conceptualism”, sparked in part by the landmark exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which featured a catalogue essay on the subject by Okwui Enwezor.¹² In 2001, when Hassan and Olu Oguibe organised the influential exhibition Authentic/Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art for the Venice Biennale, their catalogue essay featured Shaddad’s conceptual work and emphasised its rarity as a challenge to the academic notions that dominated many national art schools on the continent.¹³

In spite of ongoing acclaim for the Crystalists’ interventions in Khartoum, the archival record of their writing and exhibitions has often proven difficult to access, let alone to parse. That the manifesto and other statements resist easy translation is, of course, a testament to the intellectual heft of the writing. But equally, the diffuseness of the archive reflects the hardship of life under dictatorship, which lasted until 1985 only to dovetail in 1983 with the catastrophically deadly resurgence of civil war. Sudanese artists, curators and critics had long faced travel restrictions, and the circulation of their scholarship outside Sudan has been similarly constricted. Musa, the artist and critic who oversaw al-Ayyam’s cultural pages in the 1970s, has published a detailed account of the constraints as well as the hopeful commitments of the period in his remarkable article “The Party of Art: When the People Entered the Gallery”.¹⁴ As he makes clear, the particular violence of life under Nimeiri – and here we must take note that on the very date the Crystalists published their manifesto, El-Salahi was being held in Cooper prison without trial – can also flatten the ideological complexity of the artistic documents that remain from the period. When the archival record of these years is scrutinised from our position in the present, debate of any kind can appear to be a valiant struggle against the regime. The mere fact that Musa and other journalist-artists found ways to use al-Ayyam as a platform for veiled critiques of government policy can be cited as evidence of a leftist effort to foster democratic participation and, indeed, of that effort’s ongoing, underground resistance activity.¹⁵

In our own endeavor to assemble a more complete archive of Crystalist texts, we were spurred on by a desire to highlight the other debates about authenticity that took place in Sudan – in texts we hoped might complement the Crystalist materials and give a better sense of the stakes of their discussion of transparency without objecthood. Our search was aided most directly by the indispensable documentary history, Contributions in Artistic Writing, 1974–1986 (Musahamat fi al-Adab al- Tashkili, 1974–86), compiled by the Khartoum-based artist and scholar Salah Hassan Abdullah, who was himself a participant in the debates.¹⁶ Abdullah’s scholarship helped us to establish 21 January 1976, as the publication date for the first Crystalist manifesto (rather than 1978, as has been reported), and to identify the text that had hitherto circulated as the manifesto as a 1980 statement by Shaddad.¹⁷ Our sense of the importance of the Sudanese debates was fortified, in turn, by the recent efforts of the Sharjah Art Foundation to launch a major research and exhibition initiative devoted to Sudan’s modernism(s), overseen by director Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi in collaboration with Salah M. Hassan.¹⁸ Ultimately, for the purpose of representing the discursive energies of Sudan’s 1970s art world in Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, we opted to excerpt two pieces of newspaper writing by al-Ayyam’s own critical team: commentary by Bola and by Mohamed Abusabib, both of whom – over a long, recurring series of responses – purport to analyse the “crisis” of the visual arts as a bourgeois product and seek to articulate better pathways to a transformative socialist art.¹⁹

Against the ground of intellectual authority and structured political commitment promoted in the cultural pages of al-Ayyam, it is the self-professed liberals who emerge as the most radical. The conundrum is a crucial one, for it is common to conditions of authoritarian rule in these decades. We know that beginning around 1960, the most promising and highly trained plastic artists in Sudan began to try to develop an art that would represent the “people of Sudan” (with “people” having a distinct socialist cast), and in so doing, made a conscious break with the foreign values they had studied in London.²⁰ As El-Salahi himself has noted, he perceived that the people did not accept the art that he and his generation brought back to their country. The challenge was thus to figure out what the people sought from art. He met that challenge by recourse to Arabic calligraphy and the creation of decorative units from Sudanese folk entities and forms.

“In spite of ongoing acclaim for the Crystalists’ interventions in Khartoum, the archival record of their writing and exhibitions has often proven difficult to access, let alone to parse.”

Later, after the 25 May 1969 coup by “free officers” brought Nimeiri to power by overturning the brief period of multiparty democracy in place from 1964 to 1969, there remained excitement (short-lived) around the state’s proclaimed commitment to “Sudanese socialism”. Communist party members served in the Revolutionary Council and continued leftist initiatives in the field of culture, such as rural outreach programmes. At a high point in this optimism, in 1970, the student union of the College of Fine and Applied Art made an official endorsement of the new government, a move for which they were rewarded by Nimeiri’s attendance at their 1970 graduation, where he delivered a speech defending the role of art in development and progress.²¹ These events only narrowly preceded a major break in solidarity in July 1971 – when a leftist faction tried to take over the government with intentions of more closely allying with the Soviet Union – and they are often seen as the beginning of the end for artistic autonomy.²² Whereas “questions of culture, development, and national unity were real, and the regime was forced to face up to them in its official conferences and within its routine cultural work,” the livelihoods of artists in Sudan became entangled in the question of loyalty to the state.²³ This neutralised the role of artists in political action. When, beginning in 1974, artist discussions moved beyond the college walls and onto the pages of newspapers and magazines, they were almost always displaced to a plane of hypothetical commentary.²⁴ In the same period, El-Salahi – away in London since 1969 – was called back to Sudan to fill a position in the Ministry of Information and to oversee an expansion of its cultural portfolio. Nimeiri’s regime had managed to reach a cease-fire agreement to end the First Sudanese Civil War (1955–1972) and was seeking to develop structures of governance. Official cultural policy in Sudan settled upon the relatively progressive policy of promoting cultural diversity and decentralisation, an approach that included efforts to preserve the languages and dialects spoken by the peoples so as to cultivate the free cultural development of rural and tribal communities, and other recognisably Communist models of development.²⁵ In this setting, El-Salahi not only helped to set up a Ministry of Culture, but he also ran a television show, Bayt al-Jak, which was devoted to open discussion on art, culture and social issues. The same purported commitment to freedom and diversity would become a double-edged sword for El-Salahi, however. In September 1975, after he crossed a regime redline on his television show, he was targeted: accused of “anti-government activity”, beaten and taken to Cooper prison in Khartoum North, where he was held until 16 March 1976. In the days immediately following his release, when he was placed under house arrest, El-Salahi worked through the experience by creating a group of ink drawings in what is now known as the Prison Notebook. To make these drawings, the artist coaxed images of captive spirits and latent presences from a limited palette of watery black inks, then added text giving accounts of imprisonment or relaying meaningful passages from the Qur’an. One features an image of a heavily reinforced barred door – visibly holding an assemblage of wraiths and people captive – over which El-Salahi wrote, “Enter it in peace, safe” (15:46), and “No one despairs of the mercy of God” (12:87). The effect is a mixing of sincerity and sardonic surrender.

Once the conceptualist bent of the Crystalist writing is considered in contrapuntal relationship to El-Salahi’s career and its double bind of celebration and punishment, the group’s invocation of clear, crystalline presences takes on newly poignant meaning. Consider, for example, the Sufistic aspects of El-Salahi’s creative production before, during and after his imprisonment. The artist has described his ritual preparations for the act of creation, by which he enters into a prayerful state and offers himself and his body as a vessel for God.²⁶ There is discussion of Sufism in the Crystalist manifesto as well, appearing under the sub-category “Transparency”. But the manifesto pushes toward a different conclusion. It explicitly distinguishes the kind of transparency sought by the Crystalists from that sought by Sufism. The distinction turns on volition. If the Sufistic mode of behavior calls for a negation of personal volition such that the self is dissolved, then the Crystalists’ dissolution must be recognised as requiring volition. They assert that “negating volition is itself a volitional act”. As a result, an endless dialectic of volition-negation is established, such that an “infinite crystal is created”, and their aesthetic discourse sustains the cosmic fact of constant oscillation between essences and outward semblances. Further, in the same section of the manifesto, Ishag, Shaddad and Al Tayib propose to make crystal a kind of trans-religious awareness or commitment, reminding readers that a number of religions, both ancient and modern, spiritual and secular – Manichaeism, Orphism, Christianity and Islam – embrace its importance.

The preservation of a role for volition amid dissolution seems to have been central to Shaddad’s efforts in Khartoum. In one controversial 1971 exhibition, for example, titled The Exhibition of the Seated Human Being, he seated the male model from his drawing class between a human skeleton and a raw leg of lamb, around which grouping he hung works of art that he’d tagged with prices given in the unit of kisses.²⁷ Subsequently understood as a kind of Happening, the exhibition raised questions about both the status of the human being as an entity situated between bones and flesh and the role of desire in the human value of art. Shaddad challenged anyone in the audience who wanted to acquire the work to simply kiss him, thereby proposing to make a show of affection take the place of contractual relations of commerce. The price proved far too heavy for the population of the College of Fine and Applied Art at that time. Hassan M. Musa recalls that no one paid it, their non-action prompting Shaddad to launch into a speech calling for a “liberation of instincts” as a necessary step to liberate the human being and, in turn, to save humanity from its own carceral history.²⁸

The Crystalists concluded their 1976 manifesto by reiterating that “the crystal is nothing but the denial of the objectification of objects. It is infinite transparency. We painted the crystal, we thought about the crystal, and so the Crystalist vision came to be.” The reference to painting the crystal is likely a reference to Ishag in particular, who, unlike Shaddad and Al Tayib, continued to work in pigments on canvas. Shaddad, by contrast, would pursue the denial of objectification at the level of materials and their manipulation. One of his earliest experiments with coloured water as form had come with his graduation show in 1974, when he piled bags of water – tinted in different colours – in a corner of his studio. This assemblage served as a shape-shifting, anti-object interior to a hard exterior that he had prepared outside: a pile of old concrete molds that, from construction sites, he had welded into a wall piece resembling pigeon towers.²⁹ As a spatialised manifestation of proto-Crystalist ideas, the installation might be taken as a rumination on the general nature of “things”, such that their existence in the world necessarily entails the coexistence of invisible (but potentially sensed) interior states and the hardened “face” by which they interact with the world. By 1976 the discussion had opened to more explicitly insist on liberation from all imposed ontological categories. “Now that man has entered the technological age,” the Crystalists wrote, “present morphology has become almost a burden on him.” The artists not only foregrounded change and constant “becoming” as defining forces in art practice, but they also spoke in favour of multiplicity, which they recognised in the coexistence of distant possibilities that otherwise seem contradictory.

“The Crystalists concluded their 1976 manifesto by reiterating that ‘the crystal is nothing but the denial of the objectification of objects. It is infinite transparency. We painted the crystal, we thought about the crystal, and so the Crystalist vision came to be.'”

Shaddad issued another statement of Crystalist ideas in late 1980, on the occasion of his exhibition The Artist and Thought (it, too, will be published in translation in Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents). It puts a still-sharper point on the situation. Perhaps holding the progressivist and so-called materialist frameworks of the dominant critics in the Sudan in mind, he writes:

Crystalists attest that there is no empirical knowledge and that everything ever said about empirical knowledge is a myth. The human mind has never evolved and will never evolve through experience. The basis for Crystalist thought is that receptivity to knowledge is also knowledge.

Nor did Shaddad have confidence in the law of evolution. Citing the presence of two vestigial breasts on his chest, he emphasised instead a multiple coexistence of morphological shapes and even “organs” arising out of pleasure and out of function (rather than producing pleasure or function). By then, the Crystalist project had been staging its disagreements with Sudanese modernist pieties for years. The Crystalists wanted artists, whom they conceived as entities in a shifting world of chemicals and forces, to be freed from taking a position on one side of the dialectic or the other. By positing the artist’s existence within the dialectical movement of quantity and quality, they define art as a transparent crystalisation of the universe’s multivalence. Just as the editors of al-Ayyam had predicted in 1976, the Crystalist artists never worked out any particular praxis on the ground or in their studios as the basis for their imaginations. Yet the openness of their programme was their position, and it promised to engage with an unbound world beyond any named or weaponised ideology. As Shaddad himself put it as the final line of his 1980 exhibition text, “I conclude without asking you to commit yourself to anything.”

The post “We Painted the Crystal, We Thought About the Crystal”: The Crystalist Manifesto (Khartoum, 1976) in Context appeared first on JCAF Journal.

Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South

(25 October 2022 to 22 February 2023)

Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South presented the works of three pioneering women artists, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) and Irma Stern (1894–1966), together in South Africa and in Africa for the first time. The exhibition examined the constructions of “cosmopolitan” and “indigenous” identities through portraiture and self-portraiture. It also considered the time and place in which each artist produced their work, and gave some insights into their experiences, inspiration and concerns. This was the third and final exhibition that concluded JCAF’s first research theme Female Identities in the Global South.

Frida Kahlo

The subject of many of Kahlo’s paintings was herself (“I paint myself, because I am what I know best.”) She painted 55 self-portraits that embody, on the one hand, an external Mexican identity known as “Mexicanidad”, imbued with pre-Columbian cultural references and symbols, and, on the other hand, an inner subjective realm arising from several traumatic experiences. Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Hummingbird and Thorn Necklace (1940) reflects the influence of her mestizo heritage, and the Catholic symbol of the thorns. Kahlo’s complex identity was foregrounded and shown to be a hybrid repository of the modern and natural worlds, and of the religious and the secular.

Amrita Sher-Gil

Sher-Gil has been acknowledged for introducing modernism into India by synthesising Western and Indian influences in her artworks. From 1934 to 1941 she produced nearly 150 paintings, in many of which her aim was to express a modern Indian sensibility, with a particular emphasis on despair and poverty. She progressed from being influenced by the European masters to observing local conditions and applying these to a distinct aesthetic and narrative that spoke to the realities of poor people as she saw them. Three Girls (1935) depicts Sher-Gil’s nieces in a pose that suggests a contemplative melancholy. Although grouped together, the figures feel isolated – a key motif of her paintings of Indian subject matter.

Irma Stern

Irma Stern’s portraits generally fall into two categories: portraits of people in her cultural and social milieu in Cape Town, and portraits of people she encountered during her travels to Zanzibar (1939–1945) and the Congo (1942–1955), which reflect the cultural, social and religious diversity of Central and East Africa. Marion Arnold points out that, “there is a disjunction between Stern’s groups of figures and her portraits. In the former she generalises; in the latter she particularises.”¹ Although Stern was a prolific portrait painter, she never painted a self-portrait, which suggests that she constructed identities of others in order, partly, to reflect her own subjectivity. Watussi Woman in Red (1946) is a portrait of a young woman, Princess Emma Bakayishonga. It is a masterful painting that depicts not only her exterior beauty but also her interiority who appears caught in her own thoughts.

Conclusion

We see in Kahlo, Sher-Gil and Stern, artists and women who constructed a self through an imagined identification with indigenous women. Drawing from modalities of traditional cultures they created modernising hybrid identities against the backdrop of new nationalisms evolving across three continents in the Global South. These were not artists who reacted against the world through direct political commentary or activism. Instead, they sought to express personal experience as a representation of political realities as they experienced them, but in the process offering various identities as a way of transcending the purely personal. Kahlo transformed her own pain and suffering by representing herself as indigenous icon. Sher-Gil located her identity in the poor and silenced, but in the process helped to formulate Indian modernist painting. Stern evoked the Black body as a translation of her impoverished self-image but at the same time created a space for herself as a pioneer of South African modernism. This exhibition presented a single painting by each of these extraordinary artists that showed not only how they were shaped by the histories that made them, but how they too helped to shape history.

SCENOGRAPHY

The exhibition was designed around three topics: (1) Historical Background (2) Identity Formation and (3) Portraits and Self-Portraits.

Historical Background consisted of three black-and-white images of Mexico, India and the Congo produced as large wallpapers. These places had a profound impact on the work of the artists and their sense of themselves in the world, and introduced the socio-political context in which the artists lived.

Identity Formation featured documentary material comprising photographs, films, diaries and objects. This content revealed a transformative narrative for each of the artists, from childhood into adulthood and from early European influences to an embodied, local, indigenous identity formation. These archives were located within a space surrounded by a semi-translucent curtain. For a moment, visitors were isolated from the rest of the exhibition and could explore three stations, one for each artist. In each station, the imaginary worlds and real influences of the artist came to life, and intimate worlds were in open dialogue with each other.

After visiting the archive section, visitors continued to the final section of the exhibition, Portraits and Self-Portraits, where they encountered three rooms. Each one referenced specific architectural motifs from Mexico, India and Congo and each was painted in a colour selected for the artist: for Kahlo, a blue based on her home Caza Azul in Coyoacán, Mexico City; for Sher-Gil, a red-earth Indian pigment she often used in her paintings; and for Stern, a yellow associated with the vibrant African sun that appears in many of her works. Contained inside these rooms was a single painting by each artist. As spaces of contemplation, the three rooms invited viewers to engage with the representation of these iconic, 20th-century paintings by non-Western women.

The post Curatorial Statement: Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South appeared first on JCAF Journal.

I.

Writing about Frida Kahlo is difficult. So much has been said. Her work has been examined in the light of her letters, her house, her clothes, her personal belongings, her relationships, her suffering. What else can be said?

I am part of a generation that watched her become a celebrity, a condition in which she stopped being Frida Kahlo and simply became Frida. The movement, which emerged in the 1980s and gained unprecedented force in the 1990s, not only aimed to make visible the work of a female artist who was already dead – as was the case of María Izquierdo or Leonora Carrington – but also to transform her into a kind of symbol. A symbol of what, I am still not sure. A symbol of a country, an identity, an economy. We saw how, while the country’s dreams of social justice collapsed, she became an icon. Her material work and the rights to it are safeguarded by Mexico’s central bank, Banco de México, by a trust created by Diego Rivera before his death. Her image, the image of her own self, her persona or anything resembling it, is safeguarded by the Frida Kahlo Corporation, managed and monetised by some members of what is left of her family.

My mother lives on the street where the Casa Azul Museum is located, in the traditional neighbourhood of Coyoacán, south of Mexico City. Every day I see hundreds of people lining up to get in. Many, in fact, are satisfied with taking selfies at the door of the house where the painter lived from her birth in 1907 until her death in 1954. The only artist recognised by my daughter – who is now five and has grown up in museums in which I have curated exhibitions and her father has exhibited his work – is “Frida”. She recognises her on T-shirts, dolls, TV commercials. She identifies her face; the artwork slips from her. She can’t tell whether she likes it or not.

There is so much in sight that, I realise, it slips from me too. I wonder why it is that in order to value Frida Kahlo’s work, her life has to have been so scrutinised? Why has it been interpreted from her biography? What is behind the psychological yearning to find, in each shape, stroke and colour, the key not only to her work but to herself, as if there were a secret that we have to decipher in order to grant dignity to a work and a life? Has any male artist been subjected to this treatment?

Undoubtedly, the fact that her body of work is mostly self-portraits has “authorised” the idea that her work is a way of introducing her, and therefore we can and must reveal her, find what she represents, as the other part of the symbol that she sustains and signifies. Under the dynamics of celebrity, commodity and complete transparency, some of her work’s political potentiality has disappeared. I confess that I too, in the face of saturation, could see nothing. There was the obvious, and I wasn’t interested in looking at it to find something else. It was the invitation to deliver this text as a lecture at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation that forced me to look, and I found a world.

As Roland Barthes decreed long ago, my generation was formed by the death of the author. This does not mean that the contexts of production and life do not matter; on the contrary, as Foucault would later propose, there is no way of understanding either words or things without the historical conditions that open them up. However, this principle does mean that seeking the meaning of an action or production from the intention of a founding consciousness is a false problem. What Frida Kahlo was – what she wanted, thought, desired – is, fortunately, beyond my reach. What I have at hand is the work, the texts, the critical possibilities existing in her work. The work is not an absolute category either, but rather a device open to different interpretations and readings, hence the importance of not fixing it in the author. What I am interested in doing here is to explore an aspect of her work to analyse what it opens, from where, and towards what it is directed. What I can do is try to interpret the work in the light of my own interests, which in recent years have revolved around feminism and motherhood, and from there, try to see beyond Frida, the art of Frida Kahlo.

II. Politics and the Invention of an Identity for an Emerging Nation

Frida Kahlo’s production, both of her work and of herself as a public figure, was part of a period of upheaval and national transformation. Born in 1907 – although she liked to say that she had been born with the beginning of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 – she was part of a project, never unified and rather ambivalent, contradictory and in dispute, of shaping the modern nation emerging from the turbulent revolutionary process, which some historians mark from 1910 to 1938, when the presidential programme was consolidated with the government of Lázaro Cárdenas.

In this long period, art, and especially muralism, played a leading role. It gave shape and support to the dreams of several revolutionary processes, and was sedimented as a national project under different governments. It was a way of making visible: an aesthetic form for entering modernity and pointing out where progress should lead.

From a middle-class family, Frida, unlike many other women of the time, studied at the National Preparatory School, with the intention of later starting a career in medicine. There she not only had an education in the progressive “spirit” of the time, but she also had very close relationships with people like Alejandro Gómez Arias, a writer who, after their relationship, played an important role as a leader of the student movement of 1929. She also met Aurora Reyes, a communist muralist with whom she had a deep friendship for the rest of her life.

Her encounter with Diego Rivera in 1928 marked her entry into a political programme, one that reflected movements and ideologies of the time but also had elements of its own, which Rivera and Kahlo not only shared but, I think it is fair to say, invented and nurtured together.

Rivera was one of the most important aesthetic and political organisers of the modern process in Mexico. Part of the project was to create a platform for propagandistic indoctrination that, through art, would generate a common representation, which gives a perspective on the importance of this movement, or series of movements.

In 1966, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan visited Mexico after a trip in the USA. Explaining his stay, he spoke about different forms of the past. The past of repetition, the past in its perfect form that was to be found in America and a specific time in Mexico that was represented in muralism.¹ Manifested in Rivera and O’Gorman’s murals there was a past that never really existed. For Lacan, this was both enigmatic and amazing: the murals represent for him “an invisible bond through an irreparable tear that subsists across generations that rise up and those of those students who populate a university in Mexico City.”²

Muralism was the process by which a future time was shaped through the recognition of denied and broken pasts. The conquest and the colony were articulated in a series of revolts that turned into the triumph and consolidation of a nation reborn from a revolution that promised social justice. This nation was an invention, a vehicle for a time to come.

Rivera’s muralism, which is very different from that of Orozco or Siqueiros, was the creation of a Mexican artistic avant-garde that united European pictorial forms – fresco techniques and Renaissance perspectives – with local figurations and inventions that had their own idea of modernity. All this emerged, as suggested by the historian Luis Vargas, under the ideology of a resolved history. At the core of Rivera’s aesthetic-political programme was a revolutionary project that would give way to a socialist policy of agrarian and workers’ integration. The murals in the National High School amphitheatre, where Frida studied, and those in the Ministry of Public Education (1923–1928), in which Frida herself is depicted, are central to this project. Commissioned during Obregón’s government (1920–1924) by the first minister of education, José Vasconcelos, the murals – as Renato Gonzáles Mello asserts – show, how painting is part of the political invention of identities:

Mural painting was crucial in developing this emerging social and political identity, at a time that was far from becoming the rhetorical category of the Revolution. Therefore, […] it is not that painting has taken its categories from politics, but it contributed to articulate political categories and identities.³

The Ministry of Public Education murals were important for, among other things, figuring the category of the peasant as a political identity. As González Mello points out, Rivera had previously painted a rural and indigenous population that had no legal name, “no precise title in politics,”⁴ a population that was not “exactly” the working class and that needed an identity in order to enter the revolutionary project. This figuration, as a political-aesthetic category, emerges in these murals. This agrarian–worker alliance may have been one of the causes of Rivera’s expulsion from the Mexican Communist Party, but it was undoubtedly one of the great political interventions of the time, its revolutionary proposals not found in so compelling a way in any other work by the painter.

This is also the first work by Rivera in which Kahlo is portrayed. In the 1928 panel, known as The Arsenal, she is presented as a communist militant handing out weapons to the workers – intellectuals would be part of the avant-garde alliance in a rare and original Saint Simonian update. Frida is portrayed in several murals, always as an agent of the coming revolution. Perhaps in them we can see the role that Rivera envisioned for her but, as we shall see, it is not the role she took on nor how she presented herself in her work.

I am not referring to Rivera’s work in order to subordinate Kahlo’s place and her representation to his accomplishments, but to point out the rising of the “Mexican” for this revolutionary project, for it is configured with elements that are present in Rivera’s work but also in Kahlo’s. They share a political programme that requires a sensible mobilisation, that needs to make other objects, subjects and sensibilities appear. Some of them take shape in the use of popular objects – something not often seen at the time, when there was still a rigid separation between high and low culture – and which they radically promote in order to characterise a Mexican plasticity, materiality and originality. The centrality of craftsmanship and popular objects had already been established by artists such as Dr. Atl and was a constant in the artists and intellectuals of the time, but Rivera and Kahlo were undoubtedly the ones who took it to another level in their work and in themselves (in their characters, their costumes, their collections, their houses).

Also fundamental here is the incorporation of indigenous ethnicity. This was not the vindication of the political rights of original people – we must be very clear about that in the light of contemporary demands – but rather their integration into the socio-political order so as to create a mix, mestizaje, that would allow the emergence of a unified identity of the “people”– the Mexican – with a common “destiny”.

The exoticisation of Frida Kahlo – her character and her work – is based on removing these elements from their context of politicisation. For example, there is a clear attempt to characterise her by her use of indigenous dress, as if this were the only way of claiming identity. Indeed, Kahlo wore traditional costumes, such as the Tehuana dress, like many artists of the time, since the Juchitecas represented a force of female social and political organisation that had been consolidated in the national imaginary since the 1920s. But what is left out is that she also wore dresses associated with the rural world, as well as Chinese garments and men’s clothing.

“The pictorial work of Frida Kahlo is a bomb aimed in another direction. It is no longer the construction of an historical time but of a world in which the self – her self – becomes a space of representation, affects and intensities waiting to explode.”

The Mexican identity is also emphasised in her collection and the incorporation in both her work and her house in Coyoacán – which is undoubtedly a work of art reformed by O’Gorman – of handcrafted and historical objects belonging to pre-Hispanic cultures. All of this is part of the invention of something that did not yet exist as such, but under a specific political prism helped to create an aesthetic “Mexicanity”, embodying and giving shape to a political subject still absent from the field of representation and historical struggle. Beyond exoticising her in order to define her, we might think that there is nothing fortuitous in her use of these elements. They are not, however, symbols of innocence or exoticism, but rather part of the creation of a political programme in alliance with art and, in some way, with life.

What I am interested in opening, with this framework in mind, is the specificity of Frida Kahlo’s political operation in her work. Although she takes up imaginaries, fabulations, figurations and representations that are part of an aesthetic repertoire that she shares with Rivera, her battlefield will be elsewhere. It will not be played out in the same cultural, artistic or political space. The pictorial work of Frida Kahlo is a bomb aimed in another direction. It is no longer the construction of an historical time but of a world in which the self – her self – becomes a space of representation, affects and intensities waiting to explode.

III. A Place of Her Own

The place that Frida Kahlo’s work made appear is a liminal space of the intimate that has political consequences for the present. Her work distances itself from the propagandistic and public operations of Rivera’s muralism. She does not try to represent the people or history, but herself, without, however, abandoning the aesthetic-political elements of her programme for the future.

This intervention has some surprising peculiarities. On the one hand, it is separated from the artistic operations of contemporary artists, such as Remedios Varo or Aurora Reyes, who promoted a body of work as a space for a local career. Although Frida regarded herself as a painter – an activity severely affected by her accident in 1925 in which the bus she was travelling in with Alejandro Gómez Arias crashed and broke her into a thousand pieces – she did not have as prominent a career as other female artists of the time in the country. She certainly had a presence and success abroad (a solo exhibition in New York in 1938 and a group exhibition curated by André Breton in Paris in 1939) but her only solo exhibition in Mexico was curated by her friend, the photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo in 1953, a year before Kahlo died.

On the other hand, she was not an exceptionally militant activist either. She was an important figure on the cultural and public scene but was not eager to express her politics in a militant way. She had a relationship with Leon Trotsky, whose exile in Mexico from 1937 until his death in 1940, she had helped to facilitate through a personal negotiation with President Cardenas. These were not easy times for women’s militancy. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, although women’s participation in the Mexican Communist Party was significant, it was clear that the priority of the agenda was the class struggle and thus suffrage and women’s rights struggles would be relegated to second place. This generated annoyance and disappointment among many collaborators, which, according to historians such as Dina Comisarenco and Deborah Dorotinsky, led to the discussion of these issues on other fronts, such as the cultural and artistic ones. Artists like Tina Modotti, Aurora Reyes and Concha Michel – all three of them very close friends of Kahlo – were active both in the political and the artistic field, while maintaining a distance from the Communist Party. This was not the case for Kahlo.

She took another direction, perhaps because of possibilities close at hand. Although today we need to explain in what sense her work shows political engagement, in the 1930s and 1940s, given the shadow of muralism, it would have been difficult to regard her production as political. She was Rivera’s wife, a woman who, her talent notwithstanding, had no formal training, and whose painting was considered naive and intuitive. Despite these readings, some contemporaries besides Rivera himself, saw the radical nature of her work. Breton categorically announced: “The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.” Perhaps her artistic project had a dimension that could only have been opened in the future, once the bomb had exploded.

Her work tends to be read as an obsessive presentation of herself and her life, her feelings and her suffering. However, it seems to me that the operation she presents has much more complex dimensions. During an interview with Parker Lesley in the early 1930s, Kahlo declared that she wanted to make self-portraits for every year of her life. These form the central body of her work, and appear to be a research project that goes beyond presenting herself out of obsession or vanity. It is, as Gannit Ankori points out,⁵ the creation of a life through different selves, which are her but also something else, an identity that, besides its fixed points, is fluid, mutable, contradictory and ambiguous.

IV. Self-Portraits

Self-portraits are a strange device. They are undoubtedly a way of representing oneself, but that presentation does very different things throughout history. In Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits, Frances Borzello argues that due to its importance in the history of art, the self-portrait could be considered as a genre itself, and that women’s self-portraits specifically, because of the historical conditions of women’s representation, are a vital space for the artistic work and agency of female artists.

The self-portraits of women are not exempt from a prejudice that attempts to relegate this genre to a mere personification of the vice of vanity. The prejudice does not consider the different operations the genre has served: from the development of techniques and skills to the need to make oneself appear either as a personal gift or a public act. The self-portrait occupies a substantial place in art not only because it is about being seen, but because it is a demonstration of how we see, feel and represent ourselves. It is a double not only embodying an externalised interiority, but also reflecting historical conditions, ruptures and desires. Although the self-portrait of women has a long history, dating back to the 13th century, it was in the 20th century that it became a substantial tool for social exploration and political critique, through which ambiguities, tensions and possible futures of the representation of women emerged from new subjectivities that lay outside the capitalist and patriarchal mandate. This is where Kahlo’s operation and research are relevant: she exteriorises while she also projects. Her portrait is a complaint as well as a demand.

In her analysis of the history of the female self-portrait, Borzello states about Kahlo: “No artist, male or female, has produced a body of autobiographical work to match its originality.”⁶ While the statement is undoubtedly true, it seems to me that radicality here lies not only in the originality of Kahlo’s work but in what the conceptual operation of portraying herself throughout her life sustains.

What these paintings do, beyond establishing an autobiography, is to open the personal and self-representation to the complex social and historical construction of being a woman – being a woman in Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century who wishes to participate as an emerging political subject while nonetheless being subject to the gender and romantic mandates of the time. At the same time, the form gives expression to one who is free or wishes to be free in order to become what they are, or perhaps what they are not yet, but that by representing it, are already on the way to being.

In this regard, I would like to explore a series of self-portraits. Kahlo created around one hundred and fifty paintings but I will dwell on only three, not because they are the most interesting or the best, but because I hope they will allow me to unravel some of the operations that Kahlo’s work performs, on the one hand and, on the other, to show what her work opens up in my present, what its outburst makes me think about. The three portraits are: My Birth, (1932), Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940).

V. My Birth

Kahlo began to paint after the accident that left her bedridden for months and with painful sequels for the rest of her life. Her father was a German photographer who photographed monuments during the Porfirio Díaz presidency. After the Revolution and without the prominent job he had had before, he began to make portraits and self-portraits, the latter seemingly of a personal nature. With these resources at hand and in precarious health, Kahlo began to paint herself.

One of her first paintings was Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926), a work, reminiscent of Modigliani, in which she is portrayed half-length, in a three-quarter pose wearing a red velvet dress. She looks thin, serious, sober. The background is sea waves. It is a stylised, conventional painting in which she presents herself as beautiful and yearning to give herself so as not to be forgotten, as she says in her letters⁷ to her then lover Alejandro Gómez Arias. She paints and presents herself to be loved, as many women have done.

After this, her work would be radically transformed, not only in terms of the elements that would figure in it, but also in terms of its pictorial motifs and structures. In the latter sense, her pictorical reference was no longer easel painting but votive offerings known as ex-votos. These are popular paintings in Mexico that are offered when a favour is granted or received. According to Clara Bargellini, the practice of placing these pieces in religious precincts spread throughout Europe and reached New Spain. The production of these altarpieces continued into the 19th century, and by the 20th they had begun to attract the attention of artists and collectors as popular artistic expressions outside the academy and the dominant techniques. They are still usually made in oil on canvas or wood, their images are simple, and what they try to do is to tell a story.

“Beyond these facts, what the work forcefully does is to thread and knot these two concepts – life and death – into the relationship between mother and daughter.”

Kahlo collected ex-votos, but took them up in a secular manner in order to narrate scenes. She emulated the simplicity of the brushstrokes and the dynamics of the perspective in these paintings, using them not as a recognition of a divine favour but to create narrative structure and to show situations that marked crucial events in her life.

A painting that draws on the ex-voto is My Birth, a complex self-portrait constructed as a scene of estrangement. Although self-portraits of pregnant women already existed in the history of art at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries – such as those made in Germany by Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker – this work by Kahlo marks a milestone in the representation of maternity and is the first frontal painting of a childbirth. It shows a woman in a bed giving birth vaginally. The mother’s face is covered with a white cloth, and from between her legs emerges a baby with Kahlo’s features. The image is crowned by a Madonna with a suffering gaze who seems oblivious to this nativity scene. This painting of unequalled rawness, on the one hand, marks the possibility of talking about the experience of childbirth without shame or romanticisation and, on the other, links birth, life and death.

I emphasise the latter aspect. One of the great taboos that those of us who have been mothers know is the close relationship between life and death. In Kahlo’s self-portrait, the cloth over the mother’s face suggests that she is dead. The mother dies and she is being born. Some suggest that this reference to the dead mother has to do with the fact that at the time Kahlo painted this picture, she had had her first abortion, and her mother was dying. Beyond these facts, what the work forcefully does is to thread and knot these two concepts – life and death – into the relationship between mother and daughter. In her book On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Maggie Nelson quotes a Buddhist priest who says about this relationship that: “Either you are going to witness your child’s death or the child is going to witness your death. Perhaps it is a very grim way of looking at life, but still it is true.”⁸

This is a condition that one prefers not to talk about, especially when death marks the child before it marks the mother. As Joan Didion sharply asserts in her book Blue Nights:

It is horrible to see oneself die without children.

Napoleon Bonaparte said that.

What a greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead.

Euripides said that.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

I said that.⁹

I will return to this point.

VI. Henry Ford Hospital

Tracing the motif of maternity, I now turn to Henry Ford Hospital, also from 1932. It depicts a miscarriage. In the centre of the picture, Kahlo lies naked on a blood-stained bed, a tear falling from her left eye. Several orange threads come out of her left hand, connecting her (from left to right at the top) with a mannequin or a replica of a female body, a baby and a snail. Under the bed, the threads connect her with a mechanical contraption, a flower – an orchid or a jacaranda flower – and the bones of a pelvis. The background is an industrial landscape, the River Rouge Plant in Detroit, the city where she was living at the time.

This painting mixes images that resemble scientific illustrations with others of a more poetic nature. It shows different elements to represent her miscarriage, and it juxtaposes the harshness of medical objects with the softness, viscosity and fragility of a body gestating inside the woman, but which is suddenly no longer there. Once again, this painting marks a milestone in art history: it is the first miscarriage painted, in all its crudeness, by a woman.

In Kahlo’s biography, her miscarriages have been assumed to determine a deep sadness in her because of the impossibility of being a mother and the terrible frustration of not being able to give children to Rivera. This reading sees her as carrying the social burden of pity and compassion, as the woman who wants to have children but cannot have them, as a failed, incomplete, infertile woman.

There is, however, information in her work and in her letters that offers a more complex, tense and ambivalent reading. In May 1932, Kahlo wrote a letter to her friend and doctor Leo Eloesser in which she expresses her desire to interrupt her pregnancy. Having had a miscarriage years earlier, she expresses doubts about her physical ability to bear the pregnancy but also about whether a child will be compatible with the kind of life and relationship she has with Rivera. One clear point she makes in the letters is how little attention Rivera has paid to his children and their mothers. She declares that she wants something different. Thus she took medication to induce an abortion, but it had no effect and she decided to continue with the pregnancy. Let us not forget that not only was abortion illegal in the United States at the time but her health was also precarious. Finally, a few months later, Kahlo lost the baby naturally.

I dwell on this because it opens up important questions regarding the mandate of motherhood, and it signals ambivalence on her part that unleashes critical possibilities. On the one hand, it seems that she does not want a child, and this lack of desire generates a tremendous guilt when she loses the baby, as has happened to many women (as if our own desire had caused the failure of the pregnancy). On the other hand, she begins to refer to herself as “La Llorona”, the weeping woman. This characterisation replicates the legend, popular in Latin America, of a woman who grieves in pain and regrets having killed her children by drowning them in a river. The legend is said to have its origins in the folk tales of different indigenous groups prior to the conquest and is related to different pre-Hispanic deities. In the case of Mexico, it has been related to Tenpecutli who kills her children in a river. This goddess, who is very beautiful, has the ability to change her face to that of an animal, like the nahuales, when she is looked in the eye. Another character with whom she has been related is the goddess of the underworld, Mictlancihuatl, who seduces and drives men crazy. It has also been proposed that La Llorona is a hybrid of three Mexican goddesses: Cihuacoátl (the mother goddess and serpent woman), Teoyaominiqui (the watcher of the dead) and Quilaztli (goddess of childbirth and twins).

These various origins open up different relationships, but in all of them women as deities break the mandate of motherhood and subjugation. They do so with violence and fury. In pre-Hispanic worlds they are deities worshipped, respected and feared in many ways. The transformation of this narrative in the colony and under the bias of Catholic morality turns her into a suffering woman, punished to suffer for eternity precisely for not having fulfilled the mandate of obedience. La Llorona, it seems to me, embodies the patriarchal fantasy of the bad woman and the bad mother in the form of punishment.

The place of Kahlo’s work in this construction seems to me to be the manifestation of this tension. In this regard, in her analysis of the maternal self in Kahlo’s work, Ankori notes that:

‘Henry Ford Hospital‘ is about Kahlo’s triple failure: the failure of her body to produce a child; her failure to fulfill the social role as a mother; her failure to fully accept and live in peace with her choices. Kahlo’s tragedy was not simply that she was unable – whether for physical or psychological reasons or by choice – to have a child. Her deeper tragedy was that she was unable to fully accept her childless Self.¹⁰

In the paintings about her miscarriage and in one in which she is depicted as Rivera’s mother (The Love Embrace, 1949), we see the tensions of a mandate that imposes itself on the construction of self. Kahlo’s work opens the way to all the tensions that this construction manages and demonstrates: on one hand, the desire to embody powerful deities who deny motherhood, and on the other, how women suffer for having failed the mandate itself.

I am not suggesting that Kahlo’s work offers a solution, but it does present the tension in this construction. In this sense, it is more interesting to read her as an artist struggling with ambivalence than as one submitting to the pain of not being a mother. Her body of work seems to me to express frustration, sadness and loss but also the freedom to be, beyond motherhood or the lack of it. Her wound enables conversations still constrained by the weight of this construction. Her work allows us to address the profound darkness of loss, which is completely compatible with the ambiguity of not wanting, or not knowing if one wants, to be a mother.

Henry Ford Hospital is undoubtedly a painting of grief and mourning. It produces a grief that is not often talked about, referencing both the physical and the emotional pain of a spontaneous miscarriage or an induced abortion that are not often discussed. It is about a death that generates a particular dislocation that remains inscribed in the body of the one who gestated. There is no social or public space for such mourning.

In her essay “Killing Time”, Caitlín Doherty explains this through her own experience of abortion:

Perhaps what’s specific is this: that with the death of your child, your own experience of time may be especially prone to disturbance because the lost life had, so to speak, previously unfurled itself inside your own life. You had once sensed the time of your child as quietly uncoiling inside your own, then when that child is cut away by its death, your doubled inner time is also ‘untimely ripped’. Yours, and the child’s. The severance of the child’s life makes a cut through your own.¹¹

Kahlo’s self-portrait explores the specific mourning of miscarriage and perhaps even of abortion. It is still a bomb to talk about maternity, about the pain of loss in the ambiguity of desire itself.

VII. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

A self-portrait that it is important to analyse in order to shed light on these tensions in Kahlo’s own identity and on how the device of self-presentation serves as a tool to produce ruptures and imaginaries of new subjectivities is Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940). In it Kahlo presents her most feminine image in a completely disruptive way. She is shown sitting on a chair wearing a man’s suit and a shirt. In one hand she holds a pair of scissors that rests on her thigh, and remnants of hair cut by those scissors are scattered on the floor and the chair. Her face, now seen without the long hair she used to braid or leave loose with beautiful arrangements of ribbons and flowers, is serious – perhaps even haughty – but serene. The ribbon at the top, in resonance with the votive paintings, reads: “Look, if I loved you, it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore.”

This painting was executed the year she divorced Rivera and is one of the few portraits of that period. Beyond its context of their complex relationship and the dramatic nature of the break-up, which was largely due to Rivera’s long affair with Frida’s sister Cristina, I would like to emphasise the strength of this work. In it she abandons the adornments and elements of the feminine to present herself as another incarnation of herself, one that leaves out the political project of Mexicanity, that renounces the ethnic and class elements of her clothing as well as the characterisation of the beautiful and fearsome woman. In this portrait she presents herself beyond all that, she assumes herself from the strength of a she who becomes more herself by also being him.

We do not know to whom the text on the ribbon is addressed. It may be taken from a popular song, although some researchers point out that it is a verse from a 15th-century romance. It may be a provocation to Rivera himself and a questioning of the elements he loved about her, or the elements she believed he loved her for. Or it may also be addressed to herself, to one of her selves. In any case, it represents a confrontation with the female subjectivity of the time, a positioning before the ambivalence through which it is constituted. On the one hand, in her letters we read of a feminine devotion to men, an infinite desire to be loved, to be enough for them. Over and over she expresses, sometimes pitifully and sometimes with the sharp sense of humour that characterised her, her need to be loved, her desire to be everything for them, to be whatever they want her to be: the wife, the lover, the mother. On the other hand, the desire for freedom is also present, a deep need to do what she wants, to be unaccountable and to freely seek pleasure and sexual adventure. To enjoy herself, to love and generate herself as a woman beyond the roles and determinations of the time.

“What interests me in these works, beyond the anecdotes that I am not interested in repeating, is how Kahlo turns to experimentation, to multiplicity, to fluidity, to being herself in many selves, to changing and transforming herself.”

In Mexico, being a woman and being free has always been a danger. Nevertheless, within the limitations of her subjective configurations of romantic love and the conditions and constraints of her relationship, she found the freedom to move about, to experience an unconventional existence. To have different lovers, both women and men. To be alone and also under new agreements, perhaps more favorable to her, to remarry the man who had hurt her so much.

I am not interested in judging Diego and Frida’s relationship, although it is difficult not to mention it because as we have seen, there are shared central aesthetic and political elements, and, also because they themselves made their relationship a blueprint for the power couple. Their house is filled with hearts with their names intertwined, dedicated photographs, portraits of him made by her, portraits of her made by him. It was undoubtedly a creative and destructive relationship, as many are.

What interests me in these works, beyond the anecdotes that I am not interested in repeating, is how Kahlo turns to experimentation, to multiplicity, to fluidity, to being herself in many selves, to changing and transforming herself. She becomes multiple, sometimes under feminine figurations, sometimes in masculine ones, sometimes from a fusion with the Mexican political subject, sometimes as an animal becoming. She is vulnerable and strong, subject and free at the same time.

Kahlo’s ambivalence does not make her less interesting. On the contrary, it shows her in the complexity of the battles and creations that all women have to engage in, in order to navigate the historical constructions imposing a subjectivity on us and from which we must make our identity. Falling results in ruptures and inventions. Her work, not her life, is the gravitational centre from which intensities and affections, temporalities to come, are disseminated. They are revolutions. Not like those imagined and projected by Rivera – which, it must be said, never materialised – but instead transformations in the field of the subjective. From the intimate comes the force inhabiting her work , which unleashes and multiplies struggles that are happening right now, through which we confront our vulnerability and our desire for freedom.

It is perhaps this power that has pushed her through time, this intensity, beyond the character and the merchandise, that keeps connecting her with a fierce, queer, sick, desiring audience. Breton was right: Kahlo’s work is the ribbon on a bomb. The bomb exploded and the ribbon is what allows us to continue linking, tightening, exploring.

The post A Ribbon Around a Bomb: On Some of Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portraits appeared first on JCAF Journal.

The nude figure in the painting, Self-Portrait as Tahitian (1934), is striking in her composure; she is resolutely female, self-possessed, and full of repose. The artist – Amrita Sher-Gil, the part-Indian, part-Hungarian painter who stands at the cosmopolitan helm of modern Indian art – was apparently responding to Gauguin’s stylisation of the female nude, one of modernism’s master tropes for the colonial “other”, by inhabiting, with her own corporeality, this over-burdened representational form. In her painting, “Tahitian-ness” takes the form of her own brown body; but it is also projected through her straight, black hair, which is tied in an unfussy ponytail, marking simplicity or indigeneity as the absence of couture.

I recall experiencing a sense of vertigo on first encountering this painting in response to the dizzying sets of questions it raised. What were the conditions that made possible such an account of Gauguin by a woman and a colonial subject in 1934? What precisely was meant by Sher-Gil’s self-conscious, self-placement into the body of a Tahitian nude? How could art history have missed this painting, so deliberate a citation of art historical precedent? And how could such far-reaching coordinates – Paul Gauguin in the 1890s, Amrita Sher-Gil in the 1930s, Paris, Tahiti, India, Hungary – be plotted onto our existing map of modernism’s unfolding in the 20th century?

Upon arriving in the subcontinent soon after completing this painting, Sher-Gil announced that: “Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and many others. India belongs only to me.”¹ As the first Indian to receive art training in Paris, where she attended the École des Beaux-Arts from 1929 to 1932, the biracial, bicultural and bisexual Sher-Gil, described recently by Time magazine as “shockingly modern”,² both physically embodied the predicament of “belonging” to the West, and painstakingly mined its artistic training, formal vocabularies and painterly paradigms to facilitate her legendary return to India. Even so, she was aware as she boasted, according to her friend, the writer Mulk Raj Anand, “that she was not on firm ground in India”.³

Self-Portrait as Tahitian speaks in powerful ways to a number of contemporary intellectual concerns: the profound and intractable global entanglements of modernism, the cross-cultural currents of the early 20th century, the place of primitivism and orientalism within the discourses of the modern; the avant-garde’s treatment of the female nude; and the bravado of the young woman who offered the statement while studying in Paris at the age of 21.

In this essay, I argue for the relevance of Self-Portrait as Tahitian for understanding Sher-Gil’s entire pictorial practice, and the pivotal place of this painting in her short, but focused, artistic trajectory. As others have acknowledged, Sher-Gil’s self-portraits during her time in Paris – 19 in all – are rather unlike the rest of her work, standing apart from the studies of European subjects and models she also painted in Paris, or the pioneering portraits of what she saw as India’s “dark-bodied, sad-faced”⁴ communities that made her artistic career in the subcontinent. In these self-images, mostly painted between 1929 and 1932 while she was still a student at the École des Beaux Arts, Sher-Gil appears to be trying on different skins, in part – as the critic, Geeta Kapur, has suggested – to “break the yolk-bag of her narcissism.”⁵ However, Self-Portrait as Tahitian, which stands precisely at the moment of transition between her “Western” and “Indian” bodies of work, suggests an aspiration of a different sort. A number of elements in the painting point to Sher-Gil’s preparation for India, while exposing her awareness and sense of trepidation about the representational dilemmas that lay ahead. Self-Portrait as Tahitian is an exemplary negotiation by a female protagonist of the masculine paradigm of the modern artist and a theatrical intervention into the question of the female nude, staged through an ambitious, but uncertain, colonial subjectivity. As I will show, it is the kind of cultural text that makes possible dynamic ways of thinking about the vast canvas of historical entanglements within modernism, and stimulates out of necessity comparative approaches to discrepant social fields that present a challenge to the authority of existing national frames.

In what follows, I explore how Sher-Gil’s self-portrait served to articulate and legitimate her own “avant-garde gambit”⁶ in the heightened political climate of India in the 1930s, a decade of intense nationalist consciousness on the part of the subject nation, whose independence was attained in 1947. I conclude, however, by pursuing what I view as the most consequential omission in the little attention the painting has received thus far, namely, the Japanese motifs that make up the curious backdrop for Sher-Gil’s performance of indigenism as a Tahitian woman. By approaching the Japanese subtext of her painting through the lens of recent understandings of Japonisme within modernism, I argue that Self-Portrait as Tahitian conceals a deep engagement on the part of Sher-Gil with the strategies of self-portraiture and acts of masquerade undertaken by both Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh in the late 1880s, in preparation for their famous collaboration in Arles.  In the end, I propose – contrary to convention – that Sher-Gil’s self-portrait is not merely a sign of the artist’s stylistic debt to the primitivist styles and colours of Gauguin in Polynesia, typically formulated by Sher-Gil’s biographers as her “Gauguinesque lust for sensuousness and colour”,⁷ or as the symptom of an unexamined gesture of “neo-primitivism”. In fact, the painting also expresses a crucial connection to the radical paradigm of identity presented by van Gogh, which offered Sher-Gil an alternative model for her gesture of outreach towards the “poor and downtrodden” people of India. What is significant about Sher-Gil’s embrace of van Gogh, I will argue, is that it exposes the precariousness of the moment of manoeuvre enacted by Self-Portrait as Tahitian, the forms of disalignment and difference at stake in this act of interpolation and reinvention, and the drive on the part of the young female artist to adopt and adapt Europe’s modernist imagination to the outer reaches of art history’s world stage.

Polynesia, Primitivism and the Female Nude

The woman in Self-Portrait as Tahitian is, in fact, only partially nude. Sher-Gil has covered herself, from the waist-down, with a pale jade Polynesian wrap, but there is no floral pattern, no vibrant colour, no flower in her hand or hair – all of which were among Gauguin’s signature tropes in offering up for his European viewers the islands of the South Seas as a lush sexual paradise.⁸ In general, Sher-Gil’s sexuality is not depicted through the terms of the French male painter’s preoccupation with the ripe fertility of Tahitian women, which he symbolised, for example, through the freshness of a flower – its readiness, if you like, to be “plucked”. Amrita’s body is not offered for consumption in the manner of the fearful, reclining nude of Nevermore (1897), or the rear-view portrait of Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watching) (1892), paintings that reveal, in Hal Foster’s terms, the “crisis of white heterosexual masculinity” that stands at the core of Gauguin’s primitivist encounter.⁹ Instead, Sher-Gil presented herself in a three-quarter profile view, with full red lips (could that be lipstick she is wearing?), hands crossed in an “x” shape below her bare, robust breasts. The entire stance, and the impertinence of the painted lips, depart unequivocally from the disempowering portrayal of Gauguin’s female subjects, whose erotic beauty was inevitably defined by their proximity to nature and their “animalistic” sexual states. And yet, the self-sufficiency of Sher-Gil in her Tahitian guise is set against the shadowy presence of a male figure, recalling the ominous doppelgängers that Gauguin himself included in several pictures to signal his own presence in the scene. In Sher-Gil’s painting, by contrast, the shadow does not appear as threatening as Gauguin’s forbidding harbingers of death. It evokes, instead, the daunting predicament of the young female artist, as she strove to make an artistic maneuver notable for its lack of historical precedent – namely, the re-working of modern Western painting for India – through the aesthetic terms made available to her by a previous generation of modern artists in Europe.

“The painting makes visible both the European provenance of primitivism, and the radical interruptions of its formations – its gendered subversions, its circuitous migrations, and its gestures of reproduction and difference – in and out of the colonial sphere.”

Self-Portrait as Tahitian may thus be seen as part of the young female protagonist’s broader attempt to subvert the modernist conventions of the female nude, which began with the charcoal sketches she produced diligently from models during art school, and continued after her return to India. Her 1933 painting, Professional Model, for example, depicted not the iconic beauty of the female body, but a saggy, middle-aged, nude woman, slouched and slightly haggard in appearance. The model, we know, was suffering from tuberculosis; the mood is that of sadness and alienation.¹⁰ In another striking picture, Two Girls (1939), Sher-Gil portrayed a brown and a white woman together in their nudity ambiguously, as possible lovers, or in an alternative reading, as a form of self-portraiture that projected her own racially divided self.¹¹ In one of her final paintings, Woman on Charpoy (1940), Sher-Gil brought the theme of the reclining nude, ambitiously, by way of Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) and the South Indian painter, Ravi Varma’s existing engagement with the trope, to the social environment of rural women in South Asia. Here, Sher-Gil used the colour red to convey a distinctive “semiotics of desire”, one that expressed both woman’s sexual yearning, and the repression of female sexuality in the subcontinent.¹²

A recurring theme within the nationalist celebration of Amrita Sher-Gil has been the issue of the young painter’s relationship to Gauguin, a debt that has been seen for decades as a series of stylistic clichés. For earlier critics, like W.G. Archer and Karl Khandalavala, Sher-Gil’s “passionate adhesion” to Gauguin seemed “almost to have haunted her.”¹³ They argued that Amrita was “missing India” during her time in Paris, and identified with Gauguin’s “sun hotted, joyous exuberant colour which to her symbolized her half-forgotten homeland,” and that “filled a void” within her while in Europe.¹⁴ For these writers, Gauguin’s approach to colour played a “supreme role” in her art, but by the end of the journey, she achieved a technical transcendence, and “the result was totally new.”¹⁵ The narrative they constructed thus emphasised the primacy of Sher-Gil’s attraction to Gauguin, but also her masterful overcoming of his style, which was heralded as part of an indigenous victory for modern painting in the subcontinent. At times, however, the critics’ preoccupation with the relationship also produced some more paradoxical results: as W.G. Archer stated obtusely, for Sher-Gil “Gauguin was India, and when at last she returned, India itself became Gauguin.”¹⁶

In more recent scholarship, the question of Sher-Gil’s relationship to Gauguin has been entangled with the conundrum of the inheritance of primitivism, described by one feminist critic as a “white, Western and preponderantly male quest for an elusive object whose very condition of desirability resides in some form of distance and difference, whether temporal or geographical.”¹⁷ It is by now well known that the story of Gauguin’s flight from civilisation, his voyage outward from the metropole to the colony, projected as an “earthly paradise”, earned him the dubious distinction of being the father of modern primitivism. It is also well known that the Hungarian born and partly European-bred Sher-Gil, who occasionally used her servants as models, was not part of the world of the Indian peasantry that she depicted in her paintings, who were essentially distant and foreign to the artist, at times gazed at from above, or viewed from outside as an undifferentiated mass. Sher-Gil’s portraits of Indians, which represented “the people” in the singular, as archetypes of humanity, would appear to reproduce, then, Gauguin’s primitivist gesture, while also complicating the idea that primitivism as a structure of desire within modernism belonged exclusively to the white, Western male imaginary. Self-Portrait as Tahitian can thus also be seen as an account, in part, of the phenomenon of historical particularity within the universalising discursive arena of modernism. The painting makes visible both the European provenance of primitivism, and the radical interruptions of its formations – its gendered subversions, its circuitous migrations, and its gestures of reproduction and difference – in and out of the colonial sphere.

By the year of Sher-Gil’s self portrait, 1934, primitivism as a set of representational conventions was both well established, and becoming unhinged by negritude, anti-colonial nationalism, and other assertions of agency in Paris and elsewhere. If anything, primitivism in the period between the wars had emerged as a spectacle, both at the level of high culture (for example, in the 1923 opera, The Creation of the World, which featured tribal costumes and sets by Fernand Léger), and at the other end of the cultural spectrum, with the eruption of jazz in the bars and clubs of Montparnasse, and the nightclub performances of Josephine Baker.¹⁸ It is a sign of the complexity of Sher-Gil’s relationship to this environment that she lived a bohemian and cosmopolitan life, but was nevertheless described by one reviewer in Paris as “an exquisite and mysterious little Hindu princess”, who “speaks French like a Parisian” and who “conjures up the mysterious shores of the Ganges.”¹⁹ In presenting herself as a Tahitian nude, Sher-Gil was perhaps leveraging some of the exoticism surrounding her reception in Paris, but she was also undoubtedly conscious of its racism, and of the limits of her own fiction of entry into Gauguin’s sexual imaginary. Indeed, as a mixed-race subject, the young female painter was more like the deracinated indigénes that Gauguin complained of in the Tahitian capital of Papeete, dominated by missionaries and French colonial officials. Later, in the Marquesas, Gauguin routinely denounced the practice of intermarriage between the races, in spite of acquiring his own Tahitian “bride”, the 13-year-old native girl, Tehamana, who served as a model in many of his pictures. One can imagine how Gauguin’s contempt for racial mixing, and his well-known predilection for teenage girls, may have resonated personally for the racially and sexually emancipated Sher-Gil, who was nevertheless still a teenager herself during much of her time in Paris. 

It is from this uncomfortable space of enunciation that Sher-Gil managed to radically scrutinise, through her own self-image, the stylistic options offered by Gauguin to “devise the indigenous body from oil paint” – a pursuit that occurred in the subcontinent, as art critic Geeta Kapur has pointed out, largely through the figure of the female²⁰ – while rejecting much of the fetishism and male mastery that underwrote the French painter’s escape from the excesses of European civilisation. What is extraordinary is that Sher-Gil, like the best self-portraitists, does not allow this act of self-reflection to devolve into epistemological anxiety. Instead, she remains poised and business-like, retaining just enough distance to present the viewer with a glimpse of herself refracted through the authoritative gaze of the Western, male avant-garde, while maintaining command over the entire situation. 

Japonisme and the Act of Masquerade

A crucial question remains: how should we understand the Japanese motifs and figures – the seated Japanese male, the female geishas in kimonos, the pagoda-like structure, and the austere lines of a Japanese court-yard (is it an exterior or interior?) – that comprise the distinctly un-Tahitian backdrop of Amrita’s provocative response to Gauguin? Perhaps Sher-Gil was commenting here upon the turn towards Japanese techniques and aesthetics, and the Nihon-ga painting tradition in particular, undertaken by the Bengal School in India from the first decade of the 20th century on. Sher-Gil was notoriously outspoken against the work of the Bengal School, which she viewed as “cramping and crippling” of creativity and responsible “for the stagnation that characterizes Indian painting today.”²¹ However, her contempt for the “insipid futilities of the Bengal School”, Nandalal Bose’s “uninspired cleverness” and Rabindranath Tagore’s “piddling little poetry”²² tended to be expressed vocally and publicly, rather than articulated through the subtleties of her painting, except insofar as she viewed her entire practice as a bid against the orthodoxy they represented in Indian art by the 1930s. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the Japanese subtext in Sher-Gil’s portrait references the pan-Asian proclivities of the Bengal School because Sher-Gil’s opposition to their perceived hold over Indian art took shape largely after her return to India, and the completion of the painting, in 1934. It is more plausible that the background represents a continuation of the painterly issues at work in the foreground, namely, Sher-Gil’s immersion in the lessons and legacies of post-Impressionist painting shaped by her art education in Paris. What is being referenced in the background of Self Portrait as Tahitian is, I suggest, the context of Japonisme in Europe, understood as a constellation of projections and longings around Japan that was simultaneously artistic and commercial, and that took hold of artistic circles in London and Paris in the final decades of the 19th century.

Many of the pioneering figures of modern art in Europe, including Manet, Monet, Degas, Whistler, Rodin, van Gogh and Gauguin, were all involved at some point or another in studying, collecting and stylistically appropriating the techniques and subject matter of Japanese art during their influential artistic careers.²³ In her self-portrait, Sher-Gil may have been seizing upon a common pictorial practice among 19th-century European painters of placing Japanese prints, objects, fabrics and motifs in the background of their portraits, not merely for decorative effect but to enhance aspects of the sitter’s biography in some way. Two well-known examples include Manet’s Portrait of Zola (1868), which presented the novelist seated at his desk below a Japanese screen and a Japanese woodcut print, along with other meaningful items, and van Gogh’s 1887/88 Portrait of Tanguy, with its kaleidoscopic background of Japanese images and prints.²⁴ I will return shortly to develop in further detail the relevance of van Gogh’s aesthetic relationship to Japan, and its unique importance for Sher-Gil. For now, it is important to also note the element of cross-cultural masquerade that characterised portraiture and self-portraiture in the Japoniste style, beginning perhaps with Monet’s eccentric portrait of his wife in 1876, La Japonaise (The Japanese Lady),²⁵ and culminating in the exchange of self-portraits between van Gogh and Gauguin that inaugurated their legendary collaboration in Arles. As I will suggest, it is the cross-cultural theatrics of Japoniste portraiture and self-portraiture in Europe that becomes part of the self-conscious arsenal for Sher-Gil’s own act of masquerade “as Tahitian”. This offers a further clue about the role of the references to Japan in the background of a painting ostensibly “about” Gauguin.

Sher-Gil and the “Studio of the South”

In the final analysis, Sher-Gil’s self-portrait betrays a preoccupation with Gauguin and van Gogh, and it takes the form of a ménage a trois – largely platonic and intellectually driven – with these male painters, whose work she admired and regarded with the highest esteem.  The painting bears the influence, in particular, of the two self-portraits that Gauguin and van Gogh exchanged in the fall of 1888 in preparation for their artistic collaboration in Arles, which they conceived and referred to as the “Studio of the South”. In these self-portraits, representing what Debora Silverman has called “the bandit and the bonze”, van Gogh and Gauguin stepped into vastly different roles and self-definitions, with a psychic intensity that departs significantly from Monet’s earlier costume play, in order to drive their aesthetic projects into previously uncharted waters.²⁶ The picture Gauguin presented to van Gogh, titled Self-Portrait: Les Miserables (1888), was inspired by Victor Hugo, and it portrayed the artist as a social outcast or bandit, a victim and a tormented soul.“In endowing him (Hugo’s protagonist) with my own features,” Gauguin stated, “I offer a portrait of myself as well as our portrait …”²⁷ Van Gogh was overwhelmed by the gesture, and wrote back that he had been “moved to the depths of my soul.”²⁸ As it turned out, his response applied only to Gauguin’s description of the work, not the actual portrait itself – which van Gogh found desperate, pessimistic and deeply disturbing when the canvas arrived in the mail a short time later.

Van Gogh had nonetheless prepared in return a picture he titled Self-Portrait as Bonze (1888), where the Dutch artist presented a bust of himself as Japanese, adapting the physical features – a round head, slanted eyes and a flattened nose – to appear physiognomically like a bonze, or Japanese monk. He too defined it as both a self-image and a portrait of the modern artist “conceived”, van Gogh explained, “as the portrait of a bonze, a simple worshipper of the Eternal Buddha.”²⁹ Van Gogh, who had no first-hand experience of Japan but was an avid collector of Japanese wood-cut prints, and read the Japonisme literature of the period enthusiastically, could have only encountered such a figure in fiction, most likely in Pierre Loti’s novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887), which he had studied carefully earlier that year. Van Gogh believed the Japanese to be a primordial people liberated from the excesses of modern society, and he projected onto Japan a utopic vision. The intensity of his imaginative operation, however fraught, was expressed in several of his portraits and self-portraits, as well as the 16 paintings of blossoming trees he also completed in Arles that year.³⁰ Self-Portrait as Bonze was the pinnacle expression of van Gogh’s idealised landscape of Japan, but also his vision of hope for the artist, and he dedicated the picture to Gauguin with the inscription “à mon ami, Paul Gauguin”.

Art historians have long been fascinated by these very different self-portraits, subjecting them to extensive scrutiny, and attributing their dissonant registers to divergent temperaments, discordant views of subject and society, and the twin responses, at different ends of the spectrum, of utopian optimism and social pessimism to the experience of modernity itself. The portraits also set the stage for the larger story, one of the most legendary episodes in the history of modern art: van Gogh and Gauguin’s pivotal nine-week collaboration in Arles, which produced a large body of paintings in intense dialogue with one another, but which was fraught with both friendship and rivalry. The personal incompatibility revealed in the self-portraits, according to one version of the story, made the relationship more and more volatile as the weeks progressed, and culminated in the famous violent incident – the ear cutting – which brought a catastrophic end to their time together (Gauguin, who feared his friend’s signs of madness, left Arles immediately, and never saw van Gogh again). Recent interpretation of this notorious event, for our purposes, has tended to stress the two very different aesthetic strategies embodied in their separate approaches to these self-portraits: if Gauguin’s portrait dramatised a problem – the social isolation of the artist – then van Gogh’s proposed a kind of solution involving monastic solitude within a community of painters, a vision that he equated, however mistakenly, with Japan.³¹ 

In the days following his release from the hospital, van Gogh produced another iconic self-portrait, in which he appeared in a coat and fur hat in the winter, with a large bandage covering his mutilated ear. It is one of two in which van Gogh depicted his injury, and both pictures have been traditionally understood as representing the artist’s precarious struggle for self-composure at a time when he was battling madness and thoughts of suicide. In the background of this painting, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889) is an easel with a blank canvas, and on the wall hangs a Japanese woodcut print, an image by Saeto Torakiyo, part of van Gogh’s personal collection.³² The message of this haunting representation now seems increasingly clear: van Gogh’s utopian investment in Japan had suffered a blow; his aesthetic and social ideals had imploded; his orientalist reality, injured beyond repair. In the words of art historian Elizabeth Childs, the juxtaposition of the blank canvas, the bandage cradling his mutilated ear, and the serene world of the Japanese print, all point to a painful confrontation, namely, the “exhaustion of the Japanese paradigm and van Gogh’s decision to leave it behind.”³³ The postscript to this picture remains well known: van Gogh, who suffered from increasing psychological imbalance, was admitted to an asylum in Saint Rémy, and ended his life two years later; while Gauguin, who lived for another 13 years, turned his attention to the South Pacific, where he arrived in Papeete, the colonial capital of Tahiti, in 1891 to begin the next episode of his artistic career.

Sher-Gil’s Artistic Self-Fashioning: Strategies, Choices, Preferences

By the time Amrita Sher-Gil arrived in Paris to study painting in 1929, the tale of van Gogh and Gauguin’s shipwrecked “Studio of the South” was firmly established as a creation story within modernism’s master narrative, and the meaning of their self-portrait exchange already subjected to over forty years of myth-making. The question is not if she knew of their collaboration, but what she took away from it, how she positioned herself in relation to it, and in what ways the story of these founding fathers facilitated her own initiation into avant-garde identity a full generation after their deaths. Sher-Gil was clearly compelled by their strategies of self-portraiture, and their acts of masquerade in particular and, as I have suggested, she self-consciously imported their role-playing paradigm for her own act of masquerade as a Polynesian woman. The pictorial tactic she selected – to approach Gauguin and van Gogh through the juxtaposition of Tahiti and Japan – displays Sher-Gil’s unique understanding of how these imaginative geographies fed the European male artist’s creative experiments in paint. Moreover, the prominence of the male shadow behind her (is it Gauguin or van Gogh?), seems to indicate the looming presence of precedent and, above all, the artist’s own search for a place for herself within the creation of modernism’s master discourse. Sher-Gil, like van Gogh and Gauguin before her, was striving to cultivate an image of herself as an artist, while negotiating her relationship to a space beyond Europe through the personal experience of social displacement and difference. Significantly, for all three painters, the self-portrait became the particular site where the aesthetic negotiation and individual quest converged in the most dramatic of ways.

“It was also the artist’s unique way of dealing with belonging and un-belonging; her enactment of identity as a dialogue across difference, her construction of a self ‘in deference and reference to larger totalities’; her liminality and its off-shoot, a dialectical mode of being.”

If, by physically inhabiting the Tahitian subject, Sher-Gil was weighing the stylistic options offered by Gauguin to represent the brown, non-Western body in paint, then the earnest quality of this inhabitation, and the optimism of this cross-cultural reach, was the option presented to her by van Gogh. As Debora Silverman has argued, van Gogh’s Self-Portrait as Bonze (1888) presented “not a victim but a worshipper; it offered a self-portrait as social dialogue, with the self constituted in and through association, in deference and reference to the larger totalities.”³⁴ It portrayed, in other words, a “relational ego”.³⁵ And this paradigm of artistic identity – malleable, contingent, relational, dialogical – had enormous intellectual and emotional appeal for the part-European, part-Indian Sher-Gil seeking to define her connection to the subcontinent.

Why was Sher-Gil so drawn to van Gogh during and after her return to India, and what was the nature of the ethical model she appeared to be seeking in his paintings and letters? There are aspects of van Gogh’s social vision – his tenacity in the face of fragility and disintegration, his “relational modality” and the syncretic model of self-hood it presented, his precariousness and ultimate defeat – had discernible implications for Sher-Gil’s life and work. The vision of identity presented by van Gogh, as compassionately constituted in and through association, offered a paradigm of artistic subjectivity that resonated strongly with the young Sher-Gil, as she sought a point of entry into the cultural landscape of India from the difficult position of standing partially outside it. Van Gogh’s idealised image of Japan, and the hope that saturated his vision of alterity, presented a framework of empathy in the cross-cultural gesture and a more tentative negotiation with representation itself, than the more triumphant, tropical escapism of Gauguin. Indeed, it was the differences and tensions between these two options, presented through the symbols of Tahiti and Japan, that provided the terms for Sher-Gil’s own self-depiction and her act of masquerade of 1934. If her performance re-worked Gauguin’s authority in relation to the female nude, it also called upon the utopic content of van Gogh’s self-portrait as a bonze, and his painful admission of the fragility of this investment in his haunting later work, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. The vulnerability Sher-Gil detected in van Gogh seemed to speak to her in the most philosophical of ways, as well as – in her words – “how inevitably the character reveals itself in one’s work. Van Gogh’s perhaps even more than usual …”.³⁶ This was especially true after her arrival in India, where she delved into the traditions of the subcontinent – the ancient Buddhist murals of Ajanta, and the medieval Mughal and Pahari miniatures – to which she did and did not fully belong with precisely the kind of tenacity and tenuousness she had seen and admired in Vincent van Gogh. 

In the end, it was not merely the brilliant raiding of historical energies for her own artistic repertoire that constituted Sher-Gil’s specifically modern consciousness. It was also the artist’s unique way of dealing with belonging and un-belonging; her enactment of identity as a dialogue across difference, her construction of a self “in deference and reference to larger totalities”; her liminality and its off-shoot, a dialectical mode of being. These qualities of her life were rather unrepresentative of the era of Indian art in which she is located. Sher-Gil’s early detractors in the subcontinent complained that her Indian portraiture “smells of the west”.³⁷ Clearly, the artist’s crossing of borders and boundaries, and her unsettled relationship to the idea of home, threatened her contemporaries in the national collective seeking to define their autonomy through an “authentic” cultural space.  Equally telling was the confidence of the young woman’s response: “How dismal to be so completely misunderstood,” she lamented, “when at long last I am learning restraint and discrimination and achieving the subtlety my work has till recently so glaringly lacked. These people have to have things yelled at them from housetops! They fail to recognize all except the most obvious.”³⁸ The inability of the world to accept her vision was an ongoing source of aggravation for Sher-Gil, and her letters often sounded the discordant tone of an individual at odds with the society around them – in her words, a “host of uncomprehending idiots”.³⁹ As Karl Khandalavala stated kindly, Sher-Gil was a “remarkably tolerant person” with “no charm, personal or otherwise, when it came to a discussion on art.”⁴⁰

“Instead, the great strength of her affecting portraiture, its modernism and its historical innovation, is that it bears the pressure of cultural dislocation and ‘existential unsettlement on its surface’, and attempts to articulate the new topos of human experience that Said and others have linked to a critical consciousness most relevant to our time: namely, the aching and seemingly interminable search for the ‘solidity and satisfaction of earth’.”

Indeed, many of the most ground-breaking qualities of Sher-Gil’s life – her restless opposition to orthodoxy, her stubbornness, her lack of serenity, her impatience with the culture of conformism around her – appear to be symptomatic of the dissonant relationship to society that Edward Said has so eloquently connected to migration and exile, as definitive forms of experiences of the modern.⁴¹ Sher-Gil was of course not literally in exile; her patterns of migration, however unconventional, did not amount to a forced departure from a place. For Said, however, the notion of exile is also a metaphorical condition “engendered by estrangement, distance and dispersion,”⁴² and a powerful motif in the art of modernity, one that has historically made possible “originality of vision”.⁴³ “Most people,” Said has explained, “are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions” and the potential to mediate between discrepant experiences.⁴⁴ In Said’s terms, exile is thus the basis for a critical intellectual practice at odds with the prerogatives of the settled collective and the “thumping language of national pride.”⁴⁵ Yet the revolutionary daring and audacity of an exilic consciousness is not without its downside:  as Said has stated poignantly, this is the essential and insurmountable sadness, the “crippling sorrow of estrangement,” that comes from the “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.”⁴⁶

The deep sense of melancholy that permeates Sher-Gil’s portraiture has long been viewed as emerging from the problem of India’s poverty, or more precisely, as a reflection of the artist’s reaction to what she saw as “those silent images of infinite submission and patience … their angular brown bodies strangely beautiful in their ugliness”.⁴⁷ Sher-Gil responded with such compassion and intensity that, according to Mulk Raj Anand, one could almost “feel misery from the pores of her paint.”⁴⁸ For other critics, however, her lyrical renderings of India’s subaltern populations amounted to an easy aestheticisation of the issues: her aristocratic class background, and the social distance created by her European education and upbringing, were both her personal “failing and that of her art.”⁴⁹ Only recently have we come to recognise how Sher-Gil’s own sense of fragmentation and cultural isolation might also stand at the heart of her pictorial project. As Sher-Gil herself once reflected: “It may be that the sadness, the queer ugliness of the types I choose as my models … corresponds to something in me, some inner trait in my nature which responds to things that are sad, rather than to manifestations of life which are exuberantly happy, or placidly contented.”⁵⁰ Clearly, the malaise she expressed in her letters about life as “infinitely grey and melancholy, something unbelievably empty,” and her puzzlement and growing anxiety about “that sensation of utterable lassitude and vague chimeric fear” that she woke up to each day, were also at the painful core of what she sought to communicate in paint.⁵¹ In other words, Sher-Gil’s art can no longer be heralded as a triumph over her own displacement, or a final act of reconciliation with her homeland, or as affirmation of the power of origins and the stabilising force of an essential Indian identity. Instead, the great strength of her affecting portraiture, its modernism and its historical innovation, is that it bears the pressure of cultural dislocation and “existential unsettlement on its surface,” and attempts to articulate the new topos of human experience that Said and others have linked to a critical consciousness most relevant to our time: namely, the aching and seemingly interminable search for the “solidity and satisfaction of earth.”⁵²

“I also Love van Gogh”

Sher-Gil once proudly described a painting of hers, Professional Model (1933), as her first successful “essay at art.”⁵³ Self-Portrait as Tahitian may also be read as an essay of sorts – a graduating thesis, as it were, submitted by Sher-Gil on the interrelated topics of painting, self-portraiture and, ultimately, her own artistic subjectivity, as fashioned dialectically in and through the processes of identification and cultural difference. Self-Portrait as Tahitian may appear to confirm, on the surface at least, a spirit of exploration of Gauguin. However, as I have sought to demonstrate in this essay, against the longstanding narrative of Sher-Gil’s intractable debt to Gauguin, Self-Portrait as Tahitian also subverts and rejects several of Gauguin’s gestures of objectification in relation to the female nude, and makes visible, albeit in a more oblique fashion, Sher-Gil’s preoccupation with the art of van Gogh and the elusive experimentation with alterity and self-portraiture that characterised the latter’s engagement with Japan. In the end, I have proposed that it was van Gogh’s dialogical and fragile ethical vision, as an alternative to the story of triumph, and not her “intimate adherence” to Gauguin,⁵⁴ that drove the painting’s radical performativity, namely, its act of masquerade as a Tahitian woman, and that prepared Sher-Gil, both personally and aesthetically, for her ambitious critical mission to “interpret the life of the Indians, particularly the poor Indians, pictorially.”⁵⁵ 

A childhood friend of Sher-Gil’s once recalled that, in 1938, Amrita announced that she was “emancipating herself from Gauguin … Do you mean, I asked her, that the Gauguin in you is dying or that you are dissatisfied? Possibly both,” she said.⁵⁶ Like almost everything that concerns Amrita Sher-Gil, we are left hanging from this hopelessly ambiguous branch. The lack of conclusion is central to her story; her sudden death at the age of barely 29 meant that her career was, tragically, but also compellingly, an “unfinished project”.⁵⁷ It is no longer possible to regard Sher-Gil as an anomalous exception, as a “highly Europeanised artist” or “a complication to the social formation” of modern Indian art.⁵⁸ Instead, she has increasingly emerged as a paradigmatic figure of the 20th century, one who embodied the most painful paradoxes of a colonial modernity, and bore the melancholic imprint of its greatest dilemmas. Feeling alien, standing outside of one’s traditions, receiving a Western education, seeking authenticity and belonging – these aspects of Sher-Gil’s life have resonated for artists, both male and female, throughout the subcontinent, and indeed across the world, in her wake. Sher-Gil’s Self-Portrait as Tahitian is a remarkable engagement with the multiple aesthetic and ideological foundations of a global modernism, a self-conscious revisiting of the existing tropes held up like a mirror of modernist possibilities, and a powerful act of imagination within the uncertain coordinates of a decolonising world. It is a record of the restless drive of the young female artist involved in the process of being, becoming and belonging. It is an extraordinary vision of the modern self shaped through the migratory historical conditions of our time. It is a “retake” of the most exciting sort. 

The post A Retake of Sher-Gil’s ‘Self-Portrait as Tahitian’ appeared first on JCAF Journal.

I want to begin this essay with a series of piercing questions linked to the ways of narrating art history from modernity to contemporaneity in the Global South.¹ Who produces the knowledge about it? Who writes its histories? Who curates its exhibitions? The questions, which run through the three exhibitions put on by the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF), are urgent, especially in the case of women artists, still vastly underrepresented in the histories of 20th- and 21st-century art. Although this situation has begun to change, the collections of national museums, created when the idea of the avant-garde was associated with the male artist, have comparatively few works by women artists. And in this sense, even when active policies are pursued to diversify their collections, it is difficult to significantly transform them.

Modern art history is a story based on what has been done in a few European cities and one in the United States that define themselves as centres of the avant-garde. Everything that happened in other parts of the planet – which the centres define as peripheries – is considered subsequent and derivative. History shows, however, that, at least since the post-war period and during the Cold War, language innovation occurred simultaneously in many of the world’s metropolises. Here is an example: in the face of the hegemony of terms such as FLUXUS, which encompasses in its spirit what was done simultaneously, but independently, in different parts of the planet, the Basque artist Esther Ferrer, who was a member of the ZAJ movement founded in Madrid, parallel to and in contact with FLUXUS, emphasises simultaneity. If we are talking about originality, innovation or anticipation, we would have to say also that Gutai anticipated FLUXUS in the fifties, and that experimental movements were generated in different cities around the world: ZAJ in Spain, Vivo Dito in Argentina, Tribu No in Chile etc. Movements – including FLUXUS – that multiplied by resorting to some of the strategies that Dadaism and Surrealism had launched before the war, were articulated and transformed in different contexts. “Neo-Dadaism” has been used as an umbrella term to refer to these movements happening in different parts of the world at the same time. Contemporary historiographical criticism proposes terms such as “horizontal avant-gardes”² or “simultaneous avant-gardes”³ in place of the narrative based on the idea of the dispersion and assimilation of Euro-American movements.

The JCAF programme, curated by Clive Kellner and the institution team, is inscribed in the perspective of the Global South. It does not focus on Euro-American styles but on problems that it addresses comparatively, thus making possible dialogues between artists who were not necessarily in contact with each other. I will return to this point later. The curatorial project was developed in three exhibitions that addressed the work of women artists from the Global South. My analysis seeks to articulate theoretical aspects that illuminate these exhibitions.

Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South was the first exhibition, presented by JCAF from 16 September 2020 to 20 January 2021. Focusing on the problem of the construction of identity in the present tense, this exhibition presented the work of five artists from different geographies. The topos – the central theme – dealt with ways of representing the body. What is the relevance of exhibiting these constructions? Since the 1960s, artistic feminism has been focused on the body. The political body. The word political here expresses not only the fact that many women artists put their very existence at risk by demonstrating in the streets, facing imprisonment and torture, or leaving their countries for exile. It also means that with their work they proposed a new grammar of bodies, a way of representation that broke the external, patriarchal and objectifying angle of vision that Laura Mulvey referred to in her classic 1975 essay analysing the representation of women in Hollywood cinema.⁴ In this new representation, the body was fragmented and interrupted, provoking a new semantic field. In these years, the aim was to approach the social and political construction of the body from the available body, the body as an autonomous field of action. Many artists used their own bodies (Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Shigeko Kubota, Esther Ferrer, Marina Abramović) not only for expressive reasons, but also because this was the legal territory for which they did not have to ask permission.

The body is the space of the social construction of gender, and it is also the territory of the negotiation of mixed, crossed identities that respond to diverse mandates. As Lorraine O’Grady has clearly expressed, belonging to various identities (metropolis/Caribbean) opened her gaze, placing her in a situation of constant negotiation and translation. One could compare her work to that of the Afro-Brazilian artist Aline Motta, a mixed-race woman who feels Black in Brazil but white in Nigeria, where she embarked on an artistic journey in which she questioned this identity.⁵

Working from the body as a field of mixed meanings involves opening up a wide and extremely rich semantic field, whose signifiers are to be found in the super-impositioning and mixing of cultures. It is necessary, however, to acknowledge different histories and agendas: apartheid and its violence in South Africa represent a different experience from the bloody and stigmatising legacy of slavery that rose out of and perpetuated various forms of racism in America. The discourse of segregation in the United States is different from that of apparent integration in Brazil and the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.

“In the patriarchal and racist structuring of society, Black women in Latin America occupy the bottom of the social pyramid: as women, poor and Black, their struggle is situated in complex forms of social intersection.”

The violence of racism in the US was palpable during the pre-emptive and enforced social isolation established during Covid-19. It was clear that the Black population was more vulnerable to disease because of poor nutrition and overcrowded housing. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, pointed to the persistent targeting of Black bodies by police violence. Comparable scenarios can be seen in Latin America and the Caribbean, where racism structures power relations. We are not often going to find Black women or men in positions of power in Latin America, and when leaders emerge, as happened with Marielle Franco, they are often subjected to various forms of violence, including assassination, as in the case of Franco who was murdered in Rio de Janeiro on 14 March 2018. Although we often hear that there is no racism in Brazil, the emergence of the Movimento Negro (Black Movement) testifies to the contrary. In the patriarchal and racist structuring of society, Black women in Latin America occupy the bottom of the social pyramid: as women, poor and Black, their struggle is situated in complex forms of social intersection.

O’Grady and Motta both use the concept of bridging in their analysis of Black identity. O’Grady conceives of the Atlantic Ocean, the main route of slavery – called the Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy⁶ and the Red Atlantic by the Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino⁷ – as a space from which to build bridges, to create zones, to generate positions from which to exchange with each other.

In Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South, the turn away from privileging of one species over another is notable in Bharti Kher, whose self-portrait is a fusion of her own face with the face of an ape, or in Wangechi Mutu, with her hybrid identity of woman-dragon figuring a new species. In the context of the fourth wave of feminism, which expanded between 2015 and 2017 in Poland, Argentina, Mexico and the United States, new concepts and theoretical frameworks were activated,⁸ such as the notion of the “cyborg” proposed by Donna Haraway, as well as her critique of anti-speciesism and her analysis of the patriarchal structures of the state.⁹ This moment was also linked to an ecological imperative, present in feminism since the 1970s, but reframed in the wake of the current depletion of the planet’s natural resources. From this frame of reference, feminism has also been linked to the indigenist turn, re-evaluating indigenous economies that are often managed by women, which propose a different relationship between humans and nature, between species. Such economies call for respect for the environment and denunciation of destruction like the deforestation of the Amazon in Brazil, the desertification brought on by the cultivation of avocado in Chile, the extraction of lithium on the border between Argentina and Chile, and the burning of wetlands in Argentina.

It could be argued that more than any other social movement, feminism has significantly expanded its agenda in the 21st century, generating extensive literature, and instigating massive mobilisations in the face of the femicides that continue unabated. This has made feminism a target for the international alt-right, which insistently attacks women and feminism. This can be seen, for example, in the attacks on American feminist theorist Judith Butler in São Paulo in 2017, who was characterised by conservative religious groups as a promoter of “gender ideology”.¹⁰ Such groups attack educational gender programmes that seek to transform patriarchal structures that condition violence against women.

In this context, the works exhibited at JCAF represent a “poetics of intervention” even when they do not carry a direct, militant, activist message.

In Berni Searle’s performance, for example, the white powder falling on her Black body suggests discrimination and the possibility of transformation. Her work can be compared to an equally powerful performance by Victoria Santa Cruz, an Afro-Peruvian artist,¹¹ in which the experience of discrimination because of her hair and the colour of her skin, becomes a journey towards empowerment, an affirmation of her Black identity.

The works undoubtedly create figurations – images – that bring together various meanings. When Shirin Neshat shows the separation of men and women in religious spaces, when she covers women’s faces with writing and alludes to their social conditioning, she constructs a poetics imbued with political meaning. Figures that pass through spaces protected by the veil suggest the place of women in the complex interaction between East and West, Islam and Christianity, Iran and the United States. These figures occupy a zone of belonging and not belonging.

“In this context, the works exhibited at JCAF represent a ‘poetics of intervention’ even when they do not carry a direct, militant, activist message.”

Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South went beyond the geographical and cultural frameworks to which the artworks referred. In the exhibition, the body became the site of transformations, migrations and inscriptions, a literal and conceptual site in which intervention was possible and the symbolic space of individual artworks could be seen to be reflecting a range of social experiences. In these works the most recent feminisms are alluded to. They invoke not only the local cultural geographies to which they refer and in which they are inscribed, but also the larger socio-political landscape of Latin America, where violence and resistance are expressed with particular force. The power of the artworks is contained not only in their extraordinary poetry, but also in their presentation of the centrality of the body in an array of urban formations.

Let us go back to the geopolitics of the art world as a framework through which to consider the exhibition Liminal Identities in the Global South presented at JCAF from 29 June 2021 to 29 January 2022.

Latin America has been considered – by those in the supposed centres – as a peripheral area with respect to modern and post-war styles. In my critical analysis of colonial structures, however, I argue that this is the canonical version constructed from the emergence of art movements in some European and US cities. When we look at art spaces in different metropolises around the world, we observe simultaneities and even anticipations. It is, therefore, not surprising that the presence and the influence in Paris of the concrete and neo-concrete movements that emerged in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil are being studied today.¹²

In this context, we can also analyse the emergence of the anthropophagic movement in the 1920s in São Paulo, Brazil, a movement that, with the help of Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila de Amaral, expressed itself as both a written and visual manifesto. In the anthropophagic manifesto, the action of devouring the other is used to elaborate a powerful cultural metaphor. It refers to the acts of anthropophagy in which some Europeans were devoured by indigenous groups during the conquest of what we know today as Brazil. The relationship between European and Brazilian culture proposed by the modern movement in Brazil is not one in which Europe carries the culture and Brazil adopts it. It is, rather, one in which Brazilian culture devours and assimilates those aspects that may be useful to it in order to elaborate its own culture. Is this not, on the other hand, the movement that European culture made when it “devoured” African culture in order to elaborate cubism? If modern art in Latin America is peripheral with respect to European artistic movements, could we not argue that Europe is peripheral with respect to African culture, which it not only transferred to its anthropological and ethnographic museums, but also incorporated into the matrices of modern art in Europe? These are questions that we must ask from a decolonial perspective.

Only recently has it been possible in Brazil to re-evaluate the originality of Lina Bo Bardi’s architecture, as well as that of other women architects completely erased from the traditional histories of architecture. The discovery of more than 120 artists made possible by the exhibition I co-curated with Cecilia Fajardo Hill (Radical Women. Latin American Art, 1960–1985¹³) was not, in fact, about discovering works that had never been seen before. It was, on the contrary, an unearthing of works that existed, that had been exhibited, had even been awarded prizes, but that when the histories of national art in Latin America were written, were erased, ignored. This exhibition made it possible to visualise the extent to which these artists had produced a profound iconographic shift, addressing grammars of the body that had never before been expressed in art. Working against the unification of the female body through the eye of male desire, they provoked the explosion of these bodies. These perspectives addressed female eroticism, motherhood, the relationship between consciousness-raising, empowerment and psychoanalysis, the relationship with the discourses of medicine, and the critique of the pathologisation of the female body. With this exhibition, we undertook the adventure of unveiling, analysing and understanding works for which there were no appropriate frameworks of analysis or exhibitions at the time. In addition, we were able to expand our knowledge of artistic languages and their intersections. These artists explored not only the traditional media of modernity – painting and sculpture – but also performance, video, installation and experimental film. And, of course, in the constellation of works brought to us by the map of America, the works of Brazilian artists after the 1960s were linked to singular and original Brazilian avant-gardes: anthropophagy, concretism, neo-concretism, Tropicália and Brazilian New Objectivity. These were original avant-gardes, not derivative, decentred or peripheral. And the same framework of analysis could be applied to the art of Africa, elsewhere in Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia.

The anthropophagic manifesto presented in JCAF’s exhibition proposed, as an alternative to the racialisation of art, a mixed-race model. It is also necessary to critically analyse, however, what this anthropophagic modernity represents for a Black artist. And here I follow the observations of the Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino. She points out that she does not feel represented by Brazilian modernism, which, although integrating the idea of the mestizo experience of Brazil, was an enlightened and white movement: for a descendant of slaves in Brazil, race, education and class represented limits in her relationship with modern movements,¹⁴ and most especially for women. Until recently, in relation to feminism, the expression of Black feminism was resisted in the Black community. If the right to work was part of the struggle for the women of second wave feminism, for Black women who had always worked, whether on the plantation or in domestic work, this was an alien agenda, especially since those who cleaned the houses of white women – of middle class, feminist activists – were Black women.

Certainly, the experiences of Black women in Latin America are different from the myriad experiences of African women. Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, a founding member of the Crystalist group (1976) in the post-independence period of Sudan in 1956, foregrounds her subjectivity as an African woman, a pioneer, a modernist. This is an example of what we call “simultaneous avant-gardes”.

Liminal Identities in the Global South had the virtue of addressing complex problems while avoiding simplifications. In this exhibition the structure in chapters allowed the transition from Tarsila de Amaral’s Abopuru, the emblematic painting of Brazilian modernity,¹⁵ to Lina Bo Bardi’s architecture, with its extraordinary observation of the popular aesthetics of northeastern Brazil. The exhibition also introduced the disease and the pandemic that ran through our lives and activities between 2020 and 2021. It did this through archival images of other plagues, from the 17th century to the influenza of 1918. Pandemic, contagion, care, masks. The sanitary masks from history, shown in the exhibition, had a clear link to Lygia Clark’s masks. This link acquired a meaning inscribed in the context of the pandemic no doubt quite different to what Lygia Clark evoked when she designed them. Anyone who has had the experience of putting on one of her masks will have been able to perceive that their function is not to protect against disease, but to provide new perceptual experiences. These masks alter our vision and hearing, and produce unexpected stimuli on the skin. Were these masks linked to the dictatorship in Brazil? Not directly, but indirectly they are, since they allude to the freedom of the senses, expression, perception, all of which Latin American dictatorships systematically sought to control. Bodies and thought were regulated by the surveillance of the repressive state. In such a context, Lygia Pape’s Divisor, also part of the exhibition, assumes a revulsive power. It alludes to the mass, to the grammar of bodies that Elias Canetti analysed so well.¹⁶ It refers to proximity and distance in the crowd, to people together but separated. It is an accurate visual metaphor for the difficulty of expressing oneself freely in public during the dictatorship.

Ana Mendieta’s silhouettes introduced a new dimension to the exhibition, a mobile, mutant geography. With her silhouettes Mendieta alludes to the homeland from which she was torn. The limit of her body on the earth defines a territory. When she rests on the earth she draws a body-map that she can install in different places. Mendieta’s work vibrates in the contemporary performances of the Afro-Brazilian artist Renata Felinto, who dances and defines her territory as that defined by her steps, her movements, in a public space in the city of São Paulo.¹⁷ In Mendieta and Felinto, the territory defined by the body is intertwined with that of diaspora. In Mendieta the diasporic condition is framed as the political relations between Cuba and the United States, and in Felinto’s case as the conditions that Brazilian society established for Afro-descendants. Politics, class and race indicate spheres of belonging and exclusion.

This sense of emancipation of a territory acquires another dimension in Kapwani Kiwanga’s Flowers for Africa in which the artist re-interprets the commemorations of African independence. How is memory constructed? In Flowers for Africa we can also see echoes of the memorials for the disappeared in Latin America. The networks between these two continents are beginning to be explored: the parallels, the simultaneities and the differences.¹⁸ The history of the bloody colonisation of the Congo by Belgium must be seen as parallel to the bloody history of colonisation and slavery in Latin America. These experiences of oppression suggest links in the international Pan-Africanist movement, connections between the various experiences of colonisation: the usurpation of Africa, and the conquests in America beginning in the 15th century. The ethnographic museums of Europe are proof of the plundering of both continents. This plundering is the focus of the repatriation movement that has begun in Europe, to return objects such as the Benin bronzes to their rightful owners.

The challenge that JCAF has taken on in Johannesburg – bringing together images from different territories with shared histories – is audacious but responsible. The third exhibition, Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South (25 October 2022 to 22 February 2023) is a remarkable curatorial experience that turns the limitations of borrowing works into potential. The exhibition focuses on just three paintings, one by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, one by Amrita Sher-Gil, who was born in Budapest but whose paternal family originated from India, where the artist lived in the last years of her life, and one by the South African artist Irma Stern, who studied in Germany but developed a body of work in Africa. Along with the three selected works (portraits and self-portraits), the exhibition gathers documents, diaries and photographs, which allow us to approach, understand and reflect on the complex situation of these artists.

The works of all three artists explore mixed heritages. In addition, all three lives are traversed by the complex histories of the countries in which they lived in the 1930s and 1940s, years of the affirmation of nationalist states, as well as of post-revolutionary and pre-revolutionary moments. How do the works of these three women fit into these complex contexts?

Frida Kahlo made her self-portrait the centre of her representations. She had, in her own image, the territory available to develop the relationship between self-portrait, body and emancipation to which I referred at the beginning of this essay. In the 1930s she and her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, travelled to the United States. In a small painting, in which she also uses collage, she depicts her empty tehuana dress, suspended amidst images of Wall Street. This is a critical view of the world of finance, a pictorial view of capitalism, of the North Country.

Sher-Gil’s paintings, which are dominated by interiors and portraits of women, do not deal with national or decolonial themes in an obvious way. They do not reflect feelings opposed to the British control that placed her country in the situation of domination, of subaltern identity, of British India in the structure of the British Empire.

South Africa was also under the domination of that empire and its conflicts, and Irma Stern’s father was imprisoned during the Anglo-Boer War. Her work is notable for its depiction of Black people with whom she came into contact in South Africa and on her travels elsewhere in Africa. She represented Black subjects in a way that suggests her disaffection with apartheid. Her travels between Europe and various African countries allowed her to develop images that seemed critical of segregation. As LaNitra M. Berger points out, the themes she addresses are not neutral; they involve contradictions that Berger tackles without erasing their problematic nature. Stern did not, for example, connect the experience of the Shoah with that of apartheid.¹⁹

Although Sher-Gil and Stern had European training, both felt themselves artists of their own countries, India and South Africa. Similarly in Kahlo’s work we see her observation of Mexican popular culture such as the tradition of ex votos, painted in metal by artisans and offered as thanksgiving for miracles performed by Catholic saints. Physically limited by injuries sustained in an accident, Kahlo produced small-format paintings in contrast to the vast surfaces painted by the muralists. This opposition, and the constant presence of her own image in her work, can be interpreted from a gender perspective. Her themes are not illustrative, like those found in Diego Rivera’s murals in which the customs and ways of life of the indigenous population are depicted. Kahlo mixes traditions, composing work in which different cultures coexist, mainly through their dress and ornaments. The representation of her own abortion or of a femicide announced in the Mexican press places her work in a bold position within feminist representations. Additionally, although her works do not present us with a half-human, half-monkey hybrid, as in some of Bharti Kher’s works, they do show a coexistence between the human and the animal, which is one aspect of the work that has interested contemporary feminist critics.

Amrita Sher-Gil’s travels and her discovery of 17th–century Rajasthani miniatures are important in her work. Trained in Europe, Sher-Gil finds the signs of her identity in India, an identity that she approaches with intimacy, portraying people close-up in domestic settings rather than alluding to larger political or nationalist narratives. Portraiture is the field from which she constructs an identity.

“The bringing together of artists from such different geographies and cultures in the exhibition programme allows us to address how female identities were constructed in distant but comparable spaces.”

The programme of exhibitions developed by JCAF approaches art history unconventionally: instead of analysing the genealogies evoked by the European avant-gardes, the exhibitions analyse the simultaneities between artists who were not in contact with each other. A comparativist perspective in art history needs at least two elements in order for the method to be sustained. The first lies in the existence of real links, contacts that existed between the artists under study. The term “contact zones”, proposed in 1992 by the Canadian researcher Mary Louise Pratt,²⁰ is useful here, although Pratt is referring to the social space in which the culture of the coloniser and the colonised coexist. But nonetheless, the places in which these three artists performed can be defined as “contact zones”. In Mexico, India and South Africa there were such contacts between colonisers and colonised, between local thought structures and colonial structures that gave rise to cultural crossings. But when we refer to the Global South in the field of art, we also think of the contacts between artists from distant cultural and geographic spaces. I am thinking, for example, of those contacts established by abstract artists from Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Uruguay. These contacts, in the case of these three modernist painters, did not exist. But it is possible to sustain the comparisons through the observation and analysis of simultaneities. We have pointed out, in each case, some of these simultaneities. Sher-Gil, Kahlo and Stern share the fact that painting allowed them to establish a terrain of freedom in which they not only gave an account of the shaping of their own identities, as female subjects unmarked from the state, but also offered a singular view of their own countries and the delicate social and political experiences they were going through.

These three painters provide a picture of modernity, nationalism and the growth of their countries from an alternative angle. They do not portray the bourgeoisie, the powerful men, the heroes, as we see them in paintings made in the 19th century in the newly declared Latin American republics. They offer us a different vision from that so often painted – of cities, industry and national heroic deeds – and bring us closer to the portrait (or self-portrait) of singular subjects, captured in intimate domestic settings.

The bringing together of artists from such different geographies and cultures in the exhibition programme allows us to address how female identities were constructed in distant but comparable spaces. The proposal to exhibit their works provides extraordinarily rich ground for thinking about how the notion of the Global South is elaborated and how illuminating dialogues can be set in motion through a consideration of the concepts of distance and proximity.

The post Female Identities, Distances and Proximities in the South–South Dialogue appeared first on JCAF Journal.

Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South

(16 September 2020 to 30 January 2021)

The exhibition explored distinct ways of representing the body by five women artists from the Global South: Bharti Kher (India), Nandipha Mntambo (South Africa), Wangechi Mutu (Kenya/USA), Shirin Neshat (Iran/USA) and Berni Searle (South Africa). This was the first exhibition in our research theme Female Identities in the Global South.

How do contemporary women artists explore their own identity in their artistic practice? What are the fictions and frictions that arise when depicting the female body? The body as subject, and particularly its relation to Black subjectivity, was the thematic thread of this exhibition. The notion of Blackness was used in an inclusive sense to refer to a broad designation of people who identify as non-Western. The concept of hybridity was thus central to the exhibition hypothesis. It was revealed in the artworks and in the performed identities of the artists, and was key to countering notions of racial purity and extremism. Each of the five artists offered diverse and multifaceted representations of the female body, incorporating hybrids, warriors, martyrs and mothers, thereby affirming the inclusion of all of these within cosmopolitan modernities.

The exhibition was curated into three areas or “worlds” that amplified the conceptual connections and formal affinities between various artworks.

The First World – The Fall

The first world was configured around the Fall, which evoked the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, a realm where the natural and human worlds meet. It is a realm of the sacred and profane in which the human is enfolded.

The Second World – Hybrids

The animal–human hybrid figures represented the second world of the exhibition. Hybridity refers to the mingling of species, races or cultures, a crossing of one thing with another. The figures were both abject and powerful, beautiful and repulsive. This uncomfortable ambivalence was meant to provoke a response in the viewer, who had to consider the relationship between themselves and other, different subjectivities.

The Third World – Body

In the third world of the exhibition, the viewer was reminded that the body is real and embedded in race, religion and identity. The works offered an intimate depiction of women, who were transformed by the aging process, or whose faces were concealed behind Farsi calligraphy or veils of Belgian lace.

Conclusion

The artists in Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South explore the complexities of women’s subjectivity in relation to the body. In their work, the Black or non-Western body is transformed, inscribed and enacted upon in poetic ways so as to render visible the fiction of self. Their individual practices reflect on the personal yet resonate with overarching global cultural concerns while at the same time referring to home and place. Ironically, none of the women depicted speak any dialogue. Instead, gestures are created through silent articulations such as the gaze of the eyes or the pose of the body.

SCENOGRAPHY

The exhibition was conceived of as an other-worldly environment in which the design helped to generate an imaginary, dream-like world. Bridges act as metaphors for identity, connecting these worlds and showing them as constructed and tangible within the “natural” environment of the dreamscape. A statement by the artist Lorraine O’Grady, in which she speaks of her upbringing, inspired aspects of the conceptualisation of this exhibition:

“Because I was raised by West Indian parents in one of the most traditional areas of New England culture, Boston’s Back Bay, my childhood placed me at a distance from wherever I stood and required me to always build a bridge to some other place. One had to be several things at once … both Caribbean and New England, both African American and West Indian, both black and white … and to daily negotiate the differences …”¹

In light of this, the exhibition produced a theatrical space in which the audience engaged with the artists’ works. It provided an exploratory viewing experience rather than a passive consumerist transaction with the artworks. Through this experience, the “white cube”, as an exhibition mode that decontextualises artworks and mediates the visitor’s engagement to a particular way of looking, is usurped.

The post Curatorial Statement: Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South appeared first on JCAF Journal.

In this essay, I contemplate black skin as a form of landscape in the artworks of Bharti Kher (India) and Nandipha Mntambo (South Africa). Both female artists were recently featured in the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation’s inaugural exhibition, Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South, which opened in September 2020 during a global health pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. Together, they make the theme of black skin and white masks (a play on Frantz Fanon’s famous 1952 book) that much more relevant to the world as we now understand it in 2023. In other words, Fanon’s title and focus on psychic interiority lend themselves as a framing device precisely because they are so weirdly prescient of these two intertwined world-historical events in their aligning of black (skin) with white (masks).

Earlier that year, in February 2020, I was physically there, in attendance at Arjun Appadurai’s opening lecture for JCAF’s institutional launch, drinking chilled white wine, in a newly transformed, red-brick, industrialised space, in proximity to other bodies in the room, amongst friends and strangers, celebrating art and life. That moment of innocence seems so distant from where we stand now, after having worn white N95 protective masks over our faces for two years to save humanity, and watching from the safety of our homes as masked citizens took to the streets across the US to protest the violent death of a Black man named George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020. This would become a larger global movement appropriately called Black Lives Matter (BLM). These two planetary happenings coalesced, and we were forced to realise more than ever that we are fragile, gendered, racialised and sexualised animal beings caught in our own skin(s). 

It is from this post-pandemic, post-BLM vantage point that I now return my own female gaze to the powerful artworks of Bharti Kher and Nandipha Mntambo, two female artists who reflect my own Global South diasporic backgrounds of India (where I was born, but not raised) and South Africa (where I have lived since 2005).  Kher and Mntambo are always self-referential, employing their own black skin(s) and subjectivity(s) as their source of inspiration, point of reflection, as materiality, medium and canvas for their photographic and sculptural works. They too share the theme of the female physical body in its multiple forms – as hybrid creatures caught between animal and human, warriors, martyrs, mothers, daughters and, lest we forget, as artists at home in the world.

Kher’s oeuvre is subtle and complex in its approach to womanhood and femininity in relation to her own black skin. An early photographic work featured in the exhibit is entitled Self portrait (2007). It shows her posing for the camera with a sideways glance. Her eyes have a searching and searing look to them, and her face is a painted mask (to invoke Fanon once again), hiding, transforming her feminine features with a prosthetic, pink-coloured nose, enlarged lips, white powdered skin and heavy black liner surrounding her main facial features. Her look borders on being half monkey/half clown, half human/half animal. That is the point. Her hair is messy, pulled up into a hasty bun, with tendrils spiraling out onto her luminous skin in the landscaped folds of her neck and clavicle, down to her bare shoulders where the photograph cuts off the rest of her physical body.

“These two planetary happenings coalesced, and we were forced to realise more than ever that we are fragile, gendered, racialised and sexualised animal beings caught in our own skin(s).”

What is her message? “Keep looking at me” is what I see. It is a critique of colonialism, of Western ideals of feminine beauty, of race as a marker easily identified and based wholly on skin and facial features that she chooses to disrupt and disguise. The artwork is both comical relief and poignant self-reflection. The theme of black skin comes up again in her second piece in the exhibit, Warrior with cloak and shield (2008). This time, the life-size, sculptured female figure stands tall and proud, with an oversized banana leaf (a symbol of abundance and fertility) serving as a shield to her vulnerable naked skin. Her cloak dangles precariously from one of the snake-like outgrowths on her head, which can also be likened to tree branches. Akin to Medusa in Greek mythology, Kher’s warrior is a signifier of fatal beauty, only she is not a sole product of the West.

Kher’s third work in the exhibit feels different, of an alternate time and place. Entitled Mother (2016), it features a sculptural figuration of Kher’s real mother’s life-size body cast in plaster. It is an act of homage. This mother figure is encased in white rather than her own natural brown skin tone. She is almost featureless, without hair, and with pendulating breasts and belly, including folds of skin that reveal the landscape of an ageing woman’s body. This mother is also seated on a wooden stool, her hands resting on her thighs. She is comfortable in her own skin, a thing of abstraction, to represent all Mothers. Together, these three seminal works by Kher point to the power of skin to convey the multiple layered identities that women have taken on, past, present and future, and suggest the closeness of human, animal and plant pluriverses that crisscross the Global South.

Nandipha Mntambo’s artworks carry our imaginations on a different journey of black skin in relation to an overlapping set of gendered themes related to the human, animal and planetary, and which are very much in dialogue with Kher’s artworks. Her photographic work Europa (2008) provincialises this continent of white colonial dominance by turning the Greek myth of Princess Europa on its head. Far from being an idealised Western beauty, this female figure (Mntambo herself in disguise) has blackened, rough skin, hair and nose, and four large protruding horns. As in Kher’s Self portrait (2007), made one year previously, it is her piercing eyes that swallow you and suggest that we humans can no longer be moored to purely Western ideals, that we are almost fully animal, not so far from them (as Other). Here too, folds of luminous skin show off a landscape of neck and collar bones, and part of one protruding breast – all hints of her female sex. This is reminiscent of Kher’s photographic image of herself, thoughtfully positioned next to Mntambo’s work in the exhibit, both having pride of place on one wall.

Mntambo returns to her physical body as material and medium for her second piece, Sengifikile (2009), a reference to the isiZulu word meaning “I have arrived”. A bronze sculptural bust that uses her own corporeality is the foundation, only its half human, half animal figure is in the guise of a bull, with two horns and large, protruding ears. In Mntambo’s hands, this work upends the idea of an idealised European bust as a thing of natural beauty. Rather, this she-figure is both appealing and monstrous, suggesting that (self) love and (self) hatred are in tension with one another and perhaps not so far off relationally, yet another reference to the psychoanalytic framing of Fanon. The artist plays with the dual meaning of the word bust, as both a sculpture of a person’s head, shoulders and chest, and as a woman’s chest as measured around her breasts. Mntambo surprises us, however, by disfiguring this already atypical bust, lopping off the breasts and arms halfway whilst she is still held high on her pedestal. Her chocolate brown skin glistens while her serene, sculpted face with its closed eyes suggests the (almost) accepted fate of the human becoming fully animal.

“Kher and Mntambo are always self-referential, employing their own black skin(s) and subjectivity(s) as their source of inspiration, point of reflection, as materiality, medium and canvas for their photographic and sculptural works.”

What Remains (2019) is Mntambo’s third artwork in the exhibition. Similar to Kher’s Mother (2016), it feels like the product of a different time and place. It is a large piece of cowhide (a symbol of masculinity not only in South Africa where the artist is from, but globally) that has been manipulated to look like skin, replete with wrinkles and folds. There is a small, cast-metal horn on the lower, right-hand corner that reminds the viewer of whence it came. On one level, it stands alone as a powerful indictment of gendered and racialised human and animal worlds, its leitmotif of “remains” fitting, given that it was made in 2019, just before the global health pandemic and Black Lives Matter with which I began my essay. On another level, it works as a deeply textured and historical landscape set against the red brick wall directly behind Kher’s Warrior with cloak and shield (2008). The juxtaposition of these two pieces by Mntambo and Kher suggests a carefully curated continuous dialogue of Global South artworks. In addition, they jointly return us to the treatise that Fanon wrote 70 years ago, that of black skin and white masks, and to its appeal to recover our humanity regardless of race or skin colour, which has returned full circle, and ever more pressing. 

The post Black Skin, White Masks: Bharti Kher and Nandipha Mntambo appeared first on JCAF Journal.

Since she began making visual art, Shirin Neshat’s work has spoken about injustice first and foremost. The Iranian artist is known for art that addresses the political situation in Iran and, in particular, the plight of women there.

With the most recent uprisings in Iran that ignited in September 2022, Neshat has been inundated with requests for commentary, and to be a voice for her people. Though this is undoubtedly a very exhausting position to be in, the artist carries this duty with grace.

Speaking over the phone from her studio in New York, Neshat is calm, soft-spoken and humble, and generously shares anecdotes about her artistic process.

Born in the city of Qazvin in Iran, Neshat moved to California in the United States in 1974 when she was just 17 to study art. She left Iran just before the Islamic Revolution took place. She currently lives in New York in exile as it is unsafe for her to return to Iran. Her art journey began with photography and video, but she has made three feature films and now spends a fair amount of time working on opera. Common themes in her work include the female body in Islam, the struggles of women, freedom, landlessness and religion.

In 2020, Neshat was one of the five women artists in Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF). Each artist offered work that examined ways of representing the female body. Neshat’s works were the photography series, The Book of Kings (2012) and the video work, Soliloquy (2009).

The Book of Kings

The Book of Kings is a multi-layered work of black-and-white images of Iranian youth during the Arab Spring movement of 2012. Neshat’s photographs here, as in her later works, Home of My Eyes (2015) and Land of Dreams (2021), follow a particular theme in order to make sense of the context around the work. She explains, “When I work, I go after a theme and then a collection of images becomes a part of that narrative. These different themes often have a lot to do with history and political turmoil.” This has been true of her method since her first work, a powerful series called Women of Allah about the Islamic Revolution of 1979, created between 1993 and 1997.

In a similar way, in The Book of Kings, Neshat tries to capture the spirit of patriotism and nationalism in Iran. Here figures are represented as “Patriots”, “Masses” and “Villains”. For instance, Nida, one of the figures in “Patriots”, is portrayed with her hand on her heart, as a gesture of honour and a symbol of love. Pictured across from the ten images in “Patriots” are 40 images of young men and women in “Masses”. These represent the youth in Iran who are bystanders to the uprising. Finally, there are the “Villains’, comprising three images of men on which Neshat illustrates scenes of war painted onto their chests.

The series is about the contradictions in patriotism: that people love their nation and sacrifice for it, and yet violence and atrocities intersect with these actions and emotions. Neshat explains:

I was really interested in this idea of brutality and violence, and love and devotion – the hand over the heart or the very vulnerable faces of the masses and then this very strong image of these three men who are wearing illustrations of scenes of war where people are being beheaded.

As in much of her other work, the series borrows from ancient history. The title is taken from an epic poem known as Shahnameh (Book of Kings) written by the poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010. The poem comprises 50 000 couplets and tells stories of Iran’s history from the creation of the world to the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.

The photographs are layered with sections of the poem handwritten in calligraphy over the subjects’ hands and faces. According to Neshat, Ferdowsi’s writing is about “the Arab conquest of Persia, with long poems about the heroes who were beheaded and murdered in their love for their nation. For me, it was like how history repeats itself. And now again, we have these beautiful young men and women who are being murdered because they love their nation.”

“The series is about the contradictions in patriotism: that people love their nation and sacrifice for it, and yet violence and atrocities intersect with these actions and emotions.”

Neshat refers also to the Green Movement of 2009, a major protest movement in Iran aimed at bringing about democracy in the country, but which was suppressed by the government. She also alludes to the recent Women, Life, Freedom protest movement that began in Iran in September 2022, but which has also since gone to ground.

Soliloquy

Soliloquy (1999), displayed as a two-channel video installation, explores the theme of Neshat in exile and the connection between Islam and Christianity. Beautifully shot amidst Islamic architecture and deserted scenery, Soliloquy presents a protagonist (played by Neshat) who moves between Iran and the US. Neshat observes that this work, “is about another kind of paradox. It’s about the theme of immigration and being a woman caught between two worlds, and the two worlds are not just different from one another, but in complete conflict with each other.”

What is constant in the two works is a woman dressed in black and silhouetted against the different landscapes. The video is highly stylised. Neshat says, “It was shot in a beautiful old city, Mardin in Turkey, because I couldn’t go to Iran. It had this beautiful mosque dome.” The other part of the film was shot in Albany, New York. One world in the film represents capitalism and projects a sense of power through intimidating and overwhelming architecture, while the other has beautiful Islamic architecture. Both, however, are claustrophobic and the subject is caught between them:

I think this was the most personal work, because it really touched on people who are caught in between these worlds. They’re never really whole. I use architecture in a very precise way to reiterate the difference between the logic of East and West, orient and occident, Islam and Christianity. It’s a work that still seems relevant because those conflicts are perpetuated today.

Poetry and calligraphy

Calligraphy and poetry are present in much of Neshat’s works. She comments that calligraphy was not something she learned during childhood:

I don’t come from a creative background. I’m not a trained calligrapher but I found my own style. Back when I started as a visual artist, I started to use inscriptions on photographs. It was a very conceptual approach [because] the women that I was portraying were passive and silenced.

This poetry became another way to use voice in her work. On closer examination, much of this textual integration refers to her upbringing in Iran. The way text is used, Neshat points out,

goes back to the history of Iranian, Islamic and Persian art, and architecture, whether it’s a sacred text or poetry incorporated into architecture, carpets, vessels. This integration of text and image is a fundamental part of both Persian and Islamic art. For me, it was more intuitive, like a contemporary adaptation of some of the ideas that are really classical but come back to very contemporary images.

Speaking of the connection between her images, poetry and text, Neshat says,

My images are very minimal. They’re very symmetrical. There’s a lot of abstraction that borrows from both Persian and Islamic art. This was not a strategy, but I grew up always looking at how text is included in everything, even our jewellery. Whether it’s a Quranic text or just poetry. Some of that found its way into my images. The images that I make are often very politically charged and disturbing. Yet there is the idea of using calligraphy or something beautiful.

She points out the contradiction between oppression, violence and discrimination, and the rich legacy of Iranian history:

Even my compositions are carefully composed and orchestrated [but with] this contradiction – dark, disturbing, sometimes very violent, and at the same time, beautiful. It’s at the very heart of my work. Whether it’s photography, video, film or opera, I’m very interested in things that are being pulled apart.

It relates to my own culture. We have two different histories. One is the current history of fanaticism and oppression and a very brutal fascist government, [the other] is this incredible, rich history of mystics and poets. The images embody that kind of contradiction in my own culture, the old and new.

The text in Neshat’s work is poetry written in Farsi transliterated into Arabic. “I’m very careful about what poems I use, which writer, which poet, what period, what is the meaning of the poetry. There’s a lot of research and work that goes into it.”

These nuances in her work, however, are often lost in translation when she exhibits to Western audiences:

This has been an issue for me from the beginning, because a lot of people in the West think that the text is from the Qur’an and galleries don’t always provide the translations. The work translates very differently to the people from Iran than to people in the West. Some people in the West think it’s just decorative, but it’s not […] That goes back to how much an artist can facilitate translation of a work that is very culturally specific but, at the same time, has universal value.

Similarly, if I make a music video, like ‘Turbulent‘ (1998), which became very popular among Westerners as much as anywhere else because people fell in love with the music. They had no idea that the words were by Rumi and what they meant. I can’t translate all of that. My feeling is that different people will pick up different ideas from the work and the artist can only do so much in a translation.

Iran has a long relationship with poetry. Neshat talks about her own background with the medium:

I think that Iranian people read poetry much more than anywhere else I can think of in the world. It’s just such a major part of the culture. It has been in the past, and it is today. People read poetry at home to each other. Often in gatherings, they use lines from a poem by Hafez or another poet to express something. So it’s very much part of our culture.

I left when I was only 17 but even at school I was always exposed to literature. And later, I became fixated on women, contemporary and modern poets and writers. I made a movie called ‘Women Without Men‘ (2010) based on a magic realist novel by an Iranian woman who is still living. I have done a lot of work and studied the significant women writers and poets. Even today, you see a lot of young people writing poetry.

Current work

In a video interview in April 2023 with NPR, Neshat expresses some of the pain of having not been able to return to Iran, and how the move to the US was never her choice. Her current relationship with Iran is that she hasn’t been back since 1996. “It’s not advised for people like me to go back, but every day I speak with my mother and with my sister.”

Neshat has a new body of work that will be shown at the Goodman Gallery in London in October 2023, and which has been travelling all over the world. The exhibition, titled The Fury, explores the female body as an object of violence:

The video and photographs called ‘The Fury‘ are about the sexual exploitation of women in prisons in Iran. But it’s very stylised. The images for the first time are all of nudity, and the video is of an Iranian woman who plays the main role who is dancing naked in front of a military man. It’s a very tough subject.

Neshat is also working on Aida, for the Paris Opera House, to open in 2025. This will be a revision of work she has made before. In addition to this, the indefatigable artist is currently spending her days writing a story for a new movie. The past year has been spent preparing the photographic and video work for The Fury, but now Neshat has time to focus her attention on film and opera:

Right now I’m working quietly on writing the movie script. I have no idea how long it will take for it or if it will ever materialise, but I’m really enjoying it because it takes off from where I left the video of ‘The Fury‘ with the idea of turning that into a feature film. With opera, I’m dealing with dramaturgists and music so it’s a very interesting challenge.

Commenting on her favourite medium to work with, Neshat says that video installation is the easiest, but that “I love movies, because I love the movie audience. I like the idea of making films that are for theatrical release, that go to film festivals and can be artistic, but still very accessible. I love opera because it’s live, there’s something powerful in that.”

With her movie and opera work, she often works in huge teams, but for her calligraphy and photography it’s usually solitary work, which she finds very satisfying too: “When you’re thinking of ideas, writing down a story or working on a single photograph, there’s something very satisfying about being alone and being with your imagination.”

We end our discussion with some valuable insight into artistic inspiration:

I always tell myself that you have to find your obsession and that’s unstoppable. That’s where ideas come from. Art should be about the internal world of a human being, and how and why that imagination or that internal world is significant enough for other people to stop and to pay attention to. I think it’s the only way – and also not to be intimidated by the art world – to trust yourself and your own intuition, your own obsessions, your own internal world, because the only basis for being an artist is your imagination, and being honest with yourself.

The post In Shirin Neshat’s Worlds appeared first on JCAF Journal.

No one thinks of the flowers.

No one thinks of the fish.

No one wants to believe the garden is dying,

that its heart has swollen in the heat of this sun,

that its mind drains slowly of its lush memories.

Our garden is forlorn.

It yawns waiting

for rain from a stray cloud,

and our pond sits empty.

Callow stars bite the dust

from atop tall trees

and from the pale home of the fish

comes the hack of coughing every night.

Our garden is forlorn.

Father says:  My time is past, my time is past.

I’ve carried my burden.

I’m done with my work.

He stays in his room from dawn to dusk,

reads History of Histories or Ferdowsi’s Epic of Kings.

Father says to Mother:

Damn every fish and every bird!

When I’m dead, what will it matter

if the garden lives or dies.

My pension is all that counts.

Mother’s life is a rolled out prayer rug.

She lives in terror of Hell,

always seeks Sin’s footprints in every corner,

imagines the garden sullied

by the sin of a wayward plant.

Mother is a sinner by nature. She prays

all day, then with her “consecrated”  breath

blows on all the flowers, all the fish

and all over her own body.

She awaits the Promised One

and the forgiveness He is to bring.

My brother calls the garden a graveyard.

He laughs at the plight of the grass

and ruthlessly counts the corpses of the fish

rotting beneath shallow water’s dead skin.

My brother is addicted to philosophy.

He sees the healing of the garden in its death.

Drunk, he beats his fists on doors and walls,

says he is tired, pained and despondent.

He carries his despair everywhere,

just as he carries his birth certificate,

diary, napkin, lighter, and pen.

But his despair is so small that each night

it is lost in crowded taverns.

My sister was a friend to flowers.

She would take her simple heart’s words

– when mother beat her –

to their kind and silent gathering,

and sometimes she would treat the family

of fish to sunshine and cake crumbs.

She now lives on the other side of town

in her artificial home, and in the arms

of her artificial husband she makes natural children.

Each time she visits us, if her skirt is sullied

with the poverty of our garden

she bathes herself in perfume.

Every time she visits she is with child.

Our garden is forlorn.

Our garden is forlorn.

All day from behind the door

come sounds of cuts and tears,

sounds of blasts.

Instead of flowers, our neighbors plant

bombs and machine guns in their garden soil.

They cover their ponds, hiding bags of gunpowder.

The school children fill their backpacks

with tiny bombs.

Our garden is dizzy.

I fear the age that has lost its heart,

the idleness of so many hands

the alienation in so many faces.

I am like a schoolchild madly in love

with her geometry books.

I am forlorn

and imagine it is possible to take the garden to a hospital.

I imagine I imagine

And the garden’s heart has swollen in the heat

of this sun, its mind slowly drains of its lush memories.

دلم برای باغچه می سوزد

کسی به فکر گل ها نیست
کسی به فکر ماهی ها نیست
کسی نمی خواهد
باورکند که باغچه دارد می میرد
که قلب باغچه در زیر آفتاب ورم کرده است
که ذهن باغچه دارد آرام آرام
از خاطرات سبز تهی می شود
و حس باغچه انگار
چیزی مجردست که در انزوای باغچه پوسیده ست

 
حیاط خانه ما تنهاست
حیاط خانه ی ما
در انتظار بارش یک ابر ناشناس
خمیازه میکشد
و حوض خانه ی ما خالی است
ستاره های کوچک بی تجربه
از ارتفاع درختان به خک می افتد
و از میان پنجره های پریده رنگ خانه ی ماهی ها
شب ها صدای سرفه می اید
حیاط خانه ی ما تنهاست

پدر میگوید
از من گذشته ست
از من گذشته ست
من بار خود رابردم
و کار خود را کردم
و در اتاقش از صبح تا غروب
یا شاهنامه میخواند
یا ناسخ التواریخ
پدر به مادر میگوید
لعنت به هر چی ماهی و هر چه مرغ
وقتی که من بمیرم دیگر
چه فرق میکند که باغچه باشد
یا باغچه نباشد
برای من حقوق تقاعد کافی ست

مادر تمام زندگیش
سجاده ایست گسترده
درآستان وحشت دوزخ
مادر همیشه در ته هر چیزی
دنبال جای پای معصیتی می گردد
و فکر می کند که باغچه را کفر یک گیاه
آلوده کرده است
مادر تمام روز دعا می خواند
مادر گناهکار طبیعی ست
و فوت میکند به تمام گلها
و فوت میکند به تمام ماهی ها
و فوت میکند به خودش
مادر در انتظار ظهور است
و بخششی که نازل خواهد شد
برادرم به باغچه می گوید قبرستان
برادرم به اغتشاش علفها می خندد
و از جنازه ی ماهی ها
که زیر پوست بیمار آب
به ذره های فاسد تبدیل میشوند
شماره بر می دارد

برادرم به فلسفه معتاد است
برادرم شفای باغچه را
در انهدام باغچه می داند
او مست میکند
و مشت میزند به در و دیوار
و سعی میکند که بگوید
بسیار دردمند و خسته و مایوس است
او نا امیدیش را هم
مثل شناسنامه و تقویم و دستمال و فندک و خودکارش
همراه خود به کوچه و بازار می برد
و نا امیدیش
آن قدر کوچک است که هر شب
در ازدحام میکده گم میشود

و خواهرم که دوست گلها بود
و حرفهای ساده ی قلبش را
وقتی که مادر او را میزد
به جمع مهربان و سکت آنها می برد
و گاه گاه خانواده ی ماهی ها را
به آفتاب و شیرینی مهمان میکرد …
او خانه اش در آن سوی شهر است
او در میان خانه مصنوعیش
با ماهیان قرمز مصنوعیش
و در پناه عشق همسر مصنوعیش
و زیر شاخه های درختان سیب مصنوعی
آوازهای مصنوعی میخواند
و بچه های طبیعی می سازد
او
هر وقت که به دیدن ما می اید
و گوشه های دامنش از فقر باغچه آلوده می شود
حمام ادکلن می گیرد
او
هر وقت که به دیدن ما می اید
آبستن است

حیاط خانه ما تنهاست
حیاط خانه ما تنهاست
تمام روز
از پشت در صدای تکه تکه شدن می اید
و منفجر شدن
همسایه های ما همه در خک باغچه هاشان به جای گل
خمپاره و مسلسل می کارند
همسایه های ما همه بر روی حوض های کاشیشان
سر پوش می گذارند
 و حوضهای کاشی
بی آنکه خود بخواهند
انبارهای مخفی باروتند
و بچه های کوچه ی ما کیف های مدرسه شان را
از بمبهای کوچک
پر کرده اند
حیاط خانه ما گیج است

من از زمانی
که قلب خود را گم کرده است می ترسم
من از تصور بیهودگی این همه دست
و از تجسم بیگانگی این همه صورت می ترسم
من مثل دانش آموزی
که درس هندسه اش را
دیوانه وار دوست میدارد تنها هستم
و فکر میکنم که باغچه را میشود به بیمارستان برد
…من فکر میکنم
… من فکر میکنم
….من فکر میکنم
و قلب باغچه در زیر آفتاب ورم کرده است
و ذهن باغچه دارد آرام آرام
از خاطرات سبز تهی میشود

The post I Pity the Garden appeared first on JCAF Journal.