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.

In 1969, Lygia Clark wrote a letter to Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa confessing that, while watching a documentary on TV, she had identified herself in another animal – a scorpion:

This self-identification with a scorpion reminds us that when Clark created her Bichos (Critters) sculptures from 1960 onwards, she was not only alluding to formal correspondences between her foldable, pointed and almost tentacular metal pieces and animals such as spiders, butterflies and other insects, but perhaps examining the possible ontological transpositions between object- and animal-hood, between art and non-art.²

As demonstrated by JCAF’s exhibition title, Liminal Identities in the Global South, Clark was interested in the in-between states of space, body, existence, time, as enunciated in the title and gestures of her 1954 painting, Descoberta da Linha Orgânica (Discovery of the Organic line), an interest that became central to her work.

Although the painting presents black outlines, the organic line that Clark refers to has not been painted, but is constituted by the space between the central plan of the work and what might seem to be its “frame”. The organic line appears once one plan is put within another. It is not tangible or visible. It is not a self-determined line, but an associated one, demonstrating how, in Clark’s work, every ontological approach is a relational one.

Departing from a relational ontology,³ in Clark’s topology, the organic line is a transmutation of the edge: once the limits of one surface encounter another body’s boundary, their previous limits become the inside of their now linked body, making an organic line emerge. Thus, “organic” is not an adjective referring to what could be a “natural” formal aspect of the line, but rather a direct allusion to the roots of the word “organic”, affiliated to the meaning of the body’s organs, things or substances that exist only inside a body, in connection to it.

Fostering a poetics based on a liaison ethics, at the end of the 1960s Clark goes beyond her initially participatory sculptures to propose relational objects, dispositifs for establishing relations between people; between people and materials or particular space-times; or even in-between a person and her own self. Although they may cover the entire body, these relational objects do not behave as segregational structures: on the contrary, they are contact and even contamination devices.

Exhibited in Liminal Identities in the Global South, Lygia Clark’s Sensorial Masks (1967) were created not to isolate our body from the world, but to catalyse senses such as sight, smell and hearing, spreading the intricate connections between the self and the other to the point that – as happens with the “glasses” in Dialogue, Goggles (1968), designed to put people in straight connection through gazing – one can experience the sensation of blurring body and identity boundaries and merging into another. As Clark states when reflecting on her scorpion-hood, the Sensorial Masks and the Relational Objects act from “pore to pore, from fur to fur, from sweat to sweat”.

Clark’s relational ontology is approximated, in Liminal Identities in the Global South, to Jane Alexander’s Harbinger in correctional uniform (2006), a life-size sculpture that merges aspects of an antelope’s body with characteristics of a human one, performing a “humanimal”. Within the confrontation between the works of the Brazilian and the South African artist, one can access not only the grotesque, melancholic, eschatological and traumatised dimensions of Alexander’s figuration of humans but, in the opposite direction, get a glimpse of how her work may also be inviting us to unfold and complexify our understanding of what defines humanity as a social and ontological condition.

While Clark creates relational dispositifs, Alexander presents identities that are already related, ontologically merged: one cannot separate animal-hood and humanity in the corpus of her work. Modelling the bodies of her figures, Alexander sometimes also adds  horns, bones and other elements from real animals to create her sculptures, which not only allude to humanimals, but in fact give birth to them in our imagination and, moreover, due to the naturalism of the artist’s installations, in our body memory.

The intensity of Alexander’s work can be linked to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of allegories in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), where he defines the allegorical as an aesthetic category that differs from the theological dimension of symbolisation. Allegorisation, explains Benjamin, is not a symbolisation method, but a dialectical one.

“As Clark states when reflecting on her scorpion-hood, the Sensorial Masks and the Relational Objects act from ‘pore to pore, from fur to fur, from sweat to sweat’.”

With no perspective of redemption since The Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and, therefore, in a state of immanence and present-ness, history (seen from the baroque perspective) holds only to itself and thus approaches the idea of ​​nature. The form of this history is historicity itself as a form, in a kind of metalanguage that is produced autophagically, devouring and redevouring its own symbols.

The allegory, which for this reason Benjamin would claim to be a “strange combination of history and nature,”⁴ is the linguistic modus operandi of this autophagy. Through allegorisation, the symbols and perspectives of a given context are rearranged, allowing new interpretations to emerge, producing historicity in the midst of the absolute immanence of history.

What Benjamin reveals in his seminal essay is that allegories arise through the fragmentation of meanings that could seem eternal and unambiguous: they are decontextualised and recontextualised to compose allegories. Once allegorists disintegrate, crop, recompose and merge meanings and images, they are able to transform them ontologically without needing to refer to God or to another suprahistorical instance. As demiurges of immanence, their gestures concentrate, in their violence, the force of death and the rebirth of the senses and, as such, of history. For this reason, while representations can replace the presence of what they aim to represent, allegories, by contrast, are the very institution of what is made present only through the allegorical procedure.

Alexander’s presentation, at a life-size scale, of images and situations that inhabit our memories and fabulations, has the power of instituting meanings while making them public – sharing them through artworks, exhibitions, books etc. More than commenting on history, through her works she is effectively producing historicisation. Her humanimals now inhabit our world; we coexist with them. We can even be them.

Besides the allegorical approach to the anthropomorphic animals/zoomorphic humans and the social and political situations in which they are presented through her installations, Alexander’s relational ontology between humanity and animality also finds interesting and productive echoes in Amerindian perspectivism. Theoretically circumscribed by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (who departed from work, studies and apprenticeship with Amazonian indigenous people), perspectivism highlights a “multinaturalist” understanding of the world. While Judeo-Christian cultures usually experience multiculturalism – regimes of a univocal nature, whose variations are of an interpretative, representational order (relativism) – some Amerindian cultures are based on multi-naturalism: a world of multiple natures. As Viveiros de Castro points out, in Amerindian perspectivism, in the face of natural pluralism there is, however, a single culture, that of humanity: “the common reference to all beings in nature is not man as a species, but humanity as a condition.”⁵

Connected by the same humanity culture, different states of being can easily keep interpenetrating one another. Because, for Amazonian peoples, “the original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality but rather humanity,” one can conclude that “animals have a human, sociocultural inner aspect that is ‘disguised’ by an ostensible bestial bodily form.”⁶ It is a cosmological and ontological perspective whose radical relationality engenders a deeply ethical approach to Otherness, reminding us that within difference – and even strangeness – there is a common existential background.

“Alexander’s presentation, at a life-size scale, of images and situations that inhabit our memories and fabulations, has the power of instituting meanings while making them public…”

Although, from this Amazonian perspective, humanity is a shared condition between different forms of being, what Western – and, in particular, European – agency in the world’s history shows us is that – as Alexander denounces in her work – due to racism and its socio-political violence and economic interests, millions of people had their humanity denied through slavery, Nazism, apartheid, etc.

While the animalisation and the monsterisation of humans have produced the worst, ongoing tragedies of humanity, in Clark’s identification with a scorpion and Alexander’s animalisation of humans, one catches a glimpse of the ethical urges of our time.

The “inhumanity of the white man” is, in turn, how Frantz Fanon⁷ described the way racism has dehumanised not only Black, but also white people, the ones who in fact acted without humanity while killing, enslaving, torturing, etc.

Addressing the absence of humanity in whiteness, therefore, is also a possible approach to Alexander’s work, whose poetic and political images – such as her quasi-canonical Butcher Boys (1985), three animalised white men – convey the urgency of racialising white people in order to engender a critical perception of whiteness so that it can assume its responsibility towards the past and its commitment to an anti-racist, repaired and retaken future.

In this sense, it is important to note that both Clark and Alexander are white women (as am I) and that, therefore, their (and also my) perspectives on the organic line, on relational ontologies or human-animal interrelations can be racially scrutinised. This means that their works’ relation to difference and liminality – the right to ambiguity, to enter and leave the condition of both humanity and animality, object and nonobject etc – is based on the privilege of being able to move, to change, to choose, the privilege of being able to blur ontological and social limits while, at the same time, nurturing Otherness and strangeness in a way that perfectly serves cognitive capitalism, “devou[ring] worlds and therefore feast[ing] on difference.”⁸

In our blocked world of brutal boundaries, with masses of terrorised refugees wandering without homes, with wars and unprecedented violence against women, transgender, Indigenous and Black people in countries such as Brazil and South Africa, Clark and Alexander’s works represented in the JCAF exhibition demand critical reflection on who has the right to hold and to experience liminal identities without being targeted by colonial, white, state and masculine violence that recognises no limits at all.

The post Jane and Lygia: Relational Ontologies and Liminal Identities in a Blocked World appeared first on JCAF Journal.

Dear (younger) Sumayya

1. There is always architecture waiting to happen in places that are overlooked:

2. You will soon fall in love with gold, kitsch, supernatural ideas,

3. with very strange and everyday things – a disco-church on wheels in the inner-city,

4. the performance of a ritual gathering on a patch of veld-grass of a traffic island next to a highway,

5. the rhythms and space of an Ethiopian coffee ceremony,

6. the smell before a highveld thunderstorm,

7. the choreography of Fordsburg on a Friday before, during and after prayer time,

8. the specific colour spectrum of a mine-dump sunset,

9. the tenacity of indigenous plants and indigenous ceremonies and practices – all the magic that is Joburg. There is another canon here.

10.  Ingest atmospheres – learn how to read and feel colour, dust, mist, the phases of the moon. There is another canon here.

11.  Look at these things deeply.

12.  Feel them, absorb them.

13.  You will soon develop a mistrust for the historical record. Listen to that.

14.  Look so deeply at what is present that you notice the silences and the absences too. There is yet another canon here, in these silences and absences.

15.  Read in other languages.

16.  Write in your mother tongues. Look deeply at sentence structure and vocabulary. There is another canon here.

17.  Learn how to dissect the index of an archive.

18.  And how to make your own indexes for archives.

19.  Stay soft and sensitive – it is a deep strength, and architecture needs it. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.

20.  Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that everything you can ever imagine has already been done. They are incorrect.

21.  Beauty and social justice are not mutually exclusive. Beauty is social justice.

22.  There are an infinity of untold stories, unheard voices, unrealised dreams, undreamt worlds.

23.  Poetry is a necessity.

24.  And dreaming is everything.

Love

(older) Sumayya

The shape, colour and materiality of this work came through the Joburg sunset. When it is clear, the Joburg sky moves gracefully and soundlessly through shades of all the colours you have never known, as the sun drops behind the horizon line at the end of a day.

The pollution, dust and chemical particles in Joburg’s air, produced by its legacy of mining, create a colourscape of refracted light and inorganic pigments that can be considered visually beautiful.

Serpentine Pavilion 2020 plus 1, designed by Sumayya Vally, Counterspace. The Pavilion’s design is based on past and present places of meeting, organising and belonging across several London neighbourhoods significant to diasporic and cross-cultural communities, including Brixton, Hoxton, Tower Hamlets, Edgware Road, Barking and Dagenham and Peckham, among others.

The forms in the Pavilion are a result of abstracting, superimposing and splicing elements from architectures that vary in scales of intimacy, translating the shapes of London into the Pavilion structure in Kensington Gardens.

The Pavilion is built of reclaimed steel, cork and timber covered with micro-cement. The varying textures, and the hues of pink and brown, are drawn directly from the architecture of London and reference changes in the quality of light.

Bernardine Evaristo and Jacqueline De Peza performing in Chiaroscuro, written by Jackie Kay, directed by Joan Ann Maynard, set and costume design by Helena Roden, 1986. The play was produced by the Theatre of Black Women, Britain’s first Black women’s theatre company, founded by Evaristo, Patricia Hilaire and Paulette Randall in 1982.

The carnival, organised by Claudia Jones, was known as the Caribbean Carnival or the West Indian Gazette Carnival and was held indoors at St. Pancras Town Hall. It would not be until 1964 that the carnival would move outside onto the streets of Notting Hill. Picture shows one woman having a good time at the event (30 January 1959).

Exterior of what was then Roots Community, now 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. The centre was founded in response to the social unrest as a result of racism and discrimination experienced in British cities, and continues to have a significant impact on the arts, cultural and education worlds, particularly for Black and Caribbean artists.

Admiral Ken with his Box Men, Hackney. Admiral Ken was one of the big sound system owners and producers in Hackney at the time. His ‘box men’ loaded and unloaded the speaker boxes and amps, and together the group performed at venues like Four Aces and Hackney Town Hall.

The Four Aces Club was a pioneering music and recreational space on Dalston Lane in Dalston, London. Based in a building that had formerly been the North London Colosseum and Amphitheatre and then a cinema, in the 1960s and 1970s the club became one of the first venues to play Black music in the United Kingdom.

Fired and unfired clay vessels are assembled as a temporal space to hold gatherings.

A series of performances that draw on the traditions of rain-making and harvest is performed in the space where the hands that formed the pots also work to un-form them. The rituals include the use of water, which allows the un-fired pots to dissolve over time, revealing areas and niches of gathering contained by the pots, as well as rhythmic drumming that evokes the sound of thunder at the end of each day.

The inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale (2023), Jeddah, was commissioned and produced by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation and was curated by Sumayya Vally alongside Dr. Julian Raby, Dr. Omniya Abdel Barr and Dr. Saad Al-Rashid. Islamic Arts Biennale, scenography by OMA.

The biennale fragments inspire, narrate and render visible wisdoms, imaginations and futures of “home” and spiritual placemaking, from the scale of the body to the scale of the cosmos. Artists explore these themes through contemporary interpretations of instruments of home.

An enclosure that recalls the humility of this first musalla (“a place to pray”), inspired by one of the first mosques to be built, the Mosque of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuH) in Al-Madinah al-Munawwarah.

The walls are formed from local palm reeds woven together by Saudi artisans, recalling how temporary prayer spaces were once created along travel and pilgrimage routes. Gaps in the walls allow glimpses of the landscape where indigenous plants bloom, evoking the historic gardens of Madinah. Light from above falls on a slit that stands for the mihrab, emphasising the role of the sun as a compass determining the direction as well as the times of prayer.

Traditionally, mosque courtyards featured a sundial that indicated the time of the five daily prayers, and mosques served as spaces where the general public could align their sense of time with the movement of the heavenly bodies. 

The installation tracks the movement of a beam of sunlight passing over lines on the ground corresponding to the hours, months and seasons, as well as sculptural objects that indicate significant moments in Islamic history.

The floor installation explores the bond that unites all people – “We Are All Made of Earth.” Using clay from the Ourika Valley and natural pigments from across Morocco, Bouhchichi has created tiles in various shades that address the complexity of difference in geography, geology and people. 

The post Visual Project appeared first on JCAF Journal.

LINA BO BARDI (1914–1992)

In 1946, architect Lina Bo Bardi and her husband Pietro Bardi, an Italian art dealer and journalist, left post-war Italy and settled in São Paulo. Shortly after, Lina was chosen as the lead architect for Brazil’s first museum of modern art: Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). The project took several years, during which Lina built her own residential house (Casa de Vidro) and other buildings throughout the country. In those years Lina wrote a weekly column for a local newspaper, started her own magazine Habitat, experimented with new materials, worked in theatre and film, and was the director of the Museu de Arte Moderno de Bahia (MAM-BA) in Salvador de Bahia. There, she engaged with the Afro-Brazilian community, including local artists and musicians such as Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia, Gilberto Gil, Glauber Rocha and Mario Clavo, among others, who were central to Bahia’s avant-garde movement.

Caetano Veloso once said about Lina: “More than the others who participated in this rebirth of scholar culture at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties, Dona Lina was the one who could better see the strength of the popular creativity of the city [Salvador de Bahia] and of the region. And she was clear that it wasn’t as folklore or documentation of a curious, exotic and fun style, but as real cultural strength.”¹

In 1976, Bo Bardi visited an old steel-drum factory in Pompéia, an industrial neighbourhood of São Paulo. She was fascinated and immediately had the vision of a popular centre for the Serviço Social do Comércio (SESC) after seeing how people from the neighbourhood engaged with the abandoned space: there were barbecues, theatre plays for kids and many other “activations” of the space. She decided to conserve the original structure and added features for the public’s enjoyment: tables where people could read or play chess and cards, spaces for sunbathing and napping and a theatre that could host up to 1,200 people. At SESC Pompéia, Bo Bardi also created spaces for local artists and craftsmen to work, resulting in a space full of “public domesticity” (Noemi Blager).

In a time dominated by masculine figures in architecture, Bo Bardi was particularly interested in the combination of local crafts with international design. For her, modernist ideas had to be flexible and adapt to Brazilian popular culture and autochthonous materials. Today, Bo Bardi’s most important legacy is the social dimension of each of her constructions, as her projects were often focused on making people’s livelihoods better, always in a sustainable equilibrium with their surroundings.

The modernist Casa de Vidro (Glass House) (1951) was Lina Bo Bardi’s first architectural project in Brazil. Lina and her husband Pietro Maria Bardi used the house as their residence for forty years and it is now the headquarters of the Instituto Bardi.

The Glass House was the first building constructed in the Morumbi neighborhood, located in the south of São Paulo, one of the most elevated areas of the city. Surrounded by vegetation typical of the Atlantic rainforest, the house was designed to incorporate the natural environment as one of its main features.

The living room of the Glass House is an open-plan design and was populated with Bo Bardi’s collection of objects, works of art and furniture she had designed.

Lina Bo Bardi dedicated her career in Brazil to developing an architectural language that she termed “autochthonous” or “poor” forms, inspired by the vernacular and historical architecture in the north-east of Brazil. Bo Bardi recognised the value of indigenous aesthetic traditions and was also guided by social and ethical considerations in her designs.

Roadside Chair (1967) can be constructed anywhere by anyone as it is made out of wood and rope. For Bo Bardi it represented a clear manifestation of the importance of accessibility and improvisation in design.

Bo Bardi’s designs often aimed at democratising and humanising the encounter between people and artworks or buildings. In Bo Bardi’s first sketches of the Glass Easel, the notion of liberating viewers from preconceived notions about the artworks displayed was present in her political gesture of placing labels at the back, enabling different readings of the art.

The glass easels were originally designed by Bo Bardi for the opening of the iconic Museo de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in 1968, generating a radical change in the museum experience.

Inaugurated in 1982, the SESC Pompéia building was previously a barrel factory which Bo Bardi transformed into an extraordinary multi-functional building designed for the local community on the west side of São Paulo.

The refurbished building became part of the Social Service of Commerce (SESC) network, hosting a theatre, a solarium and exhibition venues, and offering a wide range of free activities and leisure spaces for the public.

In São Paulo, the SESC network extends to over 40 locations embodying a proactive cultural policy, with different venues dedicated to culture, sports, youth development, senior citizens and social tourism.

Although the activities hosted at SESC Pompéia are primarily for professionals (and their families) working in businesses, tourism and services, members of the broader public are welcome to participate in the extended programming.

Lina Bo Bardi once said, “I never disregard the surrealism of the Brazilian people, their inventions, their pleasure in gathering together, dancing, singing. Therefore I dedicated my work at Pompéia to the youngsters, to the children and to the third age: all together.”²

The post Visual Project appeared first on JCAF Journal.