The Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut, where I live, has one floor for its permanent collection, with works from the 1600s to perhaps a decade ago, a mixture of famous names and those that are (at least to me) obscure indeed. That collection on the first floor remains the same, year in and year out, while new exhibits circulate through the upstairs galleries every few months. I try to take in each new exhibit and often find myself surprised, inspired, and even educated by what I see.

Recently, I visited an exhibit I’ve been unable to get out of my mind: Beatrice Cuming: Connecticut Precisionist. Ever heard of her? No? Well, neither had I. Cuming was born in 1903 in Brooklyn and studied painting at the Pratt Institute. She continued her studies in France, traveling extensively to Brittany, Italy, Tunisia, and elsewhere before ending up in New London of all places. Cuming had returned to New York from her travels in 1933 and then decided to move to Boston. On a train with all her belongings, she looked out the window — so the story goes — as it pulled into New London and impulsively got off, drawn by what she later described as the “obviously beautiful, powerful, dramatic, [and] exciting” subject matter in our town.

And she stayed, painting city scenes and diving into the local arts community. To support herself, she got a job as a security guard at the General Dynamics Electric Boat company. I try to imagine her, maybe wearing a green jumpsuit, a flashlight, and a ring of keys at her waist, patrolling Electric Boat’s massive yard and docks in nearby Groton. During World War II, that company must have been a 24/7 operation as it churned out 74 submarines and 398 PT boats from those very docks. Those subs were responsible for fearsome (and stealthy) destruction of Japanese targets. That war ended, of course, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, in the 1950s, with the Cold War with the Soviet Union ramping up, Electric Boat would start manufacturing nuclear submarines. 

Submarines As Still Life

Eventually, realizing the prodigious talent of its security guard, the company commissioned Cuming to begin documenting its contributions to the war effort. As Electric Boat’s artist-in-residence (so to speak), she produced a number of breathtaking works. All too literally. I sat across from her painting Welders at Electric Boat Company unable to breathe.

It’s a dark painting with enormous pieces of metal being transformed by heat and fire, the background crowded with partially built submarine components. Its dominant colors are brown and yellow. At the center, a white-hooded welder bends over his work as plumes of white smoke billow upward. There are four other workers in the painting, all indistinguishable, hooded and jump-suited in layers of protective gear. That’s the detail that stays with me, that stuck in my throat — those workers enshrouded in their safety suits.

However those suits may have protected them, count on one thing: what they and their successors built will not protect us. The power they wielded (and welded) to shape and connect part to part in the last days of World War II has held the world hostage ever since.  We, all 8.1 billion of us, are today anything but protected from the nuclear submarines their successors would make. In our flimsy pedestrian garb, we remain so desperately vulnerable. In the background of Cuming’s painting, there are ladders up to a platform and almost out of the painting. Where do the ladders lead? Does Cuming mean to offer an escape from that man-made hell? That might be reading too much into the painting. But what else are you supposed to do in an art museum?

It’s a mesmerizing wartime portrait that draws you in — even though there’s nothing beautiful about it. Another of Cuming’s works from that period, Chubb, is at least set outside, with glimpses of sea and sky through the unfinished hulk of another sub, the USS Chubb, as it towers on that dry dock.

Breathless at Billions and Kilotons

What took my breath away? I kept thinking about all the labor and money invested in constructing submarines — from the relatively crude and uncomfortable boats of the 1940s and 1950s to the brand new Columbia Class nuclear submarine that General Dynamics Electric Boat is building right now. The Navy’s budget for just 12 of those ballistic missile submarines is $126.4 billion. Imagine! If the Navy’s budget for that one weapons system was a country, it would have the third-largest military budget on earth.

Buy the Book

The Columbia will be the biggest and most expensive submarine ever built. How perfectly American, right? Even down to the fact that it’s named in honor of the District of Columbia, the disenfranchised, desperately unequal, and remarkably segregated capital of the United States of America. I’d love to see an artwork that encapsulates that grim irony.

Those new Columbia subs will dwarf what Beatrice Cuming’s welders were working on when she captured them in 1944. Each will be 560 feet long, or a few feet more than the height of the Washington Monument. And its bulk will displace 20,810 tons of water.

But the size and expensiveness aren’t anywhere near as important as the payload of nuclear weapons it will carry with a power those welders of Cuming’s time could hardly have imagined and that Cuming would have been hard-pressed to render with brushes and paint. Each of those 12 new submarines will be equipped with 16 nuclear missile tubes for Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). And those tubes will each be able to house up to 12 independently targetable nuclear warheads, known as W88s, costing about $150 million each and packing a mind-boggling 455-kiloton wallop. 

Okay, now do the math with me. What does 12 times 16 times 12 equal? That’s right: 2,304. Now, multiply that by the thermonuclear force of 455 kilotons, and you get more than one million kilotons. An unthinkable power.

Now, look back into history and recall the utter devastation of the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later by “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” two comparatively crude and small atomic bombs by today’s standards. They leveled two cities, caused more than 200,000 deaths (mostly of Japanese civilians), and spread radioactive material responsible for cancer and birth defects for years to come while poisoning landscapes.

And Fat Man was a 21 kiloton weapon; Little Boy, just 15 kilotons.

In short, the firepower of the future Columbia class submarine fleet will be nearly 30,000 times the combined power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What would a canvas depicting that devastation look like? I have no idea. I can’t imagine, and I wonder whether a visual artist would even be able to represent or capture that sort of — if you don’t mind the invention of a term — dis-creation.

Of course, not all of those Columbia-class submarines will be deployed at once and they could be outfitted with fewer than 12 warheads, and some of those warheads could be the “smaller” W76 variety. Those qualifications and caveats aside, the math is the math and it’s catastrophic. Each of those future billion-dollar behemoths could menace the world with the equivalent of 5,824 Hiroshimas.

In the words of the Congressional Research Service, the “basic mission” of such new nuclear-armed subs would be “to remain hidden at sea with their SLBMs, so as to deter a nuclear attack on the United States by another country by demonstrating to other countries that the United States has an assured second-strike capability, meaning a survivable system for carrying out a retaliatory nuclear attack.”

What a mission! How anything but basic! To accept such logic is to invest all those billions of taxpayer dollars in the possibility of destroying even the last gasp of life on Planet Earth.

Exploring New London and Groton, you might happen upon a brightly painted, chubby “submarine” in a park or public square. There are 20 of these mini-subs around our community, almost a decade after the region celebrated Connecticut’s Submarine Century. When they were smaller, my kids loved to climb on the one down by the train station, riding it like a carousel horse. There’s another inside my daughter’s school. The creativity and collaboration are delightful, but the reduction of submarines to kitschy local icons is downright insidious. Those shiny fiberglass mini-subs have no connection to the sleek, metallic nuclear-armed leviathans that carry about 70% of this country’s nuclear arsenal. You can’t enjoy those public art objects and think about the Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, which asserted the right of the United States to use nuclear weapons unilaterally and offensively. The cognitive dissonance is just too loud.

Imagining The New

Beatrice Cuming painted her Electric Boat canvases nearly 80 years ago. As I sat in the quiet of the Lyman Allyn museum staring at her welder painting, the Israeli Defense Forces were undoubtedly dropping American-manufactured bombs on Gaza, killing civilians, including women and children. The chief financial officer of General Dynamics, Cuming’s old employer and muse, responded to that new wave of warfare (and high stock prices) with a prediction that “the Israel situation is only going to put upward pressure on [the] demand” for the company’s artillery. Nearer to home, New London’s city council is raising taxes on residents to close gaps in the school budget, among other things. Meanwhile, General Dynamics recently petitioned to have its New London property values reassessed and won, giving the country’s fifth-largest weapons manufacturer tens of thousands of dollars in tax relief (money our community could really use).

Sitting in the Lyman Allyn gallery pondering all of this, I concluded that the military-industrial complex should more often be a subject for painters. What, I wondered, would Cuming capture today? The work has changed so much. Would she paint a test engineer stuck in her car as peace activists blockaded the main entrance to the General Dynamics complex? A configuration management analyst hunched over a computer terminal, his mind numbed by data, while he worried about his mortgage?

The story of Beatrice Cuming arriving in New London, working for Electric Boat, being hired to paint their products… it all now sounds to me like the potential set-up for a spy movie. And when you add in that Cuming had traveled the world, spoke French and Arabic, had relationships with women, and was investigated by the FBI for supposedly spying on Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, hers would certainly be an alluring tale today: a lesbian artist working undercover as a security guard, waiting for her moment, plotting to gain access to the sensitive heart of the matter?

No such luck, of course! Beatrice Cuming doesn’t appear to have been motivated in any way by anti-militarism or an anti-modernist critique. In fact, in a 1946 interview with the Brooklyn Eagle, she remarked, “There is beauty in the growth of America. We are busy going forward. We can’t go back.” 

The inevitability of progress, at all costs, is deeply ingrained in American thinking. Unfortunately, it’s exactly the wrong answer. We can, in fact, go back. We have to. Of course, we can’t uninvent the atomic bomb, but we can begin to control nuclear weapons. We can begin arms-controlling the heck out of them on the way to disarmament, opening up the possibility of nuclear abolition. And in all of this, artists could indeed lead the way. The power of creativity and imagination is — if you don’t mind my inventing an apt word for this moment — kilotonic. At least in our imagination, we can recall all our weapons of mass destruction from around the world: creating the biggest weapons buyback program in history. After all, there simply is no way forward through the military-industrial complex and no possibility of peace lurking there.

Last week, I ran across the Gold Star Memorial Bridge, a mile-long span over the Thames River — no, not in London, but right in my neighborhood of New London, Connecticut — on the narrow, cramped bike lane with views up the river. When I was almost at the top of the bridge, nearly 155 feet above the water, I saw a submarine headed up the river, escorted by tugboats and moving smoothly. There, high above the water, I was struck by how a vessel so massive and fearsome could look so small and toylike down below.

I was grateful then for the implacability of that river, the height I was above it, and the huge expanse of sky above me. For a moment, I could breathe. For a moment, I wasn’t afraid.

Copyright 2024 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com

The current Israel-Hamas war has dominated the news for the past few months. As reports of military machinations and diplomatic efforts have gained attention, the art world has struggled with responses to the horrors of this war.

For example, controversy and calls for transparency and accountability followed the departure of Anishinaabe-kwe curator Wanda Nanibush from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). The departure was apparently related to her expressed opinions on the war.

After the Royal Ontario Museum tried to change a Palestinian American artist’s work, Jenin Yaseen staged a sit-in and others protested.

I have been teaching and writing about the “art world” — what sociologist Howard Becker calls the network of artists, art institutions, funders, patrons and audiences — for years, and researching how artists navigate their thorny relationship with contentious political moments.

Policies and regulations can serve artists, but can also engender a lack of trust and create administrative burdens that impact the healthy functioning of artists and organizations.

Endeavouring to speak truthfully, meaningfully

The Globe and Mail reported some Canadians “active in a support group of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem” expressed concern to the AGO, and that one signatory to a letter said the letter didn’t call for Nanibush’s departure but rather for “antisemitism training and for the AGO to make use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.”

If the gallery did try to silence Nanibush, critics have reason to be concerned about how they reacted as the curator and others in the art world endeavoured to speak truthfully and meaningfully in a time of crisis.

In a statement, the AGO’s director and CEO Stephan Jost expressed the gallery’s support for Indigenous artists and a need to “reflect on our commitments to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report …”

Refugees in their Own Homeland, by Mohammad ElMetmari; Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

He acknowledged cultural institutions are “being asked to better define the rights and limits of political and artistic expression in a locally diverse but globally complex environment” and that “intense discussion” also raises questions about good governance.

Rights, limits, regulation and the purpose of artists’ work are what is at stake in this discussion. An investigation is underway to see how the gallery’s policies may have impacted the board’s decision-making.

People trying to create and speak truth

How people assess the value of policies and regulation affecting the art world depends on how much they feel the art world should, or should not, reflect political realities.

Some might suggest that artists should entertain and enlighten us but stay away from contentious issues.

I believe artists have a unique role, different than that of journalists, political leaders or even documentary filmmakers. Beyond parsing the facts of a situation or deliberating and brokering political solutions, artists work to bring human richness and complexity to experiences like conflict and strife.

Art and our lives

Thinking about “art worlds” as “patterns of collective activity,” as Becker does, helps us to think about art in relationship to our social and political lives, and the conditions under which artists create.

Art schools, professional organizations, galleries and performance spaces all play a part in enabling some artists and their messages to shine, whether through financial support, attention or time — while constraining or even silencing others.

Museum and gallery spaces, frequently dependent on government and philanthropic funding, curate and elevate certain artworks and in so doing mediate relationships and foster cultural dialogue between governments and pluralistic communities of citizens. At the same time, they prescribe behaviours and actions that constrain both artists and the public perception of their work.

In this way, the support systems around artistic work have political implications, just as much as the art itself may have.

Discipline via funding

As I examined in my doctoral research, the Summerworks Theatre Festival briefly lost funding from Canadian Heritage in 2011 after staging playwright Catherine Frid’s controversial play Homegrown.

The play critiqued the reach of the Anti-Terrorism Act and the use of solitary confinement as it examined the story of one man convicted of participating in a terrorist group. This was after a high-profile 2006 RCMP investigation saw 18 Muslim individuals accused of terrorism. (Charges against seven people were stayed or dropped, while four people were convicted). Some accused the play of being pro-terrorist.

Artists responded to this institutional censure by staging readings of the play to support the festival.

The art world will find pathways to speak its own truth in the face of such pressures.

For instance, as the Globe and Mail reported, the Belfry Theatre in Victoria made a recent decision to cancel its run of the Israel-set play The Runner. But Vancouver’s PuSh Festival is sticking by plans to run the play as a part of its program along with other works, including the immersive installation Dear Laila that depicts a model of one artist’s former home in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp.

When political pressure closes one door, the art world will often seek to open another, though we have yet to see how this might play out in the case of the AGO and Nanibush.

What do we want from our artists?

In the face of numerous wars, the climate emergency, housing and food insecurity, this is a challenging time. People around the world face what some scholars and activists have called a “polycrisis.”

Artists represent and reflect this social and political upheaval. Banksy scrawls murals on the blasted Ukrainian cityscape. Theatres across the world stage performances or screenings — like The Gaza Monologues — to try to represent Palestinian voices.

Especially in a time when trust in our political leaders and institutions continues to wane, artists, arts leaders and policymakers face daunting but critical questions about making ethically sound decisions.

If the public trusts the art world to do their work with rigour and honesty, artists and arts institutions can be a community of voices expressing diverse perspectives on our collective humanity, reflecting suffering and the power of resistance to violence in this polarizing conflict.

We must critically assess the value of the arts and of artists to perform this important work. And we should be mindful of desires to discipline the art world at a time when its voices are so deeply needed.

Lowell Gasoi, Instructor in communication studies at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, Carleton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As the war on Gaza began being described as a “genocide,” the years of pain that I buried finally burst and led to the creation of this art.

( Waging Nonviolence ) – I woke up on Oct. 7 to a Facebook timeline full of friends posting about how the world is just so cruel. Confused, I scrolled a bit further, and read what Western newspapers were saying: Israel and Hamas were targeting each other again.

The heaviness that lives in my chest laughed. Of course, here we go again. I’m a diasporic Palestinian American, so I’m used to these news cycles. Horrors and atrocities enacted on my people by Israel for generations, and we Palestinians struggle to get one article about it in the back pages of major, or even small town newspapers. Israel bulldozes our houses, detains children without trial. Kills nonviolent Gazan protesters and declares six human rights groups supporting Palestinians to be terrorist organizations. Forces Gazans to live in a region that the U.N. said would be unlivable in 2020 without escape.

But the minute Hamas does anything, Western news blares again about conflict, complexity, how “both sides” are equally bad. Turn on almost any news channel and they’ll say that’s why Israel has a right to its security, it’s all Hamas’ fault. Israel has a right to defend themselves, so let’s once again use U.S. tax dollars that could be funding health care and housing to kill more Gazan children.

However, something different clicked through the digital screens before me. The word “genocide” was popping up everywhere, from advocacy emails to Instagram infographics. Social media graphics educating on the “Nakba” were filling my feeds. I was amazed, remembering how even a few years ago throwing out the word “occupation” was controversial. With that, the heaviness in my chest suddenly did something it had never done before: it burst. Years of pain I’ve had to bury, swallow like knives came pouring out of me. The silence stitched into every Palestinian tongue broke loose, and we all screamed.

And for me, for the first time, I truly felt like the world was watching. For the first time, I fully realized it was my right and duty to express the grief and rage living inside of me.

From that, came this art.

1. To be Palestinian (Oct. 12)

A heaviness built in my gut as I drew this piece. I feel torn — I want to touch on universal Palestinian experiences, but I know I only taste a shade of the larger knot of pain. I know that Palestine is not defined by grief and trauma, and carries with it a rich, delicious (seriously, Palestinian fruit is top fucking notch) and vibrant culture I have the privilege of being a part of, even if from a diasporic distance.

I also know our lives are defined by persistent othering. Dehumanization. I’ve lost track of the times I have had to explain what’s really happening in Palestine, dealing with irreverent questions, being told as I beg advocacy spaces to listen to Palestinians that our needs call for an impossible “moral purity.”

This is a norm for U.S. Palestinians even in progressive spaces. Today I watched as the U.S. agreed yet again to send military aid to Israel at the same time Israel said they’re cutting off electricity in Gaza. One Gazan doctor said soon the hospital will be a mass grave as they run out of fuel.

I watch with a nonstop knot in my chest as progressive politicians try to equate Hamas (which yes, is fucked for targeting civilians, but I shouldn’t even have to add that addendum) with a nuclear state with a multibillion-dollar military budget that’s been killing my people for 75 years. That has been abducting children, raiding villages, all while the media was silent.

I watch as celebrities usually vocal on social issues stay silent. As I read the horrible news every day and know that no one in my circles, or most circles, knows what’s going on.

It’s not just the horrors Israel perpetuates that forces us to swallow stones. It’s the silence, the normalization, the knowing of just how much of the world sees us as a nuisance, does not care if we live or die.

So I desperately do what I can. I make art piece after art piece after art piece hoping more people feel the pain that always lives in my gut, that lives in every Palestinian gut. That the norm changes, that Palestinians will get some God damn apologies. Reparations. Freedom. That I can use the word “genocide” without stirring controversy. That I’m just heard.

2. Palestine is bleeding (Oct. 8)

The Arabic word you see on the left says “Gaza.” I wanted to write “we love you Gaza” but my Arabic isn’t that great sadly.

Of the two regions legally declared “Palestine” right now, the West Bank is considered the part of Palestine that has it “easiest,” especially major cities. What is one thing you’ll see all over West Bank houses, especially major cities? Massive black water tanks.

Why the massive black water tanks? Israel only gives Palestinians water, at best, three days of the week, at worst twice a month. Most Palestinians can’t even wash their hair or flush when they pee. Because yes, Israel controls Palestine’s water flow, as well as their trade and airwaves. Palestinians still are only allowed access to 3G at best. Want to send your Palestinian friend a package? Forget it. Oh, and Palestinians, especially Palestinian refugees, can be shot and killed by the Israeli military for walking on the wrong sidewalk or driving on the wrong road. Or for no reason at all.

And Israel won’t even give 66 percent of the West Bank access to water. They’re forced to poop in trash cans and go to local towns for bottled water. I know, because when I visited this part of Palestine (called “Area C”) I had to do both.

And no, the water tanks are not due to water shortages. Israeli settlements, which sit right next to Palestinian towns, regularly have pools in the backyard.

And Gaza has it worse. People in Gaza can’t leave, even for medical emergencies. They’re denied access to electricity. There is no clean drinking water. It was declared unlivable in 2020 and is unlivable because of Israel’s blockade. This sudden uptick in violence and horrendous bombings by Israel is a small grain of sand in a sea of violence against Palestinians by Israel. Yet the effects are treacherous.

That’s why we call it apartheid, colonization, genocide.

3. We just want to be free (Oct. 10)

This piece speaks from my perspective as a Palestinian of the diaspora. I cannot fully speak to the horrors beyond human language taking part in the Gaza Strip. I only watch it from afar, do all I can to support my people, but feel mostly powerless. I speak as someone where getting to visit my own homeland is becoming harder as each year goes by, even with recent political actions by the U.S. government for Palestinian-Americans that are supposed to ease our transit.

I want to go home. I want to not sit with knots in my stomach praying my relatives are safe. I want to be able to call for the freedom of my people without getting the automatic racist response of, “but what about Hamas? Does Israel not have a right to its security?” To be allowed to speak about the horrors of what Palestinians are going through without fear it will hurt my career and future.

I want Israel to stop bulldozing Palestinian homes. I want all Palestinians to have full access to water and electricity, to not have to drive on separate highways and walk on separate sidewalks from Israelis. For Israel’s detention of Palestinian children to end. I want people in Area C to be able to build beautiful homes, to not have to live in caves because Israel won’t let them build anything. I want the people of Gaza to be able to go to bed at night with their only concern being whether or not it will rain tomorrow. I want Israel to stop killing our culture. I want everyone in the West Bank to be able to go to the beach.

I want apartheid to end. I want this genocide to end. I don’t want my tax dollars funding this anymore. I want to scream my truth loud and clear without harassment. To not have to swallow myself over and over and over and over again. I want, simply put, for Palestine to be free.

The people of Palestine are steadfast, and wake up every day refusing to leave their home, their identity. But they shouldn’t have to. They should be able to live their lives with ease, joy, peace.

4. Grief beyond language (Oct. 14)

I have grieved the loss of many loved ones in my lifetime. But the grief over watching the people in Gaza, my people, my ancestry, die in droves under Israel’s horror, is beyond anything I can explain.

I’ve spent half this past week starting at the wall feeling helpless. Genocide feels like too kind, too formal, too soft of a word.

We let Gaza down. We saw them suffer for decades and did nothing. Gaza, you deserved love and a fight for your freedom. The world should’ve stopped just to save you. I’m sorry will never be enough. You were failed. Let us now carry you in our hearts. We will not allow the world to forget your fight for freedom.

5. What is left (Oct. 16)

The grief of a genocide happening to your people while being told it’s your fault and watching the world support it wreaks havoc on the soul in ways I could not comprehend before. My body refuses to eat. This is a pain no one should know or carry.

6. Children should never be ancestors (Nov. 6)

Almost 4,000 children in Gaza dead, killed by Israel, this number not including children who died from lack of access to medical care, dehydration and hunger from Israel cutting off electricity, water and food.

I can’t even comprehend that number. I can’t comprehend one.

We just passed Samhain, a holiday meant to celebrate our relationship to the dead, since the veil between the living and the dead is thin. When I hear the word “ancestor,” I think of the elderly who lived long, hearty lives, people who have had enough life experiences to give guidance to the living.

Children should never be ancestors. Children never had the chance to grow, develop into full beings who know themselves, their quirks, their flaws and strengths. To even learn how to walk, talk, in the cases of many who Israel has killed.

To accept what Israel is doing in Gaza as necessary for their security is to intentionally dehumanize us. To look at us Palestinians as a people and say “yeah, they’re allowed to die.” Do not fall for the genocidal myth. What Israel is doing is unacceptable, unconscionable. Targeting hospitals, schools, mosques and densely populated refugee camps is an atrocity beyond human language.

Call for a ceasefire. Call your government officials every day and demand a ceasefire. Especially if you’re in the U.S. Call for a ceasefire, call for an end to all military support to Israel, call for an end to Israel’s occupation and apartheid. Call for a free Palestine.

7. The world will remember (Oct. 18)

Now is not the time for complicity. The world is watching. Free Palestine. End all U.S. military support to Israel. Demand an end to Israeli apartheid. Call for a ceasefire. Hold Israel accountable, name what they are doing as ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Call your government officials. Post on social media. Educate friends on disinformation. Donate to Palestinian mutual aid funds. Go to a protest. Do not shut down. We need action if we are to survive as a people.

Liz Bajjalieh

Liz Bajjalieh (she/they/he) is a queer Palestinian of the diaspora, artist, poet, and staff member with Peace Action National. All views displayed here are their own.

Via Waging Nonviolence

(The Conversation) – Through her poetically constructed images, Hoda Afshar illuminates a world overshadowed by history and atrocity. Yet we never see despair: we see defiance, comradeship, reinvention and a search for how photography can activate new ways of thinking.

Afshar was born in Iran and migrated to Australia in 2007. She began her practice as a documentary photographer in Tehran, having originally been attracted to acting.

Staging and creative intervention would become significant features of her work.

Even in her early, nominally “documentary” series, you can sense an embracing of the ambiguity of the still image, and an interest in composing a reality more vivid (and perhaps genuine) than dispassionate reportage might be capable of.

Afshar is now one of Australia’s most significant photo media artists, so it’s a surprise that Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is her first major survey exhibition.

What unites her materially diverse work is a concern with visibility: who is denied it, what is made visible by media, and how photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth.

Much of her work addresses critical humanitarian issues of our time: war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption. She challenges stereotypes. We don’t see passive victims or closed narratives: we are introduced to new perspectives that might lead us to reappraise the world we inhabit.

Familiarity and distance

The exhibition is made up of six bodies of work, the first of which began with the passing away of her father in Iran.

In the exodus, I love you more (2014–) is a portrait of her home country formed by experiences of familiarity and distance. The artist is both at home and searching, like an outsider. Images suggest at times an intimate proximity, and at others a separation akin to the one made by raising a camera to your eye.

Afshar examines her experience of migration and, she tells me, seeks to “dismantle the idea of there being one way of seeing Iran”.

The final image in this series shows the erasure of a woman’s face in a painted Persian miniature.

In the adjoining room, the new series In turn (2023) is a suite of large, framed photographs of Iranian women based in Australia. Many images show them as they tenderly braid one another’s hair. These women are unidentifiable, apart from artist and activist Mahla Karimian, who appears airborne with a pair of flying doves.

This work was catalysed by the women-led protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman arrested in September 2022 for not following Iran’s strict female dress codes. The uprising filled the streets with women chanting “Women, Life, Freedom!” and “Say her name!” in fearless defiance of authorities, who responded with murderous retaliation.

Afshar was observing her homeland from afar. She says she wanted to “share voices the media was ignoring”. She was inspired by social media images of women plaiting each other’s hair in public: a rebellious act that echoes a practice of female Kurdish fighters preparing for battle.

But the images aren’t violent. They’re quietly peaceful, showing solidarity in grief, hope and determination. In making this “visual letter” to her Iranian sisters, Afshar has risked long-term exile from her country of birth.

Resolute defiance

Much of Afshar’s work fearlessly tells stories that have been hidden or misrepresented.

Remain (2018) was made in collaboration with asylum seekers detained on Manus Island.

This work is made up of a series of austere, absorbing portraits and a large-scale two-channel video installation.

We see men imprisoned in a place that would otherwise resemble paradise. We hear their voices recounting experiences of trauma and displacement. But, with Afshar, they co-create performative, narrative-evoking works that avoid degrading cliches of victimhood.

The most widely recognised image in this series is a portrait of Kurdish Iranian writer and filmmaker Behrouz Boochani, who chose to be pictured alongside fire. Smoke and flames echo the ardent strength of his gaze. This strength allowed him to emerge a free man after six years of incarceration.

In Behold (2016), once more we see acts of resolute defiance by people performing for the camera. Afshar was invited by a group of gay men to observe re-enacted gestures of protection and intimacy outlawed in most of the Middle East.

Unable to freely express their love in society, they disclose and affirm it for Afshar and her lens.

Agonistes (2020) pays homage to a group of Australian whistleblowers who appear as a Greek chorus of heroic truth tellers.

Created through a complex process of photographic recording and 3D printing that conjures lifelike detail, the portraits look like sculpted marble busts. But this rendering leaves the eyes blank, and captions describing the corruption revealed by each figure don’t divulge their names.

Afshar maintains her practice of disclosing truth while protecting those who have the courage to tell it.

Being alive is breaking

Speak the wind (2015–22) returns us to Iran, to the Strait of Hormuz, where “ill winds” are said to blow. African slaves were brought here over centuries, a trade only stopped in the 1920s.

Afshar’s photographs and video imagery explore a place haunted by history. We see the outward manifestations of an invisible wind (dramatically carved rock formations, ripples in water, flowing fabric). Shrouded figures bow on the dry earth, seeking cure from possession by malicious spirits.

Afshar investigates to what extent we are captives of history (in Australia we must grapple with the legacy of colonisation). In making this lyrical work, Afshar again collaborated with local people, some who made drawings of “wind spirits” they said they had encountered.

The title of the exhibition was inspired by lines in a poem by Kaveh Akbar:

a curve is a straight line broken at all its points so much
of being alive is breaking.

Hoda Afshar’s work addresses conflict, injustice, mobility and the often fragile state of being alive. It reminds us that dominant powers can be challenged by exposing truth and envisioning something new.

Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until January 21 2024.

Tom Williams, Lecturer – Visual Arts, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Gaza-based author contemplates creativity beyond the Israeli blockade’s daily misery.

Written byWe Are Not Numbers

 

This story was first published by We Are Not Numbers.  It was written by Dana Besaiso. An edited version is republished here, under a content-sharing agreement. All photos have been shared from Instagram with the permission of the photographer Mohammad Zaanoun.

( Globlvoices.org) – They say misery breeds great art. From John Keats’s powerful poems about his struggle with illness and death, to Vincent van Gogh, who channeled his battle with mental illness into his dramatic and intense paintings, those who suffer can infuse their emotions and experiences into art that holds exceptional power and meaning for the world. The dilemmatic question that comes to mind is: what happens to art when the misery is gone?

Misery as normal

 

For as long as I can remember, my story alongside every other Palestinian’s has been filled with sorrowful events. Even the cheerful and happy ones are, in some way or another, coated with misery.

Whether it’s that girl preparing for her wedding in Gaza, that youth who migrated to secure a better future, or that very old lady sitting on her couch with the key to what was once her home — before the Israeli forces dispossessed her out of it — hanging from her necklace. Her hopes of returning to her house diminish as she watches the repeated Israeli military attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque on her TV.

When my eldest sister, Rasha, graduated with her master’s degree from the United Kingdom, my family and I couldn’t be there to witness her achievement because of the travel restrictions on residents of the Gaza Strip. We had to experience it through photos and videos. Yet, I still considered myself and my family lucky that at least one of us made it!

In the meantime, most of her international friends’ families managed to attend because, for them, it was as easy as booking a ticket and getting on the airplane. We had only dreamed of seeing an airplane, much less flying in one.

Growing up under miserable circumstances

Since I was born, life has been tainted with agony. Growing up in Gaza, we bore witness to destruction, murder, and countless escalations, that we became nicknamed atfal horoob (“children of wars”). We even joke around and say we graduated with a “bachelor’s degree in war,” as we have officially survived four Israeli aggressions, in addition to numerous attacks.

We got so used to moving on after these Israeli escalations that we started believing it was the norm. We carry our losses, sadness, and grief, and keep moving on with our lives. We return to work or school with the heavy baggage of emotions on our backs. Life must go on.

In May 2021, we faced one of the ugliest and most horrifying Israeli aggressions. The 11-day attack resulted in the deaths of 232 Palestinian civilians, including 65 children, over 1,900 injured, and 1,447 housing units in Gaza demolished, leaving countless individuals with no shelter.

I considered myself one of the lucky ones back then. After that escalation, I struggled with survivor’s guilt — a mental response to an event in which someone else experiences loss but you do not.

“Why me?” I would ask myself. “Why did I survive when so many didn’t?” These thoughts haunted me for a while. I had spent each of the 11 nights saying my goodbyes to my family and friends because death was so close.

I considered myself lucky because I didn’t lose someone close to me, didn’t lose my home, or my identity.

And then, life went back to normal — or as normal as it can be.

Misery is part of our daily lives

 

Sad stories are etched in our DNA. I grew up listening to the stories of our grandparents and how they were displaced from their homes during the Nakba of 1948 and Naksa of 1967. I heard about the horrific massacres that happened before I was born, such as the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948, the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, and many more.

These anecdotes are not just part of our history, but rather a part of our daily lives. We face the brutality of the occupation, whether it is the aggression on Gaza or the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, such as in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and Silwan neighborhoods, and others.

I got so used to these stories that I stopped seeing the bigger picture. The continuous and repeated tragedies that affect almost all Palestinians made me lose perspective that this life is not normal.

It is not normal to have an entire family removed from the civil registry because they all died in an Israeli bombing. It is not normal to be denied your childhood because you were locked up in an Israeli prison since you were 13 for a crime you didn’t commit, like Ahmed Manasra.

It is not normal to be traumatized by the sound of a shutting door because it reminds you of the sound of bombing. And it is not normal to lose your four-year-old son, such as Tamim Dawood, because his heart couldn’t handle the sound of F-16s dropping bombs on his neighbors.

What will happen if the misery lifts?

 

I am struggling with the fear that if, inshallah, the Palestinian reality changes for the better, I might lose the inspiration to write. As a person who has lived her life in constant terror, my passion for writing stems from the ongoing struggle to advocate for my fundamental human rights.

So, the question remains: Will I be able to create happy stories that are not rooted in Palestinian misery? Will we ever write cheerful stories? Ones that talk about happiness and success? Ones where people are genuinely happy without mentioning the “in spite of” in the middle of it?

Will I ever write a story about a mother enjoying her son’s wedding without noting that it happened despite the Israeli forces recently demolishing their home before their eyes?

I can only hope that there will come a day when we, Palestinians, no longer have to ask these questions, because we are no longer burdened by misery. We will learn for ourselves whether there is a trade-off in terms of creativity, and whether it is worth it.

 

Featured Image: Palestinian artist Maha Al-Dayya has finished painting artworks of the houses that were destroyed by Israeli planes during the repeated wars on Gaza, July 8, 2023, Gaza Gity. Photo by Mohammad Zaanoun, used with permission.

Via Globlvoices.org

The Bridge features personal essays, commentary, and creative non-fiction that illuminate differences in perception between local and international coverage of news events, from the unique perspective of members of the Global Voices community. Views expressed do not necessarily represent the opinion of the community as a whole. All Posts

 

Written byWe Are Not Numbers

(The Conversation) – A recent rise in activism in Iran has added a new chapter to the country’s long-standing history of murals and other public art. But as the sentiments being expressed in those works have changed, the government’s view of them has shifted, too.

The ancient Persians, who lived in what is now Iran, adorned their palaces, temples and tombs with intricate wall paintings, showcasing scenes of royal court life, religious rituals and epic tales. Following the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, murals in Iran took on a new significance and played a crucial role in shaping the national narrative. These murals became powerful visual representations of the ideals and values of the Islamic Republic. They were used to depict scenes of heroism, martyrdom and religious devotion, aiming to inspire national unity and pride among Iranians.

Over the centuries, these artworks came to adorn many public spaces, including the walls of mosques, universities and government buildings, becoming symbols of patriotism and religious devotion.

After the Islamic Revolution overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, murals began to convey new political messages and ideological propaganda. They celebrated the ideals of the Islamic Revolution and showcased the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini and other prominent figures of the revolution.

Murals frequently depicted anti-Western sentiments, condemning foreign interference and imperialism. They also highlighted the concept of martyrdom and the importance of defending the Islamic Republic against external threats, aiming to inspire national unity and pride among Iranians.

In 2022, the Iranian morality police arrested Mahsa (Jhina) Amini for allegedly failing to wear her hijab properly. After she died in police custody, public protests broke out across the country with the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” – and led to a new round of public art in Iran.

As a scholar of Iranian contemporary art, but more importantly as someone who studies the development of Iranian artists, I see their renewed determination to promote freedom as a cultural necessity in Iran, even in the face of a government crackdown.

Street art as protest

In the months following Amini’s death, artists, activists, and, most importantly, ordinary citizens poured into the streets to claim the public spaces and call for freedom.

Street art emerged as a powerful medium through which individuals could address a wide array of pressing social and political issues, including women’s rights, freedom of expression, political activism and the desire for a life free from the constraints of religious laws.

Graffiti artists, in particular, played a vital role in expressing dissent and resistance. Throughout Iranian cities, evocative graffiti murals have appeared, telling stories of struggle, liberation and the indomitable spirit of the movement through the past 45 years since the 1979 revolution.

Watching the progression of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and the distribution of art created parallel to it, I noticed that artists turned public spaces into platforms for political messages, critiquing policies, advocating social change and promoting gender equality.

Sometimes even a dialogue emerged on the walls between the oppressed and the oppressor. Artists depicted pictures of the killed citizens, the activists detained, as well as iconic images of the revolution. The government erased or painted over the graffiti, but protesters came back with new images and messages.

Central to this movement is the participation of both professional artists and non-artist citizens, instigating change and fostering consciousness through powerful imagery created on the city walls. Ordinary people participate in changing the city’s visual landscape by expressing themselves through art.

The government responds

The rise of protest art in Iran has faced opposition from the government, which viewed these forms of expression as acts of defiance.

Government suppression tactics in response to murals and expressions of dissent have been alarmingly severe. These tactics encompassed frequent physical removal of murals that challenged the status quo, aiming to silence the voices of those speaking out against injustice by detaining, kidnapping and threatening the lives of their creators. In addition to this visual erasure, authorities imprisoned artists and other demonstrators for their activism and imposed employment restrictions as punitive measures.

Despite governmental opposition and legal challenges, artists and activists persevered. They have used art to voice their concerns, challenge societal norms and advocate for change.

Pouya Afshar, Associate Professor of Art & Design, UMass Lowell

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured image: ‘While the teachers are detained, the classrooms will be closed,’ reads one artist’s painting on a wall.
Khiaban Tribune via Instagram

What is culture? In today’s globalized world, we are familiar with seeing various cultural objects and ornamentation outside of their original location or context.

If culture is not fixed and bound to a particular location, how does culture move and transform?

Ornamentation in Islamic art — patterned decoration or embellishment seen on objects or in architecture — is a great example of such movement of culture that can now be found across the world.

Throughout the centuries, Islamic geometric patterns and arabesque (Islimi) designs — otherwise known as biomorphic, floral patterns — have moved from east to west.

These patterns have been built upon and adapted, and as such may not even be recognized as bearing the imprint or influence of Islamic societies.

Islamic art influence on western design

For example, the 19th century English designer William Morris — renowned for patterning that became known in fabrics, furniture and other Arts and Crafts movement decorative arts — was inspired by the biomorphic floral designs of the Islamic arabesque (Islimi) ornamentation.

A recent exhibition, Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity, at Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris showcases the influence of Islamic art on the designs of French jewelry designer Maison Cartier.

What is fascinating about this exhibition is the paring of jewels and precious objects with the artifacts from Islamic lands such as a 14-15th century Iranian mosaic tile that were the original sources of inspiration for Cartier. This exhibition travels to the Dallas Museum of Art in May 2022.

‘Cultural translation’

Part of the reason for this movement of culture is the mobility of people and the portability of ornamental objects.

The notion of “cultural translation,” coined by cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha, is the act of translation, which is neither one cultural tradition nor the other cultural tradition, but is the emergence of other positions. The root of the English word translation is from the Latin translatus meaning “to carry over” or “to bring across.”

Movement resulting from migration gives rise to people’s acts of cultural translation. Translation is the negotiation arising from encounters of two social groups with different cultural traditions.

For Bhabha, cultural difference is never a finished “thing.” Migrant experiences exist at the borders or edges of different cultures and are in flux. Consequently, people’s acts of translating language or visual signs and symbols is an act of constant negotiation between cultures.

In this process, the migrant’s struggle operates in a process of transformation in the in-between space of cultures called the third space. The third space is a hybrid space of negotiating cultural interactions.

Muslim artists in diaspora

A good example of these kinds of cultural negotiations happens in the works of contemporary artists from culturally diverse backgrounds living in the western societies (in diaspora).

For Muslim artists in diaspora, traditional Islamic art forms contextualize their connections to their cultural backgrounds within broader social, political and cultural concerns — concerns like migration, cultural identity and diversity.

Pakistani Canadian artist Tazeen Qayyum uses the language of the traditional Islamic ornamentation in her work such as A Holding Pattern (2013) in order to investigate what it means to live between two cultures.

Upon first glance, the viewer perceives an aesthetically pleasing geometric design reminiscent of arabesque tile works in Islamic architecture. However, a closer inspection reveals that the ornamental pattern is a repetition of cockroaches’ silhouettes.

In a recent article for BlackFlash magazine, Qayyum explains this work:

“I also intricately painted a set of airport lounge chairs representative of the liminal space of an airport, where migrants and refugees are neither here nor there but instead wait for clearance upon arrival at Pearson Airport. The title ‘holding pattern’ solidifies this thinking as it connotes an aircraft awaiting clearance to land. It is a state of waiting that references my own displaced identity of living between two cultures, always in transit and never truly at home.”

‘In-between space’

Contemporary cultural theorists, such as Sara Ahmed and Bhabha have argued that such artists enter a mode of cultural translation.

Artists destabilize the idea of a monolithic culture and instead construct works that are influenced by locations of cultures that reflect an “in-between space”: a site of dialogue reflecting these interconnected influences.

I recently created artwork in which I investigate cultural translation and question displacement, dissemination and reinsertion of culture by re-contextualizing culturally specific ornamentation. This work is for a three-person exhibition, The Art of Living: On Community, Immigration, and the Migration of Symbols, Jude Abu Zaineh, Soheila Esfahani, Xiaojing Yan, curated by Catherine Bédard, at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris (opening May 12, 2022).

In my work Mallards Reeds, a vintage wooden sign depicting a flock of Canada geese and mallards flying over a marsh at sunset has been laser-etched with an arabesque pattern.

By placing the arabesque design on the wood cutout of Canada geese and mallards — a vintage “Canadiana” object — I aim to question the origin of culture and the role of ornamentation. I acquired this object at a local company where I live in Waterloo Region, Ontario, that salvages and reclaims wood materials. At one time, the sign apparently hung at a restaurant.

This pattern is replicated from sections of the mosaic design of the interior dome of the Imam Mosque in Isfahan, Iran.

This mosque, also known as the Royal Mosque, is part of a complex of buildings in an urban square designated as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization world heritage site.

Experiences, cultures inform readings

As art historian Oleg Grabar notes in his book The Mediation of Ornament: “ … ornament is the ultimate mediator, paradoxically questioning the value of meanings by chanelling them into pleasure. Or is it possible to argue instead that by providing pleasure, ornament also gives to the observer the right and the freedom to choose meaning?”

My work aims to become a mediator allowing the viewer to enter the third space and hinges on an act of negotiation. The viewers’ unique experiences and cultures inform their reading of the work. This allows them to “enter the third space” by engaging in cultural translation: viewers carry their culture across and onto the work of art and vice versa.

I am interested in the notion of the third space not only in contemporary art/culture, but also as a means of opening a space of dialogue across fields of study in order to mobilize multiple perspectives.

Soheila Kolahdouz Esfahani, Assistant Professor, Visual Arts Department, Western University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.