Beirut as a Body Politic

First published on THE MANTLE

[Ali Cherri, Give Me A Body Then, Istanbul, 2013]

Where does the body begin? Does it even have a beginning? The question is at the heart of both the entire body of theories of perception in the 20th century and the visual arts. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of the pioneers in the study of the body as an epicenter of consciousness postulates, “The body is our general medium for having a world”—undermining a long tradition of consciousness based on dialectics and positing the body in an ambiguous existence as both subject and object. The body as a total medium unleashes a free performance of reality in which artistic production becomes a specific site of intervention, both unstable and permanent.Art is no longer pure subjective expression but an open field of negotiation not between subject and object, but between the concrete historical world and pure experience; the mapping of an aggregate of relationships larger than those of the individual.

Coinciding with the age of bio-politics, social and political power is applied on the human body not only as a restraining force (through institutions, laws and the concept of mental health as an extension of technological power) but on the body as an organic entity subject to the administration and bureaucratization of its functions; a body politic. A body politic is an extended metaphor in which the nation is thought of as an entity likened to the human body: The "corps-état" developed in the Renaissance on the basis of then prevalent medical knowledge, made analogies between the apparent causes of bodily disease and their equivalent in the field of politics, to be healed by similar means. The growing bureaucratization of the body politic of Modernity evolved into encompassing economic power as well as the newfound social sphere, incorporating the body by engineering sexuality and behavior.

Lebanese artist Ali Cherri’s performance “Give Me A Body Then” (2005) presented in Istanbul in 2013 in the context of the project “Transition,” uncannily explores the temporal (both ephemeral and psychological) space shared between the body politic and the individual in a tripartite sense: As medium, as consciousness and as dislocation of subject-object. Cherri, a topographer of absolute memory environments (here defined as untraceable) from the decades-long Civil War in his country, attempts to map out in this performance not the spectacle of war as a problem of representation, but its effect on the body. We are not dealing here with wounds and sores but with larger units of psycho-physical configuration. If the body is a medium, such as the space of war—Euclidean geometrical space—what is the definite shape of this container? What does it contain? Where is it located?

[Ali Cherri, Give Me A Body Then, Istanbul, 2013]

Cherri’s body, nevertheless, is not a usual body (politic); his is a rotten organic continuum that refuses to constitute itself. The procedure at work here is almostGnostic: a self-referential irredentism that accesses cognitive reality through a vision of truth beyond the physical world. The defining factor here is not the image of his own body—since this image cannot be traversed—but the relationship between his body as an apparatus of consciousness and the images of objects of desire that variegate between existing subjects and potential objects. The textures of war—synthetic, elliptical and concentrated—produce not only memory sites but what Roland Barthes called, an image-repertoire: A set of images that function as a misunderstanding of the subject carried out by the subject himself. His apokatastasis sees the restitution only as the constitution of his present self without duality or illusions of the past.

The artist lays out the plan of the work in his performance statement: “I used to search for pictures of naked people, stealing glances at any nude photos I could find. There was no Internet at the time, and I did not have access to pornography, so I would try to find these photos anywhere possible, including biology books. More than once, I found pictures of naked, often dead, people in newspapers. I did not care what photos were trying to say; I was just looking at what they showed. I would collect these pictures and look at them every now and then. When I grew up, I continued collecting pictures of people, but not all of them were dead.” Cherri understood these images not in terms of linear meaning but as a vehicle of dynamic exchanges between optics and bodily sensations, without the narrative illusions associated with consciousness.

In a previous video work from the same year, “Un Cercle Autour du Soleil” (2005) Cherri states: “I was disappointed the day they announced the war had ended. I used to be elated by the idea of living in a city that was eating itself, like excess stomach fluid that digests and gradually eats the stomach.” An apocalyptic imaginary is set free not as an escape into a remotely distant future but as a possible eschaton, it is a time freeze. Is there a specific syntax in the body? Using his body—and other bodies—not as a metaphor but in their entire ordinary spatiality, his distance from the limitations of representation is total and hence, the body, an analytical corpse in this case, opens to a variety of readings. The artist goes far enough as to confront the viewer with the possibility of discontinuous consciousness and even, of consciousness as an apparatus of ideology.       

[Ali Cherri, Un Cercle autour du Soleil, video, 2005]

Perhaps the most effective metaphysical transgression of the modern era does not come from the demise of traditional religion rooted in the breakdown of metaphysics but in a more elementary operation at the hands of Freud: “He was the most significant among those prison guards who released the old prisoner (the soul) from the prison cell (the body), now to send the body into the prison cell of the soul, or at least to unmask the body as phantom soul, and as its own prison guard."¹ Having effectively eliminated the concept of “spirit,” both body and soul become complex but ambiguously related entities. Out of this ambiguity, Ali Cherri allows himself to being possessed by his imaginary, by his image repertoire, once the referents to a continuous reality are absent from the outset or have gone—temporarily—missing.     

What if an image is not an opinion? What if this power of representation entirely depends on a relationship between referents to each other? What if this power can be lost? In his video-installation “Triptych—Studies from a Human Body” (2012) shown in the exhibition “A Territory of Resistance” (The Running Horse, Beirut, 2012), Cherri stretches his body horizontally across three different channels. The impersonal body—thus fragmented—becomes a site of violence. This violence is here not the spectacle of suffering, but rather mere abeyance, the abeyance to the merciless of biological processes. Ubiquity—the preferred metaphor for globalization—is revealed as anonymity, and the inability to appear in the world as a continuous and stable self, fractures the body politic in terms of function. Different bodies constitute a singularity that goes beyond the public bureaucratization of gender.

“Human persons do not experience themselves as a homogeneous self,”² writesAgnes Heller, therefore a grand narrative about the body—as there exists about the body politic since the Middle Ages—cannot as much consolidate our existence in the plurality of appearance that participating in the public domain requires:“Moreover, we also live in more than one world, at least two or more, and it is by far not the same self that is best suited to live in all of them."³ At deliberately disfiguring the emotional content of the body, Cherri contends with the major difficulty of video art, in dealing with heterogeneity to create something with a unifying conception.⁴ Yet it is but the unified theory of man—inherited from Christian anthropology—what has impaired the ubiquitous self to find himself at home in his multitude of appearances and representations, of which the body is an intervention site.

[Ali Cherri, Triptych - Studies from a Human Body, 2012]

The binary morphology of embodiment is researched furthered by Cherri in his project “Some Body To Love” (Janine Rubeiz, Beirut, 2013), where, inverting the procedure, the morphology of the male body is created in the most external possible manner, through a series of screens mounted on a vaguely abstract wired body, he reduces the body to a micro-physics of biological processes and presenting it as a phenomenon in which the image and the body stand in a dialectical relation. This battlefield of the body reminds us how (in 20th century medicine) the terminology applied to describe treatment of cancer is derived from military jargon, with terms such as attack, invasion, colonization, and bombardment.⁵ In this arresting video-installation we experience anatomy as something entirely abstract and therefore, break down the traditional categories of thinking about sexed beings as morphological units.

The body, traditionally speaking, is an institution radically private and incommunicable. Admitting of no metaphor for it, the entire tradition of political theory excluded the body from the preoccupations of politics as being a slave to necessity, and gave preferences to the coincidence between appearing and Being.⁶Overlooking the natural fact that the essence of the human condition, the earth, is primarily sustained by the activity of labor—homo faber—as the fundamental activities through which appearance and action can transcend. It is but through the figure of the homo sacer (a Roman legal figure for a man who is no longer a citizen and can be killed by anybody) that in the modern era the breakdown of universal human rights occur: those who have been stripped from civil rights are nothing but a body, and on a body political power can be inflicted boundlessly. A body is deathless biology.

Throughout Ali Cherri’s practice, the body does not emerge merely as a site but also as a context. Anatomy is that site of attacks, invasion, colonization, and bombardment because it is impossible to conceive of a human community—that is, of a body politic—without being shaped by social geography. Mapping out physical space as a measure of experience is not a question of pure dimensionality, because space contains no spaces. Spaces in turn, receive their being from locations and not from space.⁷ Measure in units of memory and time it is our relationship to locations that construes real space. There are no pure spaces inasmuch as there is no pure experience or consciousness; everything is filtered and corrupted by the medium of personal time: the body, the screen, language. Embodiment and disembodiment are not dialectical binaries but intermediate forms of appearance.    

[Ali Cherri, Some Body To Love, 2013]

Turning to the medium—environment is as well—as a context, Cherri’s latest project, the short film “The Disquiet” (2013), a documentary investigating the seismic history of Lebanon, with a number of violent earthquakes that have shaped the country’s history since antiquity, as a result of its geographical position on several fault lines. Surrendering to a total medium, the film steers clear from metaphors in an attempt to dislocate the lack of critical distance by means of exploring catastrophe and disaster as natural phenomena. Is the decay of this rotting body unavoidable? Another Gnostic turn here speaks of a subterraneous force and begets the question of whether the medium itself—a social reality—is not naturally endangered as to permit reading the political and bio-political history with a different lens.

The orgy of Beirut appears in Cherri’s work de-mystified and devoid of its capacity of dying a normal death. The metaphysical horizon between life and death is shattered and replaced by an abyss, by an interstice, in which the politics of the body can be reversed into something rather primal and hence free from the constraints of history. Dying is here not enough, cries an embattled Beirut; living is not enough, responds an emboldened performer, speaking to his own territory of resistance with the assurance of uncertainty. What if the capacity of understanding spaces as living places can be lost as a consequence of an imposed image-repertoire? The terse qualities of Ali Cherri’s performances, sometimes extravagant and sometimes mysterious, don’t provide any answers. A perspective on suffering inundates the work not as a circumstance but as a condition.

A winged man is seen on flight on video at the end of “Give Me A Body Then.” Perhaps the most allegorical aspect of the work—usually free from references not immediately available—confronts us with a basic paradox of Modernity: disappointment about itself is part of its basic survival mechanism. Is the flight into freedom or into madness? Agnes Heller commences her discussion on Freud’s metaphysical transgression with the following idea: “No one will know absolutely, least of all ourselves. We will not have a world in the way in which we once did. We will keep our distance, and also suffer from the distance. The bodies, after having touched one another, will part."⁸ A crucial imbalance remains. The body as a medium will never be fully ours, but the totality of the experience will then prevent us from making ourselves at home in the world. What if my body were mine?

[Ali Cherri, The Disquiet, film, 2013]

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1. Agnes Heller, A Theory of Modernity, Blackwell, 1996, pp. 197

2. Agnes Heller, The Crisis of Metaphysics, Embodiment and Disembodiment in Aesthetics and Modernity, Lexington, 2010, pp. 127

3. Ibid

4. Agnes Heller, Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of Artworks in Aesthetics and Modernity, Lexington, 2010, pp. 58-59

5. Susan Sontag, Illness As Metaphor, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978, pp. 64-65  

6. John Tambornino, Locating the Body: Corporeality and Politics in Hannah Arendt in The Corporeal Turn: Passion, Necessity, Politics, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, pp. 15-34

7. Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking in Poetry Language Thought, Harper Perennial, 2001, pp. 152

8. Agnes Heller, Theory of Modernity, Ibid., pp. 195-196

"Give Me A Body Then" was presented in August 2013 at Yapi Kredi Cultural Center, Istanbul, in the context of the project "Transition," curated by Basak Senova and Fatma Bucak. "Triptych - Studies from a human body" was shown in October 2012 in the group show "A Territory of Resistance" at The Running Horse, Beirut. "Some Body To Love" was shown in October 2013 at Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Beirut. "The Disquiet" was premiered at Toronto International Film Festival in September 2013. Ali Cherri's upcoming show, "On things that move," at Galerie Imane Fares, Paris, opens on January 16th. Photography for "Give Me A Body Then" courtesy of Can Kungor. Photography of "Some Body To Love", courtesy of Sandra Issa. 

The Return of the Real

First published on THE MANTLE

For Rana Jabbour & Gregory Buchakjian

[Hale Tenger, Beirut, video, 2005-2007]

There was nothing particularly unsettling in the image. The windows of the pink-hued building are wide open, and with singular precision an almost imperceptible wind blew the open curtains of the bedrooms in multiple directions. Here one discovers at once the poetics of an image: Poetry as a mode of production, as ποιησις. Removed from the rationalist value associated with the poetic as anaesthetic category, what we are dealing with here is poiesis, the activity through which the world is transformed and continued. It is not technical production or creative genius but the reconciliation between thinking matters and a fundamental horizon of reality. The poetic becomes a site of disclosure¹. In production, the artist is not only shaping a definite material so that it resembles an idea but is also releasing it from its relationship to the producer until it discloses its autonomy as a world of fragmented self-reference².

The image in Hale Tenger’s video work “Beirut” (2005-2007) does not constitute an aesthetic experience as much as it construes the possibility of latency; something that can unexpectedly awake and haunt the viewer not as an immersion. It is an extension of the world as the site of significance and significant³. As the image moves – the sequence is not temporal but semantic – the poetic disclosure begins through staging a site of memory: Tenger filmed the windows of the once glamorous St. Georges Hotel in downtown Beirut, as it laid in wait for repairs still half-damaged from the war. The windows are wide open and a soft breeze blows into the curtains, creating almost synchronized wave-like motions. This idyllic scenario of glowing light does not attempt to tamper with the violent history of the site but contents with the difficulty of making violence a checkpoint for memory.

At the heart of staging a site of memory – and the procedure is always theatrical, a stage in which the performers are turning their back on the public – there is the acute realization, as Pierre Nora noted, that sites of memory exists, because there are no longer real environments of memory⁴. St. Georges was one of the main locations in the infamous Battle of the Hotels, a two-year-long chapter in the Lebanese Civil War, between 1975 and 1977, which was the first large-scale confrontation between the Christian militias and the Lebanese National Movement (Muslim-Leftist) and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. These otherwise luxurious sites in downtown Beirut proved strategic points of defense and territoriality in a city already divided but that ultimately resulted in Christians being pushed out of the area that until then has operated with relative normalcy.

The aftermath of the battle is well known: A decades-long confrontation that resulted in over one hundred thousand dead and millions of refugees. It was however a turning point after which total war was declared and after a small ceasefire called upon by Prime Minister Karami during which staff of the hotels and tourists were evacuated, the fighting continued incessantly for years to come. The hotel district, located in Minet-el-Hosn remained dilapidated until the end of the war and some of the iconic buildings, such as the Holiday Inn and the Burj El-Murr, remained there unfinished, as an open scar in a wounded city. Hale Tenger’s daytime image of Beirut however, is not particularly punctuated by the catastrophic events and the latency is derived not from the narrative but from the ultimate consciousness of a break, a semantic lapse that reveals spaces as question marks.     

[Wonder Beirut #17, St. Georges Hotel, Joanna Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige]

In “Wonder Beirut” (1997-2006), an extended project by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Tenger’s St. Georges appears in the form of a postcard. Part of that memorabilia that helped consolidate the image of an idyllic Lebanon throughout the 1960s, in their project, a fictional photographer, Abdallah Farah, was commissioned by the Lebanese state to take photographic register of the city’s landmarks to be subsequently edited as postcards. After the war began, Farah set to systematically burn the negatives in accordance to the damage caused to the buildings by shelling. The result is the fictionalization of political memory into images that are still in circulation as a living memory of an image. But an image, Hadjithomas and Joreige know, is not an environment of memory. They raise the question of neither production nor destruction, but rather how to inflict an image with dissolution?

Dissolving an image is here not a chemical process but an enlarged apparatus of consciousness that prevents things from appearing as they are. This procedure is not only visual but also historical; not merely a question of representation but also of sense-direction. Hale Tenger’s video work does not stop at questioning the possibility of latency but instead, stands at the threshold of the abyss: Tenger traveled to Beirut in 2005, shortly after the assassination of Rafic Hariri, upholding a thesis that one bomb cannot follow too shortly after another – thesis disproven by the Lebanese between December 2013 and January 2014 – and found herself unknowingly filming the curious windows of the hotel, next to which Hariri and his convoy were blown to smithereens in the middle of the day. A syntactic transition occurs as the oneiric image is sharply juxtaposed with the corresponding evening scene.

An eerie nocturnal vision unfolds with a lighthouse-like glow that dissolves the composition from its solidity into a floating monument to presence – the memorial to the dead that are still dying, and the adamant refusal of the mimesis between life and art. Tenger’s aesthetics here doesn’t aim at a conflation between historical space and memory in terms of reconciliation but rather aspires to preemptively disestablish the possibility of redemption. As the curtains draw at the end, the extended space shrinks into a thinly veiled darkness, opening the aural channels to audio recordings of an Israeli invasion with sirens and gunshots, after which everything recedes into silence. But this silence is not an absence of sound, a pristine quiet. It is a ghostly immateriality that reveals the aura of the work not as a glowing light or a transparence, but as a shadow.

In the early hours of December 27th, 2013, another bomb set off in the early hours of the morning in Starco, only walking distance from the Battle of the Hotels and from the site of Hariri’s assassination. The victim this time was a senior Lebanese diplomat and politician, Mohammed Chatah, an ally of the late Hariri, foreign policy advisor of Saad Hariri and outspoken critic of the Syrian regime. The explosion, heard and seen throughout the area, cut short Chatah’s life and that of seven other people, injuring over seventy. A sixteen years old high school student,Mohammed Shaar, was also killed with the blast after sustaining fatal injuries to the head. Hale Tenger’s work was here prophetic not because it had an eye into future events but because it totalized the expanse of the present into a circular presence that invades the fragile existence of ghosts that punctuate the silences.

[Memorial for Mohammed Shaar]

The work, nevertheless, is not documentary. The filmmaker Maya Deren notes that documentary does an enormous injustice to film and video in practicing surrealism; using an apparently scientific procedure in order to blur the line between art and life, and undermining infinitely the creative capacities of the camera in resorting to the linearity of the literary format in order to create an expression which by nature, should be vertical. It is not the smooth transition between frames what creates a “filmic” experience but the impossibility to think in terms of optics alone as a site of illusion and emotion. Tenger’s “Beirut” is a composite map of a war-city, covering the living monuments in asphalt and discovering that these monuments were but lived time, organically growing into limbs of a diseased body politic that registers history only as the field of an ideological conflict.    

This apparently ingenuous title, “The Return of the Real”, is the title of a book byHal Foster (1996) in which through a discussion of Warhol via Lacan, the author posits that the turn in contemporary art towards the real, is by no means a resistance to representation as illusion or mimesis, as the production of illusion bears a dialectical relation to the real insofar as the real cannot be represented or defined as a negative of the symbolic⁵. The superrealism of contemporary art that is inherited from a profound disappointment with and suspicion of the symbolic order as a vehicle of capitalism, is not a turn to objects as the narrative vessels of social and political reality, but a consequence of  a traumatic illusionism in which the framework of reference to understand the inner grammar of the symbol has been lost.

In this new world of “thingness” in which art and theory fuse, the subject is evacuated and with it authorship. The poiesis is replaced by a political praxis in which immediacy becomes the currency of representation and therefore tearing off objects from their context in order to present them as whole realities is a means of exchange of ideas between artists. Lebanese artists have practiced this marketing of pure reality since the end of the Civil War, becoming ambassadors and ideological theorists of a country without time or political reality, endlessly suspended in a constant state of uncertainty without the ethical impetus of poetizing the world: Transforming torn off elements into a coherent syntax of being in the world that reconsiders the cycles of self-representation of those same elements. Without a stable concept of the beautiful or a realm of art, these objects become not only simultaneous with but representative of the same reality they critically elude.

In the work of Hale Tenger, the vast majority of which deals with moments and symbols in the convoluted history of the Turkish republic, torn off objects appear prominently in different syntactic arrangements that do not aim to present or perform reality; they carry always the essential quality of “lost and found”, ambiguously recreating history in different symbolic orders that speak of a poetry without beauty. It is indeed a poetics of horror, but without turning the symbolic order into a specific posturing. Aesthetics here is not the rationalist construct of value-orientation that in the modern era emerged to replace the absent God, therefore there is no category-value assigned in it for reality and super-reality as a superior morphology of representation. Aesthetics in Tenger’s work is a grammar of a common world that resists being objectified into political opinions of the public domain.

As Hannah Arendt remarked, doxa – an opinion – is a formulation of speech that encompasses not only opinions but also splendor and fame in its Greek context, therefore it is our way to appear in the world that gains validity not because of its objective truth but because it is shared in a common world with others. Henceforth, in order to look at things as they really are, it is necessary to turn around, or change one’s position, because every doxa is conditioned by one’s position in the world⁶. Hale Tenger’s Beirut, accordingly, is a multitude of positions, which do not see haunting and specters as the end of the chain reaction, but develops an apparatus of soft power working against haunting without the need for representing historical conditions or re-stage them⁷. In that sense, she has yet not regarded the facts that created the historical conditions against which she works, as eternal and incontestable.

[Hale Tenger, Beirut, video, 2005-2007]

And the memorial at the St. Georges still remains open, with a certain magic of floating simplicity, wavering between lamentation and panoptic. A conversation with the artist in Istanbul in the spring of 2013, made me soon realize the essence of her need to evoke open-ended monuments as checkpoints rather than stultifications of memory: “When I heard the news of Hrant Dink’s assassination, I cried and I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t know him personally, but after living through all those decades of terror and political assassinations I realized not only that there was no future for me, but also for my daughter.” For the Lebanese, Hale Tenger’s Beirut is today, six years later, a similar epiphany. The dormant ghosts awaken and the sense of latency that punctuates so much Lebanese art, becomes a living reality. It is not the reality of war even, but of a people that struggle to live together.

In the contemporary age, man can ignite the apocalypse at any time⁸, saysGregory Buchakjian, the art historian from Beirut, commenting on the art of the Arab world since 9-11. When will the lights go off at the sound of a gunshot? Or, of a bomb, as in the case of the teenager Mohammed Shaar?  On a pristine day of the summer, the winds will still blow gently the curtains at the St. Georges, and if new high risings haven’t swallowed by then the view of the entire city, it will still be visible from a far. For the unsuspecting eye, it will simply be another building, another day, another day to live, in this ownerless land. But for Hale Tenger, the living monument remains open. When will you start working against haunting, Beirut? 

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1. Alexander Ferrari Di Pippo, The Concept of Poiesis in Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics in Thinking Fundamentals, IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vol. 9: Vienna 2000, pp. 3

2. Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy: Indiana University Press, 1998, pp. 147-154

3. Alexander Ferrari Di Pippo, Ibid.

4. Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History in Representations, 26, Spring 1989, University of California, pp. 7

5. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, MIT Press, 1996, pp. 141

6. Hannah Arendt, Socrates (Philosophy and Politics) in The Promise of Politics, Schocken, 2005, pp. 14-29

7. Nermin Saybasili, On Haunting and the Voice in the Work of Hale Tenger, Galeri Nev, 2009, pp. 21

8. Gregory Buchakjian, War and Other Impossible Possibilities, Alarm Editions, pp. 115 

At the Ocean IV

It took me several months to realize those had been the happiest days of my life. So happy they were that I was embarrassed to admit it, and often when inexplicably I had to cry, it wasn't out of grief or sorrow, or something immediately available. There was more to it. It was the uncontrollable joy of the present tense, of something that though dislocated and uproarious, was happening in that very moment, in a region beyond your control. The purest moment of uncontrollable joy, when you realize that everything that mattered in the world was happening right there, in front of you; a gratuitous gift. And in those small hours, when you rose above your skin, in rapid flight, over the lights, becoming a light yourself, between the eyelid and the corner of the mouth, you knew it was true.

It all had started so differently, you thought. Risking everything, absolutely everything, giving yourself as a gift to another person. The night before when your suitcases were already packed, and you were just about to enter the twilight of the unknown, everything was clear, and you knew the dream was over. Everything was met with silence in the other end, and a series of fabricated sentences and silences gave it away; you had come to a terminal end in which everything had been burnt. There were so many images, often theatrical, slipping from your mind in a second. It was in that hotel room when finally everything drowned in silence, and you didn't know where to go. You no longer knew what you were. The skies were pink in that early morning, your eyes of a beautiful pale green, somehow deserted, empty of any objective content.

And you had known it all along; for no warnings were needed. There had to be a free fall, a moment of absolute knowledge, a journey so long that it couldn't be traversed alone. And you were buried anyway, under thick layers of earth and memory, completely drowned, obscured in the middle of all that great light. It was something of a miracle that you had gone this far, but it wasn't this distance what truly counted. There was another measurement, a different edge of the slope, from which you permitted yourself to fall with all your heavy suitcases, with your presents, with your letters, with all your words. It was as if death no longer amounted to anything but a simple change of matter, the result of which was completely irrelevant. You walked through the streets of that city, unprotected, so scared, but knowing you simply couldn't die.

And the reasons you never understood. As you dragged yourself through the streets of Manama, you knew yourself to have once lived, and that it was nothing but courage what had led you there. An operation a lot simpler than love, a lot simpler than elaborate thoughts. You had to put into practice what once, several years ago, had been only an idea, a simple idea: The fact that there's no certainty. And you always have to jump, to shed your skin entirely in order to remain alive, in order to compose a story not so much about yourself as it was a stage where the world began to make sense again. Not for you, but as a whole. The wish to remain, albeit scattered, but yet to locate yourself inside something. In other words, to touch the ground, no matter at which expense. Even if the expense was your own image.

How to dissolve an image? The question of Trevor Paglen, I learnt so long later, that afternoon at the little food stand in Kurtulus. How to surround yourself (rather than vest yourself) in meaning in a moment when images themselves are in transit, navigating cycles of endless reproduction. If one experience (of viewing something for example) is universally translatable and reproducible, how do we legitimize the rawest experience of life as more than a repetition or logical fallacy? The mind, says Michele, is a logical impossibility, and yet mathematically conceivable. How to go from one place to another? How to abandon yourself and others? The casual tyranny of hope, the hope on an anatomy which is so inhuman and merciless; it is pure biological cycle, without contemplation or durable representation.

In the raving madness of weeks and months, things became less and less comprehensible, up to a point in which they faded from view and became insulated from the actual grammar of experience and perception. How can I relate my personal experiences to the violent randomness of the world? How to find peace? What is peace at all? There were so many dark days, in that tiny apartment, filled with dampness and moist, and Louis was the only one who truly knew. There was Amin too, the Iranian soldier, who probably taught us more about forgiveness than we ever expected to know. And so many times I saw in those dreams, that person who was irate, so irate that ponds of blaze set themselves alight, on his skin already burnt. And then he would vanish, for good... And ironically, everything else would remain. Everybody else.

In the beginning I dreamed that I would return, and that just accidentally in the street, I would find him, and that everything, absolutely everything would be alright. The story would continue unmolested and that brief impasse, would be quickly forgotten as an accidental adventure on the path of happiness. But the break was too deep, like the ripping of limbs, severing of fingers and then burnt, the ashes burnt a second time and smashed with hammers, in order to ensure that nothing would ever stand afoot, able to recognize itself. I always wondered if he kept that book of Kafka, which was so precious to me. Perhaps the most precious of all. What if it was left behind in the closet of an apartment in New York? What if it simply found its way to the nearest bin? But curiosity overrides the pain. There's always more to give, much more. Infinitely more.

And there it was. That day. Sparkling white. Dancing among stars, the waters nearby, the hopes so elegant always, the things that never would end. So many other names, faces from old, a bursting crescendo, and the fires of truth. Sweet afternoons along the Golden Horn, as if we had never been alone, as if all of this never happened. There was no need for more. Those moments that contained and consumed everything. And when just I thought that there was enough time, all the time in the world, everything abruptly ends. But it wasn't final. There were no good-byes, no one cried at an airport (except myself), everything was yet due and expected. I'm yet to learn how to write. I'm yet to learn how to use language again. How to bring all this to life again.

We became other things, in other places, that made us from scratch, when we were dead, when we couldn't breathe, when everything was so cold. And that's why we can't figure out anything upon return... Our belongings are scattered, in the lives of others, and there's no clear or straight path to retrieve them. I owe so many letters, so many words... But how I wish I could pay them back... How I wish I knew that lies deep inside me, what once was overflowing with joy and now simply feels numb and unable to recognize these realities other than piecemeal. In the end of the day, I was once dead, thinking there would never be more, and yet there were so many more dreams in store. So humongous that even today they remain incalculable. Those dreams that leave you breathless each time you remember they were not just dreams.

I try to stay awake, somewhat against my will, to carefully observe, to rewind my own life, as something worth the effort, plagued by endless luck, unambiguously clear, serenely bright, like that day I spent alone at the Black Sea. I've departed from this land since so long, but only now I become acutely aware of my condition, of my being elsewhere, and my rapid sense of lost which is replaced by an ever so new discovery of new lands, of new ports, new islands, where I can break ranks. We've been far away, and returned, we're still far away. It all seems deserted, for a few hours, until we walk into the night... Where we can imagine the water, the ferry from Europe to Asia, the endless laughter. Even as the city was ravished by fire, it was still there, the endless laughter, glowing and blinking from one island to the next.

Relocating Music in Bahrain

First published on THE CULTURE TRIP

The Relocators and Hani Malik: Relocating Music in Bahrain

Bahrain is not renowned for its contemporary music scene either within the Middle East or beyond the region, but that is slowly changing with the emergence of a new generation of musical talents, many of whom have been promoted by local enterprise MuseLand Records. Arie Amaya-Akkermans looks at two up and coming Bahraini acts: The Relocators and Hani Malik.

The Relocators

Little is known about the music scene from Bahrain, although some specialist and ethnographers might have heard occasionally about ‘Sawt’, a popular bluesy genre influenced by African, Indian and Persian music and native to Bahrain and Kuwait since the early 20th century, or the more traditional Khaleeji and Fidjeri styles. Contemporary sounds on the other hand, have received scant attention and perhaps do not have the reception that poetry and abstract painting have had in the kingdom. Nevertheless, contemporary music from Bahrain debuted in the 1980s with the progressive rock band Ossiris and the 2000s have brought about a new generation of musicians oscillating between metal, hard rock and alternative/progressive rock, similar to the Lebanese underground of the mid-to-late 90s.

The cultural context of Bahrain, however, together with the accessibility of technology and new media, and the sometimes cosmopolitan, sometimes constricted space of the Arabian Gulf, paved the way for very different foundations and results. The Elham Collective, founded in 2009 to give a boost to the country’s art scene, greatly contributed to the growth of the modest music scene and returned in 2013 with a new project: MuseLand Records, a Bahrain-based label committed to promote young talents from the country; in a way complementing a host of institutions that have emerged in Bahrain in the last fifteen years, including two international art galleries, a number of smaller local galleries, and an annual festival run by the Ministry of Culture, among others.

The Relocators

MuseLand records launched this year with the 3rd volume of a compilation of the same name, featuring some of the emerging talents from Bahrain and the region in a variety of sounds ranging from pop to alternative rock to folk, Indie and experimental. Favorites from the selection were the band The Relocators and solo singer composer Hani Malik, who have launched careers of their own, with debut albums. Belonging to a new generation of English-speaking Bahrainis, largely exposed to the ‘contemporary’ and performing for a different audience, less traditional and more cosmopolitan, The Relocators and Hani Malik profile themselves as trend-setters in the nascent music scene of a young country, a transit point of different cultures and nationalities, at the crossroads of the Middle East and South Asia.

The Relocators’ self-titled EP debuts with five songs somewhere between raw and alternative, with noticeable influences from Blues and progressive rock. Performing in verse-chorus forms within a loose acoustic ensemble, their spontaneous semi-acoustic sounds border on the grunge music of the 1990s but in elaborate dynamic contrasts where guitar and drums are prominent. Embedded in harmonious lyrics out of which short-timed extended lengths are born, the songs allow ample room for improvisation. Complex structures are built almost intuitively out of simple parts and without the symphonic and often orchestral sound of rock; their tracks also retain the casual ability of modern pop to engage through repetition of samples but without the electronic aura.

Hani Malik

The band formed by Faisal Amin Sheikh — one of the brains behind MuseLand Records — as a vocalist and guitarist, Ali Al Qaseer on the drums and Romeriko Canvas on the bass, was born out of different former and on-going projects and influenced by sounds such as Jimi Hendrix and Incubus. While their sound is definitely raw, it is the antithesis of minimal: the editing and processing of their creative process leaves many rough edges untouched and does not fiddle with the density of Indie ensembles. Less is more, you would say. Their good-natured music is not melancholy but the range of expression is somewhat kept in check and it does not overflow into sentimentality. Clean as it might be, their music does not depart from compositional abstraction and simply grows naturally.

The listener can hear in the background a lot of plain experimentation with the physicality of the instruments rather than a composition scheme, but the sounds are later incorporated into time signatures that do not change abruptly but rather overlap in layers. The concept is very simple and the execution spontaneous and as the vocalist and guitarist insists, music is the most direct translation of the imagination. The uncollectable and intangible, an instant of expression or emotion, perhaps the only suitable metaphor would be a photograph overexposed or out of focus, from the perfect moment. The essential qualities still remain available, and in their case, barely tampered with. Pure experience.

Hani Malik’s album, No Remorse, released in 2012, in an extended play of 10 tracks, presents a similar texture but with a thicker ensemble, perhaps less harmonious but just as rough. His album, more than a full-fledged instrumental experiment, is the journey of self-discovery of a young man, oscillating between simple parts, near-symphonic themes and very personal lyrics. The nature of the sound is difficult to classify, for while the general aura certainly belongs to modern pop songs, the execution is that of progressive rock and the percussion is overarching. His songs seem born out of the lyrics, therefore a lyrical environment finds a free-floating time signature that is neither staged nor calculated. The influence from the density of post-rock is very pronounced here, although not yet audible.

Hani Malik

Certain electronic elements of symphonic post-rock are always present in the sequence but shying away from minimalism. Sometimes in chorus-verse and sometimes resembling the thirty-two-bar form of ballads, but completely unrestrained and uncontrolled, No Remorseis audibly a contemporary rock album with the grammar of pop ballads. Hani Malik’s music is personal and sentimental, but again, like The Relocators, does not indulge in melancholy, as the articulation of the sound moves too rapidly to give space to slow depth. Sometimes dense, sometimes loose, sometimes synthetic, his style is still consolidating and the unique bidirectional voice sometimes recedes into a whispered lullaby, sometimes takes center age. Overall experimental and raw, but never un-emotive or expressionless.

These young musicians, born out of almost accidental circumstances, continue to shape in different ways the sonic panorama of Bahrain. A country both young and old, with an irregular landscape, shaped by the paradox of impermanence and tradition. In the audible contemporary, it would be difficult to tell where their sounds originate, and what spaces are they trying to shape, but perhaps a more careful inspection reveals a gramophone of personal stories, embedded in the circumstances of an undefinable place. The music scene in Bahrain is still a far cry from that in the Levant and not even comparable to Bahrain’s achievement in the visual arts, but it will always take only a small number of trend-setters to unleash creative potential and create a public.

The Relocators will launch their self-titled EP at Albareh Art Gallery, on September 5th.

By Arie Amaya-Akkermans

Interview with Blogger turned Gallerist Taymour Grahne

First published on THE CULTURE TRIP

Bringing Middle Eastern Art to NYC: An Interview with Blogger turned Gallerist Taymour Grahne

Middle Eastern Art is still under represented in the international art world and understanding of the history and depth of art in the region is still poor, particular in America. As Arie Amaya-Akkermans discovers, blogger turned gallerist Taymour Grahne has spent much of his career seeking to change this under representation, revealing the breadth and scope of Middle Eastern art firstly through his blog and now through his New York gallery.

Nicky Nodjoumi, 'Inspector's Scrutiny', 2012, Oil on Canvas, Diptych, 85 x 130 in | © Taymour Grahne Gallery

Being a researcher – and now also a curator – in contemporary art from the Middle East has always been something of a daunting task, while at the same time a very particular adventure. In the absence of adequate sources, academic literature and a tradition of criticism and pushing boundaries, every researcher is mostly on his own, facing art with the help of critical tools acquired from other disciplines; art history, cultural studies, philosophy, etc. Other issues must be dealt with as well: attempting to write an art history in a time when art history itself is being challenged and one looks more at narratives than at histories. Then there’s also the struggle of not being entirely clouded by a critical apparatus born in and for the West, and the idea that there was no art in the Middle East ‘before Dubai’, as if the nearly one hundred and fifty years of Egyptian and Lebanese painting did not exist.

Photograph of Taymour Grahne/© Taymour Grahne Gallery

In the Arab world, aesthetic commentary remained largely confined to Islamic motifs and it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that an academic source distinguished between Islamic and Arab art, in the work of Texas-based scholar Nada Shabout. A few years ago, doing the rounds of the little material available in order to begin writing about regional artists, I came across the resourceful blog Art of the Middle East that was one of the only comprehensive resources at the time; though new platforms have been added, together with institutions and galleries, this now well-known blog was certainly a pioneer. In 2012 I became acquainted with the man behind this adventure, Taymour Grahne, a young art collector from Beirut (and other places) who shared the passion for regional art, and despite his age, a seasoned collector of some important names in contemporary art from the region.

Among his valuable collection, there are pieces of artists I highly regard, such as Camille Zakharia, Oussama Baalbaki, Hussein Madi and Reza Derakshani, among many others. Earlier in 2013 I learnt that Taymour had plans to open a gallery in the trendy Tribeca district of New York and thus, his cycle comes to completion: starting as a blogger and collector, then pursuing an education in art business and finally opening a gallery to showcase important artists from the region in one of the world capitals of art, where Middle Eastern art hasn’t had the exposure that it has in say, London or Paris. Indeed, a daring adventure in uncertain times for the Middle East and elsewhere. But he is well prepared for this adventure after a degree at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, hiring Helena Anrather, formerly of Chelsea-districtLehmann Maupin Gallery, an exciting artists program and a prime location in New York.

The Culture Trip spoke recently with Taymour about collecting art in the Middle East, the challenges of regional artists and the opening of his gallery.

The Culture Trip: How did you begin collecting contemporary art from the Middle East and how did you educate yourself as a collector in a region where art discourse is not particularly developed?

Camille Zakharia, 'Al Dair', 2010, Inkjet Print, 20 x 20 in | © Taymour Grahne Gallery

Taymour Grahne: I have always been passionate about the arts, so it developed quite naturally. I founded the blog [artofthemideast.com] four years ago as a way to document and share my reflections on artists and art events from across the Middle East. The gallery represents an opportunity to share the work of artists I respect with a wider audience – and to develop a strong program of events and exhibitions to showcase their work. I studied International Relations at Boston University, with a focus on the Middle East, including art history courses. After graduating, I decided to take my art education one notch higher and pursued and received a Masters in Art Business from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. Because art discourse is quite rare in the Middle East, I take it upon myself to research as much as I can, and have amassed a wide-ranging collection of art publications and catalogues from the region. I also read a lot, from publications that cover art from the Middle East — including Canvas, Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia, Bidoun, Nafas, Contemporary Practices, and Ibraaz — as well as international outlets such as Art Info, ArtForum, Frieze, etc. I also attend art fairs, biennials, galleries and museum shows as frequently as possible, which helps stay on top of new trends in contemporary art and the art market. I am driven by the strength of work coming from new art hubs around the world, especially from across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. Artists are movements that have been overlooked are receiving long overdue international attention.

What do you think are the biggest challenges for artists in the Middle East from the perspective of artistic production? Censorship? Thematic variety? New formats?

Nicky Nodjoumi, 'Chasing the Butterfly', 2012, Oil on Canvas, 96 x 60 in | © Taymour Grahne Gallery

While international attention on Middle Eastern artists has definitely increased, they need to exhibit more widely in the West — especially in the USA. This helps artists build a wider following for their work and also helps to expand the understanding of the diversity of art from the region. I also strongly feel that Middle Eastern artists should be presented without a ‘from the region’ label; we want the artists to be seen for the value of the work. This is why the gallery has an international focus.

The ‘Oriental’ in art is a topic tirelessly and yet unsuccessfully explored in art theory. Do you think that it is still relevant to speak of the Oriental in contemporary art?

Traditionally in both the West and the Middle East, the region has been viewed within the framework of the ‘Oriental’ — and there are some artists who play on this theme — however I want to show another side to work from the region.

How did the idea of opening a gallery come about? Do you think there’s a growing interest for art from the Middle East as a part of international art or it is still an exotic curiosity?

The gallery developed out of my work on the blog. It represents an opportunity to share the work of artists I respect with their wider audience — and to develop a strong program of events and exhibitions to showcase their work. More and more Middle Eastern artists are exhibiting internationally, with institutions such as the MET, Tate, LACMA, the Louvre, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, focusing on the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) region. Unfortunately when the West views the Middle East, there is sometimes an emphasis on such tropes as the veil, the role of women, calligraphy, exotic or orientalist connotations of the region. Also, explicit political and social commentary — however great the awareness about the region that this brings, but I think this is starting to change. My job is to firmly place Middle Eastern art in terms of international art, without the labels.

Tell us a bit about the artists you selected for your program and why you think they’re important figures in presenting Middle Eastern art to a New York audience?

Camille Zakharia, Coastal Promenade, Hut 13 Busaiteen | © Taymour Grahne Gallery

I have selected an international roster of artists, with a core offering that reflects my experience in the Middle East and it brings a much needed platform for artists from the region to the US, however we do so in an international context, with a range of artists from Ireland to Indonesia. In fact, many of the artists we work with who have roots in the Middle East have lived outside the region. For example, Nicky Nodjoumi is as American as he is Iranian, having lived in Brooklyn for decades. Similarly Hassan Hajjaj has been based in London for many years now. Although they have roots in the Middle East, they are international artists. I am committed, as a gallery, to be a global space, which is driven first by artists I believe in rather than being limited to any particular locality or national perspective. I am proud that our program includes four artists who represented their countries in Venice this year — Tarek Al Ghoussein (Kuwait), Mohammed Kazem (United Arab Emirates), Camille Zakharia (Bahrain), and Albert Yonathan Setyawan (Indonesia). We want to cultivate an international following, but our primary audience is New York. It is an exciting prospect to introduce New York to contemporary artists from other parts of the world and we have already worked closely with several institutions to place works showcased at the gallery, in museums.

Nicky Nodjoumi, 'Intriguing Gesture', 2013 | © Taymour Grahne Gallery

As a collector you should know how traditional the practice of collecting can be when it comes to Middle Eastern art. What are the expectations for new media works in this context?

Middle Eastern collectors are at present firmly drawn to painting and photography. There is a very limited audience interested in collecting video and installation works; however this is slowly beginning to change. This is why institutions in the region are so critical, as they can really expand the general public and collectors’ overall interaction with and experience of new media. It is great to see these institutions develop, as they support artists’ long-term careers, build international awareness, and cultivate local art-conscious publics.

Taymour Grahne Gallery opens its doors to the public on September 7th with the inaugural exhibition Chasing the Butterfly and Other Recent Paintings, by Iranian-American artist Nicky Nodjoumi, which has received attention from high profile magazines in the art world and will be the talk of town as the art world is returning from the long summer break and a busy calendar of exhibitions awaits lovers of Middle Eastern art in Dubai, Istanbul, London and Paris. Eyes are also set now in New York as Taymour Grahne’s project takes off with well-established artists who are well known not only to galleries, but to biennials, art fairs and professional publications. It will also be interesting to see what this young gallery; with an edge both Middle Eastern and contemporary, will be bringing to upcoming art fairs. Perhaps a reshuffle on the reception of Middle Eastern art in America? Time will tell.

By Arie Amaya-Akkermans