Adel Abdessemed -Parasol unit

That Adel Abdessemed was not courted by British Institutions before now is no reflection of either his work, which is exceptional, or his position in the art world, as an internationally recognised artist. Thanks go the Parasol Unit for being the first UK institution to feature his work in a solo exhibition running from the 22nd of September to the 21st of November. Entitled Silent Warriors, the exhibition is indicative of the diversity of his practice, which unfurls through photography, sculpture, video, installation and drawing. As one enters the large space of the Parasol Unit one is confronted at once with the vast figure of flying skeleton Habibi, 2003 - prostrate on the threshold, in transit between life and death as it hangs from the gallery’s ceiling, an aeroplane propeller tickling its toes - and the haunting metallic sound of Music Box, 2009 - a music box made of a metal cylinder punctured with metal screws which plays as it revolves an excerpt from Wagner’s Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). That Abdessemed’s practice is one of action rather than scripted performance is made clear with the two video pieces Enter the Circle, 2009 in which the artist draws a vast circle whilst hanging upside down from a hovering helicopter, and ALSO SPRACH ALLAH, 2008 in which the artist inscribes the words Also Sprach Allah to a carpet like cloth suspended to a ceiling, reaching the ceiling by the force of a circle of men throwing him in the air repeatedly with a sheet of cloth. Whilst Enter the Circle is silent and continuous, ALSO SPRACH ALLAH is a staccato of marks, cries and grunts as the men submit to the effort of the task. However, both drawn outcomes exhibited hint at the physicality of the mark making exercise. Unfortunately therefore, the exhibition is dominated by Habibi and Silent Warrior especially, which covers three walls of the upstairs gallery. Perhaps is it because of the space allocated to this repetitive instillation – which overshadows therefore the rather more puzzling Moscow, (five sisters) 2010, an instillation of pairs of ice skates made from hand blown glass - that the show as a whole fails to communicate the ebullience, the furious energy that defines Abdessemed’s best work.

Singing Cymbales in the Jardin des Tuileries

For the duration of the Fiac art fair, sculptural work by renowned international artists was shown in the Tuileries gardens. Under a Parisian sky heavy with clouds, a varied crowd strolled down the alleys of the Jardin des Tuileries on the Sunday afternoon I visited. In the furthest westward basin was installed a piece by Kader Attia entitled Cymbales. Around the pond tourists and Parisians alike sat on the green metal chairs which permanently furniture the gardens. A sense of leisurely quiet and familial innocence pervaded.
As its name entails, the installation comprised cymbals, that on thin bamboo rods, floated above the large expanse of water. The copper coloured cymbals appeared at once foreign and yet imbibed with the natural world. They had the appearance of morphed water lilies. With Cymbales, Attia wanted to indeed represent the natural transcending the cultural. He intended the cymbals to resonate with the sound of the wind, or raindrops. He goes further in stating: “Ce qui m'intéresse ici, c'est d'interroger et de transcender la problématique de la règle et de l'ordre, à travers une œuvre qui crée un lien avec les spectateurs par la voie de l'air et de l'esprit.» (What interests me here is to interrogate and to transcend the question of law and order through a piece that creates a link with its audience via the ways of air and thought.)
Paradoxically, the spirited Sunday audience took to throwing small pebbles across the water, hitting the resonating cymbals every so often depending on the skill of the thrower. A joyous cacophony of clanging sounds echoed around the basin, attracting ever more passers by. As I sat with a friend smoking a cigarette and enjoying the scene, a small park maintenance vehicle came weaving its way up the main park path and started to circle the large octagonal basin. Whenever someone threw a pebble unawares the driver gathered speed and aimed for the culprit. Fathers, kids, old ladies were scowled without discrimination. The scene took on a gleeful (on my part) comic twist when it became clear that most were not conscious of the vehicle, and would therefore continue to throw pebbles. The park warden seemed to be destined to endlessly circle the pond as wave after wave of spirited spectators become participants replaced those sheepish ones that had been told off, and made the most of Kader Attia’s inspiring piece. Unbeknown to the artist perhaps, Attia’s piece indeed brought to light the question of law and order as the brief he set himself states, Cymbales also demonstrated on the one hand the playful nature of Parisians and tourists on a grey Sunday afternoon and on the other, the committed and retarded authoritarianism of the law and order’s acting hand.

Hobb, Zoulikha Bouabdellah at La Bank Galerie, Paris

I was nervous, upon entering the gallery showing Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s new work, that I would not like it - perhaps because I admire the artist herself as well as her previous work. In fact, Hobb, Bouabdellah’s second solo show at la Bank, demonstrated an aesthetic refinement and artistic maturity worthy of the complex themes the work purports to explore and represent.
In the upper level of the gallery hang enlarged Arabic letters rendered in glossy and stark black and red paint. Red unequivocally suggests passion. The black and coarse volcanic texture of the few large canvases on which bleed red letters, on the other hand, suggests tragedy and brutality. Plexiglass sheets depict an unusual, ambiguous couple, a blond bikini clad woman and a dark shadow-like man.
The slideshow showing in the lower level of the gallery brings to the fore the subtle and convoluted narratives of romance at play in the Arabic writing exhibited in the upper gallery that unfortunately remain unreadable to much of the public. Black and white images taken from the Kama Sutra are projected onto the wall of the gallery. Superimposed on the grainy soft toned images, Arabic letters espouse the lines of the interlaced bodies of two lovers. The lines of the letters and that of the bodies meet up approximately. The fusing of the two therefore seems accidental rather than calculated. Hobb, or love, is what they read.
That the Arabic letters form a language of love is only clear upon reading the translation. Once understood, Zoulikha’s work therefore works towards confounding the usual associations between the Arabic language and that of terrorism and religious extremism that together flood the web, television, airwaves and the printed news. Instead, Arabic is portrayed as a language of incredible poetic depth, like it becomes over and over under the hand of its many gifted writers, poets and lyricists. A poetic heritage that influences the daily life of many an Arabic speaker but that nonetheless, is often condoned by the regimes of Arabic speaking countries in association with carnal or human love - rather than in its pious and mystical form.

Zineb Sedira: Seafaring at the John Hansard Gallery

Within the darkened, low ceilinged gallery, MiddleSea appears that much more mesmerising. This single screen projection from 2008, later companion piece to Saphir which also features in the exhibition Zineb Sedira: Seascapes at the John Hansard Gallery, traces the enigmatic voyage of a ferry across the Mediterranean. In the eerily quiet setting of endless seascape, empty corridors and abandoned passenger lounges, ambulates a lone traveller, inscrutable, pythian, distant. The title MiddleSea and the North African appearance of the man are the only clues to situate the sequence in time and place. The camera focuses at times on his face in close up, on the distant horizon, or rests languidly on details of sea and ship. The attention given to editing and photography is evident. The pace is measured, images tantalising and poetic. The soundscape by Mikhail Karikis accentuates certain sounds or becomes suddenly silent as spumes of water froth along the side of the ship. The pride of position is given to MiddleSea but the exhibition also features three other works: Remnants of a Scattered Vessel (2009), Saphir (2006) and Beyond the Sea (2008). Zineb Sedira: Seafaring thus offers the opportunity to view these four connected works in the one space. The John Hansard is large enough to accommodate all the artworks allowing each to stand out, and thanks to a free-flowing and paired down approach to the curating of the show, without lessening the clarity of the connection between the one or the other.
The exhibition features a piece commissioned by the John Hansard gallery, an installation of photographic lightboxes entitled Remnants of a Scattered Vessel similar in subject matter and approach to that exhibited recently at the Rivington Space. Beyond the Sea, an earlier lightbox installation proves to be an interesting counterpart. It mirrors the propensity for photographic detail and specific iconography found in MiddleSea, whilst illustrating by comparison to what extent the other photographic installation is staged in an emulation of its subject matter. Indeed, whilst Beyond the Sea is conventionally hung and represents apparently disconnected images, Remnants of a Scattered Vessel fragments the image of a vessel itself in fragments. The installation is comprised of a crowded and unruly group of lightboxes spewing forth trails of cable. The installation features the wreck of a vessel that, aggressed by an implacable sun and cauterised by saline waters, is little more than twisted rusting metal. The ship graveyard pictured is near Nouadhibou, Mauritania’s economic hub and a site of passage for migrants. The hulls of the ships washed up on shore seem to echo the desperate eventuality of some journeys. Sharing themes of migration, of mobility and voyage, MiddleSea and Saphir display rather a sense of longing, of sythian waiting, however.
There is a stillness throughout all four pieces which seem to echo with the absence of any human presence, save for a man and a woman in Saphir, waiting for something unknown, paths crossing but never meeting. The passport control on the boat in MiddleSea is closed and barred, and the crowds that on any passage normally mill in front of the window-counters are not to be seen. A dream like state or space disconnected to any sense of time is created.

The Comedy of Change, Rambert Dance Company

At the premiere of The Comedy of Change two interests of mine converged, the Ballet Rambert and the work of Kader Attia, who worked on the production design. I was excited and had little idea of what to expect. Created to tie in with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, however, I was apprehensive that The Comedy of Change would turn out to be a pantomime of evolution. Instead, I witnessed a sleek production worthy of Rambert dance company’s tradition of mesmerising, poetic and inspired creations.

As the curtains rose in the Plymouth theatre the audience was faced with a sight of peaceful but disquieting beauty. Under diffuse lighting a small number of chrysalis like forms seemed to be swimming on a sea of liquid as viscous as petroleum. Their white translucent shapes reflected in the shiny black surface covering the stage. As the dancers unfurled their bodies from within the fabric cocoons they had been enclosed in to the rhythm of Julian Anderson’s striking yet convoluted music, they revealed stark costumes of black and white. Black behind, white in front. The dancers at turns thus concealed and revealed against the black backdrop.
Conceal/reveal is but one of the Darwinian theories used as inspiration for all elements of the production - the others being same/different and past/future. What The Comedy of Change was able to put across is that these opposites, which logic purports to make mutually exclusive, are in fact tightly correlated. The mating dances of birds proved to be another inspiration reads the programme notes, and the choreographer Mark Baldwin speaking during a post-performance talk, admitted to be so taken with certain species’ complex dances of seduction to have used them movement for movement. The Comedy of Change reflects Diaghilev’s triangular principle of creation, a triumvirate of music, choreography and art. However, whilst Diaghilev’s creations for the Ballet Russe demonstrated a harmonious dialogue between the three disciplines, the various elements of The Comedy of Change formed a disappointingly discordant whole.
Kader Attia’s ‘chrysalides’ were unceremoniously pushed to the back of the stage and soon disappeared behind a second black backdrop dropped soon in the performance. In the opening moments, however, organic and soft forms offered a striking contrast to the harsh shapes of the dancers moving across the stage, falling in and out of precise formations. A contrast that did not endure and the performance, I feel, was weaker for it. Later, two male dancers wrap a third in aluminium foil creating an empty fossil-like shape of the kneeling dancer, a recurrent image of Kader Attia’s work. The foil caused a hardly perceptible rustle, unexplained, until the audience’s attention locked onto the flimsy structure. The dancers then exit. On the blackened stage the aluminium structure caught the light in a spellbinding halo tinted with red. Standing alone backstage centre, it seemingly projected a velvety light across the stage. The meeting of choreography and set, nevertheless, was awkward. The choreography unfortunately echoed in no way the shape of the idol-like form sharing the stage with the dancers. The dissonance created made it complicated for the viewer to concentrate either on the dance, or on the lighting, music or art, and certainly did not allow for all to be appreciated in one fail holistic sweep.
The closing sequence, however, seemed to indicate the possibility for magic encapsulated in the triumvirate Marc Balwin, Julian Anderson, Kader Attia. Two dancers mummified in full white body suits surround the sculpture in a tight halo of light coming from above. The scene framed by the floury forms of the dancers, light bouncing off the aluminium figure. As the last note disappears in the time of 6 beats, the three dancers suddenly collapse the sculpture with an easy rapid movement. A sequence that seems to have finished before it even started. As the light goes out the image is again imprinted upon the retina, an impossible and poetic mark.
for tour dates see www.rambert.org.uk

Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, the Saatchi Gallery

‘Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East’ at the Saatchi Gallery confirms expectations: it is both exciting and utterly disappointing. It does to a certain extent bring emerging artists to a new audience and features a few works of exception such as Diane Al Hadid’s apocalyptic and futurist, yet coral-like sculpture The Tower of Infinite Problems (2008) and Shadi Ghadirian’s tongue in cheek reordering of female representation, veiling household utensils, in Everyday life series (2000-2001). Nonetheless, beyond the fact that Saatchi was naturally castigated by critics, as all prominent figures invariably are, the show still falls flat on its face with all the bravado of a slapstick comedian demonstrating a new trick. Whilst the myriad crowd flocking to the palatial temple-like gallery as the rabble to the sermon reveals the following that Saatchi has inspired - only the priggish observer cannot celebrate that fact- the show remains a poorly curated clumpy whole that stops short of instituting any real discussion with current creative practices from the Middle-East.
The title is in itself emblematic of the show’s paradoxical failure to shed light on contemporary art from the region as it apparently sets out to do. ‘Unveiled’ jumps headlong into the trap it intends to flag-post. Lisa Farjam writes - intelligently and convincingly - of dismissing pre-conceived ideas of the Middle-East and of surpassing the ‘magic’ of the fetish, yet the veil remains a poignant and obtuse, often misused symbol, that obfuscates any other aspect of Middle Eastern culture. Why then, this very title? The perplexing title is indeed unoriginal and ignorant if not shameful and borderline colonialist. Art from the Middle East, has, in fact, already been ‘unveiled’ – if unveiled it ever needed to be - and has been the subject of very interesting curatorial endeavours both within and beyond the Middle East such as ‘The Iraqi Equation’ and ‘Tamáss’, both curated by Catherine David.
‘Unveiled’ predominantly features tedious painting that over-estimates it’s own potential. A lot of the work is dependent on the exotic allure of the Middle East to sustain any interest, such as Shirin Fakhim’s unoriginal Tehran prostitute figures of stuffed tights, leather boots and provocative underwear. From the disappointing selection of work on display, Kader Attia’s Ghost (2007) is one of the few works of interest. Row upon careful row of cavernous figures modelled out of a skin or shroud of aluminium foil kneel as if in prayer. As an Algerian artist living in Paris, Kader Attia’s work hinges on a complex interplay of nationalism, identity and religion. Islam in post-independence Algeria came to be synonymous with nationalist fervour directed against the Western ideals of its former colonial oppressor, whilst the dirty civil war from which the country is today emerging is rooted in such ideology. Exhibited in the limiting space of a corridor-like room the work looses its poetic poignancy instead becoming mere spectacle. Spectre (2006-2008), Marwan Rechmaoui’s replica of a now evacuated apartment building in which the Lebanese artist resided, speaks in volumes of twisting, haunting desolation consequence of a bloody war. Her work echoes with Jalal Touffic and Walid Raad’s idea of the ‘surpassing disaster’. Spectre indeed responds to intellectual and physical realities specific to Beirut and Lebanon whilst echoing nonetheless with wider aesthetic concerns such as that of Brutalist architecture.
To focus on 19 artists from different Middle Eastern countries is to suppose an affinity between their diverging experiences. However, in a pluralized global world with an ever-widening art market it is difficult to sustain such an argument unless the exhibition is thematic. It is perhaps rather our keyhole perspective as Westerners that is the common denominator. The unfortunate reality is that the common visitor to ‘Unveiled’ is starved of information concerning the subtleties of Middle Eastern society and culture, and let alone its contemporary art scene, as Said demonstrates in ‘Covering Islam’. In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed rule.

Holocaust memorials and aesthetics of site-specificity

Recent Holocaust memorial commissions granted to artists presuppose that aesthetic theories applied to a public setting can further the memory of the Holocaust. True, critical inquiry is intrinsic to the production and reception of art. However, my hypothesis is that memorial projects conceived as public art may suffer from the simple relocation of ideas formed in artistic institutions that fail to recognise the complexities of collective memory. Recent memorials to the Holocaust increasingly place an emphasis on site and on the observer, brought to the fore through aesthetic ideas of minimalism, site-specificity and conceptual art, yet aesthetic concerns may in fact hinder the furthering of memory. Memorials in Germany have sought to debilitate easy and self-justifying narratives. The counter-monument, Young argues, is emblematic of post-modern distrust for grand narratives. However, this distrust directly affects contemporary aesthetics of memorial making. Jochen and Esther Shalev-Gerz ‘Monument against Fascism’, Harburg and Rachel Whiteread, with her Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, work within aesthetic contexts of the conceptual and the self-destructive that I would argue were unsuccessfully adapted to the reality of memorialising the Holocaust. The value and meaning of Public Art is forever the subject of debate. Nonetheless, the basic aim of every memorial is to communicate with a remembering public. Can memorials in their embodiment of aesthetic theories present a space for critical inquiry into Holocaust remembrance that is understood by a wider public?

First and foremost, monumental architecture is in fact wrongly perceived to be fixed in time and space. With the passage of time, monuments disappear in the cityscape, like all symbols, dependent on a given set of meanings, the monument or memorial is susceptible to changes in historical narratives. Paradoxically, it the very permanence of national values that memorials are thought to embody, whereas impermanence is the fate of the public monument. The memorials impermanence is often obscured by the fact that though sharing the heroic and self-aggrandizing aspect of many traditional monuments, memorials are in fact the expression of a desire to forget. In the name of History, the memorial sanctifies, it becomes the vessel for public grief and/or the bearer of national guilt. The memorial makes present what is absent (the dead) so as to better make absent what is present (grief and guilt). Nonetheless, the focal point for commemorative rituals, the memorial makes public once again the memory it upholds momentarily unearthing that which is buried in the national consciousness. The very need for these commemorative rituals is proof of the disappearing act expected of the memorial. A disappearing act that the Gerz’ only reiterate in conceptual terms. The traditional memorial is not, as it is held to be, omnipresent and omnipotent, but itself self-effacing. In this light, the self-effacing counter-memorial is in fact nonsensical.
Absence and negative space is used in memorial making in answer to mistrust for the aesthetic that is so deeply anchored within our collective imaging and imagining of the Holocaust. Allan Kaplan writes of ‘aesthetic pollution’ to demonstrate how, in heritage of such notions, monumental sites of memory, resist an aesthetic interpretation, hindering their collective function (Kaplan: 2007). However, as Ladd and Kaplan demonstrate, monumental architecture associated so closely to fascism in the common mind, is in fact a myriadic product of a modernist aesthetic, in part even opposed to fascist principles, groomed to embody fascist politics by means of cultural trappings. The architecture of the Nazi period, once festooned with the aesthetics of dramatic and self-aggrandizing ceremonial rituals, became retrospectively a haunting symbol of the fascist Idea. It is rather the absence of debate surrounding collective memory, than monumental architecture in itself that is symbolic of autocratic cultural systems such as fascism.

A memorial’s meaning does not lie within a sculptural or architectural aesthetic but should be determined by collective understanding and experience that is open to criticism. Place as defined by De Certeau, is dependent on a self-fulfilling system of rule and habit. The idea of Space, on the other hand, acknowledges the possibility of transitive and fragmentary definitions of a given place. Why is De Certeau’s definition of space so relevant? When considering memory, place is given a further temporal dimension that is necessarily transient. Sites of memory, are temporally and culturally conditioned, dependent on a complex web of projected memories. Memorials that do not encourage a perpetual experience of memory risk being autocratic or disappearing into the urban backdrop just as effectively as the traditional memorials they seek to counter. Memory thus needs to be imagined or performed rather than read.
The Harburg memorial, by allowing the public to inscribe their names and thoughts on its surface actively included the public in the act of remembrance. However, the act of writing became retrospectively an act of atonement as the inscriptions disappeared with the memorial The crux of the Gerz's conception for the Harburg memorial lay in the wish to have the burden of memory rest on the shoulders of the local population. The memorial does successfully resist memory to simply be contained within itself. However, as the column finally disappeared within its shaft it will not take long for the memory of its presence to fade. As we have seen, commemorative rituals testify to the fact that with time, memorials become gradually invisible. It is illusory to believe that without constant reminding, a particular mnemonic group will choose to uphold a problematic memory. Again, the Harburg memorial fails in communicating with its remembering public. Here, lies a common problem of public art. To what extent are the concepts central to the work understood by the public? Western art traditionally speaks to a restricted community of aficionados, anchored as it is in the notion of the avant-garde just as Whiteread’s memorial remains very elusive. It makes subtle play of the absence of memory, emphasised by creating a cast, a negative rendition of the forgotten entity. The memorial is thus an index of the absent many, and, conceptually, pre-empts and thus problematises collective amnesia. However, ‘Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial’ is meaningful only in the wider context of Whiteread’s work and is thus only truly understandable to those in the know. Memorials should allow for different understandings that are at once coexistent and diverging, at the juncture of private and public. Collective memory does not amount to the sum of myriad individual experiences but exists at the confluence of shared memories, whilst remembering remains personal and subjective. (Mitzal. 2003).

Influenced by minimalism, which encouraged the beholder to become aware of the conditions of viewing an art work, site-specific art calls upon a self-reflexive and transitive experience of space. Site-specific sculpture, as pioneered by such key figures as Richard Serra, is emblematic of a reaction against omnipresent and dictatorial cultural institutions. By placing the emphasis on site, mode of production and reception, artists rejected previously held opinions on the nature of sculpturality, negated the work’s commercial value, and, more relevant to this discussion, made the viewer central to its understanding. Peter Einsenman’s contentious Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, takes the form of a sea of concrete blocks, seemingly sinking into an undulating ground and through which the viewer is to walk around aimlessly. Peter Eisenman draws on a decontructivist approach to space, a signature of his work (Kaplan) to produce empathy by means of a visceral understanding.
Audiences unschooled in the history of art turn to everyday life experiences as reference point to understand an art work. By calling on feelings of loss and displacement felt through the body, the memorial thus seeks to bridge private and collective memory of the Holocaust. The memorial has it is true changed considerably since the original design, however, concept fails to provide content. The beholder is never disorientated, the city consistently appearing over the concrete columns. The site of the memorial itself here fails Eisenman’s wish to deconstruct the memorial space. Shunned by Berliners, the main reason for the Berlin memorial’s failure in being part of local collective memory, I believe, lies in the nature of the commission. Situated amongst other monuments, in a district that is a ‘Schaufenster’ for the city, it is evident that this memorial was intended for cultural tourists.

High concept memorials, though appealing to critics and commissioning bodies, do not necessarily encourage public debate. However, without pandering to the emotive, memorials can reveal how the viewer is implicated, rather than being purely informative, which would render Holocaust victims mere ciphers of a reiterated narrative. Horst Hoheisel’s Aschrott Brunnen Monument, Kassel, 1997 also plays with representing absence through a self-effacing monument. Hoheisel inverted and re-constructed, underground, the Aschrott fountain. Where the Harburg monument is physically finite in time, however, the Aschrott Brunnen confronts the viewer with the continuous experience of an allusive sound of running water in the depth of the sunken and overturned fountain. The fact that this sound is allusive, encourages critical inquiry that is imagined and felt through the senses. A web of memories of the Holocaust emerge, allowed space for critical inquiry that is imagined. Felt through the senses, understanding is not dependent on elusive concepts. By focusing on experience that is both imagined and felt within the body, the memorial is able to communicate with a wider public.