[-empyre-] Welcome to week 3 of February 2020 discussion: Feminist interventions

[afrah shafiq]

Hello All

Thanks for sharing your thoughts over the past two weeks that I have been
silently reading and thanks Dale for including me in the conversation.
I was really struck by some of the things Sama said last week and two of
these particularly resonated with my experiences.

The first being this question of "flattening" that I personally recognise
as a struggle in direct connection to a work I made called in 2017
Sultana's Reality.
View online at www.entersultanasreality.com

While making the work I wanted to pull apart the history of women's
education which is usually celebrated as part of the "reform movement" by
putting women's agency at the centre of the narrative. I used existing
images of women from an archive i was doing a fellowship at (CSSSC
Calcutta) and brought them to life to reimagine what the women frozen in
these images would perhaps do if they were given the space to perform,
rather than being imagined by someone outside of their inner lives and
experiences. Some questions I wanted to explore were, who was being
"reformed" into what and for what purpose and what say did they have in the
process. Almost imagining the reform movement as a software update full of
bugs. I used writing by women and their own anecdotes and instances from
history to talk about stories where education was enforced on women out of
their own will, and how education served a decorative purpose in their life
bringing them closer to the imagination of a feminine ideal that was
drawing from of a "cultivated" Englishwoman and how the texts that women
were allowed access too then were along the lines of say poetry, and
devotional texts rather than reading about say political science or history
and the stories of women who then chose to subvert this. The tricky part
for me in this idea of flattening showed up when the work was finished and
I was meant to then frame it in a context when it was being shared with
curators or galleries that were interested in it.. it is always a struggle
for me to write about my work in general too. I feel I don't have the
language for it and I feel allergic to the jargon often used to frame
contemporary art. For me Sultana's Reality was *An *alternate story of the
relationship between women and books. I was uncomfortable with the idea of
calling it *THE* history of Indian women and the colonial education
movement. For various reasons of course some of them being - Who is an
Indian women? What was "India" anyway? The main text I was drawing from was
a utopian short story called Sultana's Dream (read here
<https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sultana/dream/dream.html>) by a
Bengali writer in 1905 called Begum Rokeya Sakhwat Hossien who was at that
time an Indian but is from what is now Bangladesh. And yet I was feeling
the need to define the work in a way that would allow a larger global
audience to situate it somewhere. The ideas in it were so contradictory,
how to frame it in a way that makes it easy to enter? I still feel
unresolved about this and don't know what the way to do this is without
feeling inauthentic.

Another place I was struggling with this idea of flattening was while I was
making the work itself. Since most of my material and research was drawing
from an archive and already existing documented history where it is certain
that there was a heavier representation of an upper class and upper caste
experience as if that was the default or only experience as those stories
are certainly more prominently represented in the archive. The lives and
histories of dalit or tribal women for instance do not always fit into this
narrative and have their own trajectory. How to acknowledge this and make
room for multiplicity? For an artist whose work predominantly centres
around archives, how does one draw from the archive and yet acknowledge the
black holes within it? I don't have blanket answers to this question but
within the form of this particular work one way in which I opened out the
narrative to make it less finite and add an interactive feature where
anyone can submit their own story that then gets added on to the project as
a note.

One more thing I wanted to address was as Dale initiated, the idea of
legibility. As artists, who are you telling this story to/addressing when
you make your work? I always wonder about this when I see work by other
artists too. I remember this being said by Toni Morisson about her book the
bluest eye. When she read writing by many other black writers, she always
wondered why something basic that the community already knows was being
explained in the book. Who was this explanation for? When she went on to
write her first book she did no such thing and intentionally discredited
the white gaze. Not using what the outside world already knows about you as
the starting point to build on. Many parts of my work (jokes, puns,
breaking into Hinglish, particular references to local popular culture)
will not make sense to someone who is not familiar with the world it is set
in. This is not intentional but it is also not something that bothers me
and so I don't censor it. To see a joke about your own world for me as an
Indian Muslim is rare and a juicy moment. When this happens to me in other
work, I love it. Wondering however if that also means that your work will
always be more relevant only to an audience that is closer culturally?

On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 1:11 PM afrah shafiq <afrahshafiq at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello All
>
> Thanks for sharing your thoughts over the past two weeks that I have been
> silently reading and thanks Dale for including me in the conversation.
> I was really struck by some of the things Sama said last week and two of
> these things particularly resonated with my experience.
>
> The first being this question of "flattening" that I personally resist and
> struggled with in direct connection to a work I made called in 2017
> Sultana's Reality.
> View online at www.entersultanasreality.com
>
> While making the work I wanted to break apart the existing narrative of
> the women's education movement in India during the colonial era which is
> usually looked at as something that was part of the "reform movement" to
> really put women's agency at the centre of the narrative. I used existing
> archival images of women and brought them to life to reimagine what the
> women frozen in these images would perhaps do if they were given the space
> to perform, rather than being imagined by someone outside of their inner
> lives and experiences. Some questions I wanted to explore were, who was
> being reformed and for what purpose and what say did they have in the
> process. Almost imagining the reform movement as a software update full of
> bugs. I used writing by women and their own stories from history to talk
> about stories women upon whom education was enforced out of their own will,
> and how education served a decorative purpose in their life bringing them
> closer to the imagination of a feminine ideal that was drawing from of a
> "cultivated" Englishwoman and how the texts that women were allowed access
> too then were along the lines of say poetry, and devotional texts rather
> than reading about say political science or history and the stories of
> women who then chose to subvert this. The tricky part for me in this idea
> of flattening showed up when the work was finished and I was meant to then
> frame it in a context when it was being shared with curators or galleries
> that were interested in.. it is always a struggle for me to write about the
> work. I feel I don't have the language for it and I feel allergic to the
> jargon often used to frame contemporary art. For me Sultana's Reality was A
> story of the relationship between women and books. I was uncomfortable with
> the idea of calling it a history of Indian women and the colonial education
> movement. Who is an Indian women? What was "India" anyway? Since the main
> text I was drawing from was a utopian short story called Sultana's Dream (read
> here <https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sultana/dream/dream.html>)
> by a Bengali writer in 1905 called Begum Rokeya Sakhwat Hossien who was
> then an Indian but is from what is now Bangladesh. And yet I was feeling
> the need to define the work in a way that would allow a larger global
> audience to situation it somewhere. I still feel unresolved about this and
> don't know what the way to do this is without being inauthentic.
>
> Another place I was struggling with this idea of flattening was while I
> was making itself. Since most of my material and research was drawing from
> an archive and already existing documented history it is certain that there
> was a heavy representation of an upper class and upper caste experience as
> those stories are certainly more prominently represented in the archive.
> The lives and histories of dalit or tribal women do not always fit into
> this narrative and have their own trajectory. How to acknowledge this and
> make room for multiplicity? For an artist who predominantly centres work
> around archives, how does one draw from the archive and yet acknowledge the
> black holes within it? I don't have certain answers to these questions but
> within the form of this particular work one way in which I opened out the
> narrative to make it less finite was to add an interactive feature where
> anyone can submit their own story that then gets added on to the project as
> a note.
>
> One more thing I wanted to address was as Dale initiated, the idea of
> legibility. As artists from who are you telling this story to/addressing
> when you make your work? I always wonder about this when I see work by
> other artists too. I remember this being said by Toni Morisson about her
> book the bluest eye. When she read writing by many other black writers, she
> always wondered why something basic that the community already knows was
> being explained in the book. Who was this explanation for? When she went on
> to write her first book she did no such thing and intentionally discredited
> the white gaze. Not using what the outside world already knows about you as
> the starting point to build on. Many parts of my work (jokes, puns,
> breaking into Hinglish, particular references to local popular culture)
> will not make sense to someone who is not familiar with the world it is set
> in. This is not intentional but it is also not something that bothers me.
> To see a joke about your own world, is rare and a juicy moment. When this
> happens to me in other work, I love it. Wondering however if that also
> means that your work will always be more relevant only to an audience that
> is closer culturally?
>
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 11:35 AM Dale Hudson <dmh2018 at nyu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > Thanks, Kay and Nat, for nudging us to think differently.
> >
> > This week we continue by thinking about feminist interventions.
> >
> > I’ve invited Sama Alshaibi  and Afrah Shafiq to offer discuss how they
> engage in feminist arts practices in two different contexts, which I think
> can help us think comparatively and move beyond the essentializing
> categories that linger even as we collectively try to destabilize them
> >
> > Dale
> >
> >
> >
> > 3—Feminist interventions
> >
> > For the first week, the discussion focuses on feminist practices that
> might not always be legible outside North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia
> since they respond to different configurations of patriarchy in
> postcolonial and transnational contexts.
> >
> > Western feminisms often adopt categories of “Arab women,” “Indian
> women,” “Muslim women,” or “Oriental women,” who are imagined as repressed
> by clothing or religion. Lila Abu-Lughod’s famous “Do Muslim Women Need
> Saving?” outlined ways that A-list Hollywood female and male celebrities
> mobilized their power to forward U.S. military interests in Afghanistan.
> French president Emmanuel Macron’s speech at the opening of Le Louvre Abu
> Dhabi in the UAE evoked “universal” culture as a means of combatting
> terrorism, then sold warships in Saudi Arabia.
> >
> > How can feminists respond to these powerful foreign cultural
> institutions? How do artists navigate between claiming cultural heritage
> and tradition while also critiquing sexism, racism, casteism, and other
> forms of social and political violence? How do artists, curators, and
> scholars activate feminist critique without being accused of betrayal or
> being undermined by white (“feminist”) saviors from Berlin, London, Los
> Angeles, New York, Paris, or Tel Aviv?
> >
> > GUEAST BIOS
> >
> > Sama Alshaibi’s practice examines the mechanisms displacement and
> fragmentation in the aftermath of war and exile. Her photographs, videos
> and immersive installations features the body, often her own, as either a
> gendered site or a geographic device resisting oppressive political and
> social conditions. Alshaibi’s monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In (New
> York: Aperture, 2015) presents her Silsila series which probes the human
> dimensions of migration borders and environmental demise. Her work has been
> featured in several prominent biennials and exhibited in over 20 national
> and international solo exhibitions. Born in Basra to an Iraqi father and
> Palestinian mother, Alshaibi is based in the United States where she is
> Professor of Photography, Video and Imaging at the University of Arizona,
> Tucson.
> >
> > Afrah Shafiq is a multi/new media artist based between Goa and
> Bangalore. Her art practice moves across various platforms and mediums,
> seeking a way to retain the tactile within the digital and the poetry
> within technology.  Her work has been shown at the Lahore Biennial 2020,
> testsite Austin, Kochi Muziris Biennale 2018/19, The Guild Art Gallery in
> Alibaug, Be.Fantastic in Bengaluru, What About Art in Mumbai, Digital
> Graffiti Festival in Florida, The Fusebox Festival in Texas and the
> Computer Space festival in Bulgaria.  She has been invited on research and
> residency programs with Fluent Collaborative Austin, the Liverpool Biennial
> of Contemporary Art, and the Institute of Advance Studies in Nantes,
> France. When she is not glued to her computer she also makes glass mosaic.
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> > http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
>
>
> --
> www.loveandotheroutdoorgames.tumblr.com
>


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