Living Uncertainty: women artists of the Middle East

LEILA LAK INTERVIEWS TWO ARTISTS PARTICIPATING IN THE 32° BIENNIAL OF SÃO PAULO AND REVEALS ITS CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CONTEMPORARY ART SCENARIO

Leila Lak

In the current political climate of Brazil, Latin America’s most important contemporary art fair, and the oldest, after Venice globally, could not ignore the uncertainty of the country that hosts this event.  The 32nd Sao Paulo Bienal, which started on the 7th September is called “Incerteza Viva,” and political dialogue is heavily imbedded in the Bienal’s dialogue.  

The curators, led by Jochen Volz, have done something that is rare to see on the international art scene, fifty percent of the artists featured are women.

 Of these, two are from the Middle East. Alia Farid a Kuwaiti-Porto Rican who grew up in between the Gulf and Porto Rico, is now based in Kuwait. and involved in a burgeoning art scene, mostly constituting of people who live abroad, as the according to Farid, the Kuwait is limiting for an artist.

Her 15-minute film, Maarad Trablous, shown at the Bienal, is shot in the Rashid Karami International Fairgrounds in Tripoli, designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Farid visited Niemeyer’s Ibirapuera Park, home to the Bienal in Sao Paulo, in 2007, a few years later she went to the park in Tripoli.

“When I visited the park it reminded me so much of Ibirapuera,” said Farid on skype from Porto Rico, “that is when the idea happened, the stark resemblance between these two places, in my memory and in actuality.”

The film features a woman, a lone figure, walking through the vast and crumbling park set to a beautiful eerie sound track reminiscent of echoes of gunfire.

“For the Bienal I thought it would be a perfect thing to show a portrait of this place,” she said her focus was to illustrate the “divergent outcomes of these two places by the same architect but based on the social political environment and the nature of things show the outcomes of the different works.”

Tripoli, in Northern Lebanon is on the boarder of Syria and the conflict that has engulfed and destroyed its neighbour is now reeking havoc in Tripoli too, with constant fighting between the Alawite and Sunni communities.  The park was constructed in the early 1970s for a world fair that never came to Tripoli due to the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. Since then Niemeyer’s Lebanese work remains abandoned, with only the surrounding park being pruned and looked after as joggers and grounds men get on with their routines around the decomposing monument.

Her work bares witness not only to two converging but disparate locations, linked through the mastery of a great architect, but Farid also bares witness to the Bienal’s focus Incerteza Viva. With this comes a responsibility, which she felt palpably.

“It is also overwhelming to show the local situation there and representing it somewhere else,” Farid said. “Like it is with any project you don’t want to misinform. With this project I didn’t want to reiterate what everybody knows so I ended up doing a really feminine piece and it is really subtle.”

Farid, is part of a very small arts collective from Kuwait, most of the 8 members are based in Europe, and all the female members aside from herself are based outside of the country.

“I don’t know how to explain it without being very brutal but there is a very simple idea of what the world of art is,” she said. “Art is definitely not seen for its transformative potential.”

As she studied art in Porto Rico then in the United States, Farid brings with her a cross-cultural understanding of the power of art in transforming society.  She felt at home in Brazil, as she said, there are many similarities in the practice of art with the Caribbean.

Whilst Farid works in mixed media the second female Middle Eastern artist featured in the Bienal, is a very different artist and her practice comes from a long tradition of female crafts.  Gunes Terkol practice is with embroidering and sewing preexisting textiles. From her residency in Berlin she did not have much time but replied to Revista Diaspora’s questions.

“I combine the visuals I encounter with figures of my past, and narratives of the present, researching my own production process. The protagonists of my narratives are often women adapting or refusing to adapt to the social and cultural transformations of the cultural centres in which they live and work,” said Terkol.  “Sewing and using recycled fabrics becomes a resistance, which claims back a form of independent production and widens access to contemporary art. I hope to challenge, energize and bring new dialogues to what was once solely a form of domestic and female production.”

Her works tend to focus on the space between the collective and the individual and where the individual’s work fits into the collective and visa versa. Terkol herself works with collectives and on collaborations, mostly with feminist activists and groups of women.  In the Bienal, her new series, “She couldn’t believe what she heard,” is a progression of her practice, and one she said that Is very personal to her own journey.

“The personal confrontation of an imaginary woman with various situations endured by woman in male-dominated society is highlighted,” wrote Terkol. “I try to showcase the so-called ‘women issues’ from a politically engaged but intimate perspective which echoes the famous motto ‘personal is political.’”

In this series she chose the colour red to represent both her relationship to the subject, “the blood bond,” and the “reality, the bloodshed,” by her woman subjects.

Her second work at the exhibition is called, “The girl was not there.”  In this series she considers uncertainty, above that sensed or what is understood. She took life objects like onions and then painted the fragile cotton textiles with the colour that came from the cooked onion. She said the piece represented “onion as the colour that paints our insides (our stomachs) and our outsides; onion as a colour that breathes and contains tears.”

Both artists celebrate a “feminine” approach to art and rather than representing a preconceived image of what it is to be Middle Eastern their work is rather a representation of what it is to be a woman in a world of uncertainty.

The 32nd Sao Paulo Bienal will be running until 11th December and there are 90 artists represented.