BEND! Conference at Princeton - April, 2011

I am delighted to be presenting at the below symposium at Princeton next month. I'm going to be discussing the explorations of gender and identity in the work of Iranian photographers Shadi Ghadirian (below) and Newsha Tavakolian (above). More soon!

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BEND! Photography, Gender, & the Politics of Representation

An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Princeton University, April 22-23, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Professor George Baker, Department of Art History, UCLA

The past decade has witnessed widespread institutional and scholarly efforts to historicize the relation between art and feminism, and between art and identity politics. These efforts unfold in a present that is often characterized as “post-gender” and/or “post-racial.” Just as categories of identity seem to lose traction in cultural discourse, so boundaries between artistic media become unfixed. Yet photographic representation is increasingly pervasive, and increasingly bound to the performance of subjectivity.

This symposium aims to consider the interrelated production of gender and photography, along with their dissolution as stable categories of inquiry. An interrogation of photography today requires looking within as well as beyond the boundaries of traditional art-historical frameworks. It compels us to account for the political and social dimensions in which photography participates, and demands that we re-consider the mise-en-scène of photography’s production as art.

How has the evolution of photography—from b/w to color, from analogue to digital, from mass media to social media—served to articulate or blur aesthetic and subjective differences? What politics of representation emerge when the individual can be both agent and object of photographic voyeurism, exhibitionism, and surveillance? Might photography's expanded field offer the potential for reshaping feminist politics today?

We invite participants to explore historical, existing and possible relationships between photography and the (re)production of gender, from the perspectives of visual culture, philosophy, (art) history, and art practice. Papers might consider photography in relation to:

gender bending - histories and politics of sexuality - performance and/or portraiture - the construction of masculinity - women artists - representations of gender, race, and class - advocacy, activism, and political practice - feminist politics, ethics, and aesthetics - medical and biological discourses - capitalism, terrorism, and war

Frances Jacobus-Parker / Elena Peregrina-Salvador / Mareike Stoll
PhD Candidates
Departments of Art & Archaeology / Spanish & Portuguese / German
Princeton University

Mythologizing the West

originally posted on the delighted observationist, 11/18/2010


From San Diego/Los Angeles, CA


Paul Theroux notes in the beginning of The Patagonian Express that travel feels very different when it is undertaken overland, that there is something particularly important in understanding how the land progresses and changes and evolves as one goes across it, rather than just landing in a plane, experiencing the earth as disjointed territories and pieces rather than a slow evolution.

On the East Coast, it’s easy to get anywhere – the cities are fairly close together (100 miles or so) and the land is contiguous, interwoven with packed freeways. The East Coast itself (at least the Northeast, where I have now lived for over 2 years) has a sense of being together, being intimate, in that it’s difficult to ever get out and get lost somewhere without running into a housing development, civilization, freeways, stores. There are a few nature preserves, such as the Delaware Gap, but even that is a narrow strip of “wilderness” and when you kayak to the end of it, the end is signaled by crossing under a freeway overpass. East Coast cities are vertical – New York built upwards, creating a constellation of skyscrapers. They are beautiful, monuments to greatness in many cases, and illuminate the night sky. But the sky becomes so hard to see in New York, too many buildings obscure the broad arc of the sky.

The sky is so much bigger here, on the West Coast. You can see the sky, no matter where you are. It is blue and deep and light. It is not heavy, dense, dark. My experience of space in California is completely different than my experience in New York: in California, I want to be outside, to smell the orange and eucalyptus trees. To sit by the tiger lilies while looking at the mountains in the haze of the distance. The buildings here are closer to human scale, they are not imposing physically. As a result, the distance you travel horizontally on the West Coast roughly equal the distances you travel vertically on the East Coast. It’s just a very different way of being.

More people have cars here, because these distances are greater, and things are more spread out. There’s more space in the West, more room to expand. More freedom, more air. The spaces are more stark, there is more contrast. There are mountains, valleys; the East has rolling hills, no sharply contrasting landscapes in texture and size (excepting Maine).

The West has a long history of being mythologized as a space of freedom, for pioneers, for dreamers, for the sons and daughters of families that didn’t have important last names or dynasties…the place where the American dream stands, where anyone can make their future and fortune. The exhibition at LACMA, “The Modern West,” looked at the ways that artists mythologized the West and created a visual language to explain the sense of possibility and creative opening they felt here. The West is also rough: it is a ragged, demanding place to live that. Los Angeles, as a city, should not exist; there is no water to sustain it, so it had to be stolen from elsewhere (see Mike Davis' City of Quartz, Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert). Anyone who has visited Yosemite understands the awesome and awe-inspiring intensity of living in a landscape so beautiful but dangerous. The history of the West includes lawless vigilantes, cowboys, and rough “Wild West” towns, people who wanted to live outside strictures of society. Perhaps this epitomizes the inherent danger in freedom: if you are constrained, there is little risk; if you are free, you are also free to make the wrong choices and take yourself down a path of no return. The wide open spaces of the West open that opportunity.

I know that I play into this, that I fall under the lure of the “wide open West” idea. I know I idealize Los Angeles, because I was doing interesting work with the Getty <here's one of our projects, I did the video for this> and my two best friends from Seattle U were living there to attend USC (still reside there). So for me, LA was a place where I had fulfilling, stimulating work, I got to travel, and I had great friends. In my memory, it has become something so mythic it could never have been real. I have edited out the traffic, the eating disorders of the women I saw in Whole Foods, the odd surreal nature of living in a place you recognize, deja-vu-like, because you’ve seen it on tv somewhere. I’ve redacted the unreal relationship to the land and water, the beautiful topiary and manicured lawns that depend on siphoning water to render the city livable, beautiful, vibrant. In my mind, even though I know these things to be true, they have melted away.

I have to admit a predilection towards the desert, too. Perhaps this is vestigial from my childhood in Albuquerque, but the desert feels like home. My childhood weekends were filled with visits to Mesa Verde, Pueblo National Monument, Santa Fe. The mesas and brush of the desert, long brown and ochre expanses dotted with the occasional cacti or magnificent tree, with imposing stark peaked mountains in the distance, feels comfortable. My cousin, who has spent 20 years in Seattle, can’t imagine living in the desert; to her, it is beautiful in its way but not bearable past a few days. The lush verdant greens of the Pacific Northwest are home to her; the desert alien. In a way, I am biased towards the desert, it is inescapable the way I feel at home here. I cannot make it not feel this way. Tennyson was right, “I am a part of all that I have met.” And I met the West when I was so young, and fell in love with her, and have never managed to fall out of love with her again.

Contemporary Iranian Art: Shadi Ghadirian

Photographer Shadi Ghadirian lives and works in Tehran. Her series of Qajar photographs, mimicking standards of 18th and 19th century Qajar court photography, is framed in "Veil" as a thoughtful and witty retort to ethnographic Orientalist portraits and in "Unveiled" as subversive art worthy of a second look. Responses to her work vary. In an exhibition review, critic Olivia Hampton writes, “Qajar is a recreation of the photographic compositions and styles of the studio portraits that flourished in the Qajar dynasty, who ruled Iran from 1794-1925... But clear intrusions of modernity surface in the work, in the form of ghetto blasters and television sets.” Here we see a European art critic reading the work to be about modernity, and an “intrusion” into an idealized and Orientalized past. In a similar vein, “Unveiled” curator Lisa Farjam writes, “Ghadirian, who is influenced by Qajar traditions in Iranian photohistory, does not bow to the standard image of the darkly-clad Muslim woman; these veils are full of color and life.” Here, Ghadirian is presented as drawing from a traditional and Islamic past while infusing a modernity and vibrance. Farjam frames Ghadirian as breaking stereotypes of “the Muslim woman,” whose form, voice, and sexuality are cloaked and disappear with the veil. To counter these views, fellow artist Jananne Al-Ani intervenes to clarify multiple readings by varied audiences, rather than assuming a homogenous and Western audience. She notes, “For an Iranian audience, the contemporary props are seen as ordinary objects in an extraordinary costume drama, whereas for a Western audience – with no knowledge of the history of Iranian dress – the contemporary props disrupt what appears to be a timeless ethnographic portrait of an Other culture.” Here, Al-Ani broadens the debate and the discussion of the work to include multiple perspectives, rather than presuming the work’s audience(s) will be culturally homogenous. Moore writes that Ghadirian's inclusion of Western electronics "raise pointed questions about the provenance of commodity culture and the different forms of fetishism that impact upon women transnationally.” Moore thus creates a productive channel into discussing how women’s bodies in representation have been historically used across many cultures for varying reasons. This call to a broader audience and shared commonalities reappears in Ghadirian’s more recent work, the “Like EveryDay” series, which highlights the quotidian nature of many women’s lives and the roles they perform. Ghadirian’s gallery labels the series, which was featured in the “Unveiled” exhibition, as “depicting anonymous chador-wrapped figures with kitchen utensils instead of faces. This simple, ominous collision of potent symbols – the veil and domesticity –parodies stereotypical understanding of women of the region and universally.” Most viewers imagine the veiled figures to be human, and Muslim women, given that resemblance to variations of the Islamic veil, but there are no discernible people in these photographs. The immediate association for Western audiences is the equating of women as tools, implements, and as invisible as the household items of daily use; women are reduced to sexual tools in wearing the veil, could be an interpretation. In the photographs, there is no trace of a person visible except for one figure in a gingham flowered veil with a strainer over her face; here, the viewer can see traces of skin, a nose, and the tip of a finger, presumed to be feminine by the veil. Otherwise, the series portrays tools and veils, but not people. Ghadirian works within Iranian political constraints, despite the potentially difficult interpretations of some of her works. According to Iranian law, “All images of women in Iran must be shown in hijab and instead of trying to escape this or seeing it as a constraint, Shadi Ghadirian has made it her theme as she continues to investigate the condition of women in her home country.” Much as Sedira pushes viewers to interpret, hold, and gather multiple viewpoints at once, Ghadirian works within and through her sociopolitical situation to create works that challenge easy assumptions and classification.

Contemporary Arab Art: Walid Raad

from the delighted observationist archives

This is amazing.

Go to the Atlas Group's website, and pick Archive > A > Raad.




Raad placed colored dots over the bullet marks in buildings and the urban environment in Lebanon in the 80s, based on the tracemarks of the bullets which often etched various colors into the buildings.

He realized later that the color of the bullets corresponded to their country of origin, and he had created an archive of the countries that sold ammunition during the war.

More soon - on Raad, whose work has been a joyful discovery.
So much to do, so much to prove, so little time.

originally posted on the delighted observationist, 12/10/2010.

Looking at Africa: The Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

from the delighted observationist archives



Ngugi wa Thiong'o is not a small name in African literature. He and Chinua Achebe famously debated whether it was possible to write in the language of the colonizer: can the formerly colonized (even that is debated, is colonialism every truly over?) write and express themselves in the language of the colonizer? Does that constitute a mental adherence or subjugation to a form of expression, a way of seeing the world, that belongs to the colonizer? Because of this, despite being in exile from his native Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiong'o has written in Gikuyu. He translates his novels himself into English.

My question, after reading the mammoth 776-page Wizard of the Crow, shares that same concern of retaining African voices and expression. Does the magical realism of Wizard detract from the seriousness of the other depictions in the book? If despotism, corruption, and bribery are as despicable as they seem, and so egregious as to endanger so many lives, does the magical realism of the Ruler's illness, of the magical and mysterious disguises of Kamiti and Nyawira, make the reader take the corruption less seriously too? Does that endanger our thinking about Africa, or strengthen it? Open it?

The story is a rich one, tracing the lives of several characters as they grow or diminish in power in the state of Aburiria. I appreciated the irony of Kamiti, who becomes (by accident, largely, but also by fate) the Wizard of the Crow, falling prey to an illness he himself divined in others. The Wizard was also Kamiti, Nyawira was herself also the Wizard, but also the Limping Witch, and assumed many disguises and characters in the book. I took this to be an interesting comment and depiction of the many faces we assume in our daily lives, manipulating others or being manipulated.

Thiong'o ends with an optimistic note: the discovery that Arigaigai Gathere (A.G.) had saved the Wizard's life in the fatal shootout scene towards the end of the novel. A.G., as a policeman, had throughout the story believed in the Wizard's power, but was an agent of the state. In the end, he seemed to be the only character who escaped a fate of either government agent (powerful at some times, and taken from power viciously by enemies at others) or citizen fighting the government. In the end, A.G. is the only one who wrote his own fate. Haki ya mungu.

originally posted on the delighted observationist, 1/6/2011.

Political Geographies: Putting Khanna & Anderson together

from the delighted observationist archives



I recently discovered LinkTV on my tv, which is amazing. It is also noteworthy in that Link carries Al Jazeera English here in America. What people don't seem to realize is that AJE is actually a great news source and not a terrorist organization...but that's a sidebar, albeit related, to the discussion of political geographies that I'm concerned with this evening.

Link also replayed the above video of Parag Khanna speaking at TED in 2009. He discusses the Middle East, mentioning that these countries are often "uncomfortable" in the borders left them by colonial realities. I didn't hear Khanna reference Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, but I'd be highly surprised if the articulate Khanna has not read this incredible and (rightly) influential tome.

In Anderson's revised edition (1991), Anderson added a chapter on "Census, Map, Museum." He writes about how these elements are crucial in providing information to buttress, describe, divide? the imagined community of the nation. Anderson writes that these "three institutions of power which, although invented before the mid nineteenth century, changed their form and function as the colonized zones entered the age of mechanical reproduction. These three institutions were the census, the map, and the museum" (163). Anderson points out that maps essentially create imaginary boundaries, and that the word country connotes "bounded territorial space" (173). To this end, Khanna points out that Africa's map is covered with "suspiciously straight lines." The lines show how unnatural, how inorganic, these national boundaries are.

Khanna ends by noting that "Geopolitics is constantly morphing - we are always searching for equilibrium, we fear changes on the map...but the inertia of our current borders is far worse. We focus on the lines that cross borders, the infrastructures lines, we'll end up with the world we want: a borderless one."

I question, do we truly want a borderless world? Khanna opened with a note about 90% of the world's population living outside of the 40 biggest population centers in the world. Are borders meant to give those within them a sense of belonging, or to keep others out? They do in fact provide definitions we rely on, especially in this country (ie, American, Mexican). Khanna is right, borders denote power and money and the flows of both. Are we - here, in the US, in particular - willing to give up some of our privilege to really truly begin to stabilize the world? Power, wealth, and privilege cannot continue to be located in such small loci as the world's population expands and demands their fair share of these privileges.

As I write this, I watch images of the protests in Egypt as its people attempt to redefine their country, their rights as citizens, their image and place in the world. (Meanwhile, Egyptian state tv, according to reports, continues to show soap operas & cooking shows instead of international news.) Commentary runs on about how these protests, and those in Tunisia and in Yemen, can destabilize Israel or the entire Arab world, even though the US claims to support burgeoning democracy. Interestingly enough, this political struggle reflects Khanna's point about internal lines: the news I get on Facebook and via Twitter, from those I went to school for Middle Eastern studies with, and my other Syrian connections, is faster, and more...honest (in my view) than what I see a day later on the international news. There are no borders, in a sense, in the age of information (despite Mubarak's attempt to shut down all internet communication services). But how far gone are the very real borders and mentally calcified divisions that have seemingly evaporated in the digital world?

originally posted on the delighted observationist, 2/2/2011

book review: Enfoldment & Infinity on AMCA

In Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, Laura U. Marks is concerned with images as they enfold and contain information. Drawing on the scholarship of Gilles Deleuze and Charles Sanders Peirce, she argues that Islamic art and philosophy contain the deep sources of contemporary information culture and art. She defines new media art as works with a common “basis in code, an algorithmic process, and a database-interface relationship” (32). As she frames it, the work is, “mainly intended to introduce Islamic art to readers more familiar with contemporary art,” but is also directed at scholars of Islamic art, in the hopes that the comparative approach she offers will be a generative one for new curatorial and scholarly insights (29).
To continue reading, click here.

by Elizabeth Harrington
**published by AMCA International