For Sharjah Biennial 15, as a content writer for the guidebook, I contributed text for John Akomfrah, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi, Brenda Fajardo, mandla, Steve McQueen, Mame-Diarra Niang, and Khadija Saye.
The following are the writing drafts that I submitted. For the edited text and other information on the exhibitions visit sharjahart.org
John Akomfrah
John Akomfrah delves into themes of memory, identity, postcolonialism, temporality, and the politics of aesthetics through his experimentations on film and the moving image. Together with Black British multimedia artists, he co-founded the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982 where he began pushing the boundaries of the cinematic form into radical ways of understanding history. Through his keen presentation of complex migrant black life, Akomfrah continuously challenges established norms in filmmaking. It is his investigations of sociopolitical events that give power to his multisensory, audio-visual works that demand a reconsideration of multiple modernities highlighted at the intersections of ethics, aesthetics, and politics.
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ body of work is an inquiry into the interconnectedness of migration, displacement, historical narratives, and memory to the history and formation of the diaspora. Hauntingly poetic, her works in painting, sculpture, film and performance create an interplay between the personal and the political through a converging of the past and the present. Essential to her practice is her use of her identity and heritage as Afro-Cuban, from which she retraces her family history in congruence with the continuing history of the African diaspora.
For Sharjah Biennial 15, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons presents Liminar Circularity [working title], a multi-media installation that features a possible pathway of return for the African diaspora to Africa. Campos-Pons seeks to address the Middle Passage, the slave trade route from Africa to the Caribbean (16th-19th century), through the circularity of movement of modern day diaspora. Campos-Pons asserts that the Middle Passage too can be a means for healing—African descendants, particularly in Cuba, have returned to Africa to be in solidarity with the fight against South African apartheid. The red soil from Mantazas, Cuba, Campos-Pons’ birthplace, is laid on the ground to evoke a vantage point where she begins her narrative. Seven paintings, with her grandmother as the central figure, are hung on the walls and are made to converse with memorabilia. Campos-Pons creates a dialogue between the past and present as she reincarnates her family heirlooms into glass sculptures, molding them in metaphor. What is absent is made present: bodies that bore witness to slavery and bodies that can begin to mend this rupture.
Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi
Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi’s art practice seek to address the relations that arise between nation-states and the individuals that thrive within their imagined borders. They are multi-disciplinary artists interested in the media-saturated expressiveness of urban experience whose critical practice provides interventions on popular visual culture. At the core of their works are inquiries into the rich materiality of urban vernacular technologies with their use of conceptual art and pop art as media, particularly of the Global South. Having taken root in Karachi, Pakistan in the early 1990s, their collaborations have been continuously transformed through their direct engagement with the vitality of urban cities which are mediated by visual art that persistently addresses their inherent ambivalences.
At Sharjah Biennial 15, Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi’s Efflorescence Series (2013-2019) exemplify the potency of flowers as national symbols. The title of the series simultaneously affords these delicate blooms with the grace of unfolding at their utmost vigor and with connotations of degradation. Although these flowers are common elsewhere, it is the cultural project of these nation-states to acquire them as symbols of nationhood. The Dadis, however, use these blooms as signages that point to contested regions with tensions that inevitably arise from political, religious, and cultural disputes. Bathed in neon lights, these larger-than-life flowers remind the viewer of the function of identity, willingly ascribed to or otherwise, in a nation-state’s autonomous impositions on territory and sovereignty.
Brenda Fajardo
Brenda Fajardo is a painter, printmaker and art educator whose expansive practice took shape during the Marcos dictatorship (1965-1986) in the Philippines. At the height of the regime, critics of Marcos were either detained, tortured or forced to disappear. Fajardo’s involvement in theatre production made her more adept in grassroots sensibilities as cultural workers and activists at that time retreated to rural areas. Co-founding the feminist art collective Kasibulan (Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na Kamalayan) in 1987, Fajardo has since been an active mediator between the redemptive practice of art-making and the process of narrative formation that are both rooted in Philippine culture, history and society.
Known for her transgressive reconfiguration of the tarot card deck as a tool for rereading the Philippines’ colonial history, Brenda Fajardo presents three works from her Tarot Series (1989) at Sharjah Biennial 15. Fajardo gilds, frames, and subverts settings of contestations between colonisers and Philippine society with indigenised renderings of tarot cards that allude to characters throughout Philippine history. Fajardo, through the cards, vindicates the woman’s struggle as she emphasizes femininities with differing affinities: the precolonial Babailan (The High Priestess), the imagery of Inang Bayan (Motherland), to the ordinary Filipinas in Katatagan (Strength), in Kahinahunan (Temperance), and in Ang Bituin (The Star). Leaping from painting to painting is the shape-shifting female figure of Inang Bayan, being the object of colonial desire in Magkasuyo (The Lovers), in asserting her freedom, transfigures to become the heroine who helms the seat of Katarungan (Justice).
mandla
mandla rae’s performance is an invitation to partake in an unravelling of contexts. mandla means power, a name they have chosen to simultaneously regain a selfhood that was once lost and to renounce an identity that is imposed yet contested. mandla is firm in their convictions. They are queer, agender, a being that dissolves every facet of gendered identity.
For Sharjah Art Biennial 15, mandla furnishes a home in as british as a watermelon. At the cornerstone is a biographical event that informs their practice: being born in Zimbabwe, raised in London and then residing in Manchester. A four-cornered house is presumed to be erected as its invisible wall is marked on the floor with a light strip. mandla’s emotional state swings between cordial smiles and arresting pain as they recall vivid memories. From a table, watermelons are handled methodically. Precise incisions are made with knives or screwdrivers at the exact moment that pain needs to be felt. Some are hacked to access the sweetness of memory, their flesh and juice they apply to their skin so that they too can permeate and sweeten their scars. mandla’s performance is at once a reminder that not all homes are safe spaces. Iterations of their performance and consequently their art practice questions the conditions that had paved the way for coloniality. In asserting their body and narrating their memory, mandla utilises their performance as a space through which post-colonial discourse is made possible.
Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen is an artist and a filmmaker whose practice constantly explores the tactility of film and the possibilities of cinema as art. His experimentations give weight to the body within a space and the sensations that arise from viewing the moving image. McQueen draws from memory to make sense of the present as he generously allows sensorial experience to precede cognition. His practice mangles the familiar with the intangible—a tacit agreement made with the viewer to elicit a profound understanding of his abstracted works.
At Sharjah Biennial 15, Steve McQueen’s Pursuit (2005) portrays his poetics and mastery of his craft. His fragmentation of the cinema conjures an array of meanings that can be derived from his works. He treats the audience not as mere spectators but as active participants in front, around, and within the cinematic sensual imagery he produces. Glowing orbs projected on two sides of one screen bounce frantically in a space lined with mirrors that infinitely reflect the projection, the only source of light within the room. The atmosphere is tinged with uneasiness as the viewer is engulfed further with laboured breathing, muffled footsteps, and the rustling of foliage. It is the artist who wears these lights, and is grappling with the nocturnal darkness of Amsterdam’s Sarphatipark. What is captured is the illusory dance between the act of an escape and a run toward what is possible. Shrouded in anonymity, McQueen’s participation as the subject of the film appeals to a universal understanding of a disorienting experience that can only be communicated through the language of cinema.
Mame-Diarra Niang
Mame-Diarra Niang is a self-taught artist and photographer whose practice expands the notion of photography as a medium through explorations of her concept of the plasticity of territory. Her inquisitive perspective in documenting a place coincides with her own metamorphosis. The landscape becomes a means for an exchange in transformations: the photographer in capturing the vernacular, the vernacular in evoking a sense of intimate remembering within the artist, and the viewer in reinterpreting what the photographer captures. As Niang makes sense of a place, she simultaneously constructs and navigates around the territory of the self. Her practice becomes her quest to understand her lineage—a trace of her ancestors that still lingers and remains given her upbringing between Senega, the Ivory Coast and France.
For Sharjah Biennial 15, Mame-Diarra Niang presents her masterful renditions of grappling with her identity and blackness. Printed on metallic paper, the blurry figures either advance or retreat from the point of focus. Her abstraction of portraits breeds familiarity and demands the viewer to read what the frame cannot capture or construe. The act becomes reflexive as the viewer acknowledges the meanings that inevitably surface: notions of identity and relational aspects of memory. Niang constructs memory within a dreamscape that necessitates recollection, recognising that forgetting can play a significant role too in constructing and deconstructing the self. She utilises her awareness of forgetting as the starting point of her interrogations. Her non-portraits morph the past that informs, the present that becomes a memory and the future that is dreamed.
Khadija Saye
Khadija Saye was a Gambian-British photographer who celebrated her African heritage through her portrayals of the black body. Growing up in the diaspora, her art practice became her subversion of a patriarchal society that often discriminates people of color. In search for a spirituality that can heal an embodied sense of trauma, she used her art to navigate the continuing struggle of first generation migrants in honoring their African heritage and in recognizing their blackness. Khadija Saye and her mother tragically died in the Greenfell Tower fire in 2017.
For Sharjah Biennial 15, Khadija Saye’s In This Space We Breathe (2017-2018) transforms artifacts of her Gambian heritage, her mother’s Christian heritage, and her father’s Muslim heritage into objects and rituals of healing. First rendered using the wet collodion photographic process, nine silkscreen prints of her self-portraits highlight the strength of African femininity. The process, too, was a ritual that symbolically captured the surrender to a materiality that was beyond the artist’s control. Caused by the unpredictability of the chemicals used, what emerges are dream-like, hazy, and mystical figures that powerfully manifest the spiritual with playful curiosity. In Sothiou (2017) she holds chewing sticks that signify purification and invocation of ancestral spirits. She ties a protective amulet with written Qur’anic verses over her eyes in Tééré (2018). A healer uses a cow horn in Nak Bejjen (2018) to suck out impurities from the body. Saye shields her face from fear with one hand, and goat’s horns on her fingers in Ragal (2018). She holds Muslim prayer beads in Kurus (2018). An incense pot is held over her ear in Andichurai (2018). Lemons and plastic flowers in Limoŋ (2018) and in Toor-Toor (2018) evoke the duality of her life in The Gambia and in Britain.