Homelands catalogue

Angus Boulton Fabien Cappello Lisa Cheung Nathan Coley Jeremy Deller Suki Dhanda Jimmie Durham Paul Graham Graham Gussin Mona Hatoum Anthony Haughey Tim Hetherington Susan Hiller David Hockney Anthony Lam Langlands & Bell Richard Long Rachel Lowe Haroon Mirza Raymond Moore Cornelia Parker Martin Parr Grayson Perry Zineb Sedira George Shaw David Shrigley Bob and Roberta Smith Gillian Wearing

HOMELANDS A 21st Century Story of Home, Away, and All the Places In Between Contemporary Art from the British Council Collection Curated by Latika Gupta

Delhi – Kolkata – Mumbai – Bengaluru January – July 2013

In Partnership With

Jaguar Cars Limited, founded in 1922, is one of the world’s premier manufacturers of luxury saloons and sports cars. As an iconic British brand, we are delighted to partner with the British Council in bringing Homelands, a unique and landmark exhibition of 28 artists and world class contemporary art, to India.

Jaguar entered the Indian market in 2009 and since then has expanded to 14 major cities through a world-class dealer network of 16 outlets. In India, one can access the full range of Jaguar products, including the XJ, XF, XFR, XKR and the fastest and most powerful production sports car Jaguar has ever built the Jaguar XKR-S. More information on Jaguar’s rich heritage and latest product range can be found at www.jaguar.in

We are delighted to have the opportunity to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to supporting the arts in India through our partnership with Homelands. The exhibition of the very best art by leading contemporary artists in Britain is a fitting juxtaposition to our international sales of works by their South Asian contemporaries.

Christie’s has had a long association with India. James Christie, founder of the company, offered ‘four India pictures painted on glass’ in his inaugural auction in London in 1766. In 1994, we opened Christie’s India, the only international auction house to have a consistent presence in India.

As market leaders in the South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art category, with sales held in New York and London, we are delighted to be lending our support to this unique exhibition which, through its varied programme of educational events, will encourage a greater understanding for and appreciation of the arts.

Associate Partner

Kotak Mahindra Bank Limited is delighted to be associated with the British Council’s flagship project for 2013, Homelands – one of the year’s most anticipated exhibitions that will showcase works by 28 leading contemporary artists from the United Kingdom.

Outreach Partner

Outset India’s endeavour to support, expand, and engage with art, design, and culture in India as a unique production fund partner for public art projects has, so far, had an incredible impact.

Our support of the Homelands outreach programme has enabled us to further expand our commitment to providing a platform for contemporary art across India.

The activities, workshops and public events that form the Homelands programme are a great demonstration of the vital support Outset aims to offer to artists and art organisations during what we are sure will be a truly exciting time for contemporary art in India.

Venue Partners

Contents

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Foreword Rob Lynes, Director British Council India

13 Exile House Poem Tenzin Tsundue

26 Ten Dispatches About Place from Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance John Berger

53 Torn Between Two Countries Poem Tsoltim N. Shakabpa

68 A Song From a Distance

Poem Bhuchung D. Sonam

78 Anthony Haughey in

conversation with Latika Gupta

10 Introduction

Andrea Rose, Director Visual Arts and Strategic Programmes British Council

19 On Growing Up

from Conversations with Edward Said Tariq Ali

41 Zineb Sedira in conversation

with Latika Gupta

57 Suki Dhanda in conversation

with Latika Gupta

72 Who Sings the Nation State? from Who Sings the Nation State?

Language, Politics, Belonging Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

87 HOMELANDS A 21st Century Story of

Home, Away and All the Places In Between Latika Gupta

98 105 106 110 112

List of Works Publication Credits Artists’ Biographies Authors’ Biographies Acknowledgements

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Rob Lynes, Director, British Council India

Foreword

Since 1934, the British Council has devoted itself to making links between the UK and other countries: to the exchange of culture, education and ideas, helping lower the frontiers that divide us.

Nearly eighty years on, we live in a hyper-linked world. Revolutions in communication and mobility mean that for ever greater numbers of people, those frontiers have already come down. But as more and more people live transitory lives, with hyphenated identities, some of the old certainties of belonging and homeland are fading away.

The British Council exists not just to promote international cultural relations but to interrogate it; to understand the pressures that frame our cultural relationships, and critique the changes in global society that can affect our shared humanity. Throughout 2012, we have been running Re-Imagine, a dialogue and research project, involving thousands of people exploring the cultural relationship between the UK and India in the 21st century. So it’s thrillingly appropriate for our flagship arts project of 2013 to be so closely intertwined with the ideas we’ve been exploring for the last year.

Homelands is, on its own terms, a fantastically exciting project for British Council India. It’s bold, introducing work by 28 brilliant British artists to India, most of whom have never been seen here before. It’s inclusive, reaching tens of thousands of people, especially young people, across four cities, with the very best contemporary art. And it’s collaborative, a truly international exchange of ideas, with an Indian curator Latika Gupta offering a unique slant on a British art collection.

But most of all, Homelands is groundbreaking, because it asks fundamental questions about a world that’s changing before our eyes, about the sometimes bewildering identity crisis that, for so many of us, constitutes modern life. Homelands demonstrates that art can help us learn about the world around us: but also, that it can help us learn about ourselves.

We’re hugely grateful to the four Homelands venues, to our sponsors and partners, and to the project team. Without their enthusiasm and support Homelands would not have been possible.

I hope you’ll enjoy the exhibition.

Andrea Rose, Director of Visual Arts and Strategic Programmes, British Council

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Introduction

In 2009 we launched an online initiative inviting curators under the age of 35, and living outside the UK, to select works from the British Council Collection. The initiative took the form of a competition, with the winner presenting his or her exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, as part of the British Council’s 75th anniversary celebrations. It was the first time we had ever asked curators outside the UK, and whom we didn’t know, to select an exhibition from our Collection, and the response was both surprisingly large and sobering. From all over the world, we learned how others see us. After much internal discussion and debate, six curators out of the many hundreds of entrants were invited to come to London to develop their initial ideas into a full scale exhibition. One of these was Latika Gupta, who has curated and organised this exhibition, Homelands.

What attracted us to Latika’s proposal was her reflection on the changing world order since 1934, the year of the British Council’s foundation. Much of the century has been characterised by mass movements of people, whether through ideas and ideologies that have driven apart the age-old certainties of home, hearth, family, tribe, religion or territory, or due to economic necessity, and the search for a better life elsewhere.

‘Britishness’ itself is now an increasingly fluid concept, with the capital city, London, home to 300 different nationalities, and its ancient principalities and former kingdoms now considering their political independence. Latika’s interest in the shifting make-up of individuals, and of their relationship to their own histories, seemed to us a compelling subject, and we are delighted that she has been able to develop this story using the resources of the British Council Collection.

Latika’s initial proposal was for an exhibition of work by British artists for a British audience to be shown in a London gallery. She has since refined her ideas, and tilted the exhibition on its axis to present it in India, for an Indian audience. British art is here defined in the most catholic sense. All the artists have been associated in some way with developments in the British art scene and, as such, have not only become a part of the British art story themselves, but have changed and contributed towards what it is today – a diverse, rich, generous and challenging series of perspectives, all the more potent for being able to co-exist and amplify one another.

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The title Homelands is borrowed from Salman Rushdie’s collection of essays Imaginary Homelands and Latika explores the meaning of belonging and alienation, of the real and imagined home, drawing from the reserves of the British Council Collection, one of the most comprehensive collections of modern and contemporary British art in existence. She had free rein to choose as she saw fit, and her theme of personal memory and public history has been woven into a narrative that reminds us of the tensions involved in losing traditions and gaining freedoms. One of the most compelling works on the theme is Susan Hiller’s The Last Silent Movie, an installation that memorialises the fate of dying and extinct languages as the world hurtles towards globalisation and threatens to rub out the distinctive features of local dialects, colour, patterns and ways of life. Like local flowers underfoot, it is a salutary reminder of what we might tread on if we move too quickly from one place to another, and not care enough about our passage.

We are enormously grateful to Latika for the time she has invested in putting together this exhibition, and for the insightful and thoughtful way she has brought home to us the many different ways in which a work of art can be read or viewed. I would like to thank my colleagues in India – particularly Rob Lynes, Adam Pushkin and Elise Foster Vander Elst – who have ensured that the exhibition is seen as widely as possible in India and have put together a wide-ranging accompanying programme. I would also like to thank my colleagues in London - Diana Eccles, Head of Collections, Sinta Berry, Collections Assistant, Katrina Schwarz, Collections Development Advisor, and Marcus Alexander, Head of Workshop, who have between them worked with Latika over many months, discussing her selection, bringing out new works for her to consider, and encouraging the British Council Collection to open itself up to a new generation of curators and spectators from around the world.

Richard Long Stone Line 1979 Cornish slate 239 x 130 cm

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Exile House

Our tiled roof dripped and the four walls threatened to fall apart but we were to go home soon.

We grew papayas in front of our house chillies in our garden and changmas1 for our fences, then pumpkins rolled down the cowshed thatch calves trotted out of the manger.

Grass on the roof, beans sprouted and climbed the vines, money plants crept in through the window, our house seems to have grown roots.

The fences have grown into a jungle, now how can I tell my children where we came from?

1Changma (Tibetan) – a tree usually planted for fences, flexible and flourishing

Tenzin Tsundue

George Shaw Scenes from the Passion: The Blossomiest Blossom 2001 Humbrol enamel on board 43 x 53 cm

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15 Untitled II, 12.3.95 Untitled I, 9.4.95 Untitled, 23.6.95 from the series The Homeless, London 1995 – 2000 C-type photographs 25.5 x 30.5 cm

Angus Boulton

David Hockney The Arrival A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, aquatint 30 x 40 cm

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17 Meeting the Good People Distintegration A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, aquatint 30 x 40 cm

David Hockney

David Hockney Cast Aside A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, aquatint 30 x 40 cm

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Tariq Ali, Conversations with Edward Said

On Growing Up

Going back to your childhood, Edward, what are your first memories of Jerusalem?

Well, the house, principally. Because I was born at home, not in the hospital. I was delivered by a Jewish midwife my family brought in, because my mother had a bad experience in the hospital. She had a previous child who died in hospital. So I was brought to light, so to speak, at home.

My earliest memories are of the house in which my family lived until we left at the end of 1947.

It was in west Jerusalem, which was taken in the early part of the winter of 1948. It became Israel. And then, very early in my life, my family went to Egypt. My father’s business was in Cairo and Jerusalem, so my earliest memories are intermingled between Cairo and Jerusalem.

And as I grew older, more Cairo than Jerusalem.

And what was Jerusalem like as a town, while you were growing up?

Well, I never much cared for it. I found it an austere, rather cheerless town. Associated in my mind, to this day, with death and religion, neither of which I’m particularly fond of. Endless church and Sunday School services. Lots of women in black. Many lectures on how one should behave, piety, austerity. And of course, the pervading English influence on top of the Arab. We belonged to a Christian minority – This was a Maronite – No, no. Episcopalian, on the contrary. Episcopalian. My family was originally Greek Orthodox, as most Palestinian Christians are, but my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, converted to Anglicanism in the late nineteenth century. They were referred to as the congregation of the shilling, because all of the missionaries who came to Palestine, the Christian missionaries who came to Palestine, were fantastically unsuccessful with both Muslims and Jews, so they converted other Christians! And we were the Greek Orthodox sort of ‘rump’ that went into the Anglican church. And they did it for benefits. In the case of the Anglicans, it was education.

So my father went to this British colonial boys’ public school in Jerusalem called St George’s, to which I was also sent. I was brought up in that – it was very much part of our lives, the English

Tariq Ali, Conversations with Edward Said

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system, you know ... I was, of course, very young at the time, but all my male relatives, my cousins and so on, went to that school. So I followed along, in a long tradition in which I was not very distinguished. In fact I was caned on the very first day I attended school, because I was speaking during prayers. There was a lot of physical punishment in all the schools I went to in the Middle East, all the English schools I went to.

They were modelled on – Yes, they were modelled on English public schools, but in a way they were a parody of those schools. Because there were no English students. The masters were all English. And they were all single sex schools, they were all boys’ schools. St George’s was a kind of ruling class school.

All the leading families of Palestine sent their children there. The school I went to in Egypt, Victoria College, was also a kind of a ruling class Middle East school. People would come from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, they were all fellow students at the time. It was a very mongrelized group of people. So at least in school there was a certain feeling of – not exactly liberation – but diversity.

Were these boarding schools?

Yes, they were, boarding and day schools. But I was always a day student.

But the effect on the students was very different, in the sense that the boarders ...

Well, the boarders had a more miserable time, I like to think. At least I got to go home. The school day began for me, both in Jerusalem and in Cairo, at seven or seven-thirty in the morning and went on till late afternoon, early evening. But my impression of the boarders is that they were a miserable lot. They had first of all to put up with the awful food, and the rigours of the dormitories which involved a lot of physical punishment and prefects – I was very often the butt of prefects, they were the bane of my life.

Why did your family leave Jerusalem?

Well, most of my family left Jerusalem because they had to. Our house was in an area that was totally unprotected. It was in an area that fell to the Haganah in, I think, February of 1948. To

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my recollection, there was no militia, there was no organised resistance of any sort. We lived in a prosperous but sparsely settled Arab suburb of west Jerusalem. In fact all of west Jerusalem was Arab. That’s not known. We hear about east Jerusalem today but at the same time, the four big districts of west Jerusalem were Arab. And we lived in the most sparsely settled one.

And by the time the fighting began in the latter part of 1947 it became impossible to live there, and there was a general sense of panic. My family left at the end of December, 1947. We were already living in Cairo, so it was a coincidence, we were going to go back to Cairo anyway.

But the rest of my family, that also lived in the family house, left because it was impossible to live there. And by early Spring of 1948 my entire family, both sides, my mother’s side and my father’s side, became refugees. And they ended up, some in Egypt, some in Jordan, some in Lebanon.

And how did you take the shift from Jerusalem to Cairo? Did you prefer Cairo as a town?

I preferred Cairo. I mean, Cairo for me was, first of all, a much bigger city. It was a city in which I felt more at home. The language was more pleasing to my ear – I mean the Arab dialect that was spoken in Egypt – and I still prefer it to any other language. Cairo was a cosmopolitan centre. Jerusalem was a provincial capital. My relatives, and my family, if they wanted to do some serious shopping, would go to Cairo.

Jerusalem was very affected by the war, and by the presence of the British and the Zionists, and the small Arab community felt relatively isolated. So Cairo for me was more of a pleasure, although I was part of a very Victorian regime, in school, so there wasn’t much room, but there was more room than there was in Jerusalem.

In what sense?

Well, intellectually it was much more interesting. There is no intellectual life in Jerusalem that I can recall – though of course I was much younger – but in Cairo one felt that one was part of a large culture, a large civilization. It was very European and Arab at the same time. And I also felt that I was able to develop more in Cairo. By being exposed to the culture of the city, to a school that was much bigger, and had a more diverse student body. The teachers were better.

In all those respects it was a more pleasant place for me to be.

Langlands & Bell Great Mosque, Cordoba, Spain from the portfolio Enclosure and Identity 1996 Blind embossed print on 300 gsm Somerset Satin paper 76 x 71.8 cm

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Langlands & Bell

Qal’a of the Banu, Hammad, Algeria and Friday Mosque, Yazd, Iran Great Mosque, Smarra, Iraq from the portfolio Enclosure and Identity 1996 Blind embossed prints on 300 gsm Somerset Satin paper 76 x 71.8 cm

Langlands & Bell www.

2000 Laser etched optical glass 10 x 10 x 10 cm

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Haroon Mirza

Taka Tak 2008 Mixed media installation Dimensions variable Duration 7 minutes 30 seconds

John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

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Ten Dispatches About Place

1. Somebody enquires: are you still a Marxist? Never before has the devastation caused by the pursuit of profit, as defined by capitalism, been more extensive than it is today. Almost everybody knows this. How then is it possible not to heed Marx, who prophesied and analysed the devastation? The answer might be that people, many people, have lost all their political bearings. Mapless, they do not know where they are heading.

2. Every day people follow signs pointing to some place that is not their home but a chosen destination. Road signs, airport embarkation signs, terminal signs. Some are making their journeys for pleasure, others for business, many out of loss or despair. On arrival they come to realise they are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed. Where they now find themselves has the correct latitude, longitude, local time, currency, yet it does not have the specific gravity of the destination they chose.

They are beside the place they chose to come to. The distance that separates them from it is incalculable. Maybe it’s only the width of a thoroughfare, maybe it’s a world away. The place has lost what made it a destination. It has lost its territory of experience.

Sometimes a few of these travellers undertake a private journey and find the place they wished to reach, which is often harsher than they foresaw, although they discover it with boundless relief. Many never make it. They accept the signs they follow and it’s as if they don’t travel, as if they always remain where they already are.

3. Month by month millions leave their homelands. They leave because there is nothing there, except their everything, which does not offer enough to feed their children. Once it did. This is the poverty of the new capitalism.

After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves: their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear, and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof.

In some photos taken in the Red Cross shelter for refugees and emigrants at Sangatte (near Calais) by Anabell Guerrero we can take account of how a man’s fingers are all that remain of a plot of tilled earth, his palms what remain of some riverbed, and how his eyes are a family gathering he will not attend.

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4. “I’m going down the stairs in an underground station to take the B line. Crowded here.

Where are you? Really! What’s the weather like? Getting into the train – call you later…”

Of the millions of mobile telephone conversations taking place every hour in the world’s cities and suburbs, most, whether they are private or business, begin with a statement about the caller’s whereabouts. People need straightaway to pinpoint where they are. It is as if they are pursued by doubts suggesting that they may be nowhere. Surrounded by so many abstractions, they have to invent and share their own transient landmarks.

More than thirty years ago Guy Debord prophetically wrote: “... the accumulation of massproduced commodities for the abstract space of the market, just as it has smashed all regional and legal barriers, and all corporate restrictions of the Middle Ages that maintained the quality of artisanal production, has also destroyed the autonomy and quality of places.”

The key term of the present global chaos is de- or re-localisation. This does not only refer to the practice of moving production to wherever labor is cheapest and regulations minimal.

It also contains the offshore demented dream of the new ongoing power: the dream of undermining the status of and confidence in all previous fixed places, so that the entire world becomes a single fluid market.

The consumer is essentially somebody who feels or is made to feel lost unless he or she is consuming. Brand names and logos become the place names of the Nowhere.

In the past a common tactic employed by those defending their homeland against invaders was to change the road signs so that the one indicating ZARAGOZA pointed in the opposite direction toward BURGOS. Today it is not defenders but foreign invaders who switch signs to confuse local populations, confuse them about who is governing who, the nature of happiness, the extent of grief, or where eternity is to be found. And the aim of all these misdirections is to persuade people that being a client is the ultimate salvation.

Yet clients are defined by where they check out and pay, not by where they live and die.

5. Extensive areas that were once rural places are being turned into zones. The details of the process vary according to the continent – Africa or Central America or Southeast Asia. The initial dismembering, however, always comes from elsewhere and from corporate interests pursuing their appetite for ever more accumulation, which means seizing natural resources

John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

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(fish in Lake Victoria, wood in the Amazon, petrol wherever it is to be found, uranium in Gabon, etc.), regardless of to whom the land or water belongs. The ensuing exploitation soon demands airports, military, and paramilitary bases to defend what is being syphoned off, and collaboration with the local mafiosi. Tribal war, famine, and genocide may follow.

People in such zones lose all sense of residence: children become orphans (even when they are not), women become slaves, men desperadoes. Once this has happened, to restore any sense of domesticity takes generations. Each year of such accumulation prolongs the Nowhere in time and space.

6. Meanwhile – and political resistance often begins in a meanwhile – the most important thing to grasp and remember is that those who profit from the present chaos, with their embedded commentators in the media, continuously misinform and misdirect. Their declarations will get nobody anywhere.

Yet at the same time, the information technology developed by the corporations and their armies so they could dominate their Nowhere more speedily is being used by others as a means of communication throughout the Everywhere they are struggling towards.

The Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant puts this very well: “...the way to resist globalization is not to deny globality, but to imagine what is the finite sum of all possible particularities and to get used to the idea that, as long as a single particularity is missing, globality will not be what it should be for us.”

We are establishing our own landmarks, naming places, finding poetry. Yes, in the Meanwhile poetry is to be found.

Gareth Evans: As the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey as the rose buds a green room to breathe and blossoms like the wind as the thin birches whisper their stories of the wind to the urgent in the trucks as the leaves of the hedge store the light the day thought it had lost

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as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a sparrow in the turning air as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark hold everything dear 7. Their Nowhere generates a strange because unprecedented awareness of time. Digital time. It continues forever uninterrupted through day and night, the seasons, birth, and death.

As indifferent as money. Yet, although continuous, it is utterly single. It is the time of the present kept apart from the past and future. Within it, only the present is weight-bearing; the other two lack gravity. Time is no longer a colonnade, but a single column of ones and zeros.

A vertical time with nothing surrounding it, except absence.

Read a few pages of Emily Dickinson and then go and see Lars von Trier’s film Dogville.

In Dickinson’s poetry the presence of the eternal is attendant in every pause. The film, by contrast, remorselessly shows what happens when any trace of the eternal is erased from daily life. What happens is that all words and their entire language are rendered meaningless.

Within a single present, within digital time, no whereabouts can be found or established.

8. Lets take our bearings within another time-set. The eternal, according to Spinoza is now.

It is not something awaiting us, but something we encounter during those brief yet timeless moments when everything accommodates everything and no exchange is inadequate.

In her urgent book, Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit quotes the Sandinista poet Gioconda Belli describing the moment when the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown in Nicaragua: “two days that felt as if a magical, age-old spell had been cast over us, taking us back to Genesis, to the very site of the creation of the world.” The fact that the U.S. and its mercenaries later destroyed the Sandinistas in no way diminishes that moment existing in the past, present, and future.

9. A kilometre down the road from where I’m writing, there is a field in which four burros graze, two mares and two foals. They are a particularly small species. The black-bordered ears of the mares, when they prick them, come up to my chin. The foals, only a few weeks old, are the size of large terriers, with the difference that their heads are almost as large as their sides.

John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

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I climb over the fence and sit in the field with my back against the trunk of an apple tree. The burros have made their own tracks across the field and some pass under very low branches where I would have to stoop double. They watch me. There are two areas where there is no grass at all, just reddish earth, and it is to one of these rings that they come many times a day to roll on their backs. Mare first, then foal. The foals already have their black stripe across their shoulders.

Now they approach me. They smell of donkeys and bran – not the smell of horses, more discreet. The mares touch the top of my head with their lower jaws. Their muzzles are white.

Around their eyes are flies, far more agitated than their own questioning glances.

When they stand in the shade by the edge of the wood the flies go away, and they can stand there almost motionless for half an hour. In the shade at midday, time slows down. When one of the foals suckles (ass’s milk is the closest to human milk), the mare’s ears lie right back and point to her tail.

Surrounded by the four of them in the sunlight, my attention fixes on their legs, all sixteen of them. Their slenderness, their sheerness, their containment of concentration, their surety.

(Horses’ legs look hysterical by comparison.) Theirs are legs for crossing mountains no horse could tackle, legs for carrying loads that are unimaginable if one considers only the knees, the shanks, the fetlocks, the hocks, the cannon bones, the pastern joints, the hooves. Donkeys’ legs.

They wander away, heads down, grazing, their ears missing nothing; I watch them, eyes skinned. In our exchanges, such as they are, in the midday company we offer one another, there is a substratum of what I can only describe as gratitude. Four burros in a field, month of June, year 2005.

10. Yes, I’m still amongst other things a Marxist.

31 Wiltshire 1975 Silver print 25.3 x 35.3 cm Kilkenny 1971 Silver print 21.9 x 29.3 cm

Raymond Moore

Raymond Moore Fletchertown 1977 Silver print 21.3 x 29 cm

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33 Flimby 1977 Silver print 28.8 x 27.1 cm

Raymond Moore

Tim Hetherington Christine Sesay, 9 Prince Street, Bathurst, Freetown, Sierra Leone from the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm

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Tim Hetherington

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Top left to right: Pastor John Abu Kanu, 99 Pademba Road, Freetown, Sierra Leone Mr Ina Johnson, 15 Gloucester Road, Regent, Sierra Leone Pa Amdu Kamara, Methodist Mission House, 23 Roberts Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone Bottom left to right: Elizabeth Conteh, 15 Wilberforce Road, Freetown, Sierra Leone Ada Johnson & Abiodu Johnson, 39 Macdonald Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone Traditional Krio Architecture, Freetown, Sierra Leone from the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour prints 42 x 42 cm

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Tim Hetherington Alpha Kamara, 97 Pademba Road, Freetown, Sierra Leone from the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour prints 42 x 42 cm

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37 King Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone from the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm

Tim Hetherington

Susan Hiller The Last Silent Movie 2007-2008 Single channel projection on Blu-Ray disc 24 etchings Each 37 x 42.5 cm Detail, video still

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39 The Last Silent Movie 2007-2008 Plate 1 K’ora The people in this country speak a beautiful language Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de GuÊ (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Susan Hiller

Zineb Sedira Mother Tongue A - Mother and I (France) B - Daughter and I (England) C - Grandmother and Granddaughter (Algeria) 2002 Video-projections on plasma screens Duration 5 minutes each

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Zineb Sedira in conversation with Latika Gupta

LG: Could you describe your concerns as an artist and how these and the imagery in your work have changed over the years? Do you think that the transformation in content can be understood in the context of your personal history, as well as through larger political and social issues – such as the relationship between France and Algeria?

ZS: One of the primary themes that runs through my work is the issue of displacement or mobility. This is emblematic of my own displacement from Paris to London in 1986, but also of my parents’ immigration from Algeria to France in the early 60s. Memory, oral history and transmission are the three main strands within this notion of displacement, and much of my earlier work is connected to my French and Algerian identities. Living in England as an art student, I was very influenced by the field of postcolonial studies that was in vogue in the UK in the 80s. This approach helped me to understand the complex relationship between France and Algeria; being away from both countries meant I had the necessary distance to look at my identities in a less emotive manner. It helped me come to terms with it in many ways. With this distance I could make work that dealt with Algerian independence, about colonisation and about racism.

Until 2003 many of my works were autobiographical, and were executed using experimental and documentary style. At the time I was living in London and my parents in Algeria, although they would also spend time in Paris. Many of the works were dealing with Algeria via my parents’ stories. Accessing my Algerian identity was through my parents: their experience, their history, and their displacement from Algeria. In 1991, I became a mother; I gave birth to a daughter in London. That is when I started thinking about transmission, especially in terms of language, because now in the family there were three languages spoken – Arabic, French and English. In 2002, I created the video Mother Tongue that stemmed from these concerns.

I went back to Algeria in 2003 after almost fifteen years of absence. I had not visited Algeria because of ‘the black decade’ (armed conflict between the Algerian government and Islamist rebel groups), and it was frustrating in this period to only be able to meet my parents in France. After my visit to Algeria, I started making films in Algiers that were no longer autobiographical in an explicit way. The Algerian landscape that I filmed became a metaphor for the family and especially the mother. In French, the word for the sea is very similar to the word for mother: La Mer - La Mère. So for me, the sea and the figure of the

Zineb Sedira, Interview

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mother became closely associated; the sea became a metaphor for my mother, stretching to my parents’ homeland. The work still used the family as a starting point, but was now more distant from it, also the style of filming changed, it became more lyrical and poetical. I am now mixing documentary, historical, factual and poetic approaches. In the last two years, I have made a significant video installation, Gardiennes d’images (Image Keepers), about a photographic archive of French colonisation in Algeria and the Algerian war of independence.

The work is about history, yet it also very intimate and personal as it interviews Safia Kouaci, an 86 year old lady who inherited her husband’s archive after he died. Safia speaks about the burden of conserving and disseminating such an important archive, as well as the difficulty of transmitting history. The work is about the fragility of memory and storytelling. I decided to explore the subject in a lyrical and personal manner using the interview format and it was important to convey national history with the intimate personal history of Safia and her husband. As an artist I am always looking for new ways to make work, so combining these modes was very exciting.

LG: With regard to the reception of your work in different places, do you think the work changes when the culture or community that is viewing it changes? Does the work take on additional meanings in an explicit way or is that change very subtle?

ZS: That is an interesting question. The work that deals with Algeria or the Algerian war, when shown in Algeria, is read and understood differently than when it is exhibited in France.

In those two contexts, the reception is ‘emotional’. As the work talks directly about French colonialism in Algeria it become more reactive depending on the audience. However, when it is shown in England, or anywhere else, the reading is detached and less affected by passions.

For me it is interesting to communicate with an audience directly impacted by the issues in the work. However, there are other works, more ‘poetical’ such as Saphir or MiddleSea, which are removed from the Algerian or French context, although shot in Algiers. The readings become more universal.

I am not a political activist. I want my works to be poetic, yet I am interested in social issues.

I believe it is most effective to communicate ideas sensitively rather than via campaigns and slogans. Also, the ‘messages’ have to be universal and should speak to a broad audience; by making works removed from the specificity of France-Algeria I am hoping an audience in India

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or anywhere else can relate to it. For example, I am quite excited to show Mother Tongue in India as it is about transmission, immigration, colonisation and therefore has interesting connections and resonances to past and present India.

LG: Even though a large part of who we are is tied into where we come from, how do we understand this idea of where; how can this where be traced? How can ‘place’ be represented? In your work, place is also written onto the bodies of people, whether it is in the autobiographical mode or in later work such as Saphir and MiddleSea, where place is represented as landscape.

ZS: I am not sure, but when I think of ‘homeland’, it makes me think of mother tongue. I ask myself which is my homeland – is it the same as my ancestors? Is it where I was born or is it where I live? If I leave England, it will still be the homeland of my children. The same questions apply to the idea of mother tongue. Literally, my mother’s tongue should be Arabic but in fact it is French and my children should be French but it is English. So what is interesting in the concepts of homeland and of mother tongue is that it is not fixed and permanent, but instead it shifts between borders. Fixed notions of homelands, as they used to be fifty years ago, have a different resonance today. Now we talk with normalcy of the diaspora, a diasporic language or a diasporic way of thinking.

As regards to the body, for me it is not just a physical entity, it is a metaphor for landscape but also an intellectual and spiritual space.

LG: How do you think the relationship between history and memory informs the way in which we think about place and in what ways does your work delve into these ideas?

ZS: Mother Tongue and Mother, Father and I, to name just two works, deal with memory and oral history looking at my French and Algerian identities. While living in the UK, my Algerian identity was explored via my parents and my recollection of the country when visiting as a child. So in a way, memory was the key to enter Algeria. When I went back in 2003, after a long gap, my work shifted, as I was now able to directly access the country. Memory shifted and became something else as my earlier memories were challenged. Memory is not fixed and it can be contested. I became interested in the fragility of memory.

Zineb Sedira, Interview

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LG: Do you think the idea of homelands are really rooted only in memory and, if you were to think of it in the diasporic sense, that it changes as you experience it with your own physical movement back into those places, rather than accessing it only through memory?

ZS: The word ‘emotion’ comes to my mind while you are talking. I am wondering if fifty years ago, such a sense of homeland was tied up with emotion. Nowadays our experience of travelling, of meeting people from different backgrounds and even eating food from different cultures, allows us to be less attached emotionally to the land we come from. In the same way, there is also less attachment to tradition and culture due to ‘globalisation’.

LG: It is interesting that you say this because the exhibition also looks at the idea of homelands even if you are not in a condition of exile. If anyone were to ask you, as I am sure they often do, where is your homeland, what is your response? Is it Algeria, by virtue of your parents, or France? But you have also spoken about how you have felt a bit like an outsider in both places.

ZS: In addition to Algeria and France, I have also made Britain my home. This means I have a strange relationship to these countries, as I do not feel as rooted as others might do.

However, my experience is not unique as I live in an era where immigration and displacement is everywhere. So when you ask me about my homeland, I am always struggling to answer. I truly do not have this attachment to the land so I don’t know where my homeland is. In fact, I have three homelands rather than one and I find the fixity and limits that come with homeland problematic.

LG: In your family, given that migration and displacement occurred in different ways across three generations, in a way for your daughter as well, do you think that there is any shared experience in these displacements across time, which could then be thought of as a universal response or experience?

ZS: I think the nature of the movement itself has changed. My parents left Algeria for economic reasons and so they were immigrants in France. One could say that I immigrated to England, but I didn’t. I came to be educated. So my experience differs from my parents on many levels. Unlike me, my parents can’t read nor write as they lived in rural colonised Algeria.

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For them the experience of immigrating would have been difficult especially in France where administration is complex and paperwork is essential. Also the colonial relationship and the war of independence between Algeria and France made the immigration of my parents more difficult. I guess the world must have been very different from immigrating in the 60s to the 80s. However, in terms of the experience and the feeling of displacement, much of it is similar.

LG: What do you think about the relationship between this condition of displacement and the art that emerges from this experience? Also through my interactions with people who have experienced exile in very different ways than immigrants, I have been wondering whether it is possible to speak of the exile experience in terms other than just nostalgia.

ZS: I do not come from a background of exile; I do not have that experience. But it seems to me that someone who has been exiled often cannot go back to his country. In the case of my parents, as they immigrated for economic reasons, it was always possible to return. I can perhaps speak about another form of ‘exile’ – that of illegal immigrants. They end up in countries where they do not have identity papers so cannot travel within the country, let alone go back to their home, until the situation is legally clarified. That is again a different kind of experience.

LG: For your parents the experience of moving and of displacement was coloured by the lack of being able to read and write. This leads to the question of language and the loss of language. How essential is language to our sense of who we are? Of course this brings us back to Mother Tongue, where three languages speak of the histories of the three women in the family, but also of three countries – Algeria, France and England – and their intertwined histories.

ZS: For me communicating is important but it depends on the type of communication: familial, intimate, administrative ... Many people feel sad when watching Mother Tongue, as my mother and daughter struggle to converse with each other. And one can see my daughter looking towards me, the camera. My role becomes one of translator or interpreter. It is true that there is no verbal communication between them, but where there are no words, sometimes there are other means. In the case of my daughter and my mother, they converse via looks, cuddles and kisses – their communication is through a physical language. So at

Zineb Sedira, Interview

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times, it is possible to communicate by other means of language, however, there are other occasions where language is vital to a stable life. As I work in Algeria, France and England, it is useful for me to correspond in the local languages. I have seen my parents struggle all their immigrant life as they could not read or write French. Especially my mother, as she was a housewife so was less exposed to the local language. My parents have had to rely on their children for any tasks that required language such as bills, health care ...

LG: This makes me think of the relationship language has to places that we think of as home.

For your mother, to not be able to easily mingle, and to have to rely on other members of the family may make her feel on uncertain ground ...

ZS: When my mother is in France, she feels totally familiar with the architecture and the streets. But at the level of communicating with people it an entirely different experience. She has been in difficult situations, for example visiting a doctor and not being able to express her pain. Luckily now in France, there are doctors who are Algerian, so she can speak to them of her medical problems in Arabic.

LG: In the case of exile where people are not able to return to their countries for political reasons, for instance Tibetans who are in exile in India, retaining their language, making sure that the younger generation learns and communicates in that language, becomes one of the primary tools to retain identity.

ZS: My parents wanted their children to learn Arabic, Muslim traditions and Algerian culture.

Obviously, they did not realise that living in France would make it a challenge. My parents have deep regrets for having immigrated to France. My mother often cries because if she hadn’t immigrated, her children would be with her in Algeria instead of France. Her daughters would be raised as Muslim girls and all the children would be speaking Arabic. This is very important to them.

Of course, we, the children have been influenced by our parents Algerian traditions, however we have adapted it to our lives in the west. As mentioned earlier, my parents were not educated and their understanding of immigration was wholly emotional, and not articulate: they would live in France without changing or compromising. I wonder if it is not to do with

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generation again. When I came to England, I knew that by giving birth to my children here they would be influenced by where they were growing up. In order to protect their Algerian identity, my parents tried to retain their customs. This was problematic, as they did not realise that in Algeria, ideas, traditions and attitudes were changing too.

LG: This takes us to the idea of loss – whether the loss of a place or culture, history or memory. If we push this idea of loss a little further and think about gaps; and here, I am thinking also of the theme of mobility in your later works from 2004 onwards, where we are between places, between histories and between identities, can we think of the idea of a homeland or home also as a gap? A lost homeland as a gap in our history, a gap in the reality that we are trying to hold on to while the reality back in the homeland changes, so homeland as a gap that we are always constantly trying to fill ... in a way trying to prevent a loss that has already occurred, a loss that we try and prevent by remembering, by recounting, by collecting and preserving.

ZS: For me, homeland and the sea are interesting spaces as they work together. The sea represents the gap between lands. It is in some ways the opposite of the land, the homeland.

Both spaces speak of my experience of mobility, for it is quite literally a space of movement.

Also the sea is interesting as it is not a ‘territorial’ space as such. There are no clear borders, or customs. The sea is an appropriate metaphor for my own ‘homeland’ as it is not fixed and opens up possibilities in terms of belonging. The sea and land represent, in terms of photographic language, the positive and negative. The land being the positive and sea the negative; our eyes are trained to look at the positive not the negative.

While my parents can talk about their immigration in terms of loss, I would see mine as advantageous. Again, this has to do with their particular generation, their social status and where they came from. They truly wish we all were living in our homeland, Algeria. As for me, I would say I am lucky to have three identities.

LG: I am thinking of your work, Gardiennes d’images, the archive as a keeper of history and your interest in memory. Whether it is an image archive or memory transmitted through oral narratives, memory itself is so fragile. What for you is the value of memory?

Zineb Sedira, Interview

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ZS: Memory is not fixed and can differ depending on who is telling the story. In some of my projects about memory and oral narratives I have worked with the elderly. In these cases, memory is even more questionable, although one cannot argue with their life or their stories.

However, in terms of ‘facts’ there might be some incorrect details, which may be forgotten, or even imagined. But this is precisely what interests me, the fragility of memory and how remembrance fades away.

LG: You have spoken earlier about the twin ideas of arrival and departure, of reaching and of running away. Could you expand on this idea of movement, mobility and travel?

ZS: Saphir and MiddleSea explore the Mediterranean Sea and its ports as places of arrival and departure. Both works are about immigration from Algeria to France, but also about the exodus of the French settlers in 1962. Moreover, the children of immigrants and Harkis (collaborators) also visit Algeria to reconnect with their roots. And finally, the pied noirs (settlers) return to Algeria to reconnect with their past. The sea journey becomes a multifaceted space where many stories circulate.

Whatever we may say, the connection between France and Algeria is still very strong.

MiddleSea is literally shot on a boat during a sea journey. One can see an arrival and a departure, but you never know where from. In Saphir, the imagery is anchored in the architecture around the port of Algiers. The city was built during colonial times, hence its French appearance. When in the streets of Algiers, it is as though you are in Marseilles, similar architecture by the same architects! In Algiers, there are so many reminders and remainders of the colonisation. This can also be found in other areas such as food. So here the sea both separates and connects the two countries.

49 Ghost 1998 The Cambridge Atlas of the Stars/pulped paper disc 20 cm diameter

Graham Gussin

Lisa Cheung I Want to be More Chinese 1997 Photo-emulsion on ceramic 10 parts, Dimensions variable

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51 Village of Penians 2001 Glazed ceramic 50 x 24 cm

Grayson Perry

Bob and Roberta Smith Concrete Boats 1996 Cast concrete, string and metal Each 15 x 30 x 13.5 cm

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Torn Between Two Countries

torn between two countries separated by boundaries one gave me birth the other one hearth one gave me my heritage the other one my parentage one taught me theocracy the other gave me democracy shattered dreams in one in the other a life in the sun for whom shall I my loyalty reserve? which country shall I loyally serve? torn between two countries separated by boundaries my heart will die in America my soul will live on in Tibet

Tsoltim N. Shakabpa

Jeremy Deller Acid Brass 1997 DVD Duration 8 minutes

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55 The History of the World 1997 Screenprint 66 x 112 cm

Jeremy Deller

Suki Dhanda Untitled Four works from the series Shopna 2002 C-type prints mounted on aluminium 125 x 125 cm

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Suki Dhanda in conversation with Latika Gupta

LG: Suki, you were born in England to immigrant parents. What was your experience of growing up and moving between cities in England as a first generation British-Asian woman?

SD: My parents emigrated from Punjab in north India in the 1960s, as part of a mass-migration to England. They settled just outside of London in Slough, where I was raised. Slough is a very multicultural town, with a large Asian community. Living there would sometimes make me feel a little claustrophobic, in that you couldn’t move left or right without people knowing what you were up to. One had to always be seen to be modestly dressed in the neighbourhood and also behave like a good Indian girl! We were brought up with cultural baggage in that my parents, and others of their generation, tried to bring us up as though we were still back in the village in Punjab. I think, socially, India was moving forward and progressing but in England, Indian immigrants were stuck in the old ways and they did not know how to move forward with the times in a western culture. Eventually, they learnt, albeit the hard way. When we were growing up, we were always confronted with questions about our identity and where we belonged, especially in the 70s, when racism was much more overt in England.

I went to study in Plymouth Art College. Moving there gave me a great sense of freedom, as I was finally in a place where nobody cared about who you were. I moved to London in my twenties and came in contact with many like-minded people. At that time there was a movement in the arts – particularly music and theatre – in which a definitive British-Asian identity was forming and becoming popular. I was now living the way I wanted without the constraints that I had when I was growing up in Slough.

When I visit my family in Slough I suppose I am exposed to my ‘Asianness’, that is, I become again my parents’ daughter. There is still a strong sense of ‘home’, which I respect.

LG: What is the role of gender in your work, for example in the Shopna series? You have also done a series on your parents’ home, in which there are many images of the kitchen. Can spaces, whether domestic or public, be thought of as embodying the experiences of people, genders or communities?

SD: The kitchen played a big role in my life as I was growing up, because I had to do a lot of work there. While a lot of my friends socialised, I had to spend my time cleaning, cooking

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or cutting onions. I would make breakfast for my brothers, since it was understood that boys were not supposed to do kitchen work. Interestingly, Shopna too spends a lot of time in the kitchen helping her mother. It is a well utilised space, especially for women in Asian families.

LG: How did you decide to work with Shopna? I understand the photography series was commissioned as part of the British Council exhibition Common Ground?

SD: Shopna was someone I knew from work that I was doing with youth groups in the East End of London. The project I was involved with at that time explored the idea of the outfit, specifically the influence of Asian clothing in Western culture. At that time, a lot of young, fashion-forward English women were wearing dresses with trousers underneath – very close to a traditional Asian look. I was struck by the cultural baggage that clothing carries with it. It resonated with me as when I was younger I had to wear Punjabi suits. This was a time when Asian girls were not considered cool and therefore their clothing too was not commonly accepted on the street. Growing up in Slough, I would be embarrassed wearing Indian clothes in public. This would often also result in being called ‘Paki’.

LG: The precarious context of India and Pakistan is one instance, but why is being mistakenly identified as belonging to another country or community so fraught?

SD: Around thirty years ago, people in the western world could not really tell the difference between various communities within Asia. When I was at school, Muslim girls were not wearing the hijab, as a result all ‘brown’ girls were simply Asian. Over the years, specifically after 9/11, people are realising the distinctions between Asians. In Britain, it is much more acceptable for people to dress differently, but elsewhere, there continues to be racism. Until a few years ago, Sikh taxi drivers in New York were getting beaten up because they had beards and turbans; people can have a blinkered view of others they don’t know or understand.

Everything we are discussing now has been influenced by what happened with 9/11. When it comes to art or even fashion, we speak in terms that are either pre- or post-9/11. For instance, the hijab no longer has the same meaning that it did prior to 9/11.

LG: Just to stay with the idea of India and Pakistan, especially since your parents are from

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Punjab, why was it important to specify which side of the border one was from; to mark the distinction between Sikhs and Muslims, even though both communities can be from Punjab?

SD: The distinction was not being made on sectarian grounds, but more in order to assert one’s own identity with pride. Slough is home to very diverse communities. Today my parents’ neighbours are a Muslim family and a Caribbean man married to a Japanese woman. I wore a karha (the Sikh’s silver bangle) as a child, this became more important to me as a teenager as it was a visible manifestation of my Sikh identity. At that time it was a big no-no to even think about mixing with a Muslim boy. These restrictions have their roots in the history of the partition of India and Pakistan on the basis of religion.

The karha is still an important part of who I am. I continue to wear it because I’ve had it all my life. It is interesting how a piece of jewellery identifies you to other Asians. If I go to India now, people would be able to tell where I’m from by looking at the karha.

LG: This makes me think about the idea of cultural markers, such as clothing and jewellery and the role that they play in being able to identity, define and also complicate ideas of community. Could you also speak about the role and agency of people like Shopna?

In the west, after 9/11, the hijab is too easily designated a marker of orthodoxy and the women who wear it are termed conservative. Ironically, in the case of Shopna, many Islamic communities today may condemn her for being too ‘western’, since she pairs the hijab with jeans and sneakers. In this wrestle between orthodoxy and modernity, it is women who most often become symbols that are appropriated one way or the other.

SD: Shopna was more progressive and confident than I was at her age. She wore her hijab with an attitude, though it is important to remember that this was before 9/11, before uprisings and the transformation of the hijab into a loaded religious symbol. I saw the hijab as a part of her. For her, the veil made her feel safe as a young girl living in a rough part of town. It was a part of her daily existence, much like her Nike sneakers that she wore everyday.

For me, Shopna was just like any other teenager who loves music and makeup. The only difference between her and a white girl was her colour and that she wore a scarf.

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LG: Could you describe the project, did you speak to Shopna’s family about the Common Ground exhibition and what was their response?

SD: Yes, I discussed it in detail with them and they were very open about it. I had met Shopna through the youth group in Whitechapel, East London; she stood out from the other girls as she had this amazing air of confidence about her. In photography you learn to read people’s faces, you can read their vibe by looking at them and this is what draws me in. It is not just their features, but it is something intangible that makes me want to meet them and take their pictures.

LG: When you are taking these pictures how do you decide where you will photograph your subjects? Is there a difference between a project like the Shopna series and the studio photographs that you take?

SD: With Shopna, it was very important to get an idea of her everyday lifestyle. I spoke to her about locations, where she hangs out with her friends, where she gets her chips from, and the places she spends her daily life. She dictated where we would go and we would walk around and decide what worked the best. It was important for me to photograph her in the right light; I wanted the images to be vibrant and colourful and to avoid any negative dreariness.

LG: The photographs that you chose for the final series would have been selected from hundreds that you must have taken. What governed the choices that you finally made? The eight in the series are a combination of exteriors and interiors, public and private spaces, and of Shopna alone and with her friends. These images all have a different mood, especially the wonderful image of her looking out of a window, with the lace curtain falling over her face like a veil.

SD: That picture was taken at the end of the project. I had been invited by Shopna and her family for a sleepover at her house. The next morning in the room, she woke up and happened to be looking outside, my camera was ready and I just told her not to move. And I just took the picture.

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Regarding the number of photographs, that was predetermined by the larger project of ‘Common Ground’. I wanted each picture to capture a certain environment. She enjoyed being photographed and I think she may have got something out of the whole experience.

LG: If someone were to ask you where you are from Suki, how do you answer that question?

SD: I get asked this question a lot here in England because people cannot easily tell where I am from; which country I am from originally. Because my skin is quite light and I have curly hair, some people think I am European, while others wonder whether I am Persian. Even though I know what they’re asking, I sometimes say I’m from Slough, because that’s where my parents live and it is where I was born and raised. But what they want to know is my ethnic background, to that I always answer, ‘Punjab, India’.

LG: Why do you think it is important for people to ask this question?

SD: People are intrigued, especially if they cannot quite make you out. For them, who you are is understood once they can locate where you’re from. Perhaps they like to affix identity this way, putting you in a box, as it were.

For me, London feels like my true home. I can express myself, whether it is in terms of the work that I do or what I choose to wear, all of which go towards making my identity. I don’t feel marginalised, I feel secure and have a sense of belonging.

LG: Most of your photographs are people-centric. I have not seen too many images in which it is only the landscape or cityscape devoid of human beings.

SD: I do like landscapes and I find that I am taking more photographs of them. Landscapes are very interesting because they can tell many stories without people in them. It is an area that I would like to develop more in the future.

LG: Because the human body is not merely a bare body – it carries all the cultural markers of clothing, of gestures and relationship to environment – do you think photographs of people rather than landscapes are more easily representative of the concerns of a community?

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SD: Photographs of people do allow an entry point into other concerns. As an example, if you go to a community festival, you see that all the people are dressed in a very similar way. And this goes back to the need for a sense of belonging; people want to be a part of a community and a shared space. It is linked to the idea of wanting to feel at home. And, of course, what people wear in one location could be entirely out of place in another.

LG: What have the different responses been to the Shopna series? I believe the exhibition Common Ground travelled to many places and garnered a variety of responses, including some fairly scathing reviews from religious organisations.

SD: I think some of the works in the exhibition came under sharper scrutiny than others. My photographs were pretty safe in that they were not making an obvious political statement.

They were really personal stories about one girl. I think other girls found that they could connect with Shopna’s story through the pictures. For me, that was the most important aspect of the project.

63 + and 1994 Wood, sand, stainless steel and motor 8 x 30 x 30 cm

Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum Prayer Mat 1995 Nickel plated brass pins, brass compass, canvas and glue 67 x 112 x 1.5 cm

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65 Measures of Distance 1988 Colour video with sound Duration 15 minutes

Mona Hatoum

Martin Parr Steep Lane Baptist Chapel, Yorkshire 1978 Black and white photograph 24.3 x 16.1 cm

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67 Steep Lane Baptist Chapel Buffet Lunch, Yorkshire 1976 Black and white photograph 24.3 x 16.1 cm

Martin Parr

Bhuchung D. Sonam

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A Song from a Distance (for Woeser)1

My body is trapped in a heated room.

Light shines from the ceiling.

A leather sofa invites me To let my spine relax, But my heart runs To that river by the village That bridge made of leather thongs Rocking with the wind, That dusty yard where I was tied to a boulder while mama Worked in the field everyday.

Here grey houses stare at me.

The people on the train, Frozen, edgy, tired, lonely, lost, Wish for other versions of their lives.

My mind runs to That village by The Scorpion Hill Where the willow trees whistle, Where I once set a farmer’s hut on fire.

I am now a hair of a dandelion flying with wind.

What about you, my rebel?

I see that you, too, are trapped In a far corner of a mad city Under stars shimmering bright yellow – Does your sofa invite you?

Or is it the eyes on the wall that watch Every twitch of your muscles?

I see that your heart runs away To your home in the mountains, Where under the blue sky Pointed stars watch.

From a distance I sing: You and I are the fragments of an arrow Shot forth from Gesar’s bow, You and I are the ears of barley Watered by the Yarlung River.

Every day when I open the internet My heart fears that there will be news Of your disappearance, Like Dolma Kyab into a cell Before his The Restless Himalayas Could be born to a family of books, Like Jamyang Kyi taken away unseen Soon after she produced the evening news, Like that opera master captured in darkness Before his songs became one with the wind, Like that old woman from Barkhor Who disappeared with her prayer wheel.

From a distance I sing: You and I are the pieces of a broken pot In which Milarepa cooked his nettles, You and I are the leaves of a juniper tree Fragrant in the hills of Amnye Machen.

1Woeser, a Tibetan author, poet, blogger and public intellectual, was expelled from her editorial job in Lhasa by the

Chinese Government. She now lives in Beijing, a forced exile from her homeland Tibet.

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Here in exile, my wrinkles deepen.

The leaves fall from the trees.

You will sharpen your pen in that city Where each of your words is measured, Each breath checked, each step followed.

But your pen dances with tales Which come to me in another tongue.

From a distance I sing: You and I are shattered words in a poem Gendun Choephel wrote in his cell, You and I are chipped pieces Of Yonripon’s sword that pierced the April night.

One day You and I will have A bowl of thukpa In that dingy Lhasa hotel.

You and I will be Snow lions roaming the mountains of Nyenchen Thangla.

Anthony Lam Reintegration Assistance From the series Port of Call 2002 Archival giclĂŠe print on rag paper 60.9 x 83.8 cm

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71 Citizenship and Nationality From the series Port of Call 2002 Archival giclĂŠe print on rag paper 60.9 x 83.8 cm

Anthony Lam

Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging

If the state is what “binds,” it is also clearly what can and does unbind. And if the state binds in the name of the nation, conjuring a certain vision of the nation forcibly, if not powerfully, then it also unbinds, releases, expels, banishes. If it does the latter, it is not always through emancipator means, i.e. through “letting go” or “setting free”; it expels precisely though an exercise of power that depends upon barriers and prisons and, so, in the mode of certain containment. We are not outside of politics when we are dispossessed in such ways. Rather, we are deposited in a dense situation of military power in which judicial functions become the prerogative of the military. This is not bare life, but a particular formation of power and coercion that is designed to produce and maintain the condition, the state, of the dispossessed. What does it mean to be at once contained and dispossessed by the state?

And what does it mean to be uncontained or discontinued from the state but given over to other forms of power that may or may not have state-like features? It won’t do to consider as a kind of stipulative definition that the refugee belongs to a movement of populations between existing and autonomous juridical states. When and where a “refugee” is expelled from one state, or forcibly dispossessed in some other way, there is often no place to go, even as one arrives someplace, if only in transit. It may be within the borders of a given state but precisely not as a citizen; so, one is received, as it were, on the condition that one does not belong to the set of juridical obligations and prerogatives that stipulate citizenship or, if at all, only differentially and selectively. It would seem that one passes through a border and that one arrives in another state, but this is where we do not know whether the state at which one arrives is defined by its juridical and military power and its stipulated modes of national belonging under the rubric of the citizen, or by a certain set of dispositions that characterize the mode of non-belonging as such. And even though one necessarily arrives somewhere (we can see that we are already in a dystopic kind of travel narrative), that is not another nationstate, another mode of belonging; it might be Guantanamo, where there is no state (though delegated state power controls and terrorizes the territory where its inhabitants live), or it might be Gaza, aptly described as “an open-air prison.” ... Arendt argues that the nation-state, as a form, that is, as a state-formation, is bound up, as if structurally, with the recurrent expulsion of national minorities. In other words, the nation-state assumes that the nation expresses a certain national identity, is founded through the concerted consensus of a nation, and that a certain correspondence exists between the state and the nation. The nation, in this view, is singular and homogenous, or, at least,

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it becomes so in order to comply with the requirements of the state. The state derives its legitimacy from the nation, which means that those national minorities who do not qualify for “national belonging” are regarded as “illegitimate” inhabitants. Given the complexity and heterogeneity of modes of national belonging, the nation-state can only reiterate its own basis for legitimation by literally producing the nation that serves as the basis for its legitimation.

Here again, let us note that those modes of national belonging designated by “the nation” are thoroughly stipulative and criteria: one is not simply dropped from the nation; rather, one is found wanting and, so, becomes a “wanting one” through the designation and its implicit and active criteria. The subsequent status that confers statelessness on any number of people becomes the means by which they are at once discursively constituted within a field of power and juridically deprived. ... A fair amount is at stake when we consider how best to think about the nation-state as a political formation that requires periodic expulsion and dispossession of its national minorities in order to gain a legitimating ground for itself. One might think that no nationstate can lay claim to legitimacy if it is structurally and ritually bound up with the expulsion of national minorities. That is doubtless right, but the normative claim that objects to the phenomenon ought not to stop us from understanding the mechanisms though which the phenomenon operates. It matter whether, through such expulsions, the nation-state finds its ground or whether the nation-state ... establishes its border, aligning its territory with its assertion of nationality. If the expulsion takes the form of containment, and those expelled minorities are contained within the territory, this differs markedly from those expulsions in which an exterior site contains them, and it matters further whether the exterior site borders on the nation-state’s territory. What distinguishes containment from expulsion depends on how the line is drawn between the inside and the outside of the nation-state. On the other hand, both expulsion and containment are mechanisms for the very drawing of that line. The line comes to exist politically at the moment in which someone passes or is refused rights of passage. Further, is it the case that the dispossessed populations are always and only national minorities? And what precisely is the mechanism and effect of this dispossession? The nationstate can only put some people, always, in quite a state, but which state is this? ...

Jimmie Durham Our House 2007 Drypoint on copperplate 29.7 x 42 cm

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75 Camouflage Bayrakli Mosque 2007 Painted hardboard, mirror 100 x 78 x 63 cm

Nathan Coley

Anthony Haughey Untitled From the series Home 1991/2 C-type colour print 50.8 x 61 cm

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77 Untitled From the series Home 1991/2 C-type colour print 50.8 x 61 cm

Anthony Haughey

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Anthony Haughey in conversation with Latika Gupta

LG: The political and social dynamics in Ireland and those governing Europe’s relationship with neighbouring continents informs a substantial core of your work. How has your personal location influenced your art practice?

AH: I was born in Northern Ireland where Irish and British identity defines and polarises the community; cultural identity continues to be highly contested, and no doubt this environment has influenced my art practice. I am particularly interested in how economic, political and cultural contestations shape societies. I was an art student in England in the 80s during the Thatcher era. Northern Ireland was in turmoil and working-class communities in Britain were being decimated by Conservative government policies. My formative years as an artist were immersed in an extremely politicised society. Many artist friends chose to turn their back on this reality and retreat to the studio, for me this was not an option. I have been socially engaged from the beginning. My recent work is increasingly collaborative and includes curatorial projects and critical writing.

LG: Many of your photography projects delve into the notion of ‘landscape’ – physical geography as well as built environments. Here I am thinking of series such as Home, where the images reveal hidden and intimate subtexts within the idea of religion, faith and its role and effect on the lives of families. The photographs of interiors are peopled, which is in stark visual contrast to a project like Settlement, where buildings replace bodies. How can we think of landscape, geography, structures and their relationship with bodies?

AH: Landscape is a synthesis of place, people and memory; human presence is never entirely absent. Imaging the landscape in Ireland is a particularly charged activity in which the shadow of history is ever present. Settlement, the project you refer to, is a very recent work that charts the fallout from the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy. I produced a series of photographs of ghost estates – unfinished houses. The photographs were produced between sunset and sunrise, in the penumbra or half-light. The combination of darkness, artificial light and long exposures creates a hyper-reality and a distant glow evoking the historical ruin. Art critic Fintan O’Toole described the work as the ‘Celtic Tiger Twilight … the pictures can be seen as an Irish visual version of Shelley’s Ozymandias, “Round the decay / of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”’

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LG: How did the Home series evolve and what was the process of making these images?

AH: Home evolved from a chance encounter while visiting my aunt and uncle’s house in Dublin. My aunt was sitting at the living-room table reading the bible, my two young cousins were lying across the table, there was a religious image of the Sacred Heart on the wall above them, the boy was playing with a plastic gun, he starting pointing it towards his head – the juxtaposition of all these elements created a photographic allegory. An innocent childhood gesture surrounded by religious iconography and a more significant and sinister meaning. Looking back at the work now there is a tension between narrative and tableau.

Narrative imposes the act of witnessing, it is less precise and messier – being present in the everyday, but there is also more potential for resistance. Tableau changes the function of the photograph; it has a different relationship to time and becomes more filmic and distant from reality. Home was produced within an ‘ethnographic’ situatedness – I lived with five families and camped out in their living rooms for a year. The photographs were the result of a observing everyday family rituals juxtaposed with the material culture within each living space.

My aunt and uncle’s living room was painted a really intense shade of blue. It had a shrinelike quality. Every home is a living archive where objects that have accumulated over time generate personal histories. In the living rooms there was heady mix of religious and kitsch imagery but also objects and images that referenced historical antagonisms and the world outside.

LG: Homelands attempts to explore the notion of ‘place’ beyond mere physical geographies and as being intrinsically linked to our projects of self -definition. I am thinking in particular of your current project Citizen, but also Edge of Europe. Could you tell us about the Separation Fence and its role in creating a demarcation between North Africa and Europe?

AH: The notion of ‘place’ is bound to the notion of a homeland, as much imagined as real.

For citizens the nation state appears to be a secure, fixed knowable entity. It is taken for granted that the state protects the rights of citizens. Saskia Sassen argues that the definition of citizenship has changed, especially in the wake of globalisation. Legal rights previously only enjoyed by the nation-state citizen are being expanded and challenged by international human rights law, which empowers the individual rather than governments. However when

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an asylum seeker applies for leave to remain on humanitarian grounds this often leads to inaction, whereby the claimant can spend years in limbo in detention centres and refugee camps waiting for a decision. Millions of displaced migrants are criminalised and live precarious lives on the peripheries of cities, towns and villages, in harbours, derelict buildings or outdoors on hillsides and in forests. The fortunate ones, who make it to a safe country, are housed by the state in temporary refugee centres. Giorgio Agamben describes these temporary spaces as ‘camps’, located within state boundaries and yet outside. The camp is a ‘space of exception’ within and without national space, where rights afforded to citizens of the state are suspended. I recently traveled to the separation fence between North Africa (Morocco) and Europe (Spain) where ‘Fortress Europe’ is most dramatically visible. On the African side of the fence migrant journeys are temporarily stalled. On the hillsides and forests surrounding Melilla young African migrants live in makeshift camps and hide from the border guards, waiting for an opportunity to climb over the six-metre high razor wire fence. The optics of ‘Fortress Europe’ and its exclusionary migration policies is not a deterrent for people attempting to escape from desperate situations.

The trauma experienced by those forced to leave home is swiftly followed and reinforced by disappointment at their rejection on arrival at their destination. For non-EEA [European Economic Area] migrants attempting to reach Europe the rights afforded to citizens are suspended as soon as they cross international boundaries, they are criminalised and incarcerated. The resulting trauma disrupts any sense of a linear narrative.

LG: The question of borders and boundaries that define a ‘nation’ (one of the primary building blocks of identity that modernity insists upon) are inextricably linked to the idea of Homelands as ‘place’. Land is marked for people to be included and excluded; territory is contested; barbed wires shift this way and that, boundaries are heavily armed – keeping citizens in and non-citizens out (all the more complicated in cases such as Tibet, Palestine and Kashmir); this condition becoming increasingly fraught in the 21st century. How can we think of ‘edges’, borders and boundaries in relation to land, people and identity? Do you think that today the idea of Homelands is one that is also intrinsically defined by dispute and expulsion or migration and exile?

AH: As discussed earlier the aspiration for a homeland in an increasingly populated world is

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intrinsically defined by dispute; two World Wars and ongoing postcolonial border disputes would attest to that. There are countless examples throughout the world including the Kurdish struggle for recognition and their own homeland. A major factor in all of this is the continued exploitation of the global south. But I want to avoid generalisations here and stay within the ‘art world’.

LG: Could you tell us about your ongoing project Your History is Our History? I am interested in the idea of history and memory and the role that art plays in preserving, recalling and even forgetting – all acts that are essential to any community’s sense of belonging and identity.

AH: Your History is Our History is actually an artist’s poster. It refers to a discursive collaborative project called Troubling Ireland, an artist’s think tank conceived by the Danish curatorial partnership Kuratorisk Aktion. A group of artists and curators in Ireland were invited to work together for a year to share their experience in social, political and cultural activism, informed by colonialism and postcolonialism and Ireland’s relationship to global capitalism.

It is an ongoing project that has and will continue to emerge in a variety of forms, including public art actions, exhibitions, and formal artist presentations, including my own recent artist talk at Goldsmiths, [University of London]. The poster you refer to is an image/text work, mediation on neocolonialism. The poster was part of a public art poster campaign and public hearing in Dublin, where the central concerns and outcomes from our year-long exchange were presented to the public for the first time. We will make our first exhibition together in autumn 2013.

LG: Since you work extensively with the photographic image, what is your idea of an archive and its role in imagining (creating and preserving) a homeland? I am thinking of images that people choose to take and preserve in projects of self-definition or in defining the other – be it religion/clothing/rites and rituals ...

AH: Between 1998 and 2003 I worked in the former Yugoslavia, where in 1999 Serbian nationalists invoked an historical and ancient homeland in Kosovo to justify extreme violence and ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians. Archives and buildings identified as culturally important, such as libraries, mosques and churches, were destroyed in a blatant attempt to distort history by removing traces of ethnic identities. During this period I produced a series

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of installations, exhibitions and a publication, Disputed Territory (2006). Much of this work involved archival research, including the recovery and recirculation of found photographs, corporeal objects and eyewitness testimonies. Unofficial archives, which often emerge through the persistence of memory, can play a major role in re-defining historical accounts of the daily lives of citizens directly affected by conflict and the loss of their homeland. Archives could also be described as unfulfilled cultural aspirations waiting to be narrated and accepted in the public realm. Alternatively, the lost voices of the dead and ethnically-cleansed histories have been described by Allen Feldman as ‘a vast secret museum of historical absence’. For an artist, archives are productive sites of intervention where historical narratives are ruptured and re-contextualised, generating an emerging critical and contested site of reinterpretation.

By extracting and elucidating past histories and hidden information for critical attention, the re-reading of the archive in this way may be considered transformative.

LG: Your work on illegal immigrants and failed journeys to unreachable destinations is poignant and hard hitting. How does this relate to the notion of ‘illegality’ – belonging and not being allowed to belong – where ‘documents’ (passports, asylum papers, visas etc.) serve as the primary facade of belonging. Whether as voluntary migrants or forced exiles, what does it mean to be ‘in-between’ places and what does it mean to ‘settle’?

AH: In 2007 I was invited by curator Mark Mangion and the British Council to travel to Malta to visit a refugee camp. It resulted initially in a site-specific video installation situated within the refugee camp itself. This was a relational work, where the audience was invited into the camp to engage with the residents – a group of migrants from sub-Saharan African countries who had set out to reach Europe from Libya across the Mediterranean Sea in small unseaworthy boats. The survivors were rescued and subsequently incarcerated in a Maltese Detention Centre. Those who are not deported find themselves in limbo, stuck on a small island, with no way forward and no way back. Thousands more have drowned attempting to cross the frontiers of Europe. Last year alone more than 1,500 people drowned! It’s Europe’s dirty secret. These tragedies are barely mentioned by the media, there is a complicity of silence.

When I was in Malta I met Warsame from Somalia, a chance encounter that has led to a series of dialogical, relational and performative projects and direct support for migrants in various stages of negotiating citizenship. Warsame is currently training to be a human rights lawyer at a University in Dublin. I am currently working on an exhibition called Citizen that will bring

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together several of these works, including a performance called How to be a Model Citizen, where a group of ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘refugees’ test the limits of hospitality and the host/ guest nexus embedded within destination countries. Migrants never fully arrive, they exist inbetween states, their homeland and the host country.

LG: How has your work been received in different places and across different cultures?

Outside of the ‘art world’, have there been any adverse reactions, whether of refusal, rejection or even empathy?

AH: My art practice works from the premise of a principal situatedness of art in place and community and its connectedness through dialogic exchange. I do not claim to speak for or represent the experience of the other. I am, however, interested in what Mieke Bal refers to as, ‘migratory culture … the sensate traces of the movements of migration that characterise contemporary culture’. We are all immersed in this culture, we choose whether to embrace, ignore or reject the Other, it is a choice. Inside and outside of the ‘art world’ there are people who reject socially-engaged art. I think Derrida’s provocative writing on hospitality goes someway to address the question you ask. I am very interested in how the notion of hospitality can be used to examine the fraught relationship between migrant ‘guests’ and host-country citizens. It is also connected to how power relations operate at all levels of society, in both the ‘life world’ and the ‘art world’.

Paul Graham Roundabout, Andersontown, Belfast from the series Troubled Land 1984 Colour coupler print 38.1 x 47.2 cm

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85 Meteorite lands on St Paul’s Cathedral Meteorite lands on Buckingham Palace 1998 Maple boxed framed maps of London revealing burn marks left by the meteorite in various locations 54 x 69 cm

Cornelia Parker

Rachel Lowe A Letter to an Unknown Person No. 5 1998 Super 8 film on DVD loop Duration 1 minute 40 seconds

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Latika Gupta

Homelands

A 21st century Story of Home, Away and All the Places In Between

From home you have reached the Horizon here.

From here to another here you go.

From there to the next next to the next horizon to horizon every step is a horizon.

Count the steps and keep the number.

Pick the white pebbles and the funny strange leaves.

Mark the curves and the cliffs around for you may need to come home again.1

The term ‘Homeland’ is usually defined as the country of origin, one’s native or ancestral place, the country of our national identity. Where are you from? – this deceptively simple and oft-asked question seeks to establish the identity of an individual by tracing a person to a particular land, community, language and a set of beliefs. The ‘where’ of the question seeks to locate us, establishing an intrinsic relationship between person and place. However, the idea of place is not one of mere geography. As many cultural theorists have suggested, ‘place’ is imbued with political and cultural histories, languages are born here, and it is from place that identity begins to be defined.

Today, many of us move with ease across inter/national boundaries. We are born in one country, we make another our home. In the resulting crisscrossing of political, social and cultural borders, we live our lives through hyphenated identities: belonging here and there;

1 Tenzin Tsundue, ‘Horizon’, Kora – Stories and Poems, TibetWrites, Dharamsala, 2002, p. 9

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inhabiting multiple places – both physical and metaphorical. How then, do we begin to answer the question of where home is for us? Is my homeland the country in which I was born, or is it the region where my ancestors lived significant parts of their lives? How far back in time can I trace my family line in order to fix my place, my homeland? Through more than eighty works by twenty-eight of the world’s leading contemporary artists, this exhibition suggests that it may no longer be possible to speak of a homeland; proposing instead the plurality of homelands. To consider ourselves as belonging to a single place is to presuppose, in Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf’s words, ‘... that deep down inside everyone, there is just one affiliation that really matters, a kind of “fundamental truth” about each individual, an essence determined once and for all at birth, never to change thereafter.’2 In the twentyfirst century world of hyper-technology and mobility, there is an increasing intermingling of the various aspects that form our identities: regional dialects and languages, local crafts and cuisines, festivals and ceremonies are rapidly fading in the glaring lights of the megametropolis. For Rushdie, this loss is immeasurable; he writes, ‘It may be argued that the past is a country, from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.’3 Today, when most parts of the world are eagerly aspiring towards a globalised urban homogeneity, homeland becomes a concept relegated to the past; akin to a withered, wrinkled family relation who despite being largely irrelevant to our daily lives, we are still bound to through umbilical cords of sentiment and history. Maalouf speaks of each of us possessing twin heritages; a vertical one that we trace upwards through an ancestral line and community allegiances, and a horizontal heritage that is composed of our contemporary relationships. Despite finding common ground with our peers in the horizontal axis, we almost always evoke our vertical heritage tracing our roots and our essential selves to the past.

The intersection of time and place, of the past and the present, is nowhere more potent that when individuals and communities have their countries wrenched from them. As physical geographies become increasingly contested and people are forced to live as exiles in ‘other’ places, past lives and homes are recollected, indeed constructed, through remembrance and nostalgia. Edward Said describes exile as ‘a condition of terminal loss, an un-healable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home ... [in which] exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past ...’4 The exilic condition of loss is intricately bound to the nostalgia for lost territory, terra firma that is no longer accessible.

2 Amin Maalouf, On Identity, The Harvill Press, London, 2000, p. 30 3 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, Vintage Books, London, 2010, p. 12 4 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and other literary and critical essays, Granta, London, 2001, p. 173

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Exiled writers, poets and artists – whether from Palestine, Tibet or Kashmir – remember their homeland through the invocation of geography, of the sights, smells, sounds and tastes of the lost land. Exiled Tibetan poet Bhuchung D. Sonam’s poem ‘Who Am I’ attempts to address the question through a series of word-images that bring into sharp relief the contrast between the landscape of Tibet and that of his home-in-exile in a small town in north India. He writes, Who Am I? Riverbank. Mud house.

My mother’s eyes. My father’s throat.

Garden of willows. Pigeons pregnant.

Dust that flocks the altar Invading sacred spaces.

Here in the plains there is No yak dung just empty water bottles No barley fields only smoking cars Yellow stars look down on my mother’s sky Barley has turned into wheat Cabbages have stolen the fields from round radish Grandfather’s tsampa bag is flat.5 For those in exile, home will always be remembered and yearned for not only as the place where they were born but, more importantly, as the place where they hope one day to return, the land in which they hope to die. The memory of a place as the past is in many ways an imagined one. We construct homelands through nostalgia. Salman Rushdie writes poignantly,

‘It may be that writers, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation... almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely that thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands of the mind.’6

5 Excerpt from ‘Who Am I’, Bhuchung D. Sonam. Unpublished Poem, 2012 6 Rushdie, p. 10

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The notion of a lost homeland is as potent for voluntary exiles or migrants. As Maalouf has written, before one is an immigrant, one is a migrant, an émigré; before one country is adopted, another must be left behind. For the immigrant/ exile, the discarded/snatched homeland is recovered constantly through texts and images; it is frozen in time as the place of one’s origin, unchanging and constant, in which ‘it’s my present that is foreign, and the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time ...’7 Could we consider the homeland, that place (as against this place which we inhabit in the present) as a gap; a gap that we constantly try to fill or recover through the act of remembrance; an in-between space of immense creative possibilities? Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish’s experience of displacement and homelessness is expressed in these lines: ‘I am from here, I am from there, yet am neither here nor there’.8 For Darwish, as for artists such as Zineb Sedira and writers like Maalouf, exile is an experience that contains the possibility of inhabiting multiple places, of belonging to two or even three countries. The condition of in-betweeness, of hybridity, of being able to absorb several cultural traditions and languages is an enriching experience.

For Maalouf, the fact of being poised between countries, languages and cultures defines his identity; he asks, ‘Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself?’9 Language is one of the key building blocks of an individual’s identity. It is through a common language that community is created. For Julia Kristeva, language is the ultimate sign of group identity. She writes ‘some nations define their identity through belonging to their land, and others through blood ties. Most, however, rather than with blood and soil, identify themselves with language.’ 10 For Darwish, as for the millions who live in forced or voluntary exile, language defines their sense of place and self. He writes, This is my language, a necklace of stars, around the necks of my loved ones. They emigrated.

They carried the place and emigrated, they carried the time and emigrated ... 11 7 Rushdie, p. 9 8 Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Counterpoint: For Edward Said’, New American Writing, Issue 27

(http://www.newamericanwriting.com/27/darwish.htm) 9 Maalouf, p. 2 10Julia Kristeva, The Other Language or The Condition of Being Alive, p. 2 (translation.hau.gr/telamon/files/ Kristeva’s%20speech.pdf) 11Mahmoud Darwish, A Rhyme for the Odes (Mu’allaquat), translated by Amira El-zein, 1995

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Language has the power to carry both place and time with it. Language – words, grammar, sentences – allows individuals to communicate. Language builds bridges between communities, between countries, across political and physical borders. However, the positive affect of a universal language is tempered by the parallel loss of local dialects. One of the key works in the exhibition is Susan Hiller’s The Last Silent Movie. We hear more than twenty endangered or extinct languages being spoken by the last individuals who remember them.

We understand what is being said only through the English subtitles at the bottom of a black screen. Where English allows us to access these hidden and indeed lost histories and myths, it also acts as a colonising force, signalling the gradual extinction of not only languages, but entire cultures that express themselves through the spoken word.

The double-edged sword of access/ exclusion is also present in the modern concept of the nation state. The idea of belonging is inextricably linked to the twin notion of possession. In the twenty-first century, the term ‘homelands’ invariably brings to mind the suffix of security, where ‘Homeland Security’ – the guarding of the nation, is a prime and constant concern.

Some works in the exhibition complicate this idea: where one nation’s security may become another’s destruction, where politics is entwined with culture, where markings of difference are increasingly suspect. Individuals belonging to a nation are accorded citizenship through political charters; they are given papers and official booklets that grant and document their identity. The lack of these documents marks a person as a foreigner, an alien, belonging outside of the borders of a state. The world may be reduced to a globe, with continents and countries swirling in an endless rotation, however the act of mapping also implies marking the boundaries of a land in order to indicate what is not within. Along with territories, communities and individuals are excluded.

As history has demonstrated, the idea of multiculturalism, the possibility of several disparate cultures co-existing and intermingling harmoniously, contains within itself a paradox. As the world supposedly becomes smaller, as regional affinities are questioned, the accelerated movement of people across the globe is paralleled by an increasing insularity of countries and communities. Maalouf succinctly writes

‘We all have to live in a universe bearing little resemblance to the place that we were born; we must all learn other languages, other modes of speech, other codes; and we

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all have the feeling that our own identity, as we have conceived of it since we were children, is threatened. Many have left their native land, and many, though they haven’t left it, can no longer recognise it.’12

In these uncertain terrains, identities are constructed and asserted. The ‘fundamental allegiance’ that Maalouf cautioned us against, is found in the guise of national, racial, ethnic and religious affinities. To be I, is to not be you. The project of self-definition is intricately interwoven with the act of defining the contours of the other. Clothing, food, faith and language become markers of difference, allowing us to define ourselves in relation to what we are not. However, this marking of difference manifests itself within a community too, where people return to their native lands and adopt new styles of architecture, cuisine and attire, as Tim Hetherington’s photographs of Creole architecture in Sierra Leone show us. ‘(today) we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion ...’13 Where are you from? When asked, I am quick to respond that I am Punjabi – from Punjab, a region in north-western India – a place I was neither born in, nor have lived in for any part of my life. My maternal grandfather gives a more considered response – if we are to call ourselves Punjabi, it is from undivided Punjab – a place that, post 1947, belongs to two nations – India and Pakistan.

National boundaries are fickle.

In curating this exhibition from the British Council Collection, I have come closer to an idea of my own self. An idea that is based not on tracing my roots, but one that is intent on embracing all the elements that influence me culturally and politically. I imagine my selfhood as a membrane rather than a tree; a malleable skin that is easy to shift shape, to mould itself, to expand and contain. As Bhabha writes

‘[what is] politically crucial is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and

initial subjectivities and focus on those movements or processes that are produced 12 Maalouf, p. 32 13 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994, p. 1

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by the articulation of cultural differences. These in-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that imitate new signs of identity and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation in the act of defining the idea of society itself.’14

Through the selection of texts in the catalogue and works in the exhibition, I hope to question and contemplate the idea of ‘Homelands’ through multiple layers and a plurality of meanings; exploring ideas of belonging and alienation, of the imagining and imaging of home and away.

The exhibition hopes to bring to the fore these concepts through works that deal with public histories and personal memories; to travel through familiar physical geographies and the intangible terrains of the imaginary.

14 Bhabha, pp. 1-2

Fabien Cappello Mapping The Makers Of Povoa De Sto Adriao, Odivelas 2009 Ceramic, steel Dimensions variable

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95 Melanie and Kelly 1997 Screenprint framed to artist’s specification 114.3 x 88.9 cm

Gillian Wearing

97 Imagine the Green is Red 1998 C-type print 30.5 x 30.5 cm

David Shrigley

List of Works

Angus Boulton Untitled II, 12.3.95 From the series The Homeless London 1995-2000 C-type photograph 25.5 x 30.5 cm © Angus Boulton Untitled I, 9.4.95 From the series The Homeless London 1995-2000 C-type photograph 25.5 x 30.5 cm © Angus Boulton Untitled, 23.6.95 From the series The Homeless London 1995-2000 C-type photograph 25.5 x 30.5 cm © Angus Boulton Fabien Cappello Mapping the Makers of Povoa de Sto Adriao, Odivelas 2009 Ceramic, steel Dimensions variable © The Artist Lisa Cheung I Want to be More Chinese 1997 Photo-emulsion on ceramic 10 parts, Dimensions variable On loan from the Arts Council Collection © The Artist, Courtesy Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London Nathan Coley Camouflage Bayrakli Mosque 2007 Painted hardboard, mirror 100 x 78 x 63 cm © The Artist, Courtesy the artist and Haunch of Venison Jeremy Deller The History of the World 1997 Screenprint 66 x 112 cm Edition 49/100 © The Artist Acid Brass 1997 DVD Duration 8 minutes © The Artist

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Suki Dhanda Untitled 2002 From the series Shopna C-type print mounted on aluminium 125 x 125 cm © The Artist Untitled 2002 From the series Shopna C-type print mounted on aluminium 125 x 125 cm © The Artist Untitled 2002 From the series Shopna C-type print mounted on aluminium 125 x 125 cm © The Artist Untitled 2002 From the series Shopna C-type print mounted on aluminium 125 x 125 cm On loan from the Artist © The Artist Jimmie Durham Our House 2007 Drypoint on copperplate 29.7 x 42 cm Edition 4/25 © The Artist Paul Graham Roundabout, Andersontown, Belfast 1984 From the series Troubled Land Colour coupler print 38.1 x 47.2 cm © The Artist Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London Graham Gussin Ghost 1998 The Cambridge Atlas of the Stars/pulped paper disc 20 cm diameter Edition 7/50 © The Artist Mona Hatoum Measures of Distance 1988 Colour video with sound Duration 15 minutes A Western Front video production, Vancouver, 1988 On loan from the Arts Council Collection © Mona Hatoum, Courtesy White Cube

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Hatoum (cont’d) + and - 1994 Wood, sand, stainless steel and motor 8 x 30 x 30 cm On loan from the Arts Council Collection © Mona Hatoum, Photo: Stephen White, Courtesy White Cube Prayer Mat 1995 Nickel plated brass pins, brass compass, canvas and glue 67 x 112 x 1.5 cm © Mona Hatoum, Photo: Edward Woodman.

Courtesy White Cube Anthony Haughey Untitled 1991/2 From the series Home C-type colour print 50.8 x 61 cm © The Artist Untitled 1991/2 From the series Home C-type colour print 50.8 x 61 cm © The Artist Tim Hetherington Christine Sesay, 9 Prince Street, Bathurst, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm © The Artist’s Estate. Courtesy The British Council Pastor John Abu Kanu, 99 Pademba Road, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm © The Artist’s Estate. Courtesy The British Council Mr Ina Johnson, 15 Gloucester Road, Regent, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm © The Artist’s Estate. Courtesy The British Council

Pa Amdu Kamara, Methodist Mission House, 23 Roberts Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm © The Artist’s Estate. Courtesy The British Council Elizabeth Conteh, 15 Wilberforce Road, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm © The Artist’s Estate. Courtesy The British Council Ada Johnson & Abiodu Johnson, 39 Macdonald Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm © The Artist’s Estate. Courtesy The British Council Traditional Krio Architecture, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm © The Artist’s Estate. Courtesy The British Council Mr Wilfred Wilson, 15 Allen Town Road, Charlotte, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm Elizabeth John, 15 Guy Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm 20 Pademba Road, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm

List of Works

Hetherington (cont’d) Mr Issa Mansaray, 1 Adelaide Street, Charlotte, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm Olu Pratt, 2 Elizabeth Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm Abandoned Building, Pademba Road, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm James Lewis, 53 Adelaide Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm Klusu Sesay, 4 Mend Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm D C Elliott, H.S. 3 Hill Station, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm Alpha Kamara, 97 Pademba Road, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm © The Artist’s Estate. Courtesy The British Council Zainab Jalloh, 19 James Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm

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King Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm Mountain Cut Road, Freetown, Sierra Leone From the series Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole Architecture of Sierra Leone 2004 C-type colour print 42 x 42 cm Susan Hiller The Last Silent Movie, 2007-2008 Single channel projection on Blu-Ray disc Portfolio of 24 etchings on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper Each 14 9/16 x 16 3/4 / 37 x 42.5 cm Edition of 3 + 1 AP © Susan Hiller, courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery, London Plate 1 K’ora The people in this country speak a beautiful language Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm © Susan Hiller, courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery, London Plate 2 Cajun Hummingbird, hummingbird Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm Plate 3 Xoleng Now then, come and help me paint my creation Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm Plate 4 Ngansan I’ve never heard this tale Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm Plate 5 Manx Are the crabs crawling, Joe? Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

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Hiller (cont’d) Plate 6 Waima’a Then the rains came Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 15 Potowatomi Bad behaviour Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 7 Klallam They’re lying to us Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 16 Border Cuna Prrrr Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 8 Lower Sorbian Every coin has two sides Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 17 Wampanoag We are thankful for the gifts of the forest Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 9 Silbo Gomero Bring the castanets Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 18 Kulkhassi (there are no extant speakers of this language to translate) Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 10 Jerrais A nice pint of beer for me, please Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 19 Yao Kimmien Hide, hide, hide Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 11 Livonian ‘Don’t step on the mushrooms’, said grandfather Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 20 Welsh Romany Did you ever see?

Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 12 Lenape Do you speak Lenape?

Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm Plate 13 Southern Sami Children of the Sun! No one subdues us if we keep our language golden Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm Plate 14 Ngarrindjeri We learned to hide our language and our secrets Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Plate 21 Ubykh Shade, sea Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm Plate 22 Kolyma Yukaghir The white cranes have passed, the white cranes have passed Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm Plate 23 Jiwarli There is a gap there still Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

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List of Works

Hiller (cont’d) Plate 24 Comanche From now on we will speak Comanche forever Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) paper 37 x 42.5 cm

Marries an Old Maid From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm

David Hockney A Rake’s Progress 1961-63 A portfolio of 16 prints Etching, Aquatint Images 30 x 40 cm Edition 8/50

The Election Campaign (with Dark Message) From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm

The Arrival From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm © David Hockney

Viewing a Prison Scene From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm

Receiving the Inheritance From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm

Death in Harlem From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm

Meeting the Good People From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm © David Hockney

The Wallet Begins to Empty From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm

The Gospel Singing (Good People) Madison Square Garden From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm The Start of the Spending Spree and the Door Opening for a Blonde From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm The Seven Stone Weakling From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm The Drinking Scene From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm

Disintegration From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm © David Hockney Cast Aside From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm © David Hockney Meeting the Other People From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm Bedlam From A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints) 1961-63 Etching, Aquatint Image 30 x 40 cm

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Anthony Lam Citizenship and Nationality From the series Port of Call 2002 Archival giclée print on rag paper 60.9 x 83.8 cm © The Artist Reintegration Assistance From the series Port of Call 2002 Archival giclée print on rag paper 60.9 x 83.8 cm © The Artist Langlands & Bell Great Mosque, Cordoba, Spain From the portfolio Enclosure and Identity 1996 Blind embossed prints on 300 gsm Somerset Satin paper 76 x 71.8 cm From a suite of 10 prints published by the Paragon Press, London Edition 24/35 © Langlands & Bell Qal’a of the Banu, Hammad, Algeria From the portfolio Enclosure and Identity 1996 Blind embossed prints on 300 gsm Somerset Satin paper 76 x 71.8 cm From a suite of 10 prints published by the Paragon Press, London Edition 24/35 © Langlands & Bell Friday Mosque, Yazd, Iran From the portfolio Enclosure and Identity 1996 Blind embossed prints on 300 gsm Somerset Satin paper 76 x 71.8 cm From a suite of 10 prints published by the Paragon Press, London Edition 24/35 © Langlands & Bell Great Mosque, Smarra, Iraq From the portfolio Enclosure and Identity 1996 Blind embossed prints on 300 gsm Somerset Satin paper 76 x 71.8 cm From a suite of 10 prints published by the Paragon Press, London Edition 24/35 © Langlands & Bell

www. 2000 Laser etched optical glass 10 x 10 x 10 cm Edition 15/100 Published by The Multiple Store, London © Langlands & Bell Richard Long Stone Line 1979 Cornish slate 239 x 130 cm © Richard Long.

All rights reserved, DACS 2012 Rachel Lowe A Letter to an Unknown Person no. 5 1998 Super 8 film on DVD loop Duration 1 minute 40 seconds Edition of 3 © The Artist Haroon Mirza Taka Tak 2008 Mixed media installation Dimensions variable Duration 7 minutes 30 seconds © The Artist, Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery Raymond Moore Kilkenny 1971 Silver print 21.9 x 29.3 cm © The Artist’s Estate Wiltshire 1975 Silver print 25.3 x 35.3 cm © The Artist’s Estate Fletchertown 1977 Silver print 21.3 x 29 cm © The Artist’s Estate Flimby 1977 Silver print 28.8 x 27.1 cm © The Artist’s Estate Cornelia Parker Meteorite lands on Buckingham Palace 1998 Maple boxed frame map of London revealing burn mark left by the meteorite in various locations 54 x 69 cm Edition 13/20 © The Artist

List of Works

Parker (cont’d) Meteorite lands on St Paul’s Cathedral 1998 Maple boxed frame map of London revealing burn mark left by the meteorite in various locations 54 x 69 cm Edition 10/20 © The Artist Martin Parr Steep Lane Baptist Chapel, Yorkshire 1978 Black and white photograph 24.3 x 16.1 cm © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

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Bob and Roberta Smith Concrete boats 1996 Cast concrete, string and metal Each 15 x 30 x 13.5 cm © The Artist Gillian Wearing Melanie and Kelly 1997 Screenprint framed to artist’s specification 114.3 x 88.9 cm Edition 2/90 © Gillian Wearing, Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Steep Lane Baptist Chapel Buffet Lunch, Yorkshire 1976 Black and white photograph 24.3 x 16.1 cm © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos Grayson Perry Village of Penians 2001 Glazed ceramic 50 x 24 cm Courtesy the Artist, British Council Collection and Victoria Miro, London © Grayson Perry George Shaw Scenes from the Passion: The Blossomiest Blossom 2001 Humbrol enamel on board 43 x 53 cm © The Artist David Shrigley Imagine the Green is Red 1998 C-type print 30.5 x 30.5 cm Edition 4/10 © The Artist Zineb Sedira Mother Tongue 2002 A - Mother and I (France) B – Daughter and I (England) C – Grandmother and Granddaughter (Algeria) Video-projections on plasma screens Duration 5 minutes each On loan from kamel mennour, Paris © Zineb Sedira, Courtesy Zineb Sedira and kamel mennour, Paris

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of pictures used in this catalogue. If you are the copyright holder of any uncredited image herein, please contact us at arts.india@in.britishcouncil.org

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Publication Credits

Tariq Ali, Conversations with Edward Said, Seagull Books, London, New York, Calcutta, 2006, pp. 22-28 John Berger, ‘Ten Dispatches About Place’, from Hold Everything Dear:Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2008 (first published by Verso, 2007), pp. 113-121 Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? Language, Politics, Belonging, Seagull Books, London, New York, Calcutta, 2010 pp. 4-7, 30-34 Tsoltim N. Shakbpa, ‘Torn Between Two Countries’, from Bhuchung D. Sonam (ed.) Muses In Exile: An Anthology of Tibetan Poetry, Paljor Publications, New Delhi, 2004, p. 45 Bhuchung D. Sonam, ‘A Song from a Distance’, from Songs from a Distance, TibetWrites Books, Dharamsala, 2012 (first published in 2009), pp. 10-13 TenzinTsundue, ‘Exile House’, from Bhuchung D. Sonam (ed.) Muses In Exile: An Anthology of Tibetan Poetry, Paljor Publications, New Delhi, 2004, p. 103 All texts © Publishers and Authors

Artists’ Biographies

Angus Boulton b. 1964 York, UK 2005-08 Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship in the creative and performing arts, Manchester Metropolitan University.

1985 London University.

Lives and works in London Fabien Cappello b. Paris, France 2009 Royal College of Art, London 2007 École Cantonale d’art de Lausanne Lives and works in London Lisa Cheung b. 1969 Hong Kong 1998 Goldsmiths College, University of London 1992 Queen’s University, Ontario Lives and works in London and Granada, Spain Nathan Coley b. 1967 Glasgow, Scotland 1989 Glasgow School of Art 2007 Shortlisted for the Turner Prize Lives and works in Glasgow Jeremy Deller b. 1966 London, UK 1992 University of Sussex, Brighton 1988 Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London 2013 Representing Britain at the 55th Venice Biennale 2004 Turner Prize Lives and works in London Suki Dhanda b. 1969 Slough, UK 1991 Plymouth College of Art & Design, Plymouth Lives and works in London Jimmie Durham b. 1940 Washington, Arkansas, USA 1973 École de Beaux Arts, Geneva 1997 DAAD Fellowship Lives and works in Rome and Berlin Paul Graham b. 1956 Stafford, UK 1978 Bristol University, Bristol 2012 Hasselblad International Award for Photography 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship 2009 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, London Lives and works in London Graham Gussin b. 1960 London, UK 1990 Chelsea School of Art, London 1985 Middlesex Polytechnic, London Lives and works in London

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Anthony Haughey b. 1963 Armagh, Northern Ireland 2009 University of Ulster, Belfast, Northern Ireland 2001 National College of Art and Design, Dublin 1991 University for the Creative Arts, Farnham Lives and works in Dublin, Dundalk and Belfast Mona Hatoum b. 1952 Beirut, Lebanon 1981 Slade School of Art, London 1979 Byam Shaw School of Art, London 1972 Beirut University College, Beirut 2011 Joan Mir贸 Prize 2010 K盲the Kollowitz Prize Lives and works in London and Berlin Tim Hetherington b. 1970 Liverpool, UK, d. 2011 Misrata, Libya 1996 Cardiff University, Wales 1989 Oxford, UK 2009 Alfred I. duPont Award 2007 World Press Photo of the Year 2000-04 Fellowship from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts Susan Hiller b. 1940 Tallahassee, Florida, USA 1965 Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA 1961 Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA 2002 DAAD Fellowship 1998 Guggenheim Fellowship Lives and works in London and Berlin David Hockney b. 1937 Bradford, UK 1957 Bradford School of Art 1962 Royal College of Art, London 2012 Order of Merit 1997 Companion of Honour 1997 Royal Academician, Royal Academy of Arts Lives and works in London, Los Angeles and Yorkshire Anthony Lam b. 1966 London, UK 2000 London College of Printing, MA Photography 1989 London College of Printing, Diploma in Photojournalism Lives and works in London Langlands & Bell Ben Langlands b. 1955 London, UK Nikki Bell b. 1959 London, UK 1980 Middlesex Polytechnic, London Langlands & Bell live and work in London

Artists’ Biographies

Richard Long b. 1945 Bristol, UK 1968 St. Martin’s School of Art, London 1965 West of England College of Art, Bristol Lives and works in Bristol Rachel Lowe b. 1968 Newcastle, UK 1993 Chelsea School of Art, London 1990 Camberwell College of Art and Design, London Lives and works in London Haroon Mirza b. 1977 London, UK 2007 Chelsea College of Art & Design, London 2006 Goldsmiths College, University of London 2002 Winchester School of Art 2012 DAIWA Foundation Art Prize 2011 Silver Lion Award at the 54th Venice Biennale 2010 Northern Art Prize Lives and works in London and Sheffield Raymond Moore b. 1920 Wallasey, Cheshire, d. 1987 1937 School of Art, Wallasey 1950 Royal College of Art, London Cornelia Parker b. 1956 Cheshire, UK 1982 University of Reading 1978 Wolverhampton Polytechnic 1974 Gloucestershire College of Art and Design 1997 Shortlisted for the Turner Prize Lives and works in London Martin Parr b. 1952 Epsom, Surrey, UK 1973 Manchester Polytechnic Lives and works in Bristol Grayson Perry b.1960 Chelmsford, UK 1982 Portsmouth Polytechnic 1979 Braintree College of Further Education 2010 Royal Academician, Royal Academy of Arts 2003 Turner Prize Lives and works in London Zineb Sedira b.1963 Paris, France 2003 Royal College of Art, London 1997 Slade School of Art, London 1995 Central Saint Martins School of Art, London Lives in London and works between Algiers, Paris and London

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George Shaw b. 1966 Coventry, UK 1998 Royal College of Art, London 1992 Sheffield Polytechnic 1989 Sheffield Polytechnic 2011 Shortlisted for the Turner Prize Lives and works in Devon David Shrigley b. 1968 Macclesfield, UK 1991 Glasgow School of Art Lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland Bob and Roberta Smith b. 1963 London, UK 1993 Goldsmiths College, University of London 1985 University of Reading Lives and works in London Gillian Wearing b. 1963 Birmingham, UK 1990 Goldsmiths College, University of London 1987 Chelsea School of Art, London 1997 Turner Prize Lives and works in London

Authors’ Biographies

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Tariq Ali is a writer, journalist and filmmaker. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and the London Review of Books. His fiction includes a series of historical novels about Islam; his non-fiction includes 1968:Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s; Conversations with Edward Said (2005); Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005); The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom (2009) and The Obama Syndrome (2010).

John Berger is a storyteller, essayist, novelist, screenwriter, dramatist and critic, and one of the most internationally influential writers of our time. Berger has proved prolific in a diversity of media: his television series and book Ways of Seeing (1972) is canonical, while other publications include the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours; a novel, G., which won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize in 1972 and multiple essays on photography, art, politics, and memory.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler is the author of numerous studies, including Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech (1997), and two recent co-authored volumes: Is Critique Secular? (2009) and The Power of Religion in Public Life (2011). She is also active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics, and Jewish Voice for Peace. She is presently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities.

Latika Gupta has a BA in History from St. Stephen’s College, a BFA in painting from the College of Art and an MA from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, where she is currently studying towards a PhD in art history. She has received fellowships from the Charles Wallace India Trust and the Nehru Trust for independent research projects on Buddhist art and performative rituals. She has worked on documentary films and photography projects tracing the history of Indian art and as a curator at the National Gallery of Modern Art and at KHOJ International Artists’ Association, besides curating independent exhibitions with artists from India and Pakistan. Latika writes as a critic for Art India magazine and has also published essays in Marg magazine.

Edward Said (1935-2003) was one of the world’s most celebrated and influential public intellectuals. He was the author of more than twenty books that have been translated into thirty-six languages, including the seminal Orientalism (1979), Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Freud and the Non-European (2003).

He began teaching at Columbia University in 1963 and became University Professor of English and Comparative Literature in 1992. He was a spokesman and activist for the Palestinian cause and was the recipient of numerous prizes and honours, including 20 honorary doctorates.

Tsoltim N. Shakabpa was born in Lhasa, Tibet. He was educated in Tibet, India and the United States and has worked for the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. His books include Recollections of a Tibetan (2003) and Winds of Change: An Autobiography of a Tibetan (2005). He was awarded The International Library of Poetry’s ‘Editor Choice Award’ for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry. Tsoltim lives in California.

Bhuchung D. Sonam was born in Tibet. In exile, he studied at the Tibetan Children’s Village School in Dharamsala, a small town in Northern India. He has published three volumes of poetry and has edited Muses in Exile: An Anthology of Tibetan Poetry (2004). His recent book Yak Horns: Notes on Contemporary Tibetan Writing, Music, Film and Politics was published in 2012.

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York and a recent recipient of the Kyoto Prize in Thought and Ethics, 2012. An activist in rural education and feminist and ecological social movements since 1986, Spivak’s publications include In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), Selected Subaltern Studies (ed., 1988), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012).

Tenzin Tsundue, writer/activist, was born to a Tibetan refugee family in Northern India. He was the inaugural winner of the Outlook Picador Award for Non Fiction in 2001 and his books include Crossing the Border (1999), KORA: Stories and Poems (2002), and Tsengol: Stories and Poems of Resistance (2012).

Tsundue lives in Dharamsala, India.

Acknowledgments

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Thanks to: Jill Constantine, Caroline Douglas and Monika McConnell, Arts Council Collection for the loan of works by Mona Hatoum and Lisa Cheung Zineb Sedira, kamel mennour, Paris, Jessy Mansuy and Mériadek Caraës for the loan of Mother Tongue Suki Dhanda for the loan of Untitled, from the series ‘Shopna’ Venues: The team at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 11 Man Singh Road, New Delhi 110001 The team at the Harrington Street Art Centre, 8, Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Suite No. 5 & 25B, 2nd Floor, Kolkata 700071 The team at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, 91 A, Rani Baug, Veer Mata Jijbai Bhonsle Udyan, Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar Marg, Byculla (East), Mumbai, 400027 Publishing partners: Seagull Books TibetWrites Organisation: Curator: Latika Gupta Project Manager: Elise Foster Vander Elst, Asia Art Projects Partnerships: Laura Quinn, Do One Thing British Council India: Rob Lynes, Minister (Cultural Affairs) and Director India Adam Pushkin, Head of Arts Anjoo Mohun, Head Marketing and Communications Niti Paul, Technical Executive The Delhi team: Gaurav Arora, Mitali Bose, Rebecca Chettri, Shaguna Gahilote, Aman Kaur, Madan Lal, Aanchal Sodhani, Nisha Sodhi and Charlie Walker The Kolkata team: Arnab Banerjee, Debashis Das, Shonali Ganguli, Samarjit Guha and Sujata Sen The Mumbai team: Ankita Athawale, Ruchira Ghosh, Sam Harvey, Jily Joseph, Renuka Reuben and Tasneem Vahanvaty The Bengaluru team: Charu Sapra, Paul Sellers and Neha Jaiswar British Council London, Visual Arts: Andrea Rose, Director of Visual Arts and Strategic Programmes Diana Eccles, Head of Collections Katrina Schwarz, Collections Development Adviser Sinta Berry, Collections Assistant Marcus Alexander, Workshop and Technical Manager Nicola Heald, Workshop Registrar Matt Arthurs, Workshop Technician Will Clifford, Workshop Technician Tony Connor, Workshop Technician Julian Hodges, Workshop Technician Oran Wishart, Technical Adviser Catalogue: Editor: Latika Gupta Copy editor: Katrina Schwarz Image editing: Elise Foster Vander Elst, Sinta Berry Design: Jackfruit Research & Design Printer: Archana Printers Catalogue © The British Council 2013

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