You were invited to do an installation at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel. Why do you think anthropology museums are asking artists to do exhibitions? I think its kind of a mutual interest—and this is really happening much more in Europe, because many museums here are questioning their collections and wondering how to display these objects. I think the advantage artists have is that we can be really stupid and ask really stupid questions, which helps. The basic question I asked was, “What is all this stuff doing here?” I mean going into the archives is very depressing: there are hundreds of thousands of objects in a really antiseptic environment, and they are there because of a very difficult history. Of course Switzerland is a special case because it didn’t have colonies but in fact all the objects were brought back through colonial networks and with a similar mentality. But I think in the right configurations these objects can help us (the heirs to the post-colonial situation) work through these issues, because they are in themselves so potent. Like what kinds of configurations? I think lots more can be done in that vein if we don’t think we need to be too dignified or respectful—I think respectfulness is a sign something negative is being hidden. I have several fantasies about shows that could be done by changing the setting or context for the objects. For example taking things from the Quai Branly and putting them in Versailles. Then there is the extraordinary decision in Berlin to display the huge German anthropology collection in a resurrected Prussian palace, which I think is great! It is a work already in itself. I heard they were having trouble replicating the decorative sculptures for the facade and I realised that re-duplicating the statues, eagles and so on that would be on the facade and installing them with selected objects from the collection would in fact be a really revealing and interesting 3D historical montage. And in Italy there is of course the anthro-
By Ania Soliman and Chus Martínez
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pology collection of the Vatican. By anthropology collection I mean objects brought back from countries that used to be colonies. In fact one of the sections of my show was about that—this problem of vocabulary. Art objects from those areas used to be called savage then primitive, then tribal and all those words are coded negatively and there is no satisfactory term. (The use of First Nation in the US, for example, seems weirdly condescending, like an act of forceful retroactive assimilation). How did the show in Basel happen? I was in Basel for over two years, first at the Laurenz-Haus Residency, a private residency that a friend of mine recommended me for. I actually got the idea for the show on an airplane. I realised I want to work with an anthropology collection and was introduced to the director, Anna Schmid, and we discovered we were thinking about similar things. The show took a lot longer to realise than I had planned, but because of the generosity of both public and private institutions, Basel is a kind of magical place for me where ideas can become reality. But it also is one of the places I feel at home. Where else do you feel at home? Well, that is a difficult question. In the end the place I feel most at home is New York because I don’t feel foreign at all there, it’s just normal to be there. But my childhood home was Baghdad and that is the place I am most emotionally attached to—not an easy thing these days. In Warsaw, I was recently asked the question whether I am a Polish artist and I couldn’t answer it. Polish is literally my mother tongue and my father, who was from Giza near Cairo, also learned it so we spoke it at home, in Baghdad. So in that strange way I am completely identified through language with a whole nation but in other ways less so. I think I was post-identity from the very beginning where things were not so clear in terms of belonging or not belonging. This is why the current discourse about post-identity art really resonates with me.
What made you want to work with anthropology collections? I think one of the impulses (besides my recurrent feeling of slight shock when seeing many of these objects, which I wanted to investigate) was a line in David Graeber’s text on anarchist anthropology where he says that there is a way in which we have trouble imagining alternatives to the global system we find ourselves in. It’s like we suffer from a problem of imagination. He says that anthropology can be seen as a discipline that provides a reservoir of human experience, which we can draw on to imagine alternatives. I found this approach really resonated and gave a focus to my work. But in the end it was my relationship to these objects, which in itself probably should also be looked at critically. That’s the thing—these objects are so incredible that I believe they can in fact change something inside of people. How can objects change something inside of people? Well they do, all the time! I am very interested in what happened when these objects came to Europe. They caused a huge upheaval both artistically and intellectually. So, even though they are still most often displayed as “foreign” objects, they are in fact part of European culture and now global culture for better and for worse. The two strands that interested me the most were psychoanalysis and economics. I mean, if you look at some of these sculptures with pronounced sexual organs and compare them to the fig leaf bodies Europe was used to you can see where Freud got the courage to imagine maybe something is not right here. Psychoanalysis is fascinating as a spectacle of Western reason unseating itself. That is kind of a better-known story, but I also became interested in objects that come from gift economies and their influences on economic thought. The Polish émigré anthropologist Malinowski was stranded in Australia during World War I and invented fieldwork writing a book about 93
gift cycles in the Trobriand Islands. His research influenced Marcel Mauss’ text on gift economies and afterwards Bataille wrote an amazing text, La Part maudite, which applied the theory of potlatch to solve the problems of modernity. It’s so crazy but it completely makes sense to me. So the series of drawings called “Natural Production” refers to this Batallie text, where he says economics is not a human thing, and that the basis for all production comes from the sun, to which we have a primal debt that can never be repaid. So he sees that the only way out of perpetual conflict and economic crisis is to make things and then (publicly) destroy them, to accumulate in order to dissipate. This is very different from the premise of capitalism, at least in its Protestant form, but in fact we may be moving towards something similar. The trick is to make it work for everyone. Did you find an object that gave that new experience? For sure, in fact many did. But perhaps the clearest was the Malanggan head, which is in a class of objects from New Ireland that was only used once and then thrown away. Now it is for sure an amazing work of art. And that is not how we think of the art object: as something to be discarded. But for them the object was not the issue—it was the ability to enact the object and to remember the object and all its significations and the thing itself had to be actively destroyed so that there was something to remember. So it’s like a conceptual and contractual work. But that is not how we tend to look at such objects now. What role did drawing play in the show? It was absolutely central—drawing is at the centre of my practice. I made most of the drawings first, in New York, and then chose objects from the archives accordingly. I think drawing can be a very powerful tool because it combines knowledge and the unconscious or, perhaps it would be better to say, the body through the unconscious. So it can help ask those stupid questions that are so important to ask.
Grids 1, 2014. Courtesy: the artist
Opposite – Metropolis Robot 2A and 2B, 2012. Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Derek Liwanpo Right – Freud’s Desk, 2013. Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Derek Liwanpo
How to Represent Nothing
The trick is to trust it, which is not always easy. For example, I was obsessed with drawing wrenches and this did not make sense until I went into the archives and realised that the bulk of the self-ethnologising Swiss and European collection was composed of tools and early machines. And that led me to think about how the labouring body was seen as a machine and the clash of that with non-Western ideas of the body. In my drawings I use or refer to different types of drawing. I am very interested in mechanical drawing and in its opposite,