And other monuments: A workbook on orientalism & orientalia

Oriental Rugs and the Stories They Tell (1967)

Table of Contents Introduction

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Glossary

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Part I: The Private Collector

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The collector and the commodity

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On George O’Bannon

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SparkNotes: Minoo Moallem’s Persian Carpets: The Nation as a Transnational Commodity

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Part II: The Public Museum

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A historical choreography: In conversation with Samar Hejazi

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SparkNotes: Ariella Aisha Azoulay in conversation with Sabrina Alli

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Colonial Theft by Roya DelSol

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Part III: Repatriation

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Supplementary Readings

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References

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Bios

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AND OTHER MONUMENTS: A WORKBOOK ON ORIENTALISM & ORIENTALIA

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“IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DECOLONIZE THE MUSEUM WITHOUT DECOLONIZING THE WORLD” — Ariella Aisha Azoulay

Looking to the colonial looting of Indigenous objects-made-artifacts that now adorn the walls of museums and galleries, writer Ariella Aisha Azoulay connects the object to the material conditions that determine the lives of its makers.1 While not all museum collections are retrieved through plunder, the journey of a textile into a museum may tell us as much about its social history as the knotting, dyes, and patterns which characterize it.

Tracing the movement of ‘Oriental rugs’ and ‘orientalia’, And other monuments offers threads and links to colonialism and imperialism on our walls and under our feet. Engaging with West Asian and Middle Eastern rugs, carpet bags, and other pieces from the Textile Museum of Canada’s permanent digital collection, this research project invites a reading of textiles as maps or guides; capable of tracing broader relationships to who moves, what moves, and how transnational mobilities of goods have always relied on ‘immobilizations’ of people.

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Glossary Border imperialism Put forward by organizer and writer Harsha Walia, ‘border imperialism’ defies relegating migration matters to any single state or government and instead links the politics of borders to global systems of power which find their roots in colonialism and enslavement. This thinking forces a shift from notions of charity and humanitarianism to restitution, reparations, and responsibility.

Orientalia Defined loosely and vaguely, ‘orientalia’ was a catchall term used by Europeans and Americans in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century to categorize objects attributed to the ‘East’; especially Islamic cultures in Africa and Asia.

Orientalism Coined by Edward Said to describe the ways that the native ‘Other’ is represented as backwards, dangerous, and by extension, conquerable.

Repatriation The process of returning an asset, an item of symbolic value or a person—voluntarily or forcibly—to its owner or their place of origin or citizenship.

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P. SCHMIDT & CO. POSTCARD, 1909

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GRANDS MAGASINS DE LA BOURSE POSTCARD, 1900S-20S

Part I: The Private Collector Keywords: Orienatalia, orientalism, trade networks, border imperialism

In the early 1900s, a group of T. Eaton Company buyers travelled from Toronto and Winnipeg to North Africa, the Middle East, and West Asia in search of antique and semi-antique rugs that would later join retail showrooms, private collections, and public museums across Canada. From the 1910s to 1950s, these journeys were also common practice among small retailers and department stores like Simpson’s (later purchased by Hudson’s Bay Company) who were keen to advertise ‘adventurer’ and connoisseur imagery to promote sales.2 While the ‘Oriental rug’ industry in Toronto was largely founded and shaped

by Armenian refugees in the early 20th century,3 the desire for orientalia among upper- and middle-class white settlers living in urban centres was deeply tied to networks of trade already set in place through colonialism and enslavement.

PART I: THE PRIVATE COLLECTOR

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PART I: THE PRIVATE COLLECTOR

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The Textile Museum’s extensive digital permanent collection provides space to engage with textiles from across the globe. Although the makers, origins, dates, and even object uses are sometimes vague or unknown, information about the collector and/or donor is almost always available. While early 20th century American and European literature abounds with writing on how to interpret and collect Oriental rugs, detailing everything from weaving techniques to nomadic traditions to physical geographies, the journey of a textile into the hands of the collector is rarely documented beyond anecdote. More specifically, very little is shared of who carried the rugs on their back, what border and custom regulations the collector passed through, and, where applicable, what passport they used to do so. A non-exhaustive look into the history of the collector and the transformation of rugs and other items into commodities and artefacts may be a step towards filling these knowledge gaps…

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PART I: THE PRIVATE COLLECTOR

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Who is the collector?

In her study of commodities in early Victorian households, migration studies researcher Lisa Lowe traces the way that imported objects were inextricably tied to colonial trade networks and the colonial militaries that maintained them. For example, by the 1800s, drinking tea had become socialized for upper- as well as middle-class households in England. This “English” ritual depended on sugar harvested by enslaved Africans in the West Indies, tea and china service imported from China, and further violences carried out by the British East India Company and other colonial forces.4 Like tea, the weaving, dyeing, and painting of silk and textiles headed to Europe and North America expanded exploitative labour and life in the colonies.

Similarly, due to heightened demand in Europe and North America, by 1880, the supply of old and highly valued rugs in Iran had been depleted. As a result, the next 50 years of carpet weaving in Iran were primarily driven by European firms which established looms and offices in cities like Arak (previously Sultanabad) and played an essential role in integrating Iran’s economy into the slowly globalizing capitalist economies taking shape at the turn of the 20th century.5 With these uneven power relationships in mind, the collector and the orientalia object can be understood as a part of global movement regimes marked by the luxury of some at the expense and containment of many. While present day collectors include tourists, traders, and scholars, understanding this history is helpful in naming the power relationships at stake; relationships that often continue to reveal themselves through a collector’s access to travel and mobility that is not yet afforded equally.

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PART I: THE PRIVATE COLLECTOR

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Table of Contents

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PART I: THE PRIVATE COLLECTOR

An excerpt from Oriental Rugs and the Stories They Tell (1964) by Armenian-American rug merchant Arthur T. Gregorian. The yankee clipper that Gregorian references An excerpt from revolutionized the first edition of trade Oriental Rugs and was a state of the art American-built sailing vessel which global the Stories They Tell (1964) by Armenian-American and was responsible for America’s expansion of economic power on a global scale, merchant T. Gregorian.

The yankee clipper especially up against British East Indiarug Company shipsArthur that could not match the that Gregorian references was, in the speed of a clipper. Designed in Chesapeake Bay, USA in the 1810s, this vessel wasmid-nineteenth century, a state of the art American-built originally primarily used by privateers (private individuals commissioned by govern- sailing vessel which revolutionized globalenslaved trade and was responsiments to carry out quasi-military activities) responsible for smuggling people4. By the 1840s, American merchants business in China began using ble fordoing America’s expansion of economic power on a these vessels to trade tea, opium, silk, global textile, and other goods. This activity scale, especially uptrading against British East India led to America’s involvement in the destructive Opium Wars by extension, Company ships thatand, could not match the speed of resulted in massive shifts to agricultureaand industrial labour across the globe5. Bay, USA in the clipper. Designed in Chesapeake 1810s, this vessel was originally primarily used by privateers (private individuals commissioned by governments to carry out quasi-military activities) who were responsible for smuggling enslaved people.6 By the 1840s, American merchants doing business in China began using these vessels to trade tea, opium, silk, textiles, and other goods. This trading activity led to America’s involvement in the destructive Opium Wars and, by extension, resulted in massive shifts to agriculture and industrial labour across the globe.7 PART I: THE PRIVATE COLLECTOR

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On George O’Bannon

This mid-century tent bag was a gift from George O’Bannon, a director of the American Peace Corps in the 1960s and widely recognized for his publication Oriental Rugs: A Bibliography (1994); the first English language comprehensive bibliography of Islamic textiles. O’Bannon described himself as one of many Peace-Corps-turned-rug-dealers who served in Afghanistan and later pursued the study and sales of primarily Asian rugs.8 While the Peace Corps attempt to distance themselves from the American military, their presence in Afghanistan cannot be detached from colonial rule and decades of foreign military occupation that followed. O’Bannon’s personal links to empire were made evident in his racist and extractive language, cited on the Hajji Baba rug club’s webpage as initially saying that “Carpets seemed like the only things that had any value in Afghanistan.” 9 While the Afghan war rug is the most commonly associated textile bringing the stories of imperial invasion to craft, the breadth of O’Bannon’s collection suggests relationships between conquest and carpets are not difficult to trace.

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PART I: THE PRIVATE COLLECTOR

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SparkNotes: Persian Carpets: The Nation as a Transnational Commodity (2018)

by Minoo Moallem Summary Moallem traces the cultural and political meanings of the Persian carpet from when it functioned as an imperial commodity in the 19th century to its present form as both a national and transnational commodity. Moaellem suggests that once the carpet was given an exchange value, it also became a transportable, non-human agent that interacts with the context in which it circulates.

Key Quotes “The consumption of “things Oriental” not only made the Orient tangible and tactile but also collectible.”

“As for the design of the [Persian] carpets… most are neither registered nor owned by anyone except for those that are owned by a company or an individual in the Global North. Although production has increasingly been moved around and outsourced to countries where labor is the cheapest and most flexible, especially in the Global South, the patenting of designs is mostly located in the Global North.

Because many designers considered their designs as part of the “commons,” not

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PART I: THE PRIVATE COLLECTOR

possessed by any individual or collectivity, they were copied and transported to the West at the end of the nineteenth century when symbolic commodities started to have a value. I came across an archive of many designs in England created by European travelers who came back with sketches and outlines mimicking carpets, murals, and mosaics. It would be impossible to tell the story of the designs, then, without telling the story of the transnational theft of those anonymous designs.”

“Persian carpets were mostly exported to the United States before the Iranian Revolution of 1979. However, the limits of the US embargo on the carpets and the pleasure of having a commodity that transgressed borders and travelled regardless of rules and regulations created a new excitement for possessing the carpets. It even made entrepreneurs and smugglers out of ordinary diasporic families who managed to bring along too many rugs to display in their households.

As one of the dealers I interviewed stated, ‘Many Persian carpets had to change their identification to pass for Afghan carpets to get into the US market.’”

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Part II: The Public Museum

Keywords: historical present, settler colonialism, sovereignty

Looking to the global systems which continue to determine who is in or out of place on racialized, gendered, classed, and ableist terms, surveillance studies researcher Simone Browne uses the term ‘historical present’ to describe the ongoing legacies of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.10 In many museums the erasure of this ‘historical present’ is felt in the disconnect between objects and the people which enliven them; crafts relegated to lifeless artifacts and peoples’ and their cultural traditions relegated to a part of history.

By example, tatreez (Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery), wherein which each stitch is inscribed with meaning, can be rendered seemingly neutral when detached from ongoing settler colonial destruction across Palestine. Put differently, the occupation, the apartheid, the blockades of the land, air, and sea, the mass imprisonments of Palestinians, the uprooted olive trees, and the mobilizing for liberation are also a part of a textile’s life.

Moving beyond decolonization as metaphor, how can we better attune to what is politically at stake for people who make and use museum objects?

PART II: THE PUBLIC MUSEUM

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A historical choreography: In conversation with Samar Hejazi Samar Hejazi is a Toronto-based Palestinian artist using her art to question conceptual ideas of self identification, social construction, ethnology, and intellectual traditions. Over Zoom, we discussed everything from her practice of tatreez as “historical choreography,” embodying inherited tradition performed over generations, to how cultural appropriation is used as a land grabbing strategy that falsely connects the colonial settler to Indigeneity.

Mitra: Your work beautifully employs textile and, more specifically, tatreez to explore time, memory, and the social construction of knowledge. Could you share a bit on when you were introduced to tatreez? And what drew you to taking this up as an arts practice?

Samar: I’ve always been surrounded by tatreez just growing up in a Palestinian home. We had it on our pillows and on all the decorative items as well as some utilitarian items. Tatreez was also very much a part of our conversation. We had images of the dresses. We all have items of clothing that have tatreez on it. Tatreez has always been in my life.

Initially my decision to learn tatreez was intuitive but this eventually developed into more conceptual reasons. I thought of it as a method to explore my identity as well as the societal, political and traditional influences surrounding self identification.

Mitra: You’ve described your use of craft as a practice of historical choreography. Could you expand on what this means?

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PART II: THE PUBLIC MUSEUM

Samar: When I think of historical choreography, what I mean is the repetitive action of embroidery. As soon as you start embroidering or doing tatreez, you’re sitting on a chair, you’re in a certain position, you’re in a specific mindset to start working, and then you’re actually moving your body in a specific way that is both repetitive and kind of rhythmic.

This turns into a choreography that has been performed over the years. My ancestors that embroidered also performed this choreography.

So when I say historical choreography, I’m implying a set of movements or a performance that creates an environment that is also a part of the past. It pertains to a bit of a ritualistic aspect and a creation of space... or a recreation.

Mitra: Diasporic relationships to home are marked by continuation and carrying traditions across geographies, into the present and into the future. They’re also marked by natural shifts and exchanges. How/have you navigated this relationship between continuation and change in your work?

Samar: I don’t necessarily see the continuation as an intentional act. The way that culture unfolds with movement and diaspora, you do what you’re familiar with or you practice and have rituals from your history and upbringing. So it’s not so much this awareness of a continuation when I’m working, but it’s more an awareness of being connected to myself and where I come

from. And when it comes to changes, you move around but you still are who you are wherever you are.

Mitra: Yes, and the reasons that you are where you are as well, in the Palestinian diaspora.

Samar: Definitely. And that’s when the way the pieces look and feel starts to change as I’m expressing myself. Embroidery is a reflection of our contexts, it’s always been a visual language that people used to express their lives and share their stories. I’m doing the same thing. It’s just the stories have changed.

Mitra: Moving beyond the home and towards the art world, perhaps one of the most glaring failures of the classic, Western-style Museum is its tendency to categorize and display objects as lifeless artifacts. Like you’ve said, in reality many objects were and are a fabric of life; interwoven into rituals and used by people who, despite colonialism’s attempts, are still here. Have you encountered this failure of the museum in your viewing of tatreez or Palestinian art & craft more generally?

Samar: I agree that specific museums have this way of freezing a people or freezing a culture in the past. Often, the interpersonal connection to the work is lost and this can be an oppressive tactic or strategy, intentionally or unintentionally. In terms of Palestinian tatreez in museums, I actually haven’t seen very many and I feel like it’s because of the specific project or goal to erase Palestinians in general as an identity that exists...

To listen to the full conversation, please visit https://tinyurl.com/ andothermonuments

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SparkNotes: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: “It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world.”

(2020) by Sabrina Alli “It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t engage with this important work, but we have to do so with the full awareness that decolonization cannot be limited to discrete objects, museums, or archives, and cannot be substantial as long as the people from whom all this wealth was expropriated are not allowed to lead the process. It is not about hiring an individual curator but about opening the imperial borders and letting people re-build their worlds in proximity to their objects.

When I look at [a] map of migration, I see patterns of counter-expeditions, a belated movement of people to join the objects that were forcibly migrated away from them decades or centuries earlier.

We should think about those people who are deemed “undocumented” alongside this massive forced migration of objects that started in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, objects that are still held in imperial archives, museums, and libraries.

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PART II: THE PUBLIC MUSEUM

Rather than thinking of decolonizing the museum as a discrete institution, as if the museum exists in a world apart, I study the correlation between the migration of people and objects, out of which I configured this non-imperial right—the right to live near your objects. With this right, it is not hard to imagine what it would mean to live in a world free of imperial borders, a world in which people whose culture had been destroyed are recognized as those whose rights are inscribed in the objects preserved in Western-type museums.

Rather than calling these people “undocumented,” I offer a shift that enables us to see their “documentation”—that is, their rights—in their objects.”

‘Oriental’ rugs on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Near Eastern Department from 1910 to 1944. The Metropolitan arrangement with the Iranian government in the 1930s was to divide the excavation finds equally; a coin toss determined which half went to the Metropolitan and which stayed in Tehran.11

MET MUSEUM ??

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Colonial Theft (2019) by Roya DelSol photographed at the British Museum in London, England.

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PART II: THE PUBLIC MUSEUM

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Part III: Repatriation Keywords: Decolonization, border abolition

The toppling of statues is one of the many ways inanimate objects are connected to infrastructures that are alive and a result of the colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism that mark our world and its spatial organizing. Arguably, these acts also serve as a visual reminder that empires are permeable, vulnerable, and bound to be overcome by resistance.

How can we consider museums as vulnerable?

The stories about objects and artifacts as subjective?

And how can we trace the social histories that mark the movement of objects and people to imagine a world without borders and demand no less?

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Supplementary Readings

On objects and public museums…

The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: A Present History of a Living Shrine, 2018– 20 (2021) by Keelan Overton and Kimia Maleki The Museum Shoots Twice (2021) by Travis Diehl Weaving History: Ziegler Co. and the Making of Iran’s Carpet Industry (2014) by Kimia Maleki

On repatriation…

Plunder, the Transcendental condition of modern art and community of fabri (2017)

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay Land of the Lost: MTL Collective talks with Jasbir K. Paur about decolonization (2018)

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References 1

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: “It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world” (2020) by Sabrina Alli.

2

“Adventurers, Connoisseurs, and Dealers: the Rise of Toronto’s Oriental Rug Traders by Neil Brochu in From Ashgabat to Istanbul: Oriental Rugs from Canadian Collections (2015).

3

Ibid.

4

“Chapter 3: A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities” in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) by Lisa Lowe.

5

“Weaving History: Ziegler Co. and the Making of Iran’s Carpet Industry” (2014) by Kimia Maleki.

6

“Clipper Ship Owners Made Millions. Others Paid the Price” (2018) by Simon Worrall in National Geographic.

7

“Chapter 3: A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities” in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) by Lisa Lowe

8

“The Peace Corps and the Making of a Rug Dealer” (1983) by George O’Bannon in Oriental Rug Review Volume 3 Issue 1.

9

“George O’Bannon” (2000) by The Hajji Baba Club.

10 Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015) by Simone Browne.

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“Displaying Islamic Art at the Metropolitan: A Retrospective Look” (2012) by Rebecca Lindsey

12 “Four Eighteenth-Century Monumental Ethiopian Tablet Woven Silk Curtain” (1996) by Michael Gervers, Textile Society of America Proceedings.

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Bios Roya DelSol is a Black media artist based in Toronto. Working primarily as a lensbased artist, she aims for her work to centre and uplift the experiences Black, queer, and marginalized peoples. As a photographer, she has worked on projects for NXNE, Spotify, Adidas and Maggie’s: Toronto Sex Workers Action Project; with work published in outlets such as FLARE, Lez Spread the Word, West End Phoenix and NOW. Creating motion work ranging from experimental video art pieces to music videos, her video content has been featured in online outlets including the Globe & Mail. She is also an experienced community arts administrator dedicated to showcasing the work of new generation artists who live and work on the margins.

Beginning in street art, Mitra Fakhrashrafi is a curator interested in cities and indebted to border abolition organizing. Fakhrashrafi is the corecipient of the 2021 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curator’s and will be a guest curator at the 2022 Mayworks Festival of Working People & the Arts. In her spare time she thinks about how to reverse shisha bans and listens to music that emerges from Toronto; a since-always queer, trans, Indigenous, Black and diasporic city.

Samar Hejazi is a visual artist of Palestinian descent raised in diverse communities in the Middle East and North America. Samar uses art to question self identification, social construction, ethnology, and intellectual traditions.

These ideas are engaged through her process and development of diverse materials and forms. Since graduating with a BFA in New Media, she has attended residencies at the Arquetopia Foundation Mexico and Peru for which she was awarded a scholarship. She also attended the Takt Art Residency in Berlin in 2016 and completed a studio residency at the Toronto Museum Of Contemporary Art in 2019. Samar has exhibited nationally and internationally. She has an upcoming exhibition at Warehouse 421 in Abu Dhabi in 2021.

Aala Sharfi is a designer specialising in branding and publication design. She enjoys creating work that is inspired by cultures and storytelling. Previously she studied architecture.

Design & Art Direction: Mubashir Baweja Cover Art: Aala Sharfi Text: Mitra Fakhrashrafi September, 2021

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The Creatives in Residence 2021 program was made possible through a Seed Grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.