Who's Afraid? booklet

MIK AL A HYLDIG DAL

W H O’ S A F R A I D?

Exhibition Opening February 21st 2015 – 19.00 22.02.2015 27.02.2015

/////////////// WHO’S AFRAID? /////////////// WHO’S AFRAID? deals with contemporary iconoclasm as a sociopolitical act of communication. In the context of the exhibition “killing images” and “erasing identities” are examined as an intersection point between iconoclastic processes and BDSM-practices, in particular sado-masochism.

Several works refer to the politics of historical iconoclasm where artistic representations of human bodies were considered subversive of God’s authority in the sense of image-veneration. In the context of early Islamic societies, for instance, offending images were not physically destroyed or erased. Rather, they were symbolically killed – marked with a line across the necks of the depicted figures, removing all religious or evocative power. “Killing the image” thus became a ritual gesture in itself, leaving its own trace and creating symbolic content as a by-product. The thesis of this project turns on how ISIS’ destruction of living human bodies with a literal cut across the neck resonates within this historical context.

In the context of historical iconoclasm, killing images is perceived as an act of destroying their “life” and meaning, while in contemporary iconoclasm (e.g. ISIS decapitation videos), images are being destroyed in order to produce new images. In this sense, a single image of suffering and terror becomes a motive, an icon and a frame for other images. Current visual footages of terror interleave in a massive mesh of image-data, with no clear lines. In this “clouding of terror”, intertextuality is a core aspect, which has long ago gone beyond the field of linguistics and is not just a characteristic of any text, “constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text […] the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva, Julia.

Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980: 66), as the linguist and poststructuralist Julia Kristeva argues. The idea of intertextuality makes every text a “living hell of hell on earth” (ibid.), as it implies an understanding of text as network of never-ending citations, which have left the field of written or spoken language. They apply to culture perceived as text and of reality, made sense of through images. Yet, another popular poststructuralist understanding of endless reference-processes, goes back to Jean Baudrillard’s “hyperreality”, which he proposes as a state of disorientation in a hyper-simulated, self-referential and in this a closed media landscape

in the 1980s. Also, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman (1985) refers to “talking hairdos” and “televised news” in the American Culture of the 1980s, a constellation in which, according to Postman, the recipient is unable to follow on information (and is bound to amuse him/herself to death).

These perceptions of recognising simulation and hyperreality as potentially dangerous, require that there is a dramatic difference between “reality” and “hyperreality” or “simulation”. If Disneyland, who Baudrillard refers to as a “digest of the American way of life” (Baudrillard, Jean (1978): Agonie des Realen: 25), was once outstanding as an over exaggerated fairy-tail mirror of reality and the New-York-Skyline was in contrast to the average city, do these contrasts still exist in a way to tell authenticity and simulation, private and public, scaring and fascinating, etc. apart?

Interleaving is thus a key characteristic of imagery-production, which needs to be explored as a network and also as an apparatus, going back to the idea of “technoimages” as proposed by Vilém Flusser: “The new post-historical existential climate which characterises the technoimage culture articulates itself in many ways, for instance in structuralism, cybernetics, scenario-based politology, or trans-ideologisation. It may be concretely observed in the programs impressed into the memories of computers, intelligent tools, and miniprocessors. However, it is as yet very far from having become entirely conscious. We live, all of us, as yet on the magico-mythical and on the historical level. We decipher, all of us, TV programmes as if they were traditional images or as if they were linear texts telling some story. Which means that we find ourselves in the same situation that illiterate Israelites found themselves in faced by the Sinai stone tablets. Instead of deciphering these programmes critically, we adore them. It is difficult for us to live and think on the level on which techno-images are made. This is why they tend to programme us, just as texts programmed the masses during their illiterate situation. Unless we learn how to decipher techno-images, unless we may achieve what may be called “conscious techno-imagination” (Flusser, Vilém, in Variantology 4. On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies in the Arabic-Islamic World and Beyond, edited by Siegfried Zielinski/Echard Fürlus (2010): 115).

Text: Sandra Moskova

WHO’S AFRAID 1 (RGB) Video projection (HD) 2014, 3 min - Sound by Soren Jahan RGB (red green blue) are mirrors the color spectrum the primaries that construct of the applied primary. the color-space of digital media. In the triptych WHO’S AFRAID 1 (RGB) the artist uses a paint brush to draw colored lines across her neck: Each stroke activates an audio tone that

WHO’S AFRAID 2 2-channel Video installation 2015, 12 min A video-recording of a “real-time iconoclasm” in the form of reciprocal face-slapping over the course of an afternoon. The documentation traces how faces (skin, eyes, voice) are deformed in the moment of the blow, as

well as how the process affects expressions, constitution and feelings. The brightness of one of the two adjacent monitors is reduced to a minimum letting it function as a mirror surface of the other.

WHO’S AFRAID 3 Photographic prints 2015, 86x114,5 cm - photographed by Ana Lessing

The photos were taken immediately after the video piece WHO’S AFRAID 2 (SLAP) printed and manipulated with acrylic paint.

(Soren Jahan / Mikala Hyldig Dal)

WHO’S AFRAID 4 Documentation Video on monitor 2015, 11 min - filmed by Siska The large-format prints of Soren’s and Mikala’s faces, made after the WHO’S AFRAID 2 (SLAP) piece, were put on the ground and the faces were smeared over with black paint, using feet and hands. This gesture of masking (can) reference objects such as the niqab, elephant hoods, terrorist masks or special police forces.

The process was captured by a HD digital reflex camera, filming through the screen of a smartphone the light sensitivity of which creates a brightly lit stage.

/////////////// THE WORKS /////////////// In the tension between violence/pain and power/domination (fetish), the works aesthetically examine the image politics of groupings such as the current Islamic State (ISIS) in the context of visual propaganda that both makes and destroys images.

In the sense of the interleaving and the intertextuality of imagery, the lust element in the “killing of images” is explored by the artist’s referencing of BDSM practices. On the edge of sexual “aberrations”, pleasure, pain and suffering, fixed power structures of dominance and subjugation, the relation to political propaganda seeks to explore shared choreographies, roles, hegemonies.

Self-perception becomes a defining capacity, given that we define our modern reality through images. Showing the “open wound”, everyone gathering around (the graves), has a mysterious force of attraction, as Mark Seltzer argues in “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere” (1997): „the mass attraction to atrocity exhibitions […] takes the form of a fascination with the shock of contact between bodies and technologies: a shock of contact that encodes, in turn, a breakdown in the distinction between the individual and the mass, and between private and public registers.” (Seltzer 1997: 3).

Seltzer talks about the fascination of exhibiting, showing images of terror, where the act of showing becomes an endlessly reproduced screen (ibid.), so that the addressee becomes a spectator, an observer, a voyeur, a protagonist. In the connection between the historical symbolic “killing” of images with the current discourse of the ISIS decapitation videos the artist explores the gesture of power on her own body, and fetish as a man-made object with mystical/supernatural power(s) to dominate others.

Yet, Hyldig Dal’s works don’t seek to exploit or scandalize images, but instead to establish the ISIS decapitations, prisoners wearing Guantanamo-Bay-look uniforms and the artist’s body as hyper-symbols. These are all multi-referential and intertextual constellations in a discourse in which Religion-based iconoclasm has been replaced with iconoclasm as an act of political communication, addressing an international spectatorship instead of a specific, localized community of faith. The distinction between

amateur and professional footage is increasingly challenged: the ISIS-videos are professionally produced, as a visual upgrading of terror (images) take place and violence is subject to dramaturgy now more than ever.

Through the visual staging and parallel representation of BDSM and public violence, Who’s Afraid? creates ambivalent realms of experience, that explore the clash between trauma and aestheticization in the very moment of their simultaneous and immediate formation.

/////////////// THE TITLE /////////////// The title Who’s Afraid references Barnett Newman’s triptych Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue?” (1966-1970), itself a quote of the play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966) by Edward Albee. The play, itself inspired by “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”, a Disney song, written in 1933, discusses a shift of reality and fiction, resulting in abuse and terror, as the relationship between the main protagonists, a married couple, is constructed over an unaccomplished dream, to conceive a child as bond between them.

Also the purchase of Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? III by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, was object to terror as the painting itself was attacked with a knife by Gerard Jan van Bladeren in 1986 and restored

by Daniel Goldreyer in 1991. Accoding to critics the painting had been attacked twice: first during the knife attack and again during the restoration (as Goldeyer used house paints and a roller, which presumably destroyed subtle nuances in the three monochrome sections). Final cost of the attack was about 1 Million US dollars.

1982, when the Verein der Neuen Nationalgalerie in Berlin purchased Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? IV, the work led to death threats against the museum’s director Dieter Hönisch and was also attacked: by a 29-year old student.

In the stories above, destruction is an act of re-accumulation of meaning and restoration is seen a. o. as an act of “killing”. As a result of these dynamics, Who Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?, becomes iconic in contemporary art contexts. In terms of the current exhibition, the title adds an additional layer by referring to an anxiety situated within images, as depicting death becomes death itself.

WHO’S AFRAID 5 Photographic prints 2015, 79x118 cm

The portraits were taken after video sessions and re-worked digitally, adding masks. The manipulated images are photographed from the computer screen and printed as a form of “double screen shots”.

(Siska/Stephanie Ballentine)

WHO’S AFRAID 6 (Cut) Video projection 2014, 6 min - Sound by Soren Jahan

The gesture of decapitation merges with the act/process of painting: the image-frame itself has been asymmetrically cut, obscuring the surface.

WHO’S AFRAID 7 Video displayed on iPhone 2015, 2:25 min

The video shows the automated procedure of erasing all images from the image folder on an iPhone, the data shuffling in and out of visibility. The deleting process rearranges the newest pictures in the folder according to placement and

size of the older data.

WHO’S AFRAID 8 Collages/YouTube playlist, videos displayed on iPad, 2014, 9:06 min The work consists of a YouTube playlist that integrates ISIS propaganda and riot scenes from around the world with the artists body in large-scale-projections. The artist has placed herself in front of the projection and with a round-shaped light diffuser she catches a second projection, this time of virtual bdsm scenes. The audio is layered from multiple sources

including the artist’s reading of YouTube user comments; automated subtitles shuffle the spoken words into unintelligible dada-like poems.

WHO’S AFRAID 9 Photographic Print 2015, 86x114,5 cm

The paint/ink of the portrait of the artist will dissolve over the course of the exhibition –­ making it a “dying time sculpture”. Via a dropinfusion hanging from the ceiling the image receives “killing” water drops (instead of “vital medicine”).

Mikala Hyldig Dal Mikala Hyldig Dal is an artist, curator and author, based in Berlin and Cairo. In the context of her artistic, curatorial and academic practice, she explores the interrelations of image-production, iconoclasm and political processes. She has worked on exhibition projects, publications and artistexchange-programmes in Germany, Denmark, USA, Egypt, Syria and Iran.

Her works are presented internationally, a. o. in Martin Gropius Bau, Townhouse Gallery Cairo,

Nikolaj Kunsthal Copenhagen, Fluxfactory New York and Azad Gallery Teheran.

Between 2011 and 2013 she has been teaching in the departments of Fine Arts, Arts and Applied Sciences at the American University and the German University in Cairo. In 2013 she published the book Cairo Images of Transition (Transcript Verlag/ Columbia University Press). Mikala Hyldig Dal is a PhD candidate at PhDArts, Royal Academy of Art KABK, Holland.

Daniel Franke Sandra Moskova Mikala Hyldig Dal

Leipziger Strasse 63, 10177 Berlin

www.mikala-hyldig-dal.net

22.02.2015

27.02.2015

LA A IG IK D M YL H AL D

Opening

21.02.2015

7 pm

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Exhibition

W H O’ S A F R A I D?