Di'van | A Journal of Accounts | Issue 9

9_M A R C H 2 0 2 1

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ART | CULTURE | THEORY

Heba Y Amin | Stephanie Bailey | Ariana Chaivaranon | Blair French | Judith Naeff Robin Peckham | Jim Quilty | Una Rey | Frank Vigneron | Tim Riley Walsh

Yhonnie Scarce, Prohibited Zone, Woomera 2021, research photograph. Courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne

Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 27 March—14 June 2021 Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 17 July—18 September 2021 Presenting Partner:

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The National New Australian Art

Over 50 artists. 3 locations.

Opens 26 March Art Gallery of New South Wales Carriageworks Museum of Contemporary Art Australia the-national.com.au

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Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) 2020 (detail). Courtesy the artists and Iwantja Arts © the artists

Principal Local Government Partner

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Editor Contributing Editor Publisher

Design

A Journal of Accounts Art | Culture | Theory

Alan Cruickshank Paul Gladston DIVAN ART JOURNAL | University of NSW Art & Design Alan Cruickshank

ISSN 2207-1563 © Copyright 2021 Alan Cruickshank in conjunction with the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney, the authors and artists No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts is published biannually by DIVAN ART JOURNAL and University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney Editorial | Subscription | Advertising inquiries: Email: artandculturejournal@gmail.com Post: University of NSW Art & Design Paddington Campus, Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd, Paddington, SYDNEY NSW 2021 Australia The views and/or opinions expressed in d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, DIVAN ART JOURNAL or the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney divan: from the Persian dīwān, an account book; origin dēvan, booklet; also related to debir, writer; evolved through ‘a book of poems’, ‘collection of literary passages’, ‘an archive’, ‘book of accounts’ and ‘collection of sheets’ to ‘an assembly’, ‘office of accounts’, ‘custom house’, ‘government bureau’ or ‘councils chamber’, to a long, cushioned seat, which in this sense entered European languages divan presents a shift of content and meaning over time coexistent with evolving historical relationships between the East and West. d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts offers critical interpretations on contemporary art and culture, and its broader historical, socio-political and theoretical contexts, from the greater Asia (Middle East, South/Southeast/East Asia and Asia-Pacific) regions which determine historical and current socio-cultural affinities with contemporary Australian art and society

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD NANCY ADAJANIA India Cultural theorist, editor, writer and curator, Mumbai HOOR AL QASIMI United Arab Emirates President and Director, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah STEPHANIE BAILEY Hong Kong/United Kingdom Writer and editor, Hong Kong/London UTE META BAUER Singapore Founding Director NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore Co-Curator, 17th Istanbul Biennial THOMAS BERGHUIS The Netherlands Independent Curator and Art Historian, Leiden DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT Bangladesh Chief Curator, Dhaka Art Summit, Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation, DhakaArtistic Director, Bellas Artes Projects, Manila FULYA ERDEMCI Turkey/Denmark Curator, KØS Museum of Art in Public Places, Denmark PATRICK FLORES The Philippines Professor of Art Studies, University of The Philippines, Manila BLAIR FRENCH Australia CEO, Carriageworks, Sydney ADAM GECZY Australia Senior Lecturer, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; author, artist, Sydney PAUL GLADSTON Australia Judith Neilson Chair Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR Australia Executive Director, Artspace, Sydney REUBEN KEEHAN Australia Curator Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane VASIF KORTUN Turkey Curator, writer, Board Member, SALT, Istanbul LEE WENG CHOY Malaysia Independent art critic, Kuala Lumpur IAN McLEAN Australia Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne VALI MAHLOUJI United Kingdom Curator, writer, critic and author, London GUY MANNES-ABBOTT United Kingdom Writer, essayist and critic, London CHARLES MEREWETHER Georgia Curator of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Georgia, Tbilisi NAT MULLER The Netherlands Independent curator and critic, Amsterdam DJON MUNDINE Australia Independent curator, writer and art critic, Sydney NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS Australia Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne

Cover: Yhonnie Scarce, Burial Ground (detail), 2012 Image courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne Photography Janelle Low

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A Journal

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of

Accounts

ROBIN PECKHAM China Co-director Taipei Dangdai, writer, Taipei SHUBIGI RAO Singapore Artistic Director 2020 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, artist PHIL TINARI China Director, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing MURTAZA VALI USA/UAE Writer, art historian and curator, New York ALA YOUNIS Jordan Curator and artist, Amman

CONTENTS

11 Parergon

ALAN CRUICKSHANK

12 Temporality and Landscape JUDITH NAEFF

68 Figure/Ground (Zero): The Camouflage Works of Gordon Bennett and Andy Warhol TIM RILEY WALSH

22 Upon and of The Terrain JIM QUILTY

32 Images of Record BLAIR FRENCH

42 The Myth of Empty Country And the Story of ‘Deadly’ Glass UNA REY

56 The General’s Stork

80 When is a Landscape Like a Body?

FRANK VIGNERON

98 This Piece of Land: Living With Continental Drift ROBIN PECKHAM

106 The Poor Image and Royalty: A Battle Between Two Thai Pops ARIANA CHAIVARANON

HEBA Y AMIN

124 The Spectre(s) of Non-Alignment(s) STEPHANIE BAILEY

138

IMAGE NOTATIONS

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ASIA SOCIETY

TRIENNIAL WE DO NOT DREAM ALONE PART 2 MARCH 26, 2021–JUNE 27, 2021

SONG-MING ANG REZA AR AMESH MINA CHEON

EXECUTIVE CHAIR AND CHAIR OF THE STEERING COMMIT TEE

Agnes Hsu-Tang, Ph.D. ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe

CHEUK WING NAM VIBHA GALHOTR A JOYCE HO SUSIE IBARR A ABIR KARMAKAR DINH Q. LÊ

EXHIBITION COCUR ATORS

LU YANG

Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe

PR ABHAVATHI MEPPAYIL

Boon Hui Tan

MOUNTAIN RIVER JUMP! (HUANG SHAN + HUANG HE) AHMET ÖĞÜT HETAIN PATEL ANGIE SEAH SAMITA SINHA

Admission is free and by advance timed ticket only. For hours, reservations, or to take a virtual tour, visit AsiaSociety.org/Triennial

MEL ATI SURYODARMO XU BING XU ZHEN ®

CUR ATED BY NINA MIAL L

27 MARCH – 11 JULY 2021 twma.com.au Jacobus Capone, Sincerity and Symbiosis 2019 (video still detail). Courtesy of the artist and Moore Contemporary MAJOR SPONSORS

MAJOR PARTNERS

EXHIBITION SUPPORTERS

6 Dec 2020 – 2 May 2021 Brett Graham, O' Pioneer, 2020 photo Neil Pardington

42 Queen Street New Plymouth Aotearoa New Zealand

govettbrewster.com

Exhibiting soon Dale Harding: There is no before May — Aug

Stars start falling Tanuvasa, O'Neill, Tibbo: May — Aug

Len Lye: Wand Dance Apr — Nov

Len Lye: Tangibles: 1963-1966 May — Jul

Raewyn Martyn: Open Window May — Aug

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CONTRIBUTORS

Heba Y Amin is a Berlin-based multimedia artist, researcher and educator who works with political themes and archival history, using mediums including film, photography, archival material, lecture performance and installation. Her works and interventions have been covered

by The New York Times, The Guardian, Intercept and CNN among others; recent solo exhibitions have been held at The Mosaic Rooms, London (2021), Center for Persecuted Arts, Solingen (2019), 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), 15th Istanbul Biennale (2017) and 12th Dak’Art Biennale, Senegal (2016).

Amin is the 2021 Spring Audain Visual Artist in Residence at Simon Fraser University, a 2019 Field of Vision fellow, cofounder of the Black Athena Collective and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War. Amin is one of the artists behind the subversive graffiti action on the set of the television series Homeland, which received worldwide media attention.

collaborations with Rirkrit Tirivanija, Tania Bruguera, and Lee Mingwei.

She is a Schwarzman Scholar, a member of the College Art Association Podcast Committee, 2017 Harvard College recipient of the Fitzie Foundation grant, and 2017 –2018 Art Editor of the Harvard Advocate.

Stephanie Bailey is editor-in-chief of Ocula Magazine, contributing editor to ART PAPERS, managing editor of Podium, the online journal for M+ in Hong Kong, editorial advisory board member of d’ivan, A Journal of Accounts, and part of the Naked Punch editorial collective. Formerly senior editor of Ibraaz, she also writes for ArtMonthly, Canvas and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and since 2015 has curated the Conversations program for Art Basel Hong Kong; essays have appeared in Navigating the Planetary: A guide to the planetary art world–its past, present, and potentials (eds. Hildegund Amanshauser and Kimberly Bradley, VfmK, 2020); Germaine Kruip: Works 1999-2017 (ed. Krist Gruijthuijsen, Koenig Books, 2018); Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East (ed. Anthony Downey, Sternberg Press, 2016); The future is already here–it’s just not evenly distributed, 20th Biennale of Sydney catalogue (ed. Stephanie Rosenthal, 2016); Armenity, the catalogue for the Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (ed. Adelina von Furstenburg, Skira, 2015); Happy Hypocrite #8: FRESH HELL (ed. Sophia Al-Maria, Book Works, 2015); Hybridize or Disappear (ed. Joao Laia, Mousse Publishing, 2015); and You Are Here: Art After the Internet (ed.

Omar Kholeif, Space/Cornerhouse, 2014).

Judith Naeff is Assistant Professor Cultural Studies of the Middle East at Leiden University, the Netherlands; her research focuses on contemporary Arab visual arts and literature and brings together approaches from urban studies, memory studies and cultural analysis.

Publications include Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut: A City's Suspended Now (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and the volume Visualizing the Street: New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City, co-edited with Pedram Dibazar (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, Cities & Cultures series, 2018). Her current research project focuses on memories of twentieth century contentious politics in the Arab world in contemporary video art.

Ariana Chaivaranon is a Kansas Citybased Thai-born artist and an Interpretive Planner at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; graduated from Harvard in 2018 in Visual and Environmental Studies. Her research examines how states construct and consolidate national identity through the porous field of fine art. Chaivaranon’s interpretive work dethrones hegemonic narratives in museums, including the National Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and Frick Collection. Chaivaranon creates art that intersects with activism, through

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Blair French is CEO of Carriageworks in Sydney. Previous roles include Director, Curatorial and Digital, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) and Executive Director of Artspace, Sydney; has published widely on contemporary art and photography and has curated exhibitions and performances with artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and around the world. He was curatorial convenor of the 6th and curator of the 7th iterations of SCAPE Public Art: Christchurch Biennial, and one of the initiators and co-curators of the first edition of The National: New Australian Art presented at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks and MCA, Sydney.

Robin Peckham is a curator and editor currently living in Taiwan, where he is Co-Director of Taipei Dangdai; previously Editor-in-chief of LEAP, the international art magazine of contemporary China, founded the Hong Kong exhibition space Saamlung, and organized exhibitions for Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Fosun Foundation, K11 Art Foundation, M Woods Museum, and City University of Hong Kong. He was named to Apollo Magazine's ‘Thinkers’ list on 40 Under 40 Asia in 2016, and had his exhibition Art Post-Internet listed by Artnews as one of the twenty most important art exhibitions of the 2010s.

Jim Quilty is a Beirut-based Canadian writer, journalist, film critic and editor who has written about the arts, cultural production and politics of the Middle East and North Africa. More recently he’s been living the fever dream of print journalism in Lebanon, editing and otherwise contributing to the arts and culture pages of The Daily Star; has published political and cultural journalism in sundry magazines, most recently Canvas. Before recent events in Beirut he was preparing a nonfiction study on the work of filmmaker Kamal Aljafari.

Una Rey is a lecturer in art history at the University of Newcastle; prior she worked in the Indigenous arts sector in the Northern Territory for over a decade.

Her research and industry experience has generated curatorial projects including Speaking in Colour (2011) and the critically acclaimed exhibition Black White & Restive: cross-cultural initiatives in Australian contemporary art, both at Newcastle Art Gallery in 2016. She has published biographies, art criticism and critical essays on Australian contemporary art in journals, news media and exhibition catalogues for Australia’s leading public institutions; won in 2017 the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art’s annual art writing award; her forthcoming chapter ‘Bardon’s legacy: paintings, stories and Indigenous Australian art’, will appear in Mediating Modernism: Indigenous Artists, Modernist Mediators, Global Networks published by Duke University Press.

Frank Vigneron is chairperson of the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received a Ph.D. in Chinese Art History from the Paris VII University, a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Paris IV Sorbonne University and a Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He has lived in Hong Kong since 1990 and joined CUHK in 2004; his research focus is on the history of Chinese painting from the 18th century onwards and on different aspects of contemporary Chinese art seen in a global context. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics Hong Kong and a Museum Expert Adviser for the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Hong Kong SAR. As a practicing artist he has held several solo exhibitions in Hong Kong and has taken part in local and international exhibitions. His publications include: Hong Kong Soft Power. Art Practices in the Special Administrative Region 2005-2014 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2018); I Like Hong Kong…

Art and Deterritorialization (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010); and Académiciens et Lettrés. Analyse comparative de la théorie picturale du 18e siècle en Chine et en Europe (Paris: Editions You Feng, 2010).

Tim Riley Walsh is an art historian and Curator in Residence, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; previously worked in gallery management, communications, and programming roles at Milani Gallery, Brisbane; Camden Arts Centre, London; and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Recent projects include the exhibition and publication On Fire: Climate and Crisis (2021, Institute of Modern Art) and editing Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings (2020, Power Publications and Griffith University Art Museum); he is the Australia Desk Editor for ArtAsiaPacific, Hong Kong, and a previous a contributor to Frieze, OSMOS, Apollo, Art Monthly Australasia and Art+Australia.

ALAN CRUICKSHANK

Parergon

On the night of 15-16 July 2006, Mazen Kerbaj—one of the initiators and key players of the Lebanese free improvisation and experimental music scene—recorded on the balcony of his Beirut flat an improvised duet, between his trumpet and accompanying bomb explosions courtesy of Israel’s Air Force. This forty-plus minute nocturnal soundscape, which he titled Starry Night—of tones blown, strained, rubbed and hissed, to jarring detonations, silence, distant car alarms and barking dogs —bizarre, horrific, meditative, sombre—has since become widely acclaimed, an act of resignation, resistance and defiance. And poetry. Throughout those days and nights in Beirut during the 2006 July War (aka the 2006 Lebanon War)—of bombings, blackouts, violence and destruction —Mazen Kerbaj kept a daily blog of his discordant fears, anger, frustration and (black) humour (“Beirut+free improvised music+comics+bombs+drawings”), observed in real time by a global online audience. On the evening of 4 August 2020, an explosion, since calculated as being one of the largest non-nuclear in history, tore through central Beirut and beyond, killing hundreds and displacing many thousands of people in a landscape already reverberating to the shockwaves of civil unrest, socio-economic crises and a rapidly enveloping pandemic.

The texts here, as diverse positions on another duet, are responses to the impulses of ‘trembling landscapes’ and ‘seismic movements’—not so much of the machinations of Brexit and Hong Kong, or the Trump-l’oeill antics of the US presidential campaign, as two explosions that bookended 2020, one viral and the other chemical (their intrinsic political-class institutionalisms being both responsible and ergo, in repudiation), the latter event symbolic of endemic deceit and prevarication, the former seemingly no less so—echoing multiple attendant global ruptures and fault lines (not least cultural/identity, secrecy, deception, the postcolonial and non-aligned). By chance, Trembling Landscapes happened to be the title (conceived pre-Beirut blast) of an exhibition of Middle Eastern artists at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam held at the end of 2020, while Seismic Movements was the title for the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh at the beginning of the year which managed to materialize and conclude before COVID-19’s displacement of global harmony, including that of the ‘global artistic industrial complex.’ History underscores ‘The Contemporary.’

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Temporality and Landscape From September 2020 through to January 2021, the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam hosted the exhibition Trembling Landscapes: Between Reality and Fiction. Curated by Nat Muller, the exhibition and related program of screenings and lectures showcased contemporary films, video art and mixedmedia installations tied to the Middle East through the lens of landscape—landscape as the object of territorial conflict and resource exploitation, but also as the site of belonging, and the canvas of our imagination. Eye Filmmuseum’s website proposed that “what binds these artworks together is that they explore landscape as a versatile trope for telling stories about the past, present and future, whether rooted in reality or fiction” and it is this relation between landscape, time and temporality, that forms the main interest of this text.1 The past is inscribed in our environment, sedimented in the traces of our movements or commemorated by our monuments. The aerial shots in Jananne al-Ani’s video works, for example, depict the infrastructure of archaeology and mining in the Jordanian deserts as scars on a skin, and in Mohamad Hafeda’s Sewing Borders (2018) refugees stitch the routes of their journeys across the borders of the region with a sewing machine on a map, piercing the land with the pain of their loss and stitching attachments across time and space.2 Our sense of belonging is materialized in our childhood home as Hrair Sarkissian’s installation on displacement makes us painfully aware, and political relations are embodied in fences and borders, the topic of Heba Amin’s project.3 In contrast, Wael Shawky’s and Larissa Sansour’s videos project imagined realities onto the land, entire worlds situated in mythical and futurist times.4

Trembling Landscapes: Between Reality and Fiction also offered a futurist temporality that is not imagined as a singular and coherent world to come, but rather made present as a set of potentialities enfolded within the present. This text focuses on three artworks that engage with landscape as the harbinger of possible futures. Ali Cherri’s The Disquiet (2013) and Trembling Landscapes (2014) together explore underground seismic activity and geological fault lines in the region.5 The Incidental Insurgents Part 3: When the Fall of the Dictionary Leaves All Words Lying on the Street (2015), by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme take the spectator on a journey through a landscape that vibrates with revolutionary possibilities.6 Though these works are very different in both form and spirit, they share an anticipatory approach to landscape expressed in vibrations. It is this idea of the ominously or promisingly trembling landscape that the following seeks to conceptualize.

TREMBLING LANDSCAPES In the aftermath of the Beirut explosion in August 2020, the title Trembling Landscapes evokes the image of shockwaves and the earth reverberating after the blast. But the artwork that lent its title to the exhibition, Trembling Landscapes by Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, reverses that temporal sequence.

This work consists of a series of satellite images of the cities of Algiers, Beirut, Damascus, Erbil, Mecca and Tehran. Taken from Google maps, the images are rendered in softly toned black-andwhite lithographic prints, each with a red stamp indicating the coordinates of a geological fissure.

The work thus makes a double vertical move away from the mediatized images of these cities as sites 12 | 13

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of geopolitical conflict or religious fundamentalism, up into the air and down into the underground.

This double step back repositions the cities as geological rather than geopolitical localities. It is a humbling move—a temporal expansion of our view to include centuries or even millennia of seismic activity, and a spatial expansion that resituates the urban within the planetary.

Next to these aerial views, another work by Cherri, The Disquiet or in Arabic, qalaq, drew out the fault lines running through Lebanon that wreak havoc every few hundred years, causing imperceptible vibrations that rock the soil on a daily basis. The video combines archival images of catastrophic earthquakes in Lebanese history, images of machines running their measuring activities at a seismological observatory, and of the land: the leaves covering the earth in the forest, and the line between water and sand on the beach. Cherri worked with a sound designer to create a dense and layered soundscape which includes subterranean and underwater vibrations recorded with a special microphone. The idea of something buzzing or rumbling under the surface appearance of our everyday lived reality reverses the notion of “trembling landscapes” from an after effect into a sense of ominous anticipation.

The repetition of the word “catastrophe” and the archival images of destruction and suffering, alongside the aerial views of Algiers, Beirut, Damascus or Erbil, inevitably activate memories of the human-made disasters in recent history. Rather than moving away from our political present, the rumble of tectonic plates seems to resonate with contemporary conflict. A similar redoubling of past and future catastrophe appears from a much earlier work by Cherri. In Once a Shiny Morning Puddle (2005) water is bubbling in a black basin, likewise a sense of ominous activity simmering under the surface. Behind the basin is a screen onto which a video is projected, showing a man turning around and the words, “yesterday was dramatic” and as its flipside, “today is OK.” PRECARIOUS TIME-SPACE In my book on imaginaries of Beirut in visual arts and literature, I analyzed Once a Shiny Morning Puddle together with a number of other art works to argue that the urban landscape of post-Civil War Beirut is marked by a peculiar temporality, “the suspended now,” “a sense of being stuck in the present, not being able to move forwards, nor to look back.”7 This experience of time is constituted by a past that has remained unresolved, and an uncertain future that seems out of reach. While any claim to a resolved past and a future within reach could be deconstructed, it is also clear that unpunished crimes, simmering conflict and silenced suffering keep infecting the present while a more distanced, historical access to that past remains blocked. At the same time, regional conflicts, structural inequalities and rampant corruption make for a volatile horizon of expectation: always on the brink of losing sustenance, always in fear of renewed violence. An unresolved space of experience and a volatile horizon of expectation make for a precarious present.8

How do these temporalities relate to space and to landscape? The same conditions that produce “the suspended now” as a temporal experience create a landscape that is at once charged by past events and that is precarious, utterly exposed to harm. Even the use of strong material such as reinforced concrete or the gesture of monumental proportions cannot dispel the sense that it is all utterly provisional, about to be dismantled or destroyed with the next catastrophe. The subterranean vibrations along geological fault lines co-produce the precarious present because they pose a threat of natural disaster to a landscape already exposed to human made forms of harm—such as conflict, neglect and displacement. More urgently, their spatio-temporal latency symbolically resonates with the sense of forces lurking under the surface. l

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LATENCY Sigmund Freud used the term “latency” to refer to the repressed desires and memories that direct our dream content. These drifts had become invisible, unknowable even, buried in the subconsciousness, but could erupt in uncontrollable ways, symbolically manifested in our dreams and physically manifested in somatic symptoms. While his drift model and dream analysis are now considered to be outdated, Freud’s ideas on the subconsciousness continue to inform the ways in which we give meaning to our psyche and to society. The Lebanese filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige use the term latency to describe their artistic practice. They situate this within a discourse that applies psychoanalytic notions of the post-traumatic and the repressed to post-war society in Lebanon: “Latency… evokes what is often felt in Beirut, in face of the dominant amnesia prevailing since the end of the war, in face of this strange paralysis that pervades the city, in face of this violent desire to place things between parentheses—to censure oneself.”9 Latency is thus linked specifically to the precarious ‘suspended now’ of post-civil war Beirut, where latent images abound “turning sometimes to the past, others to the future, or on the contrary stuck in a continuing present.”10 But the term is also used to describe the imprint on photosensitive material after exposure, but before development. With this technical signification of the term, Hadjithomas and Joreige refer to latency in the context of a more general circumnavigation of direct representational modes such as news images. Here latency refers to the desire to capture the non-apparent, affective traces of subjects and events. Their questioning of representation is therefore not limited to a post-catastrophic context, but fits within broader poststructuralist critique, “a paradigm shift from culture-as-text to cultureas-embodiment [which means] that attention to the world cannot be reduced to a disembodied, cognitive function, but must be understood as a somatic mode of intersubjective engagement.”11 Cherri’s The Disquiet opens with the following lines: “In Lebanon, the earth shakes between forty-five and sixty times every day. No one feels these tremors. Except me. I feel every single one.” The narrator senses a presence that remains imperceptible to others, remarkably similar to Hadjithomas’ and Joreige’s latent presence, “the idea of the dormant,” “a diffused state, uncontrollable, underground, as if lurking.”12 The Disquiet’s long takes of seismographs measuring the earth’s vibrations and making them legible in scientific graphs and numbers convey humanity’s inevitable failure “to fully represent history, or catastrophe, as comprehensible and complete.”13 In Cherri's Trembling Landscapes, it is the move from digital to analogue technique, where the supposedly objective aerial view loses its computed precision, leaving room for the gaps and the blurry in the lithographic printing process, presenting the cities in a “ghostly” manner.14 The following explores some of the properties of sensing vibrations as a mode of knowing the world before engaging Abbas’ and Abou-Rahme’s Incidental Insurgents.

VIBRATIONS While all sound consists of vibrations, it is especially the lower register including frequencies imperceptible to the human ear, infrasound, that we not (only) hear but also feel. This haptic and tactile quality of sound waves, its ability to “fill space, pulse through matter, and elicit movement,” seems to escape our cognitive and linguistic apparatus for signification;15 “sound embeds itself in the creation of meanings, while remaining elusive to their significations.”16 Isabella van Elferen describes the elusive concept of timbre, or tone colour, as a “sonic excess of precise signification” that is nevertheless “palpably present.”17 Here we can begin to appreciate the peculiar capacity of vibrations to make palpable a latent presence that escapes cognitive perception. l

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Exceeding our cognitive and linguistic epistemological capacities, sounds and other tremors seem all the more powerful in eliciting emotions, as evidenced by linguistic expressions such as “to touch an inner chord”, “to be shaken to the core”, or “to be thrilled”. Because of the capacity of sound and infrasound vibrations to extend through space, and penetrate the body, it effectively expresses the relational and embodied nature of affect. In his study of electronic dance music, Luis-Manuel Garcia points out that “sonic metaphors of vibration and resonance” effectively “link affect to collective experience” as in the term “vibe” which denotes a sense of collective intimacy.18 Sound is also distinctly spatial. “Sound… performs with and through space: it navigates geographically, reverberates acoustically, and structures socially.”19 But, as we have seen, this spatiality is far removed from the practice of mapping and measuring. The tremors the narrator in The Disquiet claims to feel daily, but also the sound of his footsteps on leaves and branches in the woods of Lebanon, express an embodied and affective knowledge of the landscape in sharp contrast to the seismographs or aerial views mapping the land.

Operating beyond the realm of the linguistic and the measurable, soundscapes are able to produce a more intuitive conception of time. Significantly to the argument at hand, the spectrum of low frequencies where sound dissolves into tactile vibrations is perceived as the “not yet audible” and therefore generates a collective mood of anticipation.20 In the dance club, such vibrational ecologies are designed to stimulate excitement, in sonic warfare they are used to instill fear. It is now clear that while the topic of seismic activity may constitute a move away from recent histories of violent conflict and displacement on a cognitive level, the trembling earth does resonate with—another vibrational metaphor—a collective mood of anxious anticipation on an embodied and affective level.

As Max Silverman recently argued, this effort to affectively make present latent embodied knowledge is not limited to catastrophic times.21 Hadjithomas and Joreige themselves give evidence of a more affirmative reading of latency parallel to their engagement with trauma studies, when they write that “latency is the introduction to the possible, to the state of becoming.”22 It suggests that the manifestation of whatever exists in a latent condition is not necessarily a Freudian return of the repressed. The present holds many potentialities. While there is a shared sense anticipation, of something buzzing and boiling under the surface, in the precarious time-space of Lebanon, fear and excitement alternate and often overlap. “It is always living on the verge of, but without the event.

Just the anticipation. It is very tiring, but also: everything is possible,” explains Cherri.23 The concept of a landscape trembling with possibilities was more fully developed with the installation The Incidental Insurgents.

THE INCIDENTAL INSURGENTS Basel Abbas’ and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s installation filled an entire room. The spectator could move between multiple screens suspended from the ceiling, upon which footage was projected of a late night, early morning road trip in the landscape around Ramallah. The travellers are young and appear alone or in a pair; we do not see their faces, only their silhouettes and shadows. The landscapes are otherwise devoid of people and in the corners of the exhibition room, little constructed watch towers throw large shadows upon the walls.

It is in this charged and precarious landscape of Palestine that sound and text work together to activate the future as a site of possible change. The room is filled with a loud electronic soundscape, including a low frequency bass reverberating in the flesh of the spectators. In large bold script, fragments of archival and new texts invoke a landscape of former guerilla fighters, a network of 18 | 19

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revolutionary militants now vanished. But the scattered fragments of this past lie dormant in the land: “Who could guess that beneath/the calcined ground/millions of invincible seeds were concealed/ ready to germinate.”24 So while the incidental insurgent, the young traveller in the video footage, is a lone figure, “part rebel, part artist, part vagabond,” the latent presence of a revolutionary collective is implied by the text.25 This is affectively activated by enveloping the spectator “in something that is speculative and immersive in a whole journey of sound and images.”26 A vibrational ecology of exciting anticipation renders the empty scenery as a land pulsating with possible futures.

THE VIBE IS BACK This text has analyzed the relation between temporality and landscape in three art works presented in Trembling Landscapes: Between Reality and Fiction. Ali Cherri’s Trembling Landscapes seems at first sight to withdraw from the immediacy of a territory riven by geopolitical tensions and violent conflict.

But while the aerial view and the coordinates create a cognitive distance, the gesture towards subterranean vibrations affectively resonates with the present, its recent troubled history and its uncertain future. This is more fully developed in the video The Disquiet, which juxtaposes the cognitive distance of the seismograph to an embodied affective knowledge of the land as a trembling land.

Vibrational ecologies in the lower spectrum of frequencies around the boundary between sound and infrasound are particularly suitable to express a sense of latency, a spatial co-presence that inspires a collective mood of anticipation, whether fearful or exciting. While a sense of latency is particularly strong in a precarious context, because everything seems constantly on the verge of collapse, latency also has a strong political potential, “meaning, ‘I exist, even if you don’t see me.’”27 Abbas’ and Abou-Rahme’s installation exploits this revolutionary potential by coalescing fragments of revolutionary pasts and a soundscape physically and affectively moving the spectator. These animate a landscape that appears still on the surface, but the lone incidental insurgent is perceptive of the revolutionary potentialities that lie folded within the land. Because no matter how precarious, anticipation is also something hopeful. Ali Cherri: “when I visited Beirut just after the blast, I thought something had died for good. But when I returned in December, I realized that it had only been muted for a while: the vibe is back.”28 Notes 1 Nat Muller, ‘Trembling Landscapes: Between Reality and Fiction’, Eye Filmmuseum; https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/exhibition/tremblinglandscapes 2

Jananne El Ani, Shadow Sites I, 2010 and Shadow Sites II, 2011; Mohamad Hafeda, Sewing Borders, 2018

3

Hrair Sarkissian, Homesick, 2014; Heba Y. Amin, The Earth is an Imperfect Ellipsoid, 2016

4

Wael Shawky, Al Arbaa Al Madfuna II, 2013; Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate, 2012

5

Ali Cherri, Trembling Landscapes, 2014, and The Disquiet, 2013. See https://www.alicherri.com

6 Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas, The Incidental Insurgents, Part 3: When the Fall of the Dictionary Leaves All Words Lying in the Streets, 2015. See https://baselandruanne.com 7

Judith Naeff, Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut: A City’s Suspended Now, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, p. 35

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8 I take the terms “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” which “constitute a temporal difference in the today by redoubling past and future on one another in an unequal manner” from Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, K. Tribe trans, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 263 9 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, ‘Latency’, translated from the French by Tony Chakar, Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices, Beirut: Ashkal Alwan, 2002, p. 40 10 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, ‘A State of Latency’, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel eds, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002, p. 242; https://hadjithomasjoreige.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/A-stateof-latency.pdf 11 Mark Westmoreland, ‘Making Sense: affective research in post-war Lebanese art’, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 27:6, 2013, p. 726 12

Hadjithomas and Joreige, ‘Latency’, op cit.

13 Ali Cherri, ‘Image and Imagination: Ali Cherri in conversation with Sheyma Buali’, Ibraaz 6, 6 November 2013; https://www.ibraaz.org/ interviews/111 14

Interview with the author, 22 January 2021

15

Luis-Manuel Garcia, ‘Feeling the vibe: sound, vibration, and affective attunement in electronic dance music scenes’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 29:1, 2020, p. 35 16

Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise, Second Edition: Perspectives on Sound Art, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, p. xviii

17 Isabella van Elferen, ‘Agency, Aporia, Approaches: How Does Musicology Solve a Problem Like Timbre?’, Contemporary Music Review 36:6, 2017, p. 483 18

Garcia, p. 23

19

LaBelle, p. xiii

20

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010, p. xviii

21 Max Silverman, ‘Latency in Lebanon, or bringing things (back) to life: A Perfect Day (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 2005)’, Memory Studies, forthcoming; http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/169816/ 22

Ibid.

23

Interview with the author, 22 January 2021

24 Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas, The Incidental Insurgents, Part 3: When the Fall of the Dictionary Leaves All Words Lying in the Streets 25 Nat Muller, in an interview by Reda El Mawy, ‘aṭfāl bi-shawārib wa samā’ bi-shamsayn fī hūlanda’, BBC Arabic, 3 December 2020; https://www.bbc.com/arabic/tv-and-radio-55181569?fbclid=IwAR3G5TWwL68K1-VEVVkvI5mgYIQ3KMILXA_rjL07R5B-uUmnoohQgw8wG5M 26

Ibid.

27 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, ‘Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige on “Latent Images”’, transcript; https://www.guggenheim.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/guggenheim-videotranscript-joana-hadjithomas-khalil-joreige-latent-images-10.27.17.pdf 28

Interview with the author, 22 January 2021

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Upon and of The Terrain

“Catastrophes are believed to fall suddenly, when least expected. They are thought to be spectacular, almost sublime,” Lebanese artist Ali Cherri muses. “Catastrophe has slowed down, abandoning all desire to shock or surprise... A slow death, a macabre dance… deliberate, seductive, repetitive, monotonous to the point of banality.” These reflections don’t date from 2020. They accompany Cherri’s 2013 artwork The Disquiet. This lyrical video oscillates between a documentary narrative about the intersection of four different geological fault lines which Lebanon straddles, and the motif of a man ascending a rural incline in wintertime. The narrative is concerned with historic catastrophes “that have become a series of images”—whether block prints and photos recording historic earthquakes in this fault-riven region or footage of seismic equipment monitoring the “forty-five to sixty times a day that the earth shakes in Lebanon.” All four fault lines have had a distinct history of seismic activity. Each major geological event has left varying degrees of destruction in its wake.

The best known is the earthquake that destroyed Roman Beyrutus in 551. It sent the town’s renowned law school tumbling into the sea, later inspiring sardonic remarks that the region has been lawless ever since. “It took Beirut 1,300 years to recover completely from its last catastrophe,” Cherri’s voiceover says, noting that there are no minor catastrophes.

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Whether it’s an empire that’s collapsing or a bridge, the human beings trapped amid the carnage make it catastrophic. Ruminations on the reliable instability of this terrain return repeatedly to that steadicam footage framing the feet of a man climbing. It’s as if the unease motivating this work can only be expressed in images. Take the work’s opening vista, showing an islet sunken in the midst of a brisk current, the Beirut River in the rainy season. Flooded foliage emerges from water that is neither blue nor brown but red. It isn’t post-production whimsy. The river ran red this day, as if the earth itself was bleeding.

The Disquiet is one of two works Ali Cherri presented in Trembling Landscapes: Between Reality and Fiction, an exhibition curated by Nat Muller at Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum towards the end of 2020. His other artwork, which donated its title to the exhibition, is a series of lithographic prints of ink and charcoal drawings, based on historic aerial photos of Algiers, Beirut, Damascus, Erbil, Mecca and Tehran. Muller’s exhibition assembled work by eleven artists of diverse practices from the MENA region—a territory whose recent history, resources, proximity to European imperialism, settler colonialism, and their ramifications, have ensured that its terrain would be a subject of lingering contestation. As Cherri demonstrates, it’s not the region’s political history alone that makes its landscape tremulous. The artworks in Trembling Landscapes explore and interrogate facets of this wobbly terrain, its representation and attendant uncertainties. Muller’s exhibition was conceived before humans underwent the regimented isolation of lockdown, but the pall of contingency that lingered over the pandemic year enhanced the resonance of these works, or at least inflected how some of them could be read. Unfortunately, this is particularly true of the pieces conceived in Lebanon, where the ruin of 2020 was a gradual and multifaceted thing, swelling as the year wore on.

Contemporary art in Lebanon springs from a toxic terroir, whose contradictions also gave rise to the country’s bipolar post-war politics. Over its fifteen years, the Lebanese Civil War exhibited symptoms of social revolution and ideological conflict, tribal vendetta and geopolitical proxy war. When the early idealism dissolved into exhaustion, its proponents either emigrated, shifted paradigms, or fell back on mafia-style clientelism whose ideological face remains sectarian. It’s been widely observed that the Civil War ended without any resolution of its basic causes. The post-1990 reconstruction regime threw its resources into infrastructure building, property development and institutional graft on a massive scale. Politicians (a significant number of whom had been militia leaders during the war) and their enablers in the business sector grew rich from exclusive import agencies and the dividends of foreign investment and aid initiatives. Most Lebanese people were left to fend for themselves. There was a general amnesty for anyone implicated in war crimes but no truth and reconciliation commission for their victims and survivors.

Putting aside the period of institutional development the Shihab regime oversaw in the wake of the 1958 civil war, Lebanon’s political parties have tended to be over-mighty, and the post1990 muhassasa (allotment) regime normalized their plunder of state assets. As its institutions were further enfeebled, a culture of impunity insulated political actors from the consequences of their graft.1 Lebanon’s politicians seldom betrayed much interest in enforcing institutional norms other states take for granted—whether the monopoly of coercion represented by state security services or universal provision of basic utilities (electricity grid, water networks, telephone service, etc.) beyond major urban centres and Mount Lebanon. The allotment regime ensured that, rather than recreating (or even consolidating) itself, the state shrank, creating opportunities for petty entrepreneurs.

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Mobile telephony found a restless market in post-war Lebanon. After 2006, Beirut traded twenty four-hour electricity for regulated power outages of three hours (or more), gaps in service filled by unregulated generator operators and others tapping the grid itself. Households only had all-day water if they were serviced by a well, creating opportunities for unregulated tanker-truck operators with contacts in the country’s water companies. It was harder to fill the gaps created when the allotment state failed to find a solution to its waste problem.2

In the early 1990s the company Sukleen had been contracted to oversee rubbish collection and disposal, using a labour force comprised of migrant workers from Syria and South Asia. Around 2015 the company lost their landfill when villages refused to renew their contracts. Swarms of flies became ubiquitous. The state was unable to negotiate a solution, so rubbish went uncollected for weeks on end. As a stopgap, Sukleen dumped collected waste at properties where labourers were housed. When Beirut rubbish piles, festering in the summer heat, reached the balconies of firstfloor apartment dwellers, residents took matters into their own hands and began burning the stuff.

Plumes of acrid smoke rose all over greater Beirut. When they began blocking the streets with burning trash, nervous state actors told Sukleen to dump the city’s waste at undisclosed rural locations.

Another company, Ramco, now oversees waste management.

The waste crisis was, for some, the proverbial last straw. Grassroots activists organised the “You Stink” campaign, touting root and branch changes to the political system, abolition of the muhassasa state. The country’s prolonged economic disintegration reached new lows in late 2019, and the government announced it would place a tax on WhatsApp, the mobile messaging app that allows underpaid and underemployed Lebanese to sidestep the country’s vastly overpriced mobile telephone fees. Protesters returned to the streets with a vengeance, repeating demands for radical reforms. In response, commercial banks shuttered for two weeks, unprecedented even in the worst days of the Civil War. When they reopened, ad hoc capital controls were in place, tightly restricting account-holders’ access to their savings and credit card usage. Lebanon’s currency devaluation began. In October 2019 the exchange rate was US$1=L£1,500. At the time of writing, the rate was closer to US$1=L£10,500.

One government resigned, to be replaced by another that was more energetic in deploying teargas and live fire against protesters. The crackdown depleted the ranks of demonstrators, as did the economic and financial crises, which slashed employees’ incomes, eroded the savings of the middle class and set prices soaring. The novel coronavirus pandemic descended upon an economy contracting as businesses shut, a workforce staggered as casual labour evaporated. Lockdown measures are antithetical to the hospitality sector, the most robust in the capital, so measures were at first laxly applied and enforced. COVID-19 numbers soared. The damned year was punctuated by the Beirut Port blast of 4 August. It killed over two hundred people and gutted a kilometres-wide swathe of the urban fabric, damaging over 6,000 buildings and affecting an estimated 300,000 people.

It soon emerged that the explosion issued from a massive cache of confiscated ammonium nitrate, incompetently stowed, and ignored by state actors for years. The catastrophe of 4 August was the result of criminal negligence.

It is perhaps no surprise that Lebanon’s contemporary artists don’t fetishize landscape.

This attitude has been eloquently expressed in one work by artist, writer and pedagogue Walid Sadek. His 2006 series Love Is Blind is a conversation with ten artworks by Lebanese painter Moustafa Farroukh (1901–1957), completed between 1933 and 1952. Sadek doesn’t reproduce Farroukh’s romantic renderings of Lebanese landscapes. Their absence is simply noted by the l

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series’ ten vacant frames. Sadek’s work resides in the exhibition tags. Of Farroukh’s View of Beirut (c.1952), for instance, Sadek’s tag remarks, “this city is not here. Pilgrims will not find in it a shrine to circumambulate and to no avail will believers proclaim their divorce with its place. Names are fated to be abandoned by us as we are fated to be abandoned by places.” Sadek is among the socalled 1990s generation of Lebanese contemporary artists, who emerged after the Civil War ended.

Among his contemporaries are artist-filmmaker collaborators Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.

A significant portion of their practice reflects upon or foregrounds the significance of photography in representing and apprehending the world. Landscape, whether in its presence or absence, has long been a feature of their work. Take Barmeh/Rounds (2001). Over the course of its seven and a half minutes, this video work follows artist and actor Rabih Mroué as he drives about Beirut—the carmounted camera trained on the driver throughout. As he navigates the city streets, Mroué complains about all the things that irritate him. Each annoyance prompts a recollection and a narrative, accompanied by the sounds of the city in the background. Though audible, the urban landscape is invisible. The car windows radiate only a hostile, overexposed glare.

Landscape receives a more formally nuanced treatment in Hadjithomas and Joreige’s Waiting for the Barbarians (2013), which Muller included in Trembling Landscapes. This work shows a vista of Beirut as seen from the adjacent mountain, accompanied by a voiceover reading of Constantine Cavafy’s poem of the same name, a nineteenth century interrogation of political crisis and complacency eerily evocative of contemporary Lebanon. The tableau isn’t a still image but a diorama comprised of fifty-odd overlapping still and film images. The effect is to make the landscape details appear less solid. The voiceover (delivered by the architect, Bernard Khoury) is cluttered, emerging from a sound design that superimposes snippets of the reading atop one another, with discernible snatches of the poem occasionally rising above the dissonance. Visually and aurally, the work is a distillation of Beirut’s trembling landscape.

With the suite of eight works that came to be called the Unconformities project, Joreige and Hadjithomas seek to use the disrupted earth itself as a narrative media. The material inspiration for this series is the core sample, a feature of geological research that property developers are obliged to take before starting a project. The Boxes (2017), part one of Unconformities, is a photo series in which each core sample is shot from above so that it’s ‘framed’ by the wooden box containing it. The photo is part of an ensemble that includes lists of the archaeological, palaeontological and geological data the core contains, along with supplementary sketches and texts. The artists use each ensemble as excerpts from a subterranean archive narrating the neighbourhoods from which the core sample was extracted. Each of the eight instalments of Unconformities uses the samples somewhat differently.

In Time Capsules (2017), the samples aren’t photographed but physically encased in clear tubes and suspended in transparent resin to form vertical sculptures. Hung from the ceiling of an exhibition space, an ensemble resembles an oversized test tube experiment.

Sculpture is the favoured form of Marwan Rechmaoui. He’s worked in a range of media —from beeswax and marble to pre-formed concrete—and is best known for his miniature depictions of facets of Beirut. Beirut Caoutchouc (2004–08), is a sprawling moulded-rubber scale map of the city.

He has a growing series of maquettes of iconic architectural ruins. Monument for the Living (2002), for example, is a rendering of Burj al-Murr, an unfinished pre-Civil War tower that became a torture centre and snipers’ nest. When Lebanon’s cultural sector launched a general strike in sympathy with the popular uprising of late 2019, Rechmaoui’s gallerist Andrée Sfeir-Semler closed her space. Eventually Sfeir-Semler decided to resume the space’s exhibition program with a reiteration of Rechmaoui’s 24 | 25

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Pillars exhibition, which had shown at Sharjah Art Foundation and at Maastricht’s Bonnefantenmuseum in 2019. The artist has been developing this series since 2014. Pillars emulates the aesthetic of wreckage. Individual pillars are similar insofar as many are chaotic-looking amalgams of breeze block, concrete, and rebar, sometimes festooned with traces of building materials like tiles, insulation or household elements like bits of fabric or spent consumer goods. These forms will be familiar to residents of any city whose neighbourhoods are dotted with the orphaned walls of bombed-out, neglected, derelict or partially bulldozed twentieth century structures. For Beirut habitués, Pillars is a modular synecdoche for Lebanon’s urban and psychic landscape, redolent of destruction, urban decay and interrupted re-development. The catalyst for the series, Rechmaoui has said, was the Syrian civil war, specifically the battles for Homs, especially the Baba Amr district.

The scenes of fierce destruction playing out on television and online tapped into his experience of Lebanon’s Civil War. “I could see beyond the screen,” he reflected in 2015. “I could smell the images and hear what was happening and imagine the dynamics of the people under that rubble.”

He recalled how, at one point, he was thinking about T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia”, about his selfaggrandizing autobiography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the Sykes-Picot Agreement that redrew the map of the Middle East to approximate the one we know today. “What’s happening today is the anti-Sykes-Picot, the mission of [ISIS] is to eliminate borders. I ended up making twenty-five or thirty pillars or more. I had the pillars,” Rechmaoui laughed, “but without the wisdom. Later I realized that I’m working on the decay of things that the pillars carry… whether in architecture or society or ethics. All this is falling apart in the Middle East, specifically the idea of Arab nationalism, which proceeded from Sykes-Picot. [ISIS] won’t realize their dream, but they’ll destroy all the other pillars as they go.”3 The 4 August blast tore through Beirut’s Karantina district and wrecked the interior of Sfeir-Semler Gallery. Rechmaoui decided to create a new work from some of the debris.

It will debut as part of the Beirut exhibition of Pillars, once the COVID-19 numbers drop enough to stage an opening.

Muller’s exhibition was replete with Middle Eastern artists whose work reflects upon how landscape is imagined and the institutional and power dynamics that help form these perceptions.

After 2004, Kirkuk-born Jananne Al-Ani commenced a series of filmic works that either capture humans upon desert landscapes or else read the terrain itself. In the latter case, she said her aim was to liberate the land from certain orientalist fantasies that had been projected upon it, to the exclusion of the stories of its actual inhabitants. Trembling Landscapes showed Ani’s two best-known landscape pieces, Shadow Sites I (2010) and Shadow Sites II (2011).

Shadow Sites I is comprised of excerpts from a 16mm film shot over the Jordanian desert.

The camera looks down upon discrete enclosures in the terrain—agricultural furrows of uncertain provenance, verdant circular fields of contemporary irrigation, industrial-scale sheep farms, new villas and archaeological ruins. The vertiginous experience of Ani’s original work is reprised in Shadow Sites II—while capturing similar terrestrial features, is less an exercise in documentation than a study of forms. She also images these forms differently, using monochrome digital photography.

The camera appears to zoom upon the sites until they melt and reform as something else—so the foundations of a Nabatiyyan town appear to bleed into a recently erected walled structure. The works’ title derives from the practice of locating otherwise indistinct topographical features by noting the lengthened shadows they project when the sun is near the horizon. The technique was devised for wartime aerial reconnaissance, developed after European armies arrived in the region in force during the First World War. Archaeology, another Western pastime, soon adopted the technique. l

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Palestine’s decades-long experience of settler-colonialism has made it impossible for its artists to ignore the matter of land. Since the Israeli state and Palestinian resistance-cumadministrative organizations have been busily generating contending national narratives, and supporting appropriately themed cultural production, contemporary artists have been challenged to devise distinct languages of engagement with a terrain that is already multiply mediated.

Sensitive to the hackneyed depictions of Palestine thrown up in legacy media, Bethlehem-born Larissa Sansour began addressing the occupation of Palestine early in her career. She’s done so playfully, but never frivolously, through the lens of cinematic and television genre and the incongruities they evoke. Bethlehem Bandolero (2005), for instance, toys with the tropes of cowboy movies, while Happy Days (2006) spoofs American sitcom conventions. Capturing a Bethlehem family’s rooftop lunch on a hand-held camera, Mloukhieh (2006) veers toward the norms of DIY documentary, with the meal unfolding in black-and-white—save the deep olive-green of the mloukhieh itself and the bright yellow of accompanying lemons. Sansour’s mature work reflects upon the Palestinian condition via science-fiction tropes. A Space Exodus (2008), the earliest miniature, is imbued with a familiar amused incongruity. The gaze of more recent works has found more dystopic terrain in the future of the occupied territories.

For Trembling Landscapes, Muller chose one of Sansour’s most accomplished sci-fi miniatures, Nation Estate (2013). As its title suggests, the video depicts a future in which Palestinians are confined to a single massive tower block. Featuring crisp, cinematic production values and convincing CGI, the dialogue-free Nation Estate flirts with sci-fi of an art house sensibility. Reflecting its form, Sansour’s work imagines a future in which some Palestinians live in comfortable and spacious flats with a superb view of their historic landmarks, one higher than the wall still separating them from Palestine.

Jaffa-born Kamal Aljafari is also engaged with how media has depicted, or otherwise used, the land of Palestine. A non-fiction filmmaker whose cinema has come to be embraced by contemporary art, Aljafari’s work is, like that of Sansour, rooted in the experience of his family —Palestinian citizens of Israel (aka 1948 Palestinians) residing in the towns of Jaffa and Ramla.

While Sansour vectors the Palestinian condition through ever more sophisticated application of genre tropes, currently lodged in a speculative future, Aljafari’s aesthetic has moved from capturing the textures of contemporary Palestinian lives to seeking traces of home in past cinema.

The language of his debut feature, The Roof (2006) is that of an un-narrated essay film. His sophomore effort, Port of Memory (2010) shifts to re-enactment. Commencing with Recollection (2015), Aljafari embarked on a series of projects working with found footage. Recollection (which began its public career as the art exhibition Untitled) draws upon an informal archive of Israeli-made films (commercial features and documentary) mined from DVDs and VHS tapes. The film set out to recover traces of Palestinian landscape and architecture, and with them shades of Palestinian lives, from the margins of Israeli cinema production in the vicinity of Jaffa.

The aesthetic of Recollection doesn’t rest in just altering the focus of Israeli films. Aljarafi uses digital film editing processes to excise Israeli narratives and characters from the footage.

By redacting the historical document of the landscape, the work formally challenges the colonizing state’s cultural-productive hegemony over the land’s history. As he’s working with found footage, the artist’s authorial imprint is more nuanced than in his earlier work. While conventional notions of authorship may be denied—not unlike the way true agency is denied those living under occupation —the artist’s role is greater than that of mere witness.

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Aljafari released a second feature-length found-footage project in 2020. An Unusual Summer draws on a cache of VCR tapes archiving footage shot during Israel’s 2006 Lebanon War. Since the footage was shot by a CCTV camera the artist’s father installed after someone had vandalized his car, the film’s location is the family parking lot. Once invoked, the Lebanon war remains steadfastly outside the frame. True to the function of a security camera, the film commences as a whodunit, with the artist (represented by intertitles) seeking out who smashed the elder Jafari’s car window.

As the pixelated figures wandering through this low-resolution tableau become discernible characters, the artist embraces the footage for what it is: a time capsule from the edges of the past, made all the more precious because none of its characters knew what was being documented.

Like Recollection, An Unusual Summer finds meaning beyond the intention of the footage’s original authors.

Vartan Avakian knows something about contingency snatching a share of authorship over his work. The Jbeil-born artist comes to landscape through an interest in public monuments.

He has argued that the power of a monument resides in the residue it collects—its accretions of soil, pollen, fibres, shed skin cells, hair, tears and sweat. This argument frames Collapsing Clouds of Gas and Dust. The minute crystalline sculptures of this series are formed from minerals refined from water that pools in a monument’s pipes and drainage systems, where over decades the residues of environmental and human pollutants accumulate. Once the artist collects the necessary elements, chemical processes do the rest. This laissez-faire approach to authorship suggests a way of reading the exhibition career of another of Avakian’s works. The artist unveiled his triptych Untitled Signs for Bourj Hammoud in 2010, part of the group exhibition Noise. A knowing wink at contemporary art’s l

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place in the global art market, the work was comprised of classic red neon signs. Each lamp’s glass tubing formed “Sfeir-Semler,” the name of the hosting gallery. Two of the signs, one in Arabic script, the other in Armenian, were hung in the space itself. The third, in Devangari—the script used in Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali—was mounted on the south-facing exterior wall of the Tannous Building, the light-industrial structure in Karantina that houses the gallery. This third piece faced the eponymous Bourj Hammoud, a sprawling quarter on the eastern edge of municipal Beirut that over decades has absorbed several waves of immigration—Armenian, Syrian, Kurdish, Ethiopian and South Asian. Burning red throughout the night for weeks, Avakian’s signage hypothetically notified Devangari-reading residents of the gallery’s existence. Since Beirut’s migrant labourers aren’t known to frequent the city’s contemporary art spaces, the work flickered in mute amusement at the incongruity of its gesture.

A decade later, Beirut was in economic and political turmoil. Marfa’ gallery’s Joumana Asseily had been among those to close her space in October 2019, in support of the civil disobedience campaign. With the protests flagging, in February 2020 she discretely opened When the image is new, the world is new, a group exhibition featuring her usual artists. The sole ‘new’ work was Avakian’s somehow familiar A Sign For Things to Come. It’s text-like glass tube ensemble was inert, save for a small square in its lower left-hand corner. Glowing neon red, it resembled a nuqta (an Arabic full stop or dot). When they’d finally got around to removing it from the wall of the Tannous Building, ten years before, workmen had damaged the Devangari face of his Untitled triptych, the artist explained, not quite smiling.4 The backstory of A Sign For Things to Come bears no relation to the cycles of ecstasy and hope, strife and paralyzing uncertainty the country had undergone since October 2019.

Yet the piece’s deracinated cosmopolitanism—an orphaned full stop, glowing amid a derelict work in a self-consciously nostalgic medium—expressed Lebanon’s catastrophe well. Something, the nuqta declared, had ended.

Marfa’ means “port” in Arabic, and it sits only a few dozen metres from the 4 August 2020 explosion’s ground zero—the warehouse at Beirut Port where the ammonium nitrate had been stored.

A few days after the blast the gallery was a wreck but, remarkably, the squat 1940s-era concrete building housing it still stood. The city’s port-side grain silos had absorbed a large part of the blast, saving any structure in its shadow. Within the wreckage, bits of A Sign For Things to Come still hung from the gallery wall. The wall itself was smashed. The jury’s still out on the rest of Lebanon.

Notes 1 For an informative précis of the institutional corruption of Lebanon’s allotment state in the context of Beirut’s 4 August 2020 port blast, see Reinoud Leenders, ‘Timebomb at the Port: How Institutional Failure, Political squabbling and Greed set the stage for Blowing up Beirut’, 16 September 2020; https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/timebomb-at-the-port-how-institutional-failure-political-squabbling-and-greedset-the-stage-for-blowing-up-beirut/ 2 Lebanon’s 2015 waste crisis wasn’t its first. During the Civil War, various militia leaders had padded their coffers by purchasing toxic waste and disposing of it on Lebanese soil, indifferent to risks of groundwater contamination. Jessika Khazrik (aka The Society of False Witnesses) has taken up this business in her early work, recollecting tales of local entrepreneurs taking receipt of deadly cargoes from Italian colleagues and illegally burying it. Her 2016 works Waste Eats Your Histories and All the Flowers that Were Thrown on my Head Come Back Panting revisit these episodes, exploring the photo archive of eco-toxicologist and herbal pharmacologist Pierre Malychef, one of three scientists charged with investigating the case, who were later accused of lying in their report 3

Interview with Marwan Rechmaoui, 4 September 2015 during the 14th Istanbul Biennial: SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms

4

Conversation with Vartan Avakian in Beirut, 14 February 2020

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Images of Record

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Immediately following the thirty-three day 2006 Lebanon War (also referred to as the IsraelHezbollah War) Western Sydney-based artist Khaled Sabsabi was in Beirut on one of his regular visits to Lebanon. Moving through the city he took photographs and video footage of the destruction he encountered, documenting an environment that in little over a month had been rendered unrecognizable by Israeli bombing. On returning to Australia the resulting images were added to a burgeoning personal archive of visual material gathered on these visits.

Almost eight years later Sabsabi exhibited a first set of artworks derived from these photographs under the title Guerilla (2014). The presentation featured thirty-three individually framed photographs, simply printed at 15x10cm snapshot-size, then painted by Sabsabi. They sat within a larger solo exhibition at Milani Gallery in Brisbane, centred on his then new video installation work 70,000 Veils (2014)—composed from 70,000 still photographs—that had just premiered at the 2014 Marrakesh Biennial. The Brisbane exhibition also included a version of the earlier (2007) three-channel video work sharing the same title, Guerilla. Given the apparent basis of his work in moving image, sound and to a lesser degree installation over the previous fifteen years, the presence of these thirty-three subtle, but intensely concentrated painted photographs was not only a surprise to audiences familiar with Sabsabi’s work, but suggested new pathways into the artist’s process, his relationship to the country of his birth and his tussle with the volatility of images as conduits between the known and unknown, the physical and the metaphysical.

In his own way Sabsabi had documented the visually apparent, physical damage to sections of Beirut caused by a conflict that had killed over a thousand civilians (the vast majority Lebanese) and between three hundred and five hundred combatants and resulted in the destruction in Lebanon by Israeli forces of some fifteen thousand homes, nine hundred businesses, more than seventy-five bridges and over thirty utility plants, as well as some three hundred buildings in Israel.

(It is also estimated that around one million people were displaced within Lebanon, and between a third and a half of that number within Israel.)1 There was no specific intention behind Sabsabi’s process, other than the ongoing impulse to personally document the impact of evolving regional tension and conflict on the place of his birth, its history, culture and the experience of its people.

Having migrated to Australia from his home city of Tripoli aged twelve in 1977, a few years into the devastating 1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War, Sabsabi only first returned in 2002. He has made numerous subsequent visits and has spent time working in Lebanon both as an artist and as a facilitator of music, theatre and art projects with local organizations (including Shams Beirut Theatre, AL-JANA Arab Resources Center For Popular Art and the International Arts Academy in Beirut).

Moreover, his visits to Lebanon have been critical to his engagement with Sufism and his own family’s long history with this mystical strand of Islam.

In 2006 he was in Lebanon working on his video work Guerilla, featuring three protagonists detailing the experience and impact of the Civil War. Sabsabi’s memories of the violence of that war remain strong. If he began Guerilla (the video work) with a restorative impulse, focused upon finding a connection across divergent experiences that might point to paths of healing, his encounter with the brutality of the 2006 conflict flipped this process into an experience of recurrent violence and trauma at both a personal and collective level.

Guerilla (the series of painted photographs) was comprised wholly of images of urban destruction—awkward arrangements of broken concrete slabs, collapsed structures, remnants of political signs and graffiti, exposed twisted reinforcing steel, strands of wiring, blown up streets, buckled vehicles, and more. While clearly photographic in origin and composition, the prints had l

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been meticulously worked over in watercolour and acrylic. Certain paint colours not only highlighted features and gave political emphasis but also triggered emotional responses to the scenes: red cloths and flags; green forms of plant life amongst the ruins; yellow bands of emergency incident tape.

But equally important were the less demonstrative treatments of the general scene of each image—the prevalent browns, greys and fawns overpainting rubble, the skeletal forms of eviscerated buildings, dirt craters and pieces of pavement. While less demonstrative in terms of colour or painterly touch, the care with which Sabsabi had also picked out and worked over this tangled detail of destruction —detail otherwise prone to being overlooked in images of a type so prevalent in the contemporary mediascape—called it and the viewer to attention. Painting the photographs had the effect of slowing them: while relatively informal, non-professional and private in their snapshot quality, such photography is nowadays the commonplace model for online global media where the role of either participant or witness is non-distinguishable from that of the reporter. These are the type of photographs as likely to be seen on social media feeds as in print media.

So how did such apparent care, and touch, on the part of the artist shift their register? And what did it ask of a viewer in the act of looking? This apparently new aspect of Sabsabi’s practice involved a generative impulse to redirection through two mediums less visible in his work to this point, painting and photography—painting as an interpretation of the photograph lying below, but also as a reconstruction of our encounter with the photographic more broadly. The works have on some occasions been referred to as paintings, on others as photographs, pointing to an oscillation between medium-specific frames of reference (including that of video) that is important to understanding their potency, and to approaching Sabsabi’s drive to produce the work.

The original 2006 photographs are largely unpeopled, although according to Sabsabi not consciously so.2 Perhaps the impulse was to focus on the shattering effect of human action, to mirror the intent of the distant protagonists with consequential images, not of individualized pain but the ruination of place. Perhaps social reportage as a genre of conflict photography was simply never his interest. Or perhaps people were simply largely absent from these scenes in this stunned moment of relative quietude following the relentless battering of shelling, rocket and bombing attacks.

This unpeopled quality nudges the photographs towards the field of ruins photography, particularly that twentieth and twenty-first century strand documenting and holding for time the present and immediate human destruction of cities across the globe (as distinct from ruins pictured for the aesthetics of decay and entropy formed in their slow dissolution through time). However, very few of Sabsabi’s images are formally framed to give the degree of visual clarity and concentration associated with this genre. Their informality of composition resists this aesthetic convention.

Any encouragement to the viewer towards empathic identification with an experience of pain, loss or trauma is to be found in the rapid snapshot sensibility of the images. And also, perhaps, in a recognition that a sense of violence repeated, of an inescapable cycle of conflict is being paralleled in the recurrent rhythms of return of the migrant home, entering and exiting this sphere, carrying with them not only the embodied and psychological imprint of the situation but its documentation in images, notes and recordings.

These source photographs veer dramatically from close-up details—the cracked and splintered surface of a single structure hard up to the surface of the image—to complete, full-view but abandoned and now tenuous structures at mid-distance, often at odd angles and placement within the frame (leaning to one side, revealing a patch of blue sky to the other, for example).

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document is therefore comprised of fragments, its impact felt in an accumulation, one that conversely provokes a similarly fractured, distressed mode of viewing flitting back and forth, unable to settle on any single view. The photographs may trigger trauma for some. They certainly induce restlessness, anxiety even. Their taking is political. They picture the destruction wrought by political antagonism.

They mark history. There is a quiet but insistent tone of protest in their being. But their generation and fundamental impact is derived and felt most immediately as personal, inferred in the informality of their composition that highlights a personality at their centre, the sense of the photographer as a person moving through this place; observing as an artist certainly, as a witness and as a citizen.

On Sabsabi’s return to Australia the photographs sat with many others in his studio. Tucked away they were certainly not forgotten. They troubled him. An assumed correlation between them as records—as images—of violence and the very acts of violence they indirectly depicted gave him particular concern. If an image identifies an agent of violence—that is, gives to that violence an irrefutable identity—then beyond providing a focal point for disengaged compassion, or alternatively prompting more traumatic reverberations for a viewer, what effect might it be expected to produce other than an equally violent response? The protagonists behind these particular acts of violence are of course clear to Sabsabi and there are enough small signs of time and place across the images to locate them historically for most viewers. But to what end this forensic scrutiny, both by and of the image, whether drawn into narratives of historical record or simply impelled by an impulse towards truth? Is there any meaningful response to the evidential beyond a counter claim to truth, a counter act of violence? Can the image of violence truly generate understanding, reconciliation, peace?

Sabsabi has a long relationship with hip hop as an artist and producer. Back in Sydney when looking over these photographs he was informed also by the words of New York based Peruvian hiphop artist and activist Immortal Technique (Felipe Coronel), who drew just this correlation between the agency of images and violence. (“Destroy the image, and the enemy will die”, from Immortal Technique, ‘Open Your Eyes’, 2008). Sabsabi was initially compelled to try and destroy prints of the images he had taken in Beirut. Beginning with the impulse to destroy an image in order to similarly obliterate the violence it pictures—this could also be described as an act of erasing the chain of signification and therefore denying the originating action (violence) itself—Sabsabi cut, shredded, scraped and attacked the images in various ways, including applying acid to them. The image of violence begetting an act of violence. However, so far as Sabsabi could make out, the image always lingered in certain forms, the stain of violence indissoluble.3

Eventually he turned to a completely different approach, placing each photograph under a magnifying lens, scrutinising and carefully painting it, not to erase or cover over the source image but to treat it, to invest it with a different energy and to redirect its agency. (And it might be added here, to redirect his own relationship to each image.) Every one of these images is different, every work unique, with evident differences in technical and conceptual approach as the process extended across years. The 2014 Brisbane exhibition marked the first public display of works resulting from what to that point had been a largely private, personal process. The project continued. Across new series different elements of the photographs were highlighted, different stylistic approaches undertaken.

In some sets the handling of paint is particularly fine and detailed. In others the treatment is looser, more expressive. In some paint dominates. In others the colour quality of the instant lab photos is allowed more prominence. In some the density of architectural structures is intensified by slabs of acrylic paint sitting off the surface of the photo. In others paint is watercolour thin, almost translucent as it disappears into the image. l

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Following the first exhibition of Guerilla, a further set of thirty-three works under this title was presented in The National 2017: New Australian Art, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney, and ninety-nine works included in the artist’s solo survey exhibition Self-Portrait at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2018, where they formed a line around the walls of the main space, bounding and enclosing the larger exhibition.4 Ninety-nine of these works were also exhibited in the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art under the title 99 Names, a designation shared with an earlier video work comprising ninety-nine screens, each presenting a whirling figure in front of still images of urban destruction.5 The overall body of work is now complete—eleven sets of thirty-three works each, with prints of all the photographs taken over those few days in 2006 painted and included. Three of the eleven sets are held in public collections.

The eleventh set will remain unseen, stored away in the artist’s studio until his death.

These works, under their various exhibited titles constitute a slow, almost arduous reconstitution of imagery captured in haste. As an action, painting becomes a visual manifestation of processes of attenuated study, of close looking, of scrutiny. The technological image of photography was so often aligned with revolutionary, disruptive political energy and with memory given incarnate form through the twentieth century. It remains equally allied to the colonial project of cultural appropriation and deployed as means of public revelation and critique of the violent acts of hostility, invasion and inevitable resistance that colonial avarice fuels. While produced in the early decades of the twenty-first century, Sabsabi’s photographs highlight the present-day continuance of nineteenth and twentieth century traumas rooted in colonial imperatives of occupation of land and in battles over borders, political and economic power and claims to the ascendancy of one faith or belief system over another. Sabsabi’s process of tracing over, recolouring and remaking the photograph with paint is correlative to a suturing together of this blasted, fragmented history.

It is fuelled by a reparative impulse.6 For this is also a concentrated act that while acknowledging the historical specificity of the images, attempts to connect them to a contemplative, metaphysical sphere.

Their grouping in sets is important. They do not form narrative sequences, but as aggregations they create a substantial impression of Sabsabi’s experience of place. They are autobiographical. There is a personal investment in these images, of a particular place and time as if the conjoined condition of both being there (in Beirut) and not (being in Western Sydney working back over the images) turns them into ciphers of migrant experience. In the late 1980s another migrant—the philosopher Vilém Flusser—wrote of the urgency for the migrant to maintain a condition between the past location and the current, foreseeing in the figure of the migrant the idea of the coming future world.7 This experience may be transformational. But also potentially debilitating in its multiple responsibilities across place and time, constantly functioning between memory and the current moment—as Sabsabi described it, this stuttering back and forth, in and out of violence,8 which could also be thought of a stuttering back and forth, in and out of memory.

It is no surprise that an important touchstone for this work is that of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, specifically his book of short prose texts Memory for Forgetfulness (1987, English translation 1995) that describe his passage through the streets of Beirut similarly damaged by shelling and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.9

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Other new works by Khaled Sabsabi utilizing this process of painting over small snapshot photographic prints have begun to appear. A collection of collaged and painted photographs working with his own silhouette featured in his Self-Portrait work for the large group survey exhibition Australia: Antipodean Stories at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan in 2019–20. Fortyeight small paintings under the title Prophet featured in his solo exhibition A Promise at the AGNSW (2019–20), each a schematic, almost abstract image of an individual or groups of figures gathering, rendered primarily in red, blue, white and black. Highly decorative and reminiscent of Arabic mosaic forms and mid-twentieth century European abstraction, the paintings are partial homages to both Islamic miniature traditions and to the famous 1923 Kahlil Gibran book, The Prophet, pointing to Sabsabi’s own interest in connecting the everyday of his material practice to spiritual interests.

The Prophet works fundamentally differ from those of Guerilla and related series in that the photographic prints—still drawn from the artist’s archive of imagery from Lebanon—have been almost entirely painted over and rendered invisible. The photographs here are basic grounds for the paintings, however their material quality as photographic prints is still apparent on close inspection and their provenance clearly significant to Sabsabi’s overall project.

Sabsabi has produced hundreds of new works in recent years through painting over 15 x 10cm and 13 x 18cm photographic prints. The vast majority of these have yet to be exhibited.

It is possible many never will. They are produced in series or sets to quite different purposes, utilizing a variety of approaches. There are sets of work that like The Prophet veer towards abstraction —towards an array of associations slipping back and forth between graphic design, architectural forms, figures and jewellery—and in doing so cover over the photographic image below. Two of the most complete series, however, while more thickly overpainted than the Guerilla works, build up the original images below to render them anew as paintings. Both constitute forms of historical reckoning and acts of remembrance.

8.4.9.1. (2020) (note the historical reversed date reference in the title to invasion and displacement) comprises eighty monochromatic paintings (white, black, grey) over black and white photographs sourced from an early 1970s magazine on the PLO scenes of fighters in training and related scenarios reworked in relatively thick acrylic lend a sense of heft and veracity to these historical records, which are also communications tools. (The magazine was in French, its production funded through Chinese sources, and bought by Sabsabi in the early 2000s in the renowned Maktabat al-Sa’el [The Pilgrim’s Bookshop] in Tripoli that was subsequently burned out in an attack in early 2014.)

The works in Tripoli (2020) have been produced using photographs taken on Sabsabi’s last visit to the city in 2018. Largely architectural and street scenes, he has painted over the images with a limited palette selection (blues, browns, white—some black oil stick outlining of forms to highlight architectural structure and the composition of the image). The paintings cover the surface of the photographic print but serve to emphasize recognizable architectural scenes—shopfronts, the entranceway to the central mosque, street views that lead to a family shrine, or the cemetery (always the everyday and the spiritual, the material and the sacred). These are images of places that Sabsabi regularly returns to—sites that are not only key to his history in the city, and that of his family, but to his ongoing relationship to the place. They are sites frequently recorded, aiding memory but also activating present and future relationships. And while sites with personal meanings—associated with family members or friends—they are also central to the collective identity of place.

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While continuing to produce major video installation works this practice of overpainting photographs has become increasingly important to Sabsabi. As video requires increasingly meticulous levels of planning and investment and generates new challenges for artists in terms of identifying efficacious territories in a video-saturated mediascape, this focus upon the review and remaking of still images into painted objects provides Sabsabi with a conceptually more open and consistent process-based outlet for his thinking.10 There is even quite importantly a different physicality to the practice, an act Sabsabi can return to again and again in his studio. This sits within a broader compulsion to produce objects that can be arranged back into the material world in different situations and evolving configurations.

The underpinning of photography to these objects locks them firmly within a mnemonic realm. Yet, for all photography’s basis in verification and record, ultimately it is the practice of painting reworking the images, adjusting their material being and in doing so shifting the way in which they are looked at that produces both the historical heft of the works and their will to memory.

These are images of record. And in an unassuming way, also richly iconographic history paintings.

Notes 1 Figures drawn from Helena Cobban, ‘The 33-Day War: Hizbullah’s victory, Israel’s choice’, Boston Review, 2 November 2006; bostonreview. net/cobban-33-day-war and BBC News; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5257128.stm; last updated 31 August 2006 2

Conversation with author, 4 February 2021

3

Ibid.

4

This installation highlighted their relationship to a location defined by contentious and contested borders as well as to the migrant experience of border crossing

5

99 Names refers to the ninety-nine names for Allah in Islam. Numbers and numeric references are deeply important to Khaled Sabsabi’s practice: 99; 33 recalling the thirty-three day war; eleven referencing the eleven principles of Naqshbandi Sufism; seven referencing the seven layers of the Nafs or self; and three, the relationship of the divine, the soul and the physical realm

6

In this last regard the work shares an impulse with that of Kadia Attia for example, if focused less specifically on the body as object of imperial violence and vessel for attendant collective trauma

7

Although Flusser’s text has a certain utopian ring to it that seems increasingly dated, perhaps even naïve, in its assumption of shared migrant agency given the gathering horrors of mass forced migration in the decades since it appeared. See Vilém Flusser, ‘Taking Up Residence in Homelessness’, Writings, Andreas Ströhl (ed.), Erik Eisel trans, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, pp. 91–103

8

Conversation with author, op. cit.

9

As is the case with Sabsabi’s work, if using a very different media, Darwish’s texts move beyond description to the author’s meditations on memory and forgetting–two of the dominant concerns of twentieth century literature–and his own experience of time and place more broadly

10 This concentration on the still image has in fact always been central to his work, rendering video works out of literally tens of thousands of individual still frames, or alternatively breaking video footage down into component stills in order to electronically restitch a work

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The Myth of Empty Country And the Story of ‘Deadly’ Glass

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In order for Country to be living, people need to be there.1 Yhonnie Scarce, 2020 AS FAR AS THE EYE WILL SEE When British scientists were surveying international locations for their atomic tests in the early 1950s, they were looking for empty land, country devoid of human life. Culturally habituated to see what they wanted to see, they found what they wanted to find: ‘empty’ land and sea off the northwest coast and inland deserts of Australia which proved ideal for their clandestine military purposes.

This ‘find’ echoed James Cook’s ‘discovery’ when he claimed the ‘empty land’ of the Australian continent for the British Crown under Europe’s international legal doctrine of terra nullius in 1770.

In the mid-twentieth century, in the wake of their Second World War defeat in Singapore and the military power demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United Kingdom’s aspiration was to keep the fire of Empire burning: keeping pace with the United States and Russia in their escalating arms race was a matter of urgency and Commonwealth honour.

Today, such misappropriations and misdirected ambitions are often massed together under the malevolent banner of colonialism. This unresolved and violent history between Australia’s first people and British colonisers remains a cloud in its collective skies and a scar on its soil; a past complicated by the matrilineal rift between Britain and its bastard colony offspring with its own history of secrets, denials and dismissals. These muddy bloodlines and their b[lo]ody-politics intersect across modern Australia, with over four hundred unceded but effectively colonized Indigenous nations. It’s a state of affairs that leaves much of the reconnaissance work to Indigenous artists whose inheritance has been so adversely impacted upon. This unfinished business on the internal borders of the home-front has become the primary remit for Generation X.

Fortified by the enduring time machine of “the Dreaming”2 and her multicultural ancestry, Yhonnie Scarce’s work spans these tensions, which feed her artistic practice with material and metaphorical force. A leading exemplar of contemporary Australia’s political, cultural and aesthetic mediators, over the past decade she has amassed a body of work that holds each injustice up to the light, from colonial genocide to domestic slavery, “stolen children”,3 land degradation and bodysnatching. Her ‘arsenal’ includes photography and the archive, vintage objects, ready-mades and exquisitely hand-crafted glass pieces. These elements are constantly expanded, recontextualized and reappropriated to shift the critical focus of the work.

WOOMERA Scarce was born in 1973 in Woomera, a closed military complex in the northwest of South Australia.

The Woomera township was established at the birth of the Cold War in 1947, by the Anglo-Australia Joint Project; it occupies Kokatha land, Scarce’s maternal grandfather’s Country. To the south, running to the edge of Spencer Gulf are the Nukunu lands of her maternal grandmother. The word “woomera” was imported from the Dharug language of the distant Blue Mountains in the Eora nation, which Sydney now occupies. Once widely used across Aboriginal Australia, the finely carved woomera or spear-thrower is an elegant example of industrial and aerodynamic design. A multi-purpose tool used for carrying, grinding and cutting, its most impressive function is to increase the range and speed of a spear in flight, enabling it to travel at up to 150kms an hour, significantly greater than an arrow fired from a compound bow. It is a poetic irony that “woomera” has become part of the technological lexicon, synonymous with long-range weapons testing and other covert military exercises.

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THE RING OF MARALINGA If Woomera carries a certain military mystique, Maralinga (from “thunder” in a southern Pitjantjatjara dialect) lingers in the public imagination as the site of the British nuclear tests, imposed on Australian territory during the grey zone of the Cold War, while postcolonial wars raged across Europe’s disintegrating empires. Australia’s involvement in the British tests (the detail and science of which was largely secret) was promoted as “in the national interest” as Britain retained its symbolic, Oedipal hold on the nation’s consciousness. Much of the obsequiousness was due to the ambitions of then Prime Minister Robert Menzies (later Sir), whose is remembered for his conservative values and ardent Anglophilia. When entering into this contract with Britain, he bypassed the Federal Cabinet in his eagerness to grant them carte-blanche access to the country and its “human guinea-pigs”, as journalist Frank Walker described Australian (military) victims of Britain’s nuclear testing regime.

It was also convenient for Menzies and the British that Aboriginal Australians were not formally counted as citizens in the federal electorate until 1967. Menzies’ claim that the tests were conducted in the supposedly empty “vast spaces in the centre of Australia, and if it is to be said that however l

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groundlessly that there are risks… the greatest risk is that we may become inferior in potential military strength to the potential of the enemy,”4 was a campaign on the back of the long-held (‘empty land’) principle of terra nullius. One Menzies biographer cautioned that “irreverent anachronists lampoon his beliefs and highlight passages of Menzies’ career in which his almost sentimental Britishness had regrettable overtones,” but ignores Menzies’ part in the British-Australian atomic tests. Here Menzies’ own personal warning probably serves the record best: “you’ve got to be firm with the English. If you allow yourself to be used as a doormat they will trample all over you.”5

Maralinga lies six hundred kilometres west of Woomera, and twelve hundred kilometres north-west of Adelaide. It is well established in both Aboriginal knowledge and meteorological science that prevailing winds blow west to east across the inland of Australia. These are the wild ‘westerlies’ that can bring extreme dust-storms to coastal metropolitan areas. It is well documented, although still not widely known, that radioactive waste drifted and settled across vast tracts of Australia during the tests, in some instances reaching densely populated areas to the east, north and south. Baby-boomers remember there were weeks when they were not allowed to drink milk as tests revealed the existence of strontium-90, a carcinogenic radioactive isotope and bi-product of nuclear fission. In every atomic test, the immediate fallout area was on Aboriginal land (including Scarce’s Kokatha land), and whether it was learnt at anti-uranium rallies in the 1970s or as global observers of the Chernobyl and Fukushima catastrophes, the world knows nuclear waste is a long-term environmental problem with a half-life outlasting the typical human lifespan. Less well-known are the proportionately higher rates of infant mortality, miscarriage, birth defects and premature death in Aboriginal communities in the path of the radioactive winds and from the contaminated soil.

Scarce reifies these dead in her Strontium-90 series, including Fallout babies (2016) and Only a mother could love them (2016), in which forensic glass pieces augment documentary photographs of the Woomera Cemetery.

Britain carried out twelve major atomic tests in Australia between 1952 and 1957, three on the Monte Bello Islands in northwest Western Australia beginning on 3 October 1952, two at Emu Field in central South Australia in 1953, and seven at Maralinga through 1956 to 1957. For a decade, ‘minor’ trials leaving toxic levels of plutonium, cobalt-60 and other radioactive waste were performed across Maralinga Tjarutja Country. Residual contamination ignores the arbitrarily mapped ‘no-go’ areas of ground-zero sites with their desolate, monumental titles: One Tree, Marcoo and The Breakaway (Operation Buffalo, September-October 1956), or Taranaki, the last and largest balloon-suspended blast of 26.6 kilotons on 9 October, (Operation Antler), in 1957.

DEADLY GLASS CLOUDS Yhonnie Scarce is a mistress of scale, with an historian’s sharp sense of duty to the past and a genealogist’s responsibility to her ancestors. To date she has memorialized three of these atomic blasts—or rather, their victims—in grand suspended glass installations. Thunder raining poison (2015) was commissioned by The Art Gallery of South Australia for its inaugural 2015 Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, a biennial event showcasing current practice and reviving works from the Indigenous art-historical archive. The work was later acquired by the National Gallery of Australia where it featured in Defying Empire: Third National Indigenous Art Triennial (2017). Directly inspired by the Breakaway blast, its form is modelled on “a dissipating cloud” of nuclear dust which drifted across Scarce’s grandfather’s Country.6

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Thunder raining poison comprises two thousand transparent glass yams, the yam being a staple food for Aboriginal people and as such, a form invested with cultural and spiritual value.

Iconographically and symbolically, the yam and other ‘bush tucker’ plants such as the bush banana and bush plum, along with their associated Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) sites are important subjects for Aboriginal artists, particularly women who traditionally held the comprehensive knowledge of the regularly harvested and managed bush gardens across Australia. It’s a natural corollary that these distorted and distended plants signify human figures, internal organs, embryos or corpses in Scarce’s ongoing body of work. Combined with clinical apparatus and alternating display modalities (scissors, beakers, mortuary trolleys and neo-natal cribs), the glass forms can imply mass graves of Aboriginal freedom fighters, victims of unauthorized medical tests, birth defects in irradiated babies or violated food chains due to mining activity. This sophisticated use of a deceptively fragile and deceivingly beautiful medium sets Scarce apart from her senior countrymen and many of her peers.

A composition between hand and breath, the alchemical, elemental process of glassblowing neatly fuses the maker to her material and her métier to meaning.

Scarce first visited Maralinga in 2014 and returned to visit the Breakaway site in 2015 with glassblowers from Adelaide’s JamFactory. Her close working relationship developed over several years with specialist glassblowers is instrumental in realizing Scarce’s large-scale productions increasingly in demand across the artworld, nationally and globally. Such cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaborations, built on long-term trust, help promote a fuller appreciation of South Australia’s history. For Scarce, intergenerational storytelling is central.7 On the barren, lifeless Breakaway explosion site the sand was subjected to such high temperatures that it vitrified into a dirty green glass. This ‘glass story’ is compelling, an indexical salute to Scarce, who resigned from her job as a university administrator to pursue a fine art degree with a major in glass, a move partly inspired by the hand-made glass curios she collected from second-hand stores and which are casually referenced in some of her own work. Little did she realize then that the nearby University of Adelaide Oliphant Building, named after Adelaide-born nuclear physicist Sir Marcus Oliphant, who worked on the development of atomic weapons in Britain during World War Two, would become intimately woven into her future art practice.

The sublime spectacle of an atomic bomb blast delivers high iconic value, leaving a haunting afterimage for anyone who witnessed the cataclysmic spectre. As the testimonials of military personnel and Aboriginal custodians declare in very different cultural terms, the power of the explosions was incomparable and mythological. Henry Carter’s recollection is typical of the young RAAF defence recruits who were routinely ordered to turn their backs to, and then face the blast. “I pressed the palms of my hands into my eye sockets. At zero there was a blinding electric blue light of an intensity that I had not seen before or since… I realized I could see the bones of my hands… My body seemed first to be compressed, and then billowing like a balloon.”8 AFTERBURN The (Western Desert) Yankunytjatjara leader Yami Lester was a young boy when he experienced the effects of the Totem One atomic bomb explosion at Emu Field in 1953, which Scarce’s Death Zephyr (2017) evokes in its horizontal curtain of clear and opaque glass yams, a mosaic of black and white.

As Lester recalled, the explosion surpassed his world of knowledge, and could only be perceived as the ancestral serpent Wanambi beating the ground to make waterholes. Far to the northwest of Western Australia in Martu Country, Nyarri Nyarri Morgan has shared his similarly confronting l

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encounter, in filmmaker Lynette Wallworth’s virtual reality artwork Collisions (2017).9 Both eyewitnesses described a greasy black mist darkening the horizon; in Lester’s account the heavy cloud slowly rolled through the camp of men, women and children, where “the older men waved their woomeras at the cloud, trying to scare off this Mamu [devil-spirit].”10 The Martu likewise could only comprehend the terrible phenomena, which left death and sickness in its wake, as some all-powerful and punitive ancestral force. Lester partially lost his eyesight within days of the black mist, and eventually became totally blind. Countless reports were presented by witnesses and victims during the Australian government’s McClelland Royal Commission (1984-85) into the British nuclear tests, (many reprised in Walker’s exposé on Maralinga), but despite the anecdotal evidence from survivors and the high frequency of cancers and premature deaths, no criminal charges were laid against any of Britain’s leaders. Token clean-ups have been attempted by the Australian government, but unsurprisingly much of the Maralinga Tjarutja Country, handed back to its Aboriginal owners in 1985 under the Land Rights Act, remains toxic wasteland—though this description is inadequate for the original custodians who continue to cherish their homeland.11

The Official Secrets Act signed by military servicemen meant the true extent of human exposure to tests and contaminated equipment was not revealed until decades later. For Aboriginal people, cultural taboos that prevent speaking names—and inhabiting places—of the recently deceased further compounded the staggering task of accounting for the sick and the dead, let alone getting a public hearing when directives from the state were simply that there were no Aboriginals in the shadow of nuclear fallout. The human and environmental implications of an uneven partnership between a major empire at its end and minor Australian nation are slowly being exposed and interrogated by Scarce and others, but as the late Aboriginal poet and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal wrote in her poem, No More Boomerang (1966), chemical warfare is colour blind: Lay down the woomera, Lay down the waddy.

Now we got atom-bomb, End everybody.12 BRUTAL FRONTIERS Intergenerational trauma and the wholesale loss, grief and anger associated with colonization—as well as resilience and resistance—are frequently addressed by Indigenous contemporary artists and curators with impunity, but semantics and “resistance to using the term ‘massacre’” still frustrates Scarce.13 One frequent creative strategy which Australian Indigenous curator Hetti Perkins flags is using visual subterfuge, “seductive beauty” (and well-targeted curatorial hyperbole) to “draw… us into [their] tender trap.”14 Situated within the museum or the contemporary art space, this is what audiences have come to expect, to be treated to a history lesson but often without brute confrontation.

The recognition of Australia’s ‘Frontier Wars’15 (from c.1820) and the range and extent of massacres across the country into the early twentieth century is a history that can no longer be repressed, but public monuments to these conflicts are yet to be realized; historians such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan, who undertook ground-breaking work on Tasmania’s nineteenth century genocide and more recently led the digital mapping project (Colonial Frontier Massacres, Australia 1780–1930) are archiving knowledge of this violence across the country. But wars—’history wars’, ‘culture wars’, wars of words—continue to be fought over terminology and definitions: massacre and genocide, self-defence and ignorance.16 l

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Global comparisons can be powerful tools to interrogate national histories. In 2008, Scarce travelled to Berlin and was struck by the visibility and therapeutic value of memorials to victims and survivors of The Holocaust. The contrast with her homeland was stark. Compelled by a fascination/ repulsion for brutalist, military aesthetics, Scarce and collaborating partner Lisa Radford travelled on a photographic field trip through the northern winter of 2018/19 in pursuit of monuments and monumental iconoclasm, from Socialist Republic anarchy to industrial, nuclear accident.

An ongoing investigation, The Image is Not Nothing (Concrete Archives) (2021–), is being exhibited as a curatorial project as part of the 2021 Adelaide Festival, while her collaboration with architectural firm Edition Office won the 2019 National Gallery of Victoria’s Architecture Commission. In Absence (2019) in the Gallery’s courtyard, borrows the clean force and bulwark-verve of Brutalist form, sensitized to its garden surroundings and inspired by traditional eel-traps. Blackened by burning, the internal core of the monumental key-like structure seeps tear-like droplets of glass yams.

The artist’s intention is solidly articulated with In Absence, making visible the architectural and agricultural expressions of pre-contact Indigenous Australians, notably the work of Bunurong writer and public intellectual Bruce Pascoe. Pascoe’s work, especially his popular, award-winning book Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture (2014), refutes the assumption that Indigenous populations were a “nomadic hunter-gather” culture, and argues instead that low-impact architecture has been long-term on the Australian continent. Australian historian Bill Gammage’s, The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011) made comparable claims of highly strategic Indigenous land management systems across the country, including regular ‘mosaic’-style burning of bush and grassland. Both drew heavily from colonial records (journals, artworks) in their research, and both have generated considerable debate as the nation addresses, or ignores, the perils of climate change and ecological rupture.

BIRMINGHAM BOMBS, WOOMERA ROCKETS AND WURUNDJERI LANDS Yhonnie Scarce would have returned to Birmingham at the beginning of 2021 to complete her residency at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham had COVID-19 not forced her to stay in Australia. She planned to research the documents of Cold War invention located in the University of Birmingham archives, along with advanced glass-making technologies at the University of Wolverhampton’s stateof-the-art glassblowing facilities. Bristol University is active in researching nuclear fusion technology with its utopian promise of unlimited, carbon-neutral energy, and the city has a long tradition of technological innovation, manufacturing and industrial production. It was also where in 1940, under the heavy German bombing raids of the ‘Birmingham Blitz’, that prominent physicists and expatriate Germans Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls wrote their Memorandum on the construction of nuclear weapons based on the separation of uranium isotopes. Developing the “practically irresistible superbomb” was a matter of urgency, and they were transparent about the risks of windborne radioactivity and “large numbers” of civilian deaths.17 As Scarce says, “They [Frisch and Peierls] were aware of the danger of the nuclear atom when they began, but continued to work on it anyway. Not long after that came the Manhattan Project—and Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Maralinga. When you think of weapons of mass destruction, it all… started in Birmingham.”18

Cloud Chamber (2020) is Scarce’s third majestic mushroom-cloud work, created on her return from the United Kingdom. The science embedded in the title—the cloud chamber—is a device used to detect ionizing particles, technology developed in the late nineteenth century by Scottish physicist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson. Hanging from a grid-formation in the north-facing end of 50 | 51

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TarraWarra Museum of Art’s spacious complex like a palatial chandelier, Cloud Chamber embodies the human and ecological casualties associated with the Breakaway atomic blast, Maralinga’s grandfinale. A memento-mori of the first order, the installation is part of the Ikon Gallery/TarraWarra Museum of Art’s post-COVID-19 lockdown summer exhibition, Looking Glass (with Waanyi artist and previous Ikon resident, Judy Watson). Set against the cool concrete architecture and grand clean lines of glass, Cloud Chamber’s discreet wall-text explains the impact of British-Australian nuclear testing to the viewer. Framed by the sky, luxuriant grapevines and the rolling hills of the affluent Yarra Valley, occupied by Wurundjeri ancestors since the last Ice Age and colonized by Victorian pastoralists and vignerons from the mid-nineteenth century, it is hard to reconcile the lavish abundance of one privileged agricultural inheritance with the decimated heart of Maralinga Tjarutja country, a food bowl scarcely evident to outsider eyes, but a clean and sustaining source of energy for hundreds of generations.

Though its peak as a missile testing site was over by the time Scarce was born in Woomera there was a population of around 4,000 people, a quarter of them American and Australian defence personnel; her father was among a minority of civilian workers employed by the Department of Infrastructure. By the early 1970s, Woomera was being developed as a key strategic aeronautical surveillance site, along with the US base at Pine Gap (near Alice Springs), which became operational in 1969–70. The radio-controlled target drones GAF Jindivik and its prototype, the GAF Pika (from Aboriginal words for “the hunted one” and “flier” respectively) were trialled as early as 1952, and today advanced defence drones and solar-electric aircraft are the latest technologies to be piloted at Woomera. It was where Australia’s first satellite was launched in 1967, the same year a landmark referendum voted in favour of counting Aboriginal people as citizens in the national census and granting federal parliament powers to make laws relating to Aboriginal people. Another brief chapter in Woomera’s story made international headlines when the federal government placed asylum seekers into detention at the euphemistically named Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre between 1999 and 2003, which then closed due to accusations of human rights abuses.

The Woomera Rocket Range, now known as the RAAF Woomera Range Complex covers over 122,000 square kilometres of land belonging to six Aboriginal language groups in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. Scarce is still coming to terms with the fluke of her inheritance: “it’s a strange place to be born,” she notes, (the family moved to Adelaide when Scarce was still a young girl), and she spent years in Ceduna on the west coast of South Australia with family, but Woomera remains under her skin. Accustomed to the forty-three degree Celsius dry heat (not unlike a glass furnace), for Scarce the military outpost remains a matrix of unsettling histories —the local ‘trophy park’ of abandoned weaponry not far from the graves of so many of her people.

On location early 2021 conceptualizing a new work for a forthcoming survey at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Scarce is wry about a situation in which her autonomy ‘on Country’ is compromised and her skills in handling red tape are tested. Commonwealth restrictions on public access within the Woomera Range Complex mean Scarce’s artistic research, arguably her birthright, is increasingly laced with bureaucracy. It is another reminder of colonial mapping, manning and manipulating Indigenous sovereignty.

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Notes 1 Note that “Country” as a capitalized, proper noun is in regular usage to refer to Aboriginal people’s traditional or custodial homelands.

Being “on Country” is shorthand for clan estates, inherited through ancestry and identification with local language groups. “Country” also implies the sentient landscape and metaphysical world-view of Indigenous Australians, often referred to as “the Dreaming”. Quote from the artist in an interview, Hetti Perkins: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce, Looking Glass (exhib. cat.), TarraWarra Museum of Arts, 2020, p. 62 2 “Dreaming” (tjukurrpa in several Western Desert languages) is a broad encompassing term that refers to creation-times and Aboriginal ancestral law including material, social, cultural, spiritual and metaphysical knowledge and belief systems. The temporalities of “the Dreaming” include past, present and future 3 The “Stolen Generations” or “Stolen Children” refers to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families between 1910 and 1970 under the Australian government’s assimilationist policies. State and Church were instrumental in placing children into domestic servitude, foster families or institutional ‘homes’ 4 Frank Walker, Maralinga: The Chilling Expose of Our Secret Nuclear Shame and Betrayal of Our Troops and Country, Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2014, p. 66 5 Allan Martin, Australian Dictionary of Biography; https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/menzies-sir-robert-gordon-bob-11111; accessed 30 January 2021 6 For the artist’s full account of the work see ‘Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial’; https://nga.gov.au/defyingempire/artists. cfm?artistirn=42884; accessed 21 January 2021 7

Author communication with the artist, 29 January 2021

8

Walker, p. 25

9

See Nici Cumpston and Una Rey, ‘Collisions: The Martu Respond to Maralinga’, Artlink 37: 2, 2017

10

Walker, p. 62

11 See writer-director Larissa Behrendt’s film Maralinga Tjarutja, (2020) by Blackfella Films, for the Pitjantjatjara perspective on this history and their ongoing management of their land 12 Widely published in collections, anthologies and online, originally as, Kath Walker, The Dawn is at Hand, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1966, pp. 26–27. See the full poem; http://www.staff.vu.edu.au/syson/1002/oodgeroo.html 13

Watson and Scarce, Looking Glass, p. 59

14

Ibid., p. 10

15

The Australian 'Frontier Wars' is a term applied by some historians and others to violent conflicts between Indigenous people and white settlers following the British colonization of Australia 16 The ‘History Wars’ etc., which were at their height at the turn of the twenty-first century, were sparked by scepticism towards accounts of the ‘frontier wars’ that had gained increasing attention since the 1980s. While the dispute was heated, the scepticism was driven by ideological concerns that failed to sustain their claim. Seen in a broader perspective, they were a manifestation of a post-Western culture war that is ongoing and global in reach 17 Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls, ‘Frisch-Peierls Memorandum’; see https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/frisch-peierlsmemorandum 18 Debika Ray, ‘Glass Artist Yhonnie Scarce shines a light on the oppression of Aboriginal people’, Crafts Council / Stories; https://www. craftscouncil.org.uk/stories/glass-artist-yhonnie-scarce-shines-light-oppression-aboriginal-people.; accessed 26 January 2021

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The General’s Stork

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In 2013 I began an investigation on paranoia, following a viral media story about a detained stork that had been accused of espionage. The bird had been captured in Qena, a small city in southern Egypt, when a local fisherman suspected an electronic device attached to its body. The research took many forms (field work, interviews, archival research, digital methodologies) and examines the politics of aerial surveillance—against the backdrop of biblical prophecies, drone warfare, and colonial narratives—from a bird’s-eye view. The General’s Stork explores the extent to which Western military techniques of reconnaissance have determined the topographical quartering of the Middle East and how paranoia can become so prevalent that a bird can be accused of spying. Below is a transcript of an artistic lecture that has, since its first iteration, expanded as an ongoing project which includes performance, works on paper, archival research material, film and the book Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork, edited by Anthony Downey (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).

PART 1 We live in a risk society, a moment of global hysteria. A time in which everything is a construct of fear, where responses are formulated according to the phobias that define our social world. In such a world, the narrative becomes everything: it is power. Our paranoia leads us to question even the construct of our visual realities. Our visual paradigms are drastically changing as we’ve begun to dismantle the linear perspective. The mathematics of art as put forth by Italian Renaissance painters and architects, no longer deals with the horizon or the vanishing point but rather the detached observant gaze of the aerial view.

The aerial view has become the new norm as technological tools of surveillance become seamlessly embedded within our contemporary landscapes. From the Orientalist depiction of the desert of nineteenth century aerial photography in the Middle East, to the role that satellite imagery of the 1991 Gulf War has played in transforming war reportage, the problematic practices in landscape surveillance perpetuate the narrative of imperialism through the technology of warfare.

The language of occupation and colonization has been written into the visualization of landscape.1 Early twentieth century geographers were intrigued by this new perspective as a means of territorial evaluation.

The Royal Geographical Society convened in 1920 to discuss British military strategies and opportunities brought forth by aerial technologies for land expansion, particularly in Europe’s new territories on the African continent. It was surveying landscapes not only for visualizing the colonies, but also for administrative control and imperial cataloguing.2 The Society recognized the power of aerial photography for advancing scientific research, using Egypt and Palestine as testing grounds for perfecting their survey techniques. As early as 1916, surveying and mapping technologies were used to uncover Turkish systems and infrastructures in Gaza in preparation for warfare.3

As war became dictated by the needs of technology, conquest from the sky transformed Western warfare into an imbalanced spectacle of high-tech weaponry.4 Techno-aesthetics became inherently tied to the greater Middle East as landscapes of destruction—complete with trenches, tunnels, minefields and communication structures—became the image of a new regime of terror.

Aeroplanes further transformed the aestheticization of geography to another level of domination: aeromobilities not only changed the territorial sovereignty of airspace, but machines altered our contemporary imaginaries and the very nature of seeing. Paul Virilio writes of “the deadly harmony that always establishes itself between the functions of eye and weapon,” when missiles and bombs are fitted with cameras and suddenly “open their eyes.”5 56 | 57

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PART 2 In 2013, Egypt made worldwide headlines for a story about a stork. It was caught and detained after a local resident identified an electronic device attached to its body and suspected it of espionage. It was accused of being a Zionist spy and later imprisoned. Once it was broadcast in the media, it became a spectacle that was in keeping with the frenzy of the events unfolding in Egypt.6 At this time, Egypt is in the middle of a grave crisis. The elected president Mohammad Morsi and senior figure of the Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown and jailed by the military on 3 July, 2013. In the two months since Morsi was toppled, hundreds of his followers have been killed in clashes with the army and police, including during an event that Human Rights Watch has called “the most serious incident of mass unlawful killings in modern Egyptian history” where it states that at least one thousand people were killed on 14 August, 2013.7 Furthermore, an insurgency has flared in the Sinai Peninsula.

On Sunday 1 September, 2013 Nature Conservation Egypt receives an email: To whom it may concern: We have found out from the media, that a white stork with our satellite tracking device was caught in Egypt near Qena and it is in captivity: Could you get in touch with the authorities and inform them, that this is a stork from Hungary and the device is a wildlife tracking device we attached to it to follow the migration of the bird.

Even you can find the details of the bird and the tracking data on our satellite tracking website.8

The stork was a native of Hungary and was following the Nile River on his migration toward the Lake Victoria basin in East Africa when villagers in Qena spotted him at rest with a white satellite tracker fixed to its body. The bird was one of one hundred and fifteen migrating birds being tracked by a consortium of European wildlife organisations. Qena, a small city in southern Egypt, is most famous for its close proximity to the ancient temples of Dendara and today, has become a major traffic route between Upper Egypt and the Red Sea. Seemingly distant from the political events unfolding around the country, the city has its own complicated history that includes an elaborate story about a secret American military airbase.

Here is an account from Larry Grinnell, technical communicator for the US military whose role was to perform occasional preventive maintenance inspections and certify the destruction of radio operators’ classified documents. This is taken from his personal website: The 1st Comm had an ongoing mission sending people to a classified location somewhere in the middle east, simply known to us as… Site Alpha. As it turns out, this was the forward base that launched the rescue attempt to bring back the American hostages in Iran, taken when the US Embassy was invaded in 1979. The rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, failed completely due to many factors that are probably still being discussed today.9

The helicopters were sent from the military base in Qena and all encountered technical problems: eight helicopters were sent, one encountered hydraulic problems, another got caught in a cloud of fine sand, a third showed cracks in the rotor blade, and lastly one of the helicopters crashed into a transport aircraft. Eight Americans and one Iranian citizen were killed.10

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No one was supposed to know where [the base] was until they were under way, unless they had the appropriate clearances and need to know… Gee, I thought, just having seen King Tut’s riches, this was pretty amazing to be going to the country where he came from. We finally touched down, after going around three times due to difficult weather at the site, and when I got to the open doorway, my heart sunk. There it was. Miles and miles of miles and miles. This was a real desert with basically nothing.

I quickly found out that Site Alpha was a former Soviet air base, built in the days when the Soviets and the Egyptians were fast friends… officially, it was known as Wadi Qena… We called it Bum F**k Egypt (BFE for short). Along with Thule, Greenland and Minot, North Dakota, BFE was an often mythical place that military training instructors threatened to send you if you didn’t get with the program. I think we even had a sign outside Base Operations that said “Welcome to BFE,” but when local Egyptian military folks and civilian dignitaries visited, the true meaning of BFE was masked with the acronym “Beautiful, Friendly Egypt.” I don’t think anyone was fooled, but we did at least try to play the game.11

The operation was eventually aborted and failed to save the hostages. The embassy hostages were then scattered around Iran to make another rescue attempt impossible. It was Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s president at the time, who leaked the information of the American military base in Egypt.

The deal was that the Americans would use the Egyptian facilities to introduce land-based American air power to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. This was not a surprising move considering the development of aerial technologies in the region.

PART 3 A German engineer first attached a camera to a pigeon in 1908 to take aerial photographs.

Dr. Julius Neubronner patented the ‘pigeon-cam’, a camera attached to a homing pigeon activated by a timing mechanism. Neubronner was an apothecary near Frankfurt and started receiving his prescriptions from a sanatorium in Falkenstein using pigeon post. He then thought, if a pigeon can carry drugs, surely it can carry a camera. He fitted a light miniature camera with a harness weighing up to 75g, and the birds were already accustomed to carrying such weight. The imperial patent office accepted his invention which he titled “method and device for photographing sections of terrain from the bird’s eye perspective.”12 It wasn’t long before his ‘pigeon-cam’ inspired the German military intelligence to do the same. It was, in fact, reported that the German Army was training pigeons for photography in 1932 leading up to the Second World War. It was only a matter of time until real animals started being replaced by artificial ones.

In August 2012, a suspected surveillance drone crashed in Balochistan Province, Pakistan.

According to an eyewitness account, it landed near the Frontier Corps headquarters in Chaman, a bordering township with Afghanistan. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, this particular region has seen the heaviest bombardment by drone strikes, with a total of 425 strikes in the last decade and between 2501 and 4003 casualties, eighty-four of which are identified as members of al-Qaeda.13 The robotic bird resembled a SmartBird, even though the company denies responsibility or ownership. In a TV report on the incident, the reporter states in Urdu voice-over: “From now onwards, we will have to watch the skies carefully, to check whether a bird is real, or it is a spy.”14 SmartBird is designed by a research laboratory at Festo, a German industrial control 60 | 61

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and automation company based in Esslingen am Neckar. The laboratory specializes in lightweight material and advanced pneumatics. The movements of the bird have been precisely engineered to match the patterns of a seagull. They are exploring what they call “bionic thinking” and their goal is to “learn from nature and transfer that knowledge into technology to improve the production of the future.”15 But to what end?

PART 4 Today the United States has the most comprehensive and aggressive drone program in the world; they lead the world in drone technology. “When American army strategists imagine what drones will be like in twenty-five years, they begin by getting an infographist to create a composite image of a typical Arab town, complete with mosque, other buildings, and palm trees.”16 They use a so-called ‘pattern-of-life-analysis’ to locate anonymous militants based on evidence collected by surveillance cameras through spatiotemporal mapping, or the analysis of an individual’s movements in correlation to space and time. Obviously, this is not error-free and often firing is decided on arbitrary ‘pattern-of-life’ indicators and innocent people are being killed. In fact, the White House ‘kill list’ criteria are unknown and based on blind trust; they are tracking ‘behaviour’ from the sky.

In the wake of Wikileaks and particularly Chelsea Manning’s disclosure of nearly 750,000 classified documents, including the Baghdad airstrike video, ‘Collateral Murder’ released on 5 April, 2010, our exposure to the causalities of warfare from the military perspective has become embedded in our contemporary consciousness.17 Indeed, Manning’s release of that particular video greatly transformed our public discourse and collective imaginaries in regards to military conduct and our role in it. Manning’s leaks were an attempt to address the accountability of the system, in this case the US government, who not only withholds truths from the public and controls the dissemination of images, but also gets away with war crimes. The released leaks did something that military images never do; they humanized victims.

The aftermath of ‘9/11’ brought us the postmodern war and operation ‘Shock and Awe’, where scenes of violence and destruction from the aerial bombardment of Iraq in 2001 were broadcast on TV and narrated through the constructs of aesthetics. Sixteen years later, the 2017 US Shayrat missile strikes in Syria were described as “beautiful pictures” by MSNBC’s Brian Williams.18 American military rhetoric systematically portrays warfare through aesthetics that not only glorify the destruction of Middle Eastern cities but also reduce the casualties of civilians to faceless, abstract figures.

The exoticization of violence is embedded in the aerial image which simultaneously proposes notions of construction and destruction. Perhaps even more alarming is that now people are being labelled as potential threats through algorithmic processing. In other words, someone can be singled out as a potential terrorist and be arrested for it before they have even considered doing anything. In fact, in April 2017, over four hundred Palestinians were detained, based on an algorithmic determination of their possible danger.19 This is not an exact science, in the same way that drone targeting is not precision warfare. The victims of war see their spaces and landscapes simultaneously through experience and through the aesthetics of the machine. Their multi-layered perception of landscape becomes like an out of body experience where witnessing one’s own death is an imminent probability.20

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It was Israel who had discovered the potential of remotely piloted vehicles, after they had inherited a few machines scrapped by the Americans who, momentarily, had abandoned the development of their drone program in the 1970s. In 1969, the Israeli Air Force was using drones to photograph and monitor Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian troops, and by 1973, in the Yom Kippur War, they sent out a wave of drones to mislead enemy defences—they were able to attack when the Egyptians used up all their artillery and were reloading.21 This was the first time drones were officially used in battle.

PART 5 In 1869, W.F. Quinby of Wilmington, Delaware, invented a new and improved flying machine.

Quinby states in his application that his improvements “intended to provide an arrangement of temporary sails resembling in some respect the wings of birds.”22 Like him, many before Quinby attempted to acquire bird-like characteristics. In fact, The Bible itself has prompted many scholars and inventors to conceive of flying machines or bird-like machines inspired by the following passage from the book of Isaiah: “As birds flying, so will the LORD of hosts protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver [it], he will pass over and preserve [it].”23

After taking up his command in Cairo in June 1917, Lord Allenby the Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) had been given explicit orders by the Prime Minister David Lloyd George to capture Jerusalem by Christmas. This was in the wake of two failed efforts by his predecessor, Sir Archibald Murray, to conquer Gaza, a necessary condition for the conquest of Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. Lord Allenby was a believer in Bible prophecy; he was a religious man and did not want to destroy the holy places in the city of Jerusalem. He was persuaded by Biblical scholars to move forward based on Biblical prophecy.

Allenby ordered as many planes as possible to fly over Jerusalem. It is said that at that time the Turks had never seen so many planes in the sky and were terrified by their presence. He ordered pilots to send down leaflets commanding the Turks to surrender. The flyers read: “Surrender the city today, Allenby.” Allenby, in Arabic, can only be written in one way: al naby (prophet or son of god). What he did not know was that the Turks also believed in an old prophecy that they would never lose the Holy City until a man of Allah came to deliver it. The Turks surrendered without firing a shot, an incredible fulfilment of Biblical prophecy which put Palestine under British mandate.

The Balfour Declaration, a public statement issued by the British government in 1917, called for a Jewish homeland and set the foundation for modern Israel.

In fact, the following version of the story is seldom told and probably because the sociopolitical transformation of the entire region was prompted by hens. According to the witness account of Major Vivian Gilbert relayed in detail in his book from 1928, called The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem, the city of Jerusalem was, in fact, surrendered to the general’s cook who was out on a mission to fetch some eggs. On 9 December, 1917 the eggs were spoiled, so British private Murch, a cook from London, was sent off alone with his rifle to the next village to get eggs for the commander’s breakfast. As an incompetent soldier, he got lost in the fog and dust and accidentally stumbled on a group of men who greeted him with a set of keys. Hussein Effendi el Husseiny, the mayor of Jerusalem, wanted to surrender the city to the cook. “I don’t want your city” he says, “I want some eggs!” Upon his return, private Murch relayed his amazing adventure and his commanding officer promptly declared the fall of Jerusalem.24

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Conscious of the city’s special meaning for three of the world’s great religions, in a deliberate act of humility and respect Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot through the Jaffa Gate on 11 December, 1917. He walked to the Citadel from where he read a proclamation that made it clear he came not as a conqueror, but as a liberator.25 Of course, at this point, Allenby becomes the man of the moment. All eyes were on him. His unprecedented success had made him out to be a hero, a hero with religious values and kindness. But most peculiar, however, in his limelight with the media focus on our new hero is the emergence of a particular relationship with a bird.

PART 6 Lord Allenby had a pet marabou stork. Perhaps it was biblical fate that strengthened the bond with this bird. Perhaps the bird represents a sort of triumph that he holds dear to his heart, a symbolic embodiment of biblical prophecy. Perhaps it is not a coincidence. But it is this precise relationship that defines the absurdity of this story, the thread that unites the sequence of events. It relays the surreal way in which history is written and highlights the details that often get left out and are eventually forgotten and erased from history, the fantasies and the truths that we hold on to.

The regime of truth and the power of narrative.

So how does the story end? The spy bird in Qena was given the name Menes, after an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh who was credited with uniting Upper and Lower Egypt. Menes, in fact, means “he who endures.” However, the short-lived success story of getting Menes released was not enough to keep him safe until he exited Egypt. Upon release, he was almost instantly shot down by hunters and eaten by the very people who had questioned him in the first place. They had consumed their paranoia.

Notes 1 The notion of aerial photography as a construct of war was initially developed for mapping battlefields in North Africa. See for example, Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin eds, London: I.B.Tauris, 2013, p. 188 2 Dov Gavish, The Survey of Palestine under the British Mandate, 1920–1948, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005, passim. See also Dov Gavish, ‘An Account of an Unrealized Aerial Cadastral Survey in Palestine under the British Mandate’, The Geographical Journal vol. 153, no. 1, 1987, pp. 93–98 3 The Royal Geographical Society was founded in 1830 and is the UK’s leading centre for geographers. In its early years, the organization was predominantly preoccupied with colonial expansion, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. See Peter Adey, Aerial Life, Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 90-91 4 Italian pilot Guilio Cavotti dropped the first bombs from an aeroplane in 1911 near Tripoli during the Italo-Turkish war that transformed Ottoman Libya into an Italian colony. This event marked the first time that the aeroplane and camera came together as a new way of visualizing warfare through the machine’s perspective. See Mark Mazower, ‘Libya Remembers, We Forget: These Bombs Are Not the First’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/25/libya-remembers-bombs-not-first; accessed 5 July, 2017 5

Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, New York: Verso, 2009, p. 83

6

Conal Urquhart, ‘Arrested “Spy” Stork Killed and Eaten after Release in Egypt’, The Guardian, 8 September 2013; https://www.theguardian. com/world/2013/sep/07/arrested-spy-stork-killed-eaten-egypt 7 ‘Egypt: Security Forces Used Excessive Lethal Force’, Human Rights Watch, 19 August 2013; https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/08/19/egyptsecurity-forces-used-excessive-lethal-force

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The General’s Stork

8 This email was shared with the artist with permission from Nature Conservation Egypt and the director of Birdlife Hungary. See the stork Menes’ tracking data; https://www.satellitetracking.eu/inds/view/111 9 Larry Grinnell, ‘Air Force Days, Part 6: Life as a Combat Communicator in the First Combat Communications Squadron’, Meet Larry Grinnell; www.larrygrinnell.com/?p=1669#more-1669 10 Mark Bowden, ‘The Desert One Debacle’, The Atlantic, May 2006; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/05/the-desert-onedebacle/304803/ 11

Ibid.

12

‘Neubronner Applies for Pigeon Camera Patent | History Channel on Foxtel’, History Channel, 8 June 2017; www.historychannel.com.au/ this-day-in-history/neubronner-applies-for-pigeon-camera-patent/

13 See full statistics on drone warfare from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s website; https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/ projects/drone-war 14 From YouTube video, ‘American Drone Bird in Waziristan’, posted by Abdul Haseeb 14 December 2011; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6_-wy-OeTKU 15

See Festo’s website; https://www.festo.com/group/en/cms/10238.htm

16

Gregoire Chamayou, Drone Theory, Penguin Random House, 2015, p. 56

17

‘Collateral Murder’; https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/accessed 5 July 2017

18 Derek Hawkins, ‘Brian Williams is “guided by the beauty of our weapons” in Syria strikes’, The Washington Post, 7 April 2017; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/07/beautiful-brian-williams-says-of-syria-missile-strike-proceeds-to-quoteleonard-cohen/accessed 15 December 15, 2017 19 Yossi Gurvitz, ‘When Kafka met Orwell: Arrest by algorithm’, Mondoweiss, 3 July 2017; https://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/orwell-arrestalgorithm/?amp; accessed 5 July 2017 20 For an extensive conversation, see Heba Y. Amin and Anthony Downey, ‘Contesting post-digital futures: drone warfare and the geo-politics of aerial surveillance in the middle east', Digi War 1, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-020-00021-y 21

Chamayou, p. 27

22

‘Knowledge Repository @ IUP’, Site, knowledge.library.iup.edu/as_patents/13/

23

‘Isaiah 31:5’, “As Birds Flying, so Shall the Lord of Hosts Shield above Jerusalem; and He Shall Rescue and Shall Protect and Shall Deliver”, Study Bible; https://studybible.info/compare/Isaiah%2031:5 24 Vivian Gilbert, ‘The Romance of the Last Crusade: with Allenby to Jerusalem’, Internet Archive; https://archive.org/details/ romanceoflastcru00vivi/page/166/mode/2up 25 A Brief Record of the Advance of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force July 1917 to October 1918, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1919, p. 3

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Figure/Ground (Zero): The Camouflage Works of Gordon Bennett and Andy Warhol

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[Pop art] is an involvement with what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement on us.

Roy Lichtenstein, ‘What is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters’, 19641 The challenge of profiling the diverse work of a prolific artist like the late Gordon Bennett is not necessarily where to start or end, but what to include and what to omit. This is the particular burden of the survey exhibition format. That Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett, the recent Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art exhibition,2 succeeds at its task amongst this pressure is a testament to the skill of its curatorial team, Zara Stanhope and Abigail Bernal, and the collegial support of The Estate of Gordon Bennett, who provided access to a number of works not seen to date. These unseen pieces are some of the exhibition’s greatest successes, reflected in the central work on paper section that the broader show feels held in orbit by—it is a particular pleasure to witness the germs of ideas on paper flourish and expand in the larger works surrounding it.

The role of the critic and art historian in these contexts is perhaps more leisurely, but also important —the opportunity to reflect on a show’s successes also affords an opportunity to consider what is lost in the necessary capacities of exhibition formats. This essay considers thus an intriguing omission from Unfinished Business, the Figure/Ground (Zero) series of 2003 (also known as the Camouflage series) and examines these works as an important turning point for Bennett’s later practice. As part of its analysis, it considers the unexpected influence of pop art and the late Andy Warhol on Bennett’s work, the rise of a more overt abstraction in Bennett’s late oeuvre, and the significance of 2003 as a similarly catalytic time for broader society—reflected in the invasion of Iraq as part of the ‘War on Terror’.

THE ARTIST EMERGES Before beginning a deeper analysis, some background on Gordon Bennett’s life and practice must be introduced. Bennett emerged from the Brisbane art scene in the late 1980s. A mature age student, he graduated from the city’s Queensland College of Art in 1988, the same year as the bicentennial of Australia’s settlement (invasion) by the British Empire. For some, 1988 was a significant milestone of the country’s development; for others, the First Nations’ peoples of the broader continent, a grim marker of two centuries of violence and dispossession, but also ongoing survival. As an artist of Anglo-Celtic and Aboriginal ancestry, Bennett engaged deeply with this contested dialogue via his practice, challenging the cult of historical amnesia that dominated broader Australian culture.

He described the dominant narrative of this society as a “pop history”—one ridden by destructive stereotype, erasure, and ignorance that attempted to bury 120,000 years of history.3 His work aimed to disrupt these prevalent tales and assert in its place a discourse guided instead by truth, nuance, and a pursuit of freedom.

As part of this process, Bennett’s practice consistently acknowledged the influence of external forces upon Australian identity and this “pop history”. Bennett taught through his work and writing that when examining a legacy of colonial abuse, the crime scene extends far beyond national borders and typical temporalities. From the beginning, Bennett’s art imbricated global influences into his art, in particular those of Western modernism (and thus modernist art), which he associated deeply with colonial psychology. Bennett’s practice examined culture as a mechanism of the seemingly undead influence of imperial power. As art historian Ian McLean describes, Bennett was 68 | 69

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“acutely aware that the idea of an Australian art or identity has long been an ideological smokescreen for the global aspirations of European Empire.”4 By appropriating the work of Western ‘greats’ such as Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Margaret Preston, Kazimir Malevich (amongst many others), Bennett articulated Australia’s constant mediation from abroad, but also how this history erased or othered existing cultural history in this country in the process. Though these artistic engagements were not always simple critiques—often Bennett felt a sense of empathy with the experiences of these creatives, such as van Gogh, or admired their creative output, like Pollock and Malevich.

Bennett grew up not knowing of his mother’s Aboriginal heritage. What he learnt at school in the 1960s and early 1970s was this same ‘pop history’ that told of ‘peaceful’ settlement, of the ‘civilized colonists’ and ‘primitive natives’; and despite Indigenous peoples’ overt and sovereign presence here, this place’s declared status by James Cook/British Empire as terra nullius: land “belonging to no one.”5 This was the too neat fiction that the young Bennett learnt at school, as most Australian children did at this time. Fed this regimen, he grew up ‘colonized’ in body and mind—the cultural subject matter perhaps available if his upbringing was different now largely inaccessible to him.6 When Bennett found art to be a helpful language of critique toward this experience, the only subjects he felt available were those born of this Western condition. He began his process of disruption then from within the belly of the beast. Thus, Bennett’s art flourished in the context of postmodernism: specifically, its related processes of appropriation, deconstruction and intertextuality. The irony, looking back from the present, is that ‘Australian art’ then was predominantly ruled by a white and largely linear history descended from (and mediated by) the perceived centre of the Northern Hemisphere. Today, the truly global success of this country’s First Nations’ artists, as McLean also acknowledges,7 adds a particular note of defeat to the former’s desperation. Bennett, and also Tracey Moffatt—though acknowledging both artists’ resistance to strict identification—represent two of the most recognizable names in contemporary Australian art.

THE WAR ON TERRA (NULLIUS) This is the narrative of Bennett’s art and perhaps due to the sense of urgency in the work of his ‘early’ years (which for the purposes of this essay, I recognize as 1986–2003 and the ‘late’ period as 2003–2014) too often this is where scholarly and public attention is focused. Following this trend, Unfinished Business stumbles slightly in representing Bennett’s later career more fully—tellingly squeezed into the final room of the exhibition. This space features Bennett’s ‘turn away’ from the postcolonial project that had defined his earlier career as reflected in the Stripe series (2003–08) and his eventual return to postcolonial critique in ensuing years with the Abstraction (2011–13) and Home Décor (After M. Preston) series (2010–13); the latter his final body of work before his untimely passing in 2014. Omitted from this room is the focus of this essay, the Figure/Ground (Zero) series—a short-lived, but important body of work from 2003 that represents a critical turning point in Bennett’s oeuvre, reflecting the moment of his transition from what McLean describes as his “reportage” on the impacts from colonial abuse,8 to what I see as a less overtly critical mode of abstraction that is emblematic of his later career.

As I have described elsewhere,9 Bennett’s initial retreat from this discourse in 2003 was because he felt “[he] had gone as far as [he] could,” but also that he was emotionally drained after fifteen years of the exacting analysis it demanded—a period of intense, image-led examination of the racist bedrock of the Australian settler-state, and increasingly, a broadening of this study’s scope to l

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Figure/Ground (Zero): The Camouflage Works of Gordon Bennett and Andy Warhol

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an international stage. To enter into this essay’s engagement with the Figure/Ground (Zero) series, it is helpful to consider the body of work that preceded it, the Notes to Basquiat: 911 series. A sub-section of the broader Notes to Basquiat series begun in 1998 and concluding in 2007, the 911 works extended Bennett’s inhabitation of the distinctive aesthetic of the late American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent Jean-Michel Basquiat, to interrogate the events and aftermath of al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York City and Washington on 11 September 2001 (‘9/11’). In these works, the distinctive gestural forms of Basquiat’s are replicated with careful attentiveness by Bennett—a mark of the latter’s respect for the former.

The 911 works continue this same aesthetic but introduce salient details from the ‘9/11’ attacks: in particular the shattered, grid-like forms of the World Trade Center’s facades—monumental, knife-like shards of the broken buildings after their aerial devastation. These are interspersed and overlaid with X-ray figures and synonymic word lists, as well as Arabic lettering and shamsa patterning, which Bennett scanned from images of the inside covers of the Qu’ran found online.10 Bennett then abstracted the shamsa further—stretching and distorting it using Adobe Photoshop to disguise the imagery’s prominence. In these works, Bennett’s postcolonial critique had extended to America and reflected on the attacks as a symptom of broader and ongoing processes of colonial dispossession vis-à-vis neocolonialism. In Notes to Basquiat: Death of Irony (2002), a skeletal Cook appears to summon a series of planes to fly toward the already flaming ruins—with a diminutive Statue of Liberty standing benignly below. These works are the products of the first years of the ‘War on Terror’—the vast, unilateral military attack led by American forces on firstly Afghanistan in late 2001, which extended after this work’s creation to Iraq in 2003, and on into Horn of Africa in later years. Though the rhetoric of this ‘war’ became more understated in the Obama and Trump years, it still effectively rages on—with no clear end date. Australia, a member of the ANZUS Treaty,11 declared its commitment soon after ‘9/11’; though the presence of Australian troops fluctuated based on the impact of various insurgencies between the war’s beginning and now. To date, Australian troops remain on the ground in the region.12 These works thus critique the new frontiers of colonial domination: the blurred attitudes of ‘necessary’ invasion, the ‘humane’ face of peacekeeping—not far removed from the same wilful blindness of hierarchical attitudes of the past, like those of terra nullius.

As Navin A. Bapat argues, understanding the purposes of the ‘War on Terror’ beyond its vast public narrative—of ridding the world of terrorism and extremism in response to the ‘9/11’ attacks, a vastly non-specific target for warfare—must be accompanied by the acknowledgement of its further purpose: securing Western access to increasingly precarious energy resources within the Middle East and transport corridors extending through this region.13 Australia’s participation in this war did not rest lightly on the country’s populace—perhaps reflecting a distrust with the dominant reasoning for the war—and Bennett’s art, despite its seemingly consistent attentiveness to the ‘past’, was frequently laser-focused on the political and cultural context of the present.14 Bennett’s work of this period was no exception, and this is particularly true of the Figure/Ground (Zero) series.

Here, Bennett abandoned Basquiat’s style entirely, but of particular interest to my analysis of this succeeding body of work is a somewhat surprising figure who had an intermittent influence on Bennett’s practice, but is largely undiscussed in existing scholarship: the American pop artist Andy Warhol. The series also heralds an important, but gradual shift for Bennett: from the largely figurative depictions of his early career toward a fuller interest in abstraction in the later years.

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Figure/Ground (Zero): The Camouflage Works of Gordon Bennett and Andy Warhol

FIGURE/GROUND (ZERO) SERIES At the centre of Camouflage No. 6 (2003) is a silhouette. The work is one of sixteen major paintings that constitute the Figure/Ground (Zero) series. The shadowy form at its heart is somewhat familiar; the curve of its top suggestive of a slouched hat or beret. It hangs at the edge of recent memory. Further detail is veiled, obstructed by a bright camouflage pattern drawn across the figure. Rather than blending into the background, the pattern’s effervescent, eye-catching palette actively neuters its typical use value—it announces itself overtly, yet still sustains its coding as a means of concealment.

The work that precedes it, Camouflage No. 5 (2003) reveals the figure beneath this disguise: the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The base image is one infamous because of its repetition: circulated widely as a stock image of Hussein in his military guise in the context of the invasion of Iraq in the same year as Bennett made these works. As the artist described, the series was realized “as a response to the government-generated paranoia surrounding Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and the so-called ‘weapons of mass destruction’.”15 Bennett’s veiling here of the central figure plays on the extended purpose of camouflage patterning in military operations: not simply to conceal soldiers in the field, but also artillery and other heavy weapons—referring thus to the reasoning for Western military intervention: Iraq’s supposed stockpile of (and intent to produce more) “weapons of mass destruction”.

The period of these works’ production, between mid-January and May 2003, straddles the same time of the West’s pre-invasion sabre-rattling, the beginning of the actual invasion on 19–20 March, and the ongoing operations within the Persian Gulf. During this period, Hussein’s status transferred rapidly from head of state to fugitive, remaining hidden from Western forces until his capture in December. On the run, Hussein’s symbolism entered into a period of similarly dramatic flux: a process visible in his image as reproduced in Bennett’s series, shifting between obstruction, semi-visibility, before disappearing altogether in the final works: Camouflage Nos. 10–14 (2003).

At times, like in Camouflage No.1 (2003), Hussein’s image is replaced entirely for an unknown soldier donning a military gas mask—with his allegiance left ambiguous, yet via its allusion to chemical weapons such as anthrax or sarin gas, reflecting the opposing Western intervention.

Bennett establishes thus a series of visual and textual binaries across these works: veiled/unveiled, Hussein/Masked soldier, Hussein/Hussein silhouette, Masked soldier/Masked soldier silhouette, camouflage/shamsa, and iconic/unknown.

Bennett was no stranger to binary oppositions, referencing them in his writing and has a significant influence across his artistic career. Oppositions such as black/white and self/other abound. Russian linguist and structuralist Roman Jakobson described binary oppositions as an imposed order on the experience of the world.16 The realities of their structural dynamic play out most palpably in colonialism’s damaging insistence of civilized/primitive culture. As literary critic Catherine Belsey describes: “Western culture… depends on binary oppositions… these oppositions are always hierarchic. One term is highly valued, the other found wanting… But these terms can never sustain the antithesis on which they depend. The meaning of each depends on the trace of the other that inhabits its definition.”17

Within the narrative of president George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ this same logic plays out in his articulation of an “Axis of Evil”, represented by Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and their opposition in the form of Western (‘good’) forces. The use of such structural hierarchies is emblematic of neo-colonial desire for structural power, reflected in the oversimplification and manipulation of the ‘moral’ issues guiding the military invasion. In these works, Bennett chooses to reflect these machinations, yet also ground its message in a local context: including indirect references to the 72 | 73

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Figure/Ground (Zero): The Camouflage Works of Gordon Bennett and Andy Warhol

‘Tampa Affair’,18 an event emblematic of Australian then Prime Minister John Howard’s broader politics of xenophobic nationalism, and the ongoing internment of predominantly Arab refugees in Australian camps.19 As McLean notes, Bennett recognizes the racism at the heart of these behaviours —camouflaged itself beneath claims of “national security.”

However, Bennett describes the importance of a particular ambivalence toward his subject matter here, which runs counter to the dominant oppositional language (good/evil) described above, and perpetuated within Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation at the time of the Iraqi invasion.

He said of this ambiguity palpable within this series: “I took no definite position on the issues,” before articulating his consistent desire to implicate viewers in a more active process of comprehension.20 This attempt at involving viewers more immediately in decoding these images is visible in Bennett’s insistent scrambling of the source material in its reproduction on the canvas, utilizing the clashing patternation and colours, but with enough details so as to generate an ability to see what were very familiar images at the time “in hopefully new ways, and more critically.”21 In a sense, Bennett’s engagement with Hussein is both a recognition of his image’s sheer ubiquity, but further than this, his transition to an empty cipher for ‘evil’, the othered icon of the binary (good/evil) that Bush doggedly perpetuated. It is unavoidable to recognize a xenophobic tone to these narratives pushed by the US administration and eagerly consumed by the broader American (and to an extent global) public.

WARHOL As alluded to earlier, an unstated but crucial influence on this series is that of Warhol. The connection, though at first odd, is a relevant one. Basquiat and Warhol were friends and collaborators; having concluded the Notes to Basquiat: 911 series just prior to these new works, it appears that the two artists’ parallels were on Bennett’s mind.22 Bennett’s art was no stranger to the influence of pop art more broadly—with whole series, such as the Mirror works of the mid-1990s, informed by the work of Roy Lichtenstein of the 1960s.23 The benday dot, the printerly process of mid-century comic books to achieve fields of colour, was an influence on Lichtenstein’s works, which also informed Bennett’s Notes on Perception series (1988–90). Warhol more specifically is visible in a number of works on paper

by Bennett from this period, including Untitled (Dance Step) (2005) that appropriated the American pop artist’s dance diagrams like Dance Diagram (Fox Trot: The Double Twinkle-Man) (1962). Warhol equated these diagrams with Pollock’s ‘dance’ around his canvases during production, which Bennett asserts in this work. Pollock was an artist also of consistent interest to Bennett—and he had recently engaged with in works such as Notes to Basquiat (Bird) (2001). From October 2002 to May 2003, just prior to the inception of the Figure/Ground (Zero) series through until its conclusion, Bennett also experimented with prints and image multiples—including titles such as Basquiat and Warhola, Basquiat and Double Warhola, and Six Warholas (2003).24

Bennett’s work in this series also borrowed more overtly from Warhol. This is visible in a number of ways. The look of Bennett’s paintings appears to echo, through their emphasis on heavy blacks and outlines, Warhol’s iconic screenprinted works of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe.

Suggestions of the repetition offered by screen-printing, which Warhol relished for its association with industrial production, are replicated by Bennett’s own process of production. Bennett’s compositions were pre-constructed within Photoshop, built-up within the program by scanning a source image, manipulating it, composing the new painting’s elements using individual layers, before printing out each layer on separate acetate sheets and projecting these one-by-one onto a stretched linen.25 Though 74 | 75

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this method retained Bennett’s dedication to more ‘traditional’ painting with a brush, he spoke of his desire to function in this mode like a machine—recalling my previous argument of Bennett’s desire for impersonality,26 and thus echoing Warhol’s own factory-like production of many of his works.

On this, Bennett said “part of the reason I’m using projectors… is to remove myself to the point at which I become like a printing press. I’m not painting what I feel, I’m tracing it on the surface of the thing.”27 Though a happy accident, the acetate’s presence is revealed somewhat in Camouflage No. 5 (2003), where Hussein’s bright blue outline is displaced—stuttering slightly above the black outline beneath it. The ‘error’ which Bennett welcomed,28 links back to similar glimpses of what art historian Caroline A. Jones describes as “simultaneously… the pleasures of unlimited supply, and the flattering choice of individual variation” visible in Warhol’s screenprints—which relished “off-kilter lips, overlapping images, and purely accidental effects.”29 The enjoyment of these lapses reflected Warhol’s desire for machine-like precision with glimmers of humanity, seemingly echoed in Bennett’s own pleasure of these similar accidents.

Secondly, Bennett’s use of military camouflage patterns directly mimics Warhol’s own series of abstractions informed by these designs: the Camouflage series of 1986–87, one of the last bodies of work produced by him prior to his death in 1987.30 In these works, Warhol playfully shifts the original’s colouration from the typical copying of various conflict environment hues to psychedelic and outwardly loud tones, like Bennett in the early 2000s, defiantly negating the pattern’s purpose.

Warhol also incorporated camouflage elements into a series of self-portraits utilising a black and white photograph as a base image in the same period,31 a conflation that was not lost on Bennett, who produced a separate series of photographic self-portraits simultaneously as he was working on the Figure/Ground (Zero) works.32 Similarly, the influence of portraiture is obvious through Bennett’s use of Hussein’s portrait amongst the camouflage and shamsa. For Arthur C. Danto, Warhol’s combination of a subject related to disguise with images of himself reflect “the hiddenness of his own truth.”33 Perhaps Bennett’s imbrication of Hussein and the masked soldier alludes to a sense of emptiness behind these figures as icons? Hussein, a sort of straw man for neo-colonial, extractivist desire, the protected soldier as symbolic of non-existent weapons to conduct chemical warfare.

Finally, Bennett’s use of one of the more (in)famous portraits of Hussein taps into similar processes of Warhol’s when selecting his images. Jones argues that Warhol’s use of Monroe’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s portraits (amongst many others) acknowledge “the social nature of images” enabled by their “iconic, high-contrast appearance.”34 For Jones, Warhol’s engagement reflects not a personal one, but a distilled graphic sign, a visual symbol that is universalized, which signifies these subjects as cultural icons. Thus, crucially, Bennett replicates only the elements of Hussein’s features which have achieved social familiarity: the beret, the uniform, the distinctive moustache. As Jones summarizes “only those aspects of the image that have salience across a wide spectrum of society are incorporated; personal detail drops away.”35 In a similar way, much the same could be said of camouflage’s ubiquity and social traction, which Danto summarizes as becoming “as ordinary and everyday as violence itself in the modern world.”36 Building from this, the ambivalence at work in Bennett’s series here may comment too on warfare’s seeming ubiquity and increasing banality—in itself a critical comment on our desensitization and acceptance. Where some critics saw Warhol’s camouflage works as ready-made abstractions, Danto argues that their meaning is the complete veiling of the subject, or that the very subject is that of disguise. He continues, embedding greater violent affect in the pattern’s symbolism than Bennett’s work seems to describe, that “the camouflage swatch has in fact become the portrait of the political reality of our time, too horrifying to look upon l

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Figure/Ground (Zero): The Camouflage Works of Gordon Bennett and Andy Warhol

directly.” Such is its connotation, it is appropriate that the final works in Bennett’s series remove Hussein and the masked soldier entirely, to focus purely on the camouflage pattern alone.37 Pop art’s veiled yet persistent criticality should also be acknowledged here. Rather than just a ‘vacuous’ engagement with the burgeoning consumerism of post-WWII America, pop art reflected an ironic examination of economic boom times, and the dark side of this popularity. As Lichtenstein describes in the epigraph, he sees the style as an engagement with the most bold and hostile facets of culture “things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement on us,”38 a sentiment relevant to Bennett’s present too, associations of ‘evil’ projected onto Hussein’s visage, and broader Australian public reaction to the invasion of Iraq.

IMPERSONALITY/EMPATHY Despite Danto’s allusion to the pattern as horrifying and pop art’s engagement with the abhorrent foci of dominant culture, as alluded above, I would associate Warhol and Bennett’s works too with a strong quality of ambivalence. In the Bennett works’ repetitions, like Warhol’s “numbing serializations”, they inure themselves to the viewer in a way that reflects what Jones profiles in relation to Warhol’s ‘disaster paintings’ of the 1960s: “the deadening force” of society’s violent cycles expressed via the images’ serialization.39 That feeling recalls the experience of depression, not alien to Bennett, who echoed his feeling at the political experience of that time.40 Warhol’s cool industrial aesthetic, partly a comment on this deadening force, was also a response to the “supercharged nature of preceding models of artistic creation” such as Abstract Expressionism.41 Bennett’s attempt to create his own cool mode of production was a reaction of a different kind—born from a desire in the late 1980s to move away from the expressionist outpourings of his art college works toward what he described as a “cooler, more ‘conceptual’ mode.”42

The work from around 1989 onwards reveals the outcome of this desire for Bennett —illustrated by his increasing use of diagrammatic elements such as perspectival structures and grid forms, often overlaid or placed next to borrowed imagery from historical texts ‘documenting’ the settlement of Australia, and more fully realized by the advent of his use of Photoshop from the mid1990s. Though these works allowed him a sense of distance from his subjects, which took less of a toll on his mental health, he remained effectively shadowed by those first years. Audiences responded to his honesty, but in this process found it permanently difficult to separate the man from the artwork —even after Bennett distanced himself from the autobiographical qualities of his college works with his “cooler” turn. The ‘outpourings’ of his art college works were driven by a deep desire to heal himself through his art and one that insisted on a strong openness toward and examination of his personal family history. The Home Décor works of the mid-1990s championed more of this colder approach to image manipulation and reproduction, the first series to make use of Photoshop, before a return to the more overt empathy of the Notes to Basquiat works. Thus, these represent the two ‘poles’ of Bennett’s broader practice, what I have previously described as a “contradictory tug of war between his empathic and emotive self and their opposite—a desire for distance, even indifference.”43 The push and pull of these desires reflect an artist, nay a human being, trying to sustain an interest in the world around him, while sustaining some modicum of privacy.

Beyond the arguments presented here regarding the work of Warhol, the Figure/Ground (Zero) works also function intriguingly as a bridge between the postcolonial interrogations of his early career, and the next stage of his career—a turning point represented by the Stripe works, where he took a further step away from figurative elements toward a non-figurative abstraction. The fuller 76 | 77

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rise of abstraction in the work of Bennett, articulated by the Abstraction works (which continued the use of heavy outlines begun in Figure/Ground (Zero)), and the final Home Décor (After M. Preston) series evidences an artist who increasingly desired to step back behind an image of a ‘removed’, yet still socially-engaged practitioner. A fuller engagement with this argument requires another essay entirely. But until this point, Bennett had carried the burden of a practitioner whose identity frequently preceded their work. He strived continuously (and perhaps succeeded) to reorient this interpretation—and champion instead a different image: that of a private and insightful human being who just happened to also be an artist.

Notes 1 Roy Lichtenstein in Gene R. Swenson, ‘What is Pop Art?: Answers from Eight Painters, Part 1’, Art News 62, no. 7, 1964, p. 25 2

The exhibition ran from 7 November 2020 to 21 March 2021 and presented within the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

3 Gordon Bennett, ‘The Manifest Toe’, in Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings, Angela Goddard and Tim Riley Walsh eds, Sydney and Brisbane: Power Publications and Griffith University Art Museum, 2020, p. 49; Bruce Pascoe acknowledges over 120,000 years of Indigenous presence in the Australian continent. See Pascoe, ‘Australia: Temper and Bias’, Meanjin 77, no. 3, 2018, pp. 59–64 4

Ian McLean, ‘Camouflage’, in Gordon Bennett: Figure/Ground (Zero), Sydney: Sherman Galleries, 2003, n.p., exhibition pamphlet

5

“Terra nullius—meaning land belonging to no-one—was the legal concept used by the British government to justify the settlement of Australia.” See ‘Challenging Terra Nullius’, National Library of Australia; https://www.nla.gov.au/digital-classroom/senior/cook/legend-andlegacy/challenging-terra-nullius 6

Bennett, ‘The Manifest Toe’, p. 43

7

McLean, ‘Camouflage’

8

Ibid.

9 Tim Riley Walsh, ‘A Transient Separation: Gordon Bennett’s Abstract Art’, in Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, 2020, pp. 139–145 10

Conversation between author and Leanne Bennett, 25 February 2021

11 “The ANZUS Treaty which was signed by the United States, Australia and New Zealand on 1 September 1951, and came into force on 29 April 1952, is the security element of a broader relationship between the United States and Australia.” See Gary Brown and Laura Rayner, ‘Upside, Downside: ANZUS After Fifty Years’, Parliament of Australia: Current Issues Briefs 3 (2001–02); https://www.aph.gov.au/About_ Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/CIB/cib0102/02CIB03 12 For current Australian military deployments in the Middle East, see ‘Operations’, Australian Government, Department of Defence; https://www1.defence.gov.au/operations 13

Navin A. Bapat, Monsters to Destroy: Understanding the War on Terror, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020

14

Gordon Bennett, ‘Letter to Ian McLean’, in Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings, p. 104

15

Bill Wright, ‘Conversation: Bill Wright Talks to Gordon Bennett’, in Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings, p. 141

16

Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, The Hague: Mouton, 1956

17

Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 75

18 For a full description of the ‘Tampa Affair’, see ‘Defining Moment: Tampa Affair’, National Museum of Australia; https://www.nma.gov.au/ defining-moments/resources/tampa-affair

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Figure/Ground (Zero): The Camouflage Works of Gordon Bennett and Andy Warhol

19

McLean, ‘Camouflage’

20

Wright, ‘Conversation’, p. 141

21

Ibid.

22

Email between author and Leanne Bennett, 26 February 2021

23

See Gordon Bennett, Mirror (Abstract field II), 1995. Collection: The Estate of Gordon Bennett; see Roy Lichtenstein, Mirror #1, 1969.

Collection: The Broad, Los Angeles 24

Conversation between author and Leanne Bennett, 25 February 2021

25

Conversation between author and Leanne Bennett, 16 February 2021

26

Tim Riley Walsh, ‘A Transient Separation’

27

Chris McAuliffe, ‘Interview with Gordon Bennett’, in Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings, p. 132

28

Conversation between author and Leanne Bennett, 16 February 2021

29 Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 206; I’d like to thank and acknowledge the insight of Nicholas Croggon here for his suggestion of Jones’ text and its relevance to my research 30

See Andy Warhol, Camouflage, 1967. Collection: The Broad, Los Angeles

31

See Andy Warhol, Self-portrait no. 9 ,1986. Collection: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

32

See Gordon Bennett, Self portrait #8, 2003. Collection: The University of Queensland

33

Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol, New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2009, p. 145

34

Jones, Machine in the Studio, p. 214

35 36

Ibid.

Danto, p. 146

37 According to Leanne Bennett, during development of the Figure/Ground (Zero) series, Bennett travelled to a number of military supply stores across Brisbane, collecting various types of camouflage patterns that he then scanned and utilized as the basis for the patterns applied across the whole series of work. Conversation between author and Leanne Bennett, 16 February 2021 38

Lichtenstein in Swenson, ‘What is Pop Art?’, p. 25

39

Jones, Machine in the Studio, p. 209

40

“I had had my fill of politics and was getting depressed about Australia and the world in general”, Wright, ‘Conversation’, p. 141

41

Jones, p. 263

42

Bennett, ‘The Manifest Toe’, p. 45

43

Tim Riley Walsh, ‘A Transient Separation’, p. 140

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When is a Landscape Like a Body?

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When conveyed the provisional theme of this issue it proposed both the notions of “trembling landscapes” and “seismic movements”. Albeit on very different levels, one occupying squarely the domain of artistic culture and the other that of society and politics, both are of enormous importance in today’s Hong Kong. Landscape painting occupies such a prominent place in Chinese art that it would be absurd to try and explain its philosophy and historical importance in one text, no matter how extensive that might be.1 It represents the highest genre of artistic expression in the entire painting tradition of China, its roots in Confucian literati philosophy and worldview assuring it such a prominent place that, in China (and the rest of the world) landscape painting made with black ink on silk, or paper, has very nearly become a stand-in for Chinese Art in general. Landscape can be said to represent something of an ideological battlefield for the Hong Kong artists who have chosen the medium of ink painting for their practice. Since the People’s Republic of China is now promoting Confucianism on many fronts of culture and politics, it is also promoting some of its most salient artistic expressions, including literati landscape painting. As a result, many artists in Hong Kong have tried to divert its message in very subtle ways2 and Joey Leung Ka-yin, with her ink painting, Mundane Mind (2019),3 is no exception. If literati landscape painting as a genre can be seen as an aesthetic battlefield for the artists of Hong Kong, the entire social and political environment of the former colony has recently become a wider site of conflict and deep transformation. The rapidity of these changes has felt like the very ground upon which any sense of stability was built was moving away all at once. Even though the ‘trembling landscape’ of Mundane Mind, where mountains are like bodies, had been made at a time when Hong Kong still felt like it had a reliably stable foundation, the recent ‘seismic movements’ of politics were also deeply felt by the artist, as her recent comments on this work reveal.

THE MOLLYWOOD SERIES Mundane Mind was on display in a large exhibition dedicated to landscape painting at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, organized in 2020 at the occasion of the Museum’s reopening after refurbishment.

Titled A Sense of Place–From Turner to Hockney, it consisted mainly of an important selection from the Tate Britain and presented a wide range of artists and understandings of the concept of landscape, from J.M.W. Turner and John Constable to David Hockney, and even Tracey Emin and Richard Long.

Even though none of the artworks made by Hong Kong artists in the accompanying exhibitions were given a separate catalogue, they were mentioned by the Museum of Art Director, Maria Mok, in the preface to the A Sense of Place catalogue, describing two paintings made by local artists as being “added” to the group of artworks from the Tate Britain: “To complement these British landscapes, we have added a special section featuring ‘Hong Kong viewpoint’, in which we have invited two contemporary Hong Kong artists, Simon Wan and Joey Leung Ka-yin, to present their photographs, mixed-media works and Chinese ink painting in order to initiate new dialogues between traditional and modern art and between East and West.”4 The absence of these two artists in the A Sense of Place catalogue signalled that they were relegated to the “East”, so prominently inscribed against the “West” by Mok in her preface. The uncritical use of the concepts of East and West is, of course, questionable, but it was to be expected in the context of an institution whose function appears to perpetuate these problematic clichés. The narrative used by the cultural authorities, from the Hong Kong Tourist Association to the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (which runs the Museum) was contingent on the concept of Hong Kong as the place where “East meets West.”5

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The artworks of Joey Leung Ka-yin have been the topic of several passages in my two books on art in Hong Kong,6 attracted by her approach to the practice of Chinese fine line painting (gongbi), a very laborious method of depicting extremely detailed figures with lines and colours, and by her quirky narratives. Even though she does not use the Chinese brush to paint, preferring drawing pens and pencils, her choice of format as well as her general aesthetic choices evoking the stereotypes of ‘Chinese painting’. Hanging scrolls, horizontal or vertical, are frequently utilized and her use of the written text within the painting is clearly a reference to Chinese literati painting.

Even with Mundane Mind, its technique of display derives from the history of Chinese art; especially after the Ming dynasty, large landscape paintings, or groups of related paintings like the flowers of various seasons, were made in a series of hanging scrolls hung side by side.

As for her paintings’ quirky content, this can also be found in a series of comic strips she made for local newspapers in the early 2000s, a medium she used to such interesting effect that I compared them with the idea of “superflatness” advocated by Takashi Murakami, certainly the most famous contemporary artist who explored the limits between the high art of painting (or at least objects reminiscent of painting) and the low art of comic books (just as ‘East’ and ‘West’ are always problematic, so of course are ‘high’ and ‘low’ in art). However, where the Japanese artist advocated a form of neutral cultural artefact, where the cultural origins of an artwork are somehow erased by an applied commercial veneer, it was clear that Joey Leung was pursuing, in all her works, an exploration of her own roots as a Hong Kong artist. Her belonging to local culture is ubiquitous in her work, for those who would know where to look, and it begins with her use of the Cantonese language and its literary tradition. In a 2007 article on female artists in Hong Kong, art critic Koon Yeewan, who focused on the sexual connotations of the mountain in one of Leung’s works, stated her exploration of writing was steeped in Cantonese culture. About the painting titled Good View, Great Time: Element 123 (2007), she wrote, Leung refers to Chinese traditional painting by evoking a typical landscape painting of a central mountain with a fìsherman in his skiff. But the central mountain long used as a symbol of the emperor as part of the cosmology of landscape, is now embraced by a young lady and turned into a phallus. Her short dress has motifs of young deer with one such deer climbing up her skirt. On top of this mountain are a willow tree and an apartment building. The poem plays with the term “willow” long used to denote female desirability and uses it as a homophone for “foreign (new style) apartment” and “foreign (hip) babes”.

Next to the willow is a foreign apartment.

Inside the foreign apartment is a foreign babe.

Each day the foreign babe appreciates the willow.

Life as such is joyful without a care.

The style of the poem mimics Cantonese poems, which are often satirical rhymes. This one is no exception. It satirises the stereotypical desires of Hong Kong men—foreign apartments and women, but where “foreign” is used to refer to new and hip, rather than ethnic origins… willow landscape flaunts female sexuality, endorsing the complexities of women as possessions and possessors.7

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Mundane Mind belongs to a series of ‘hair landscape’ paintings Joey Leung has worked on since 2018. Titled in English Mollywood, the artist plays with words such as the name Molly, which could be identified as a stereotype of femininity but, more importantly, with Bollywood, the Mumbai-based Indian movie industry, which seems to include into this group of paintings the sort of exuberant and colourful nature of that kind of entertainment. Even though colourfulness and exuberance are evident, it is however a different characteristic the artist is exploring. It often arises with Hong Kong artists that the Chinese and English titles of their works vary, sometimes significantly. This allows for rich semantic ambiguities that are not lost on an artist like Leung for whom text always plays an essential role. The Chinese title of the Mollywood series is ‘Hair Island’ (Maodao), which seems to focus more closely on the landscape elements represented in these ink paintings. This title derives from the expression famao, which literally means to grow hair, but signifies to be panicked, scared or nervous. To clarify her intentions, the artist wrote a statement at the time she began the series: There is no time for worries in this city, all we do is to consume, indulge and light up the sky with vague smiley fireworks. Time also does not allow me to ignore my troubles, nor to forget my helplessness. To face this ridicule, I pile up all the troubles and worries and transform them into mountains and rivers, forming an island named “Mollywood”. Hair in this series is a metaphor of ‘worry’. When hair (worry) grows, it forms mountains and rivers. It also works as a kind of new bush strokes to form landscapes. Differing from traditional brush strokes, it does not look like the real mountain texture and it doesn’t aim to. I am trying to create an imaginary space which is close to the real world mentally/emotionally. It seems like an adventure to explore the unknown.8

The “new brush strokes” (cun) refer to a central technique of landscape painting in China.

Usually translated in English as “surface strokes” they form a long list of the various ways to apply the ink on the surface of the painting in order to form natural formations, such as rocks and plants.

One of these brushstrokes for rocks and mountains is, for instance, the “hemp fibre brushstroke” (pimacun), sometimes applied with fairly dry ink. One painting from the series exemplifies perfectly how the hair of Joey Leung’s maidens can be used to mimic the traditional brush strokes of literati landscape painting. The Carefree Stone (2018) represents three young women: one is standing, letting her hair flow through her fingers, another one is sitting on the ground and brushing her hair, and the third, only her panties and thighs visible, is crawling inside the mass of hair. These three characters, actually giantesses, extremely young and seemingly emotionless, are all contained within an undifferentiated mass of hair, making it impossible to identify whose hair the viewer is looking at. Within this mass of hair, other characters and objects appear: a pair of gnarled trees, a minuscule bather with a swimming cap, a boat attached to one of the girls’ toes, a white rabbit jumping, four golden shapes looking like clouds, and another minuscule figure reading inside the hair. The only exception is a bird whose proportions seem to be on par with the main human figures, until the viewer realizes that it has in fact human legs; maybe a stand-in for the artist as it appears again in other paintings from that series.

The reading figure seems to occupy a cave within this mountain of hair, while a very long lock emulates the cascades of the mountains of literati landscape painting. These two indications, and the general composition, are immediately readable as an imitation of that genre. Since the aesthetic and philosophical foundations of literati painting were established during the 82 | 83

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Song dynasty, such landscape paintings count in the tens of thousands over a period of at least nine centuries. One example from the early Qing dynasty, by the major artist Wang Yuanqi (1642–1715), is enough to establish this ‘family resemblance’ between Joey Leung’s figures and the mountains of literati landscape. Both the visual analysis of such works and the theoretical texts written by literati artists can be used to clarify how much they are defined by the patriarchal structure of Chinese culture, a position undermined by Leung given her visual choices. In Mundane Mind, an ambitious painting in terms of scale and detailing, the artist expands the ‘landscape’ by arranging many more giantesses—nine, if you count heads, or eleven, if you count the pairs of hands—with similar masses of flowing black hair. Their faces are emotionless, occupied by the same kinds of activities: taking care of themselves, or rather their bodies, surrounded by flowers and many of the same objects as in The Carefree Stone. Here too, the mood is of mild despondency. As in traditional literati painting, Leung added an inscription that clarifies these characters’ frames of mind: l

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I thought it was common sense, turns out it’s not.

This sinking [feeling] is entirely unavoidable, statistic experts rely on clear data.

Those are things I want to forget, but they’re as stubborn as a million year-old stain.

If the tears flow until they dry up, why are they still dripping?

The air is sharp and absurd, what is the nutritional value of breathing?

You want to clearly set a good goal, and suddenly your eyes are powerless.

If the world is impermanent, how do you explain it never changes?

My brain is nothing exceptional, it is so hard to understand it becomes annoying.

This classical poetic structure has been used by Leung in many of her paintings, the verses rigidly configured and containing exactly the same number of characters. However, the grammar employed oscillates between contemporary and more classical forms. The content of this poem is comparable to that of all the other paintings of this ‘growing hair’ series: it clearly puts into words what these young women are thinking, expressing the disappointment and doubts inherent in life in a city like Hong Kong; not knowing what the future holds, living with pollution, feeling powerless, with little to look forward to. The notion of impermanence towards the end of the poem is not even a consolation, as this cannot be resolved through change: everything remains the same and the only feeling one encounters is boredom. It should be recognized that this painting was produced in 2018; things have changed considerably in Hong Kong since then, especially in regard to local culture.

MUNDANE MIND AND PAINTINGS OF BEAUTIES The representation of female figures is far from rare in Chinese painting. From The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies scroll of Gu Kaizhi (c. 344–406), representing aristocratic women upholding the patriarchal mode of behaviour expected from educated persons, to the paintings of feminine beauties by the Ming dynasty painter Tang Yin (1470–1523), who was considered to be a literati painter even though he was not a member of the civil servant class to which the vast majority of literati belonged, there are many female figures prominent in paintings by male artists. There are also some renowned female artists within the literati artworld, their lives and artistic production having been the subject of monographs and histories. Some art historians have even emphasized the problematic concern that women were not forbidden access to the world of artistic production, thus trying to prove that Chinese culture was never misogynistic. In spite of the presence of these rare figures, some daughters and wives of literati families and famous courtesans of multiple artistic and literary talents, the fact remains that literati culture was male dominated, such that Leung’s paintings present an interesting and quaint angle on the conservativeness inherent in literati painting. In terms of the representation of female figures in Chinese painting, some specific paintings and texts will instruct these representations in the deeply patriarchal society of the late imperial period.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, and most of the nineteenth, a painting genre of a new kind emerged in the form of the “painting of beauties” (Meirenhua). The most famous artist of this trend was Fei Danxu (1801–1850) who made figure paintings of beauties that offer an ideal starting point to understand how Joey Leung’s giantesses are an interesting departure from older representations of women in Chinese art, i.e. in this case in paintings made with Chinese brush and ink (or at least something looking like it). First, there are some similarities in the faces of these paintings, especially the eyes that seem to all be fairly emotionless. The difference is however in the 84 | 85

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mouth, as Fei Danxu’s beauties always carry a faint smile (which is true of most portrait paintings in China before the twentieth century), while Leung’s girls seem bored. Fei Danxu’s paintings were perfect representations of the ideals of feminine beauty that have shaped female bodies and behaviour in pre-twentieth century China. What was expected of these elegant and cultured women can be found in a famous text analyzed by art historian Wu Hung. Titled The Manual of Beautiful Women, by Xu Zhen (active seventeenth century), this book that was popular among past Chinese art critics when discussing female beauty.9 His descriptions applied to courtesans in large southern cities such as Suzhou and Hangzhou in the late imperial period, and represented the activities expected from these highly educated courtesans who belonged to a social class that would have excluded them from any domestic setting. Cultural expectations from women in the home could be just as sophisticated, but only in the most cultivated of households. Such feminine perfections were still an exception, and these descriptions were clearly more of an idealization of the ‘perfect woman’ than anything existing in the reality of a world that, no matter how one looked at it, was still one of prostitution. By their very idealization, these descriptions, which can be compared with details of Leung’s Mundane Mind, are perfectly befitting Fei Danxu’s paintings of ‘beautiful women’.

Their physical appearance was described with a series of often nature-related simile (“Cicada forehead; apricot lips; rhinoceros-horn teeth; creamy breasts; eyebrows like faraway mountains; glances like waves of autumn water; lotus-petal face; cloud-like hair; feet like bamboo shoots carved in jade; fingers like white shoots of grass; willow waist; delicate steps as though walking on lotus blossoms.”10) The mention of feet in Xu Zhen’s text is a clear indication that he was describing courtesans. Even though Fei Danxu’s works only fit literati art because of some stylistic choices, such as the way rocks and plants are painted, they are however commercial paintings, but of the kind that still tried to appeal to an elegant and cultivated viewership. The visible presence of feet, even wrapped and bound, would have turned such paintings into erotic imagery, not an unusual choice for image makers of erotic art, but definitely not the kind an educated painter such as Fei Danxu would have ever made.11 It is important to note that Joey Leung does not lose an opportunity to show her giantesses’ feet and painted toenails while Fei Danxu always hid them: since, at the time, these elegant women would all have had bound feet—these limbs would have been too much of an erotic item to be shown.

In most paintings by Fei Danxu, the figures’ positions generally fit the expectations of Xu Zhen as they sit on benches in gardens with an “artful, captivating smile” and surrounded by “banana leaves [that] remind people of the background of songs.”12 Leung’s girls are also surrounded by plants, even though they stand behind a wall, and while her girls are in water, they are not in a natural pond, but in an artificial swimming pool. The fact that it is summertime is indicated by the protective sun lotion one of the girls is applying to her skin. Other indications that these unsmiling figures are lying around in a summer scene are the toys with which they play, toys whose shapes and colour are reminiscent of the phallus Koon Yeewan mentioned in her article. An unexplainable second pair of hands holding an inflatable toy might be justified by the possibility of this girl being a quadrumane, after all such giantesses escape the normal requirements of human biology. There are no similarities between the activities described by Xu Zhen and those of Joey Leung’s. The main actions of Leung’s beauties are to take care of their enormous masses of hair, as well as applying sunscreen or playing with their inflatable toys. Both instances of such toys have strong sexual connotations, mostly because of the colour and shape of the objects and how they are manipulated: inflating the toy is literally a ‘blowjob’, while the position of the second toy is between the legs of one of the girls. l

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While Xu Zhen describes some fruit among the objects surrounding the elegant women he portrays, there are none in Mundane Mind, even though Leung added a series of plants, and especially lotus flowers and leaves. The lotus flower plays an important role in Buddhist art especially, but also in literati painting since many scholar painters were themselves either full-fledged Buddhists, or believed in a syncretic form of philosophy bridging the gaps between the three great systems of belief (Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism).13 The lotus is always seen as a symbol of purity growing out of the mud, symbolizing how enlightenment can come from coarse materiality. But in Mundane Mind, this most ethereal of plants suspiciously looks like round breasts with pink, erect nipples. Considering the provocative attitude of some of these giantesses, there is little ambiguity in the representational choice made by Leung, a fact emphasized by Lucy Lippard in a 1975 text written for the 9e Biennale de Paris at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, titled ‘The Women Artists’ Movement–What next?’: But the time has come to call a semisphere a breast if we know damn well that’s what it suggests, instead of repressing the association and negating an area of experience that has been dormant except in the work of a small number of artists, many of them women. To see a semisphere as a breast does not mean it cannot be seen as a semisphere and as endless other things as well, although the image of the breast used by a woman artist can now be subject as well as object.14

It seems that the only girl who does not look too bored in Mundane Mind is the one with her face pressed to a bunch of these breast-lotuses, but then it might just be because her eyes are closed. Another indication of a possible homoerotic reading of this image is the tiny girl with her leg stuck inside a lotus pod, maybe an indication of penetration in this clearly eroticized representation.

Even though Leung never eroticizes her painting too overtly, any representation of a sexual activity being either only hinted at or made into a visual pun: Mundane Mind is therefore very different from any of Fei Danxu’s “paintings of beauties” that belong squarely to the type of art made for the highly conservative and patriarchal society of the literati, generally men who preferred to indulge in the privacy of the bedroom or brothel, with erotic images that were excluded from their highly intellectual and rarefied environment. According to Wu Hung,15 representations of sexuality, although always subdued in the type of paintings made by artists like Fei Danxu, were even subtler during and after the seventeenth century (this is not true of openly pornographic images, certainly they were never part of the realm of ‘serious’ art like these “paintings of beauty” and in spite of their belonging to the domain of literati-inspired professional art).16

Because, stylistically and technically, Joey Leung refers to the ‘fine line technique’ of the early nineteenth-century genre of ‘paintings of beauties’, Mundane Mind voluntarily imitates images that have roots in a commercial practice, and that alone would make of it a deviation from the age-old respect for literati painting. Even though Leung’s girls are a humorous reinterpretation of the classical beauty of Fei Danxu, a topsy-turvy portrait of the old representations of feminine perfection in Chinese patriarchy, it is not so much their activities and looks that matter than the fact that these female bodies are gigantic and occupy the space normally reserved for mountains in literati painting. It is this substitution, female bodies instead of masculine mountains, that constitutes Mundane Mind‘s real ironic reading of literati culture and its patriarchal structure.

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GENDER POSITIONING IN LITERATI CULTURE In the article ‘Contemporary Feminist Body Theories and Mencius’ Ideas of Body and Mind,’17 from the book Bodies in China (2016), cultural theorist Eva Kit Wah Man explores the new ways available to contemporary feminism for the creation of a mode of rationalizing the body as part of a monistic worldview—such a worldview might contain the possibility of interpretation differently from the dualism that has shaped Western philosophy, from the idealist reasoning of Plato, to the later Christian perspective in which it fitted perfectly. Eva Man pointed out that even the monistic systems created by Spinoza and phenomenology, first among them being the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, fell short of a conceptualization of the body that would put that, and mind, on the same level. Eva Man explains that feminist philosophers (such as Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray) saw in all the dualist dichotomies of post-Platonist and cartesian idealist philosophy18 a worldview that systematically marginalized women, by consistently placing them on the subservient side of the body/mind divide inherent in these philosophical systems.

Eva Man then turned towards classical Chinese philosophy, and especially the work of Mencius (active fourth century BC, the most influential of Confucius’ followers, whose work became the foundation of what has been called Confucianism in the West) in order to find new potentials for a strictly monistic system that would eschew these dichotomies. Mencius’ faith in the inherent goodness of human nature, albeit one that needs nurturing to be maintained, led him to see the potential for such a quality in every human being. However, even though the body does not seem to be gendered in Mencius, the social context within which Confucianist philosophy developed in imperial China was always structured as a patriarchy, hence the understanding that the “great or superior individuals” mentioned in these texts were always men. It should be added that Chinese characters, and the classical written language, hardly ever use pronouns; and even when they are used, they are grammatically non-committal in terms of gender: there is no feminine, masculine or even neutral in classical Chinese grammar—and not even a plural, this being indicated strictly through the context, which makes it sometimes difficult to translate into a modern language.

Nonetheless, Eva Man concludes that even Mencius’ essentially non-binary system shows some signs that women tended to be relegated to the passive side, one that had been shaped by the yin-yang interactions for a long time in Chinese thinking, and already when Mencius was writing his texts. Even though the yin-yang system is not supposed to function according to the Western value system of the dichotomies already mentioned (there is no moral or practical hierarchy between the yin and yang principles), conditions such as passivity, darkness, dampness and many other attributes are the reserve of the yin principle, while those such as activity, brightness, dryness, etc. are of the yang principle. The yang and masculine dimension of strength and domination have always been seen as the force more likely to shape social structures in China. Even though the yin-yang interaction does not contain the very specific hierarchical dimension of the dichotomies inherent in the dualist/ idealist philosophy of the West—dichotomies that automatically place women under the domination of men—it still allows for a mode of thinking leading to a strong patriarchal system where women are subservient.

This reflection shows how problematic it is to rely merely on a single source to try to understand a culture: when only looking at philosophy, it would be easy to assume that the nonhierarchical nature of the yin-yang system allowed women to be the equal of men in China (some specialists of Confucian philosophy are still frequently making that statement), but a cursory observation of real historical circumstances reveals that women have always played an ancillary role l

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in Chinese history, at least until the twentieth century.19 Since then, that position has been contentious, and the terrain for frequent violent struggle. No matter what power women might have retained during the early imperial period, the establishment of the civil service, which initiated in the Tang dynasty the development of the literati culture that began in earnest during the Song dynasty, was created in the context of a constant reinforcement of patriarchy. By the Song dynasty, when literati culture received a form that would last until the collapse of the imperial system at the beginning of the twentieth century, the patriarchal system had durably been in place and the art theory produced by the painters and calligraphers of literati art could not but reflect that hierarchical structure.

Considering that the people who made these literati landscape paintings were precisely those writing nearly everything else, from poetry to philosophy, it is not surprising they also produced many theoretical texts reflecting upon their understanding of the arts (specifically poetry, calligraphy and painting). Because of the grammatical structure of the classical language already evoked, it is not possible to say that the mountain was referred to as a ‘he’ (which is true of some other languages, English would use ‘it’ while ‘montagne’ is feminine in French—which does not mean it is female, the grammatical gender of this word does not erase its phallic, masculine connotations in painting). But it is possible to find in some early theoretical texts on painting an identification of mountains to people within a strict hierarchical structure. During the Northern Song dynasty, one of the most important figures of the early phase of literati landscape painting, Guo Xi (c. 1020–1090), wrote a short treatise titled Lofty Message from Forests and Streams (Linquan Gaozhi), in which he compares the arrangement of peaks and mountains in a painting to a sort of court hierarchy where the highest peak would be like the king: In the landscape, pay attention first to the tallest mountain, call it the main peak. Once it is established, you can start painting the others, whether they are close or remote, small or big.

We call it the main peak because it is the monarch of the entire scene. It is like the hierarchy between lords and ministers. In the scenes of rocks and trees, pay attention first to the tallest of pines, call it the venerable ancient. Once it is established, you can start painting the other elements of the flora and the smaller rocks. We call it the venerable ancient because it is different from all the other elements of the mountain. It is like a noble gentleman among mere mortals.20

This famous passage, which would inspire other theorists of landscape, clearly associates mountains and trees, i.e. the main elements of any literati landscape paintings, to the most important figures of the rigidly hierarchical structure of Chinese society during the imperial period. The main mountain as the reigning lord, and the main pine tree as its noble and ancient adviser, directly alludes to the patriarchal ordering of a court. The historical conditions that originated these concepts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries can explain how these associations of ideas were made. In his paper ‘When is a landscape like a body?,’ historian and sinologist Martin J. Powers explains the rise of landscape painting in literati culture in sociological terms.21 During the Song dynasty, landscape painting began to occupy the highest echelon of the hierarchy of painting genres, while the main genres of previous dynasties and especially the Tang, i.e. portrait and figure paintings, began to decline. Before the Song dynasty, the imperial examination system created a new elite that began to replace the aristocratic elites of the past, taking over their social, political, and economic functions.

It was that new elite of the literati, who were at least initially all civil servants thanks to the imperial examination system, who picked up landscape as their favoured artistic medium, thus replacing the favourite genres of the old aristocracy and their preference for portrait and figure painting.

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While portrait and figure painting, at the time it was in vogue among the aristocracy, had to be made by specialized practitioners and was therefore never made by the aristocrats themselves, landscape painting, on the contrary, was made by the literati who were also very eager to write about it. In these theoretical texts, they applied to their practice the knowledge of nature that was also present in the neo-Confucian philosophy that had emerged during the Song dynasty. It could be argued that the faces and bodies of portrait and figure paintings that dominated before the Song dynasty were turned into the landscapes and mountains of literati painting during and after that period. That sweeping view of art history is of course a generalization and starts to become less accurate as the social class of the literati became more complex, its ideology becoming increasingly difficult to follow closely under a changing social and economic structure. For instance, the idea that literati art should be made by disinterested individuals, painting and doing calligraphy for their own pleasure without thought of financial gain, became difficult to maintain during the Ming and Qing dynasties. That literati thinking had permeated so many aspects of art in general, and especially the making of paintings, even professional painters like Fei Danxu could claim at least a modicum of literati-ness for their portraits and figure paintings. By the twentieth century, the limits between what constituted literati and non-literati art had become so blurred that it was no longer tenable to reject portrait and figure painting from the realm of any definition of high art.

Some of the most influential painters of the Shanghai school for instance, who brought major changes to the understanding of what constitutes acceptably ‘high art’ to late nineteenth century China, had no problems making portraits and figure paintings (obviously, the main reasons behind this change was the social and economic environment of Shanghai, this most commercial of cities).

In the twenty-first century, ideas of literati art are far from being a thing of the past, but they had to adapt to a very different environment where other notions, such as ‘the contemporary’ were bound to reshape them substantially. The fact that Joey Leung is a contemporary artist has superseded the notion that she could be a literati painter, making the question of whether her figure paintings are or are not literati painting somehow moot. And yet, there is no escaping entirely these issues since she also chose to make her girls look like mountains, something that might not be immediately obvious to viewers who would not be familiar with Chinese painting in general, and literati painting in particular. Leung’s giantesses, with their mountain-like bodies and hair are therefore a slap in the face of the male mountain so clearly revealed in Guo Xi’s text. This painting, and the Mollywood series it belongs to, can also be seen as a statement on aspects of the local culture of Hong Kong.

HONG KONG MUNDANITY AND PATRIARCHY IN MAINLAND CHINA Leung’s writings, in her comics and the inscriptions of her paintings, pertain to certain literary traditions of the region of Guangdong where Hong Kong occupies an original place. If Guangzhou remains the capital of the province of Guangdong, Hong Kong has been something of its crown jewel. Its colonial past puts it apart from the rest of China in terms of culture and language, and even though Cantonese is also spoken in the rest of the province, Hong Kong Cantonese is somehow quite different because of its many uses of English words, different everyday expressions and even accent.

Although Leung’s texts are not immediately recognizable as Cantonese, since their grammatical structure is a mixture of more classical forms and modern language (just like in Mainland China for more literary writings), they become quite clearly so once spoken aloud, since the Cantonese pronunciation will make the ending of phrases rhyme.22 Also, some of its architectural context, as well as some of the visual elements of Mundane Mind, can be read as an expression of the local culture. l

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Leung has explained where these elements came from: “Regarding Mundane Mind, it was the first time I put real scenery in my painting (the tree shadow at the back; it is a place I always passed by when I visited my grandma). I turned it into mosaic which is like a process of sealing in a memory.

The text was what I thought during 2019.”23

The use of ceramic tiles to ‘seal in a memory’ probably refers to the durability of ceramics, evoking one of the most common architectural sights in Hong Kong as well as Mainland China.

The association of such a visual detail with the subtly Cantonese references of the written text present Mundane Mind as a good candidate for a cultural artefact defined by its Hong Kong Cantonese context. Leung’s comment is arresting as it indicates a change of mind concerning the content of the entire Mollywood series and especially its discontent towards the unchanging and dull nature of the everyday; that condition, in Hong Kong since 2018 no longer being valid.

These points, used by Leung in the email sent in October 2020, and therefore just a few months after the creation of the new National Security Laws, indicate how much the situation has changed in Hong Kong since she began working on this series of paintings. As has been widely reported in the international media, large demonstrations took place during the summer of 2019 in reaction to the Hong Kong government’s attempt to introduce an extradition treaty with the People’s Republic of China, where the justice system is empowered by the Chinese Communist Party. Public anxiety generated by this proposed new law turned firstly into fear, and then terror, after the government allowed its police force to crack down on the demonstrations, generating in turn more violence. While the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 brought about a less violent tone to the confrontations between police and public, the central government in Beijing then imposed a new set of laws designed to suppress any show of political dissent. Enforced by a highly secretive police with personnel directly appointed by Beijing, these laws have presented a death blow to the ‘One Country Two Systems’ principle allowing Hong Kong to retain an unchanged political and social system until 2049 (violating the international treaty signed with the UK in 1997, and confirmed at the United Nations in 1984), and are profoundly changing all Hong Kong institutions and the way they function. This eventuality had yet to occur by the time Leung began working on her Mollywood series. These paintings are now beginning to look like a remnant from a much-regretted past, however recent it is in reality, a past when things were blissfully boring and uneventful.

It is not just the freedoms used to be guaranteed in Hong Kong that are under threat, there is also a fear that even the local culture and language could soon be put into question by the CCP. Any allusion, even remote, to the possibility that Hong Kong is different from Mainland China is now being construed as a call for independence, a notion that is being actively pursued as a crime by the National Security forces. Such an attempt to erase Cantonese culture also happened in the Mainland. Even before the events of 2019 in Hong Kong, the Mainland authorities had tried to shut down local Cantonese television broadcasts in Guangdong province, sparking demonstrations in Guangzhou, whose inhabitants believed they should protect and even promote their own culture.24 The explanation given by the central government was that these broadcasts were no longer necessary, considering the influx of migrants from other Mainland provinces had made an understanding of Cantonese unnecessary. It was clear that this cultural difference was seen as an obstacle to the wider economic, cultural and political integration of the country. The resistance against this integration was sharp but has been weakened considerably by Beijing’s efforts to create the Greater Bay Area, a gigantic project of economic integration that will basically erase all limits between the great cities

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of the Pearl River Delta. The creation of this economic behemoth is the ideal pretext to abolish any historical and cultural differences between these large cities and the rest of the country, and especially the strong sense of otherness many Hongkongers feel towards Mainland China.

This sense of cultural difference under attack in Hong Kong also refers to other tendencies felt to be potent in the Mainland, especially in the cultural attitudes promoted by the CCP in the institutions of the PRC. Some of these tendencies are clearly expressing a suspicion towards any form of criticism towards the state, even when it takes the shape of feminist activism. And yet, there is resistance in the PRC against these efforts to normalize very conservative attitudes towards society in general. There are many Mainland female artists engaging in an extraordinary variety of tactics to defend and promote a feminist viewpoint. All the same, there is an official culture that has become more visible today and has been given more importance by the state in its soft power strategies. Its emphasis is on a culture that does not seem interested in reflections on gender identity in the field of culture or even in the defence of women’s rights. Stories of feminist activists being arrested for causing trouble and disturbing the peace, the most common accusation used by the state to arrest whoever questions whatever decision taken by the CCP, abound in the press. Two examples will suffice, but there are many others. Firstly, Lu Pin, an activist and curator of the travelling exhibition, Above Ground: 40 Moments of Transformation, which examined the public demonstrations of Young Feminist Activists in China documented through photographs and narratives, who was arrested in 2018,25 and secondly, Huang Xueqin who was arrested in August 2019 for simply being a powerful voice of the #metoo movement in China.26

In spite of these dark examples it is possible to somehow remain optimistic and look at this reinforcement of patriarchy as something of a joke, thanks to an event that happened in 2020.

The student handbook of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, the largest art school of the country in terms of numbers of people and the size of their several campuses, contained advice given to female students to avoid being sexually abused, by listing some of the factors that “encouraged” assault: The factors include a “focus on looks and material enjoyment,” “a beautiful appearance and frivolous lifestyle,” “cowardliness and an inability to defend oneself” and “a weak mind and inability to resist temptations.” It said sexual assaults could occur at night and in summer, and in classrooms, laboratories and dormitories. Under “prevention of sexual assault,” the academy in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou said, “women’s dormitories pose a safety issue” and it recommended that women students not stay in the rooms on their own. Women students should also “take major roads at night, not talk to strangers, and not wear clothes that expose too much.”27

It was reassuring to see the social media backlash against the China Art Academy, many commentators pointing out that the blame was placed on women without attempting to address the actual issues. Sadly, patriarchy is alive and well, even growing in its assertiveness in official culture fostered by the CCP, a fact that has become increasingly obvious in the last decade. But it is another fact that resistance to such a patriarchal culture is just as alive and well, though threatened by the growing obsession for control exerted by the state. Strategies of resistance range from the most confrontational, a choice that puts its defenders at risk, to the extremely subdued and subtle, like Joey Leung’s giantesses. A sense of humour remains a powerful weapon for today’s weary minds.

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This text relates to a public talk given by the author as part of the ‘University of New South Wales, Art and Design and the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney Presents’ annual research seminar series. In 2020 the series was co-organized online by Prof. Paul Gladston and Dr. Yu Chieh-Li (UNSW) with Dr. Mikala Tai and Bridie Moran (4A).

Notes 1 I have written a comparative study of painting theory concerning landscape by choosing a period where art theory had developed extensive reflections on the subject in both Western Europe and China in the eighteenth century. Titled Académiciens et Lettrés, Paris: Youfeng, 2010, this study contains a chapter titled ‘Landscape’ (‘Paysage,’ pp. 280–310) 2 One example would be one the works of Lam Tung Pang, a 2008 performance-cum-painting titled Faith Moves Mountain. The artist painted, with a Chinese brush and ink, a large monochrome landscape painting on planks of plywood. Then, in order to interrogate the weight of the literati painting tradition that many ethnic Chinese artists feel they have to face, he carefully tried to wipe it away with an eraser, an impossible task considering that the ink had penetrated too deep inside the cracks of the plywood. Although Lam Tung Pang made this painting in Beijing at a time the art market was only interested in the works of Mainland artists who were mainly present in the capital, this work was also a statement about the fact that this Hong Kong-born artist did not identify with the culture of the People’s Republic of China and its renewed interest in the Confucianist social order it once rejected. See Frank Vigneron, Hong Kong Soft Power, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010, pp. 170–172 3

Chinese ink, drawing pen, gouache, acrylic, coloured pencil on paper

4 Maria Mok, ‘Preface’, A Sense of Place–From Turner to Hockney (exhibition catalogue), Hong Kong: Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, 2020, p. 7 5

I have written extensively about this problem in my book I Like Hong Kong… Art and Deterritorialisation, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010, particularly in chapter three ‘Infra-national culture', pp. 55–82 6

In I Like Hong Kong… Art and Deterritorialisation, pp. 153–157, and in my more recent book on the art ecology of Hong Kong, pp. 231–239

7 Yeewan Koon, ‘Skirting the Borders: A Preliminary Sketch on the Issue of Gender in Hong Kong,’ Hong Kong Art Yearbook 2007, Kurt Chan (ed.), Hong Kong: Fine Arts Department, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008, pp. 219–229 8

From an email by the artist to the author, 2 November 2020

9 Wu Hung, ‘Beyond Stereotypes: The Twelve Beauties in Qing Court Art and the Dream of the Red Chamber’, Writing Women in Late Imperial China, Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang eds, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997, p. 336 10

Ibid.

11

Even though erotic art existed in China for many centuries, it was never part of any ‘high’ forms of art making, and especially not literati painting, always existing as part of the creative domain of craftsmen. Fei Danxu, being a nineteenth century painter, however, already belongs to a time when the possibility of more licentious representations existed for image makers: “Records of erotic activities, including kissing, are easily found in some late Qing erotic paintings that were mass-produced in popular and vulgar styles and widely circulated in brothel areas. Now, nineteenth century China was rife with an interesting tension and divergence between the Manchu ruler who adopted Confucian policies and the lifestyle of nouveau-riche merchants. The background of most of these paintings featured the newly prosperous towns of the lower Yangzi river valley, where there was demand for a more hedonistic lifestyle… Erotic behaviour in these paintings reflected the complex crosscurrents of society, including bureaucratic values and ‘immoral’ and ‘heterodox’ ideas that the government tried to ban. The traditional, leisurely approach to sex was replaced by a ‘frenetic’ mode of sexual excitement and sensation, even of decadence.” Eva Kit Man, ‘Kissing in Chinese Culture', Bodies in China, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2017, p. 82 12 In relation to the activities of the ladies described in Xu Zhen’s treatise, Wu Hung describes their skills by comparing them with those of the women of the Book of Songs, emphasizing what appeared to be a stronger sense of equality between men and women in the antique text: “Skills: Whereas women in seventeenth-century China were playing the lute; embroidering; weaving brocade; comprehending musical pitches and rhymes; swinging and playing the ‘double six’ game; the women in the songs, as discussed above, were either doing hard laborers’ work, sewing, and picking in the field, or the wealthier ones were singing and longing for their men. Yet one must say the female activities in the later portraits were more idealized and imaginary than realistic, in which the women were taking care of orchids, catching butterflies, fashioning clothes, and so on.” Wu Hung, ibid.

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13 In fact, what has been called in English “neo-Confucianism” is generally the accepted term used to talk about several philosophical movements that started in the Song dynasty. The first representatives of this movement, which has characterized all the intellectual pursuits of the literati ever since, and engendered many books and new ideas, is always described as a syncretic elaboration of ideas coming from the moral philosophy of Confucius and his followers, ideas from the more nature-oriented philosophy of Taoism, and ideas allowing for considerations on concepts such as the ego (its inexistence in fact) and the afterlife from Buddhism 14

Kerr Houston, An Introduction to Art Criticism: Histories, Strategies, Voices, Boston: Pearson, 2013, p. 292

15 “Sexual Suggestions: Expressions of this kind became more repressed and calculated in later developments, while basic gestures remained the same as in the songs, like leaning drunkenly on her lover’s shoulder; laughing seductively; secretly exchanging glances, showing slight jealousy, and so on.” Wu Hung, ibid.

16 Literati artists, even when selling their works, always believed that they had to adhere to the status of the amateur artist, practicing their art without regards for monetary gains and only to cultivate their own minds and the respect for other literati. Because Fei Danxu never even attempted the civil service examination, the commercial nature of his practice did not allow Chinese art historians to put his work inside the domain of literati art. Considering that ‘literati art’ is often described by these same historians as an aesthetic choice (and therefore in, great part, stylistic and visual), it would however not be entirely impossible to consider his work as being part of the dominant culture of the literati, since the way he used ink and brush was not very different. But the additional fact that he was a portrait painter made his association with literati painting impossible for the same art historians, since portrait painting had been relegated to the position of a craft by the literati painters ever since the Yuan dynasty (only in the late eighteenth century would literati art theorists reintegrate portrait painting as a possible venue for literati artists and even then, with great difficulties) 17

Eva Kit Man, pp. 1–17

18 Eva Kit Man even provides a non-exhaustive list of the dichotomies inherent in these philosophical systems: “mind and body, sense and sensibility, outside and inside, self and other, depth and surface, reality and appearance, mechanism and vitalism, transcendence and immanence, temporality and spatiality, psychology and physiology, form and matter, and so on.”

19 An important moment in the reaction against the traditional roles of women in Chinese society was, for instance, the anti-foot binding movement in early republican China; the list of such efforts, whether officially sanctioned or not, is quite long and has a fascinating history with remarkable ups and very depressing downs 20

My translation. Yu Jianhua, Zhongguo Hualun Leibian, Beijing: Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1957, p. 642

21 Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society, Wen-Hsin Yeh (ed.), Berkeley CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California: Center for Chinese Studies, China Research Monograph 49, 1998 22 As this example from the painting The Carefree Stone will show: “She thinks she cannot be bothered; Only because she is so lazy.

Too lazy to care or bother; She lives a carefree life.” Although this quatrain could even be considered to be written in ‘classical’ Chinese, it only rhymes when pronounced in Cantonese. “Lazy” is pronounced “lan” in Putonghua, the official language of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, and almost similarly “laan” on Cantonese (with a longer vowel); but the last character, meaning “unoccupied”, is pronounced “xian” in Putonghua (i.e. a sound closer to the older Wade-Giles transcription of “hsien”) but “haan” in Cantonese. If ‘“laan” and “haan” rhyme, “lan” and “xian” do not. This, of course, in addition to the fact that the characters used are ‘traditional’ ones, like those used in Taiwan, and not ‘simplified’ like those used in the PRC 23

From an email sent by the artist to the author, 2 November 2020

24

Wing-Chung Ho, and Jian Lu, ‘Culture versus the State? The “Defend-My-Mother-Tongue” Protests in Guangzhou’, The China Journal 81.1, 2019: pp. 81–102 25

‘Curator Lu Pin Will Speak About Feminist Activists in China’, Targeted News Service, 28 March 2018; https://targetednews.com

26 ‘China/Hong Kong: China Arrests Feminist Activist Huang Xueqin After Hong Kong Visit’, Asia News Monitor, 28 October 2019; see https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/china-arrests-feminist-activist-huang-xueqin-after-hong-kong-visit 27 Pheobe Zhang, ‘Chinese art college handbook accused of blaming sexual assaults on women’s behaviour’, South China Morning Post, 25 September 2020; https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3103096/blaming-victim-chinese-art-college-handbook-tells-womenprevent; accessed 12 October 2020

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This Piece of Land: Living With Continental Drift

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Life on earth as we know it plays out almost entirely in the Critical Zone, a thin layer of atmosphere, structure and crust that is both subject to and alienated from the deeper dynamics of the universe above and below. In the ‘Planet Terrestrial’ section of the 2020 Taipei Biennial: ‘You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet,’ artist Yung-Ta Chang expands the dimensions of his practice in an attempt to occupy the envelope of this Critical Zone at the point in space-time described as the Taroko Gorge, a feature that is markedly active in terms of both geology and human ecology, a shuddering territory that resists full description. Taiwan is positioned at the intersection of four tectonic plates, the names of which convey not only their own kind of poetry—Yangtze, Okinawa, Philippine, Sunda—but also the geopolitical, geological and geoaesthetic pressures that have shaped this island, not only through centuries of multicultural civilization but also millennia of prehistoric human and nonhuman migration, and even mega-years of continental drift. Artists like Yung-Ta Chang stick their fingers into the dirt and open peepholes onto these processes.

One of the most exciting historiographical transitions of our time has been the shift toward media archaeology, and more broadly other rigorous disciplinary deployments of various Foucauldian archaeological methods. But while media art has been extremely well served by this tendency, art history writ large has remained primarily a search for origins. Contemporary art is too often treated as an ahistorical bubble—after postmodernism came our great freedom, our end of history, we were told—largely because of the teleological function of modernism, itself conceived as a rupture from the undifferentiated mass of lumpen-history that came before. An archaeology of contemporary art would read the context of artistic practice (which is to say: exhibitions, institutions, social networks, popular culture, political dynamics) alongside the technical phenomena that are more often (but not exclusively) the province of media archaeology. Jussi Parikka’s seminal text, A Geology of Media (2015) departs from the metaphor of archaeology, burdened as it is with an unavoidable anthropocentrism, in favour of the longer arc of geological time: to understand media and, in turn, things like media art, we must first understand the environmental and pre-ecological histories of minerals, magnetism, and the rest of it all, not to mention the forms of social organization that have engaged with them.1 This approach has been especially helpful in the past few years as the materiality of the semiconductor supply chain has entered the popular consciousness: there is a shortage in American pick-up trucks because the demand for semiconductor chips has exceeded the capacity of a bottleneck caused by China’s politically fraught acquisition of rare earth minerals from Australia for Taiwanese-managed fab installations. What we know as the stack, the substrate of the technologies around us, is seemingly becoming deeper and more complex by the day.

We read the stack through the imperfect device of the core sample. I would like to propose a geology of the contemporary that drills down into layers of social and cultural accumulation, human history, ecological webs, and prehistoric geological movements. Artistic practice is exciting now in part because it is both subject and object of this set of techniques: as much as we can read the cultural, material and geological substrates of the contemporary art artefact, artists today are equally concerned with performing this analysis on the material that makes up their references and media.

And it’s not only art: the past decade has seen in popular discourse the rise of a phrase that I find both meaningful and striking: rather than the formulations of the “People’s Republic of China” or “Taiwan”, many interlocutors speak instead of “this piece of land” and in doing so sidestep not only questions of sovereignty but also older and thornier problems of ownership and naming all together.

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piece of land. In the following, I will attempt to contextualize the work of a series of artists and curators, as both a series of media-geological core samples from a specific time and place, and as media geologists performing their own excavations of this same time and place. Some artists focus on a particular cultural stratum, others on the accumulation of environmental meaning, and still others on contemporary social representation or participation, but I believe that all demonstrate an awareness of and often actively participate in the discourse framed by “this piece of land.”

There is, of course, an ideological dimension to this vocabulary: in tracing a path to the land, this narrative is intended to embrace a history for Taiwan distinct from that of China. Leaving aside these arguably simplistic political implications, I will focus on the sometimes-surprising lessons of indigenous knowledge, ecological activism, and decolonial practice that result from this bundle of positions and ideas. As much as the political history of greater China has had a massive effect on civilization on ‘this piece of land’, after all, there are always older and parallel histories that function in different ways, it is this diversity of narratives that gives shape to the open understanding of the present that we require. These layers are infinite and distinguishing between them is a fool’s errand akin to calculating the perimeter of an infinite fractal curve. But we can, if permitted, approach our task in broad strokes: we can look past the contemporary political condition into a series of colonial layers, from the Republican Chinese migration to the Japanese industrial occupation, and further from there to the Qing Chinese cultural sphere, to the quasi-independent Ming kingdom of Koxinga, to the Dutch, to the Portuguese, and to the Spanish. Lumping all of these together in the name of finding some kind of unity in contemporary society, we will find layers of approximately equivalent thickness in indigenous culture, in the ecology of the island, and in the geological base of this inquiry.

It is important to note that the emphasis on Taiwanese history and identity in the discourse of ‘this piece of land’ does not in any way discount the significance of Chinese heritage and tradition, but it does shift this into a conversation about regionalisms and regional cosmopolitanisms. China has never been a unitary entity, after all, but rather a constellation of social technologies, regional cultures, and competing suzerainties, a beautifully complex thing that can only ever be understood through highly contested boundaries—and is probably best understood through these very contests. While tensions between waishengren (Mandarin-speaking ethnic-Han from parts of China outside of the south-eastern coast, often affiliated with military or other organs of the Republican government) and benshengren (Taiwanese Hokkien-speaking ethnic-Han or Hakka, tracing their arrival to Taiwan to dates prior to the twentieth century) are largely a thing of the past, the concept of Chinese tradition in Taiwan—from food to spirituality to architecture—remains split between these two camps. But the picture should be even more complex: the earliest mass of Han Chinese settlers in Taiwan arrived essentially as slave labour for Dutch settlements in the early seventeenth century, and many of what are now thought of as staple crops and common wild plants across the island were localized via feedback loops through Dutch and Portuguese colonial networks linking Jakarta, Fujian and Japan.

These tensions—the futile quest for a single origin, and the celebration of a heritage only vaguely related to place (as if there is any other sort)—have made for fertile ground in contemporary art; there is a strong recent tradition of local histories being written outside the received textbook narratives. Two seemingly contradictory trends were forged in the crucible of the last days of martial law in the 1980s. One is evident in the story of Hung Tung, an outsider artist from a rural village who began painting in 1970 at the age of fifty and unexpectedly captured the imagination of the cultural establishment with his intricate and seemingly coded compositions of faces, crop plants, and l

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spiralling geometric patterns. The success he found in Taiwanese society reflects an undercurrent of interest in what was then referred to as “native” culture, the soup of folk aesthetics and popular culture drawn primarily from regional Chinese heritage as it existed prior to 1945. The other direction that became evident in the 1980s is tied to artists like Wu Tien-chang and Yang Maolin, both of whom were founding members of the 101 Painting Society. Stylistically interested in the bombastic painting that characterized that moment in the international art scene, they turned a critical eye on the political apparatus. Wu, in particular, focused (and continues to focus) on the 1950s as the crucial decade during which Taiwanese culture experienced its last major shift. Continuity or rupture: identity is somehow integrated between these poles.

LAYERS OF HISTORY: THE COLONIAL, THE INDIGENOUS, THE ECOLOGICAL, THE GEOLOGICAL It is epistemologically questionable to lump together every colonial project under a single banner but, taking the long view of history, these various incursions and reconstructions collectively amount to little more than a blink of the geological eye. This affective sense of historical compression comes across in Jao Chia-En’s work with the symbolic vocabularies of empire: beginning in 2012, he sketched coats of arms in seemingly endless configurations, collapsing together not only the many layers of Taiwan’s own colonial agglomerations, from the twentieth century all the way back to the seventeenth, but an assortment of other global codes that may or may not be directly related to the historical construction of his own political subjectivity as an artist in his time and place—because where, after all, is this line properly drawn? In what sense is Pax Hollandica any more or less relevant to contemporary life than Black British cinema? Jao’s series reached its apogee in 2016 with Arms No. 31, a hanging textile work that was highly visible in an important exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum: here he focuses his energies, patchworking together no fewer than seventyfive different types of cloth in order to unify the disparate components of Taiwan as he sees it, through the lens of a handful of educational institutions, governmental organs, and corporations.

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The brilliance of Jao’s project lies not in trying to make this definition monolithic, but rather in allowing all of his smaller preceding Arms (2012–14) to coexist alongside this one. This parallelism becomes the key to A Question of Balance (2017–18), a series of drawings in watercolour inspired by historical anecdotes in which a sacred site is replaced with the architecture of another colonizer.

In each image, a bald man in shorts carries a long bamboo pole over his shoulders, balancing a series of symbolic objects on the two sides. To take one example: on the left, “girls in hot springs in Beitou, Taipei photographed by Jack Birns in 1949” and “sulfur” and, on the right “illustration of sulfuric acid (H2SO4) extraction” and “American bald eagle.” The dependencies are intricate and the stories are compelling; Jao’s draftsmanship turns the layers of colonial experience into a puzzle of aesthetics.

This dynamic also works in reverse. Item Idem, a French-born artist based in Taipei, has been engaged with various rituals associated with Chinese culture for around a decade, first producing in collaboration with Hangzhou artist Cheng Ran the video, Joss (2013). In that single-channel work paper offerings of the sort typically burned for the departed across the Chinese diaspora are lit up with fireworks, with a tight framing of the branded goods—particularly luxury products—currently popular within that traditional genre. The system of paper offerings has become an ongoing obsession for Item Idem, one that has led him not only deeper into research around that industry but also into adjacent spaces, including how the Hungry Ghost Festival and other spiritual holidays are celebrated along regional lines in China, in Taiwan, and elsewhere in the diaspora. In one such work, Cold Single (2019), shot with Mel Hsieh, the artists create a haunting portrait of the embodied psychology behind the ritual known as “Bombing Handan,” during which the male youth of Taitung temporarily take on the spirit of a deity as onlookers fire fireworks at their mostly naked bodies. Then logic breaks the mould: in NUII (2017), Item Idem appropriates the fire rituals of offering culture and turns them on global political populism in the form of effigies of Trumpian politicians. Even as regional and sub-regional identities can be overdetermined by an absurdly complex matrix of global threads, the periphery inevitably feeds back into the maelstrom. l

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But the more radical (and arguably more needed) gesture in unearthing hidden strata of political aesthetics in Taiwan is tied to the indigenous experience—to the successive waves of displacement and cultural genocide to which the people who preceded and continued to live alongside the colonizers, from the Spanish to the current regime. Aboriginal traditions often appear rootless, because the languages and, in many cases, people who formed them have been very nearly wiped from the historical diagram. Indigenous inhabitants of the western plains, the area first settled by later arrivals, were almost immediately conscripted and miscegenated out of existence, continuing on now as little more than a genetic pattern said to be nearly universal across the Taiwanese population. Mountain tribes fared marginally better, retaining more distinct identities but witnessing forced resettlement, peaking but neither beginning nor concluding during Japanese rule.

There is no definitive or in-depth account of these movements. In contemporary art today there is an active and uncontroversial mandate to include artists of indigenous heritage, and to engage with this history on a conceptual level. The first thread is evident in events like Pulima, an art festival active since 2012 that spans contemporary and performing arts with a particular emphasis on performance and liveness. Its curatorial discourses are rigorous and globally aware, engaging with field study research programs and site-specific presentations without focusing exclusively or even explicitly on traditional aesthetics. The other thread might be found in projects in Lab Kill Lab, a fascinating short-term workshop-cum-exhibition series convened by artist Shu Lea Cheang at C-Lab at the end of 2020. Cheang invited several dozen interlocutors—Taiwanese, indigenous and international—to build refreshed systems of knowledge and experience through a networked laboratory approach to biology, mythology, and the everyday.

This human ecology is new; an ecology of the non-human sort—in curatorial and critical modes of speech, and in more popular forms of literary and cinematic culture—has been around for significantly longer. But while an understanding of nature, wilderness, the web of life, and conservation is established and more or less universal, there has been a more recent backdoor insertion of the ecological into the longer conversation of heritage in Taiwan. The 2020 Taiwan Biennial, curated by artist Yao Jui-Chung, unfolds in parallel through the depressing bureaucratic architecture of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the invigorating catalogue of the exhibition, printed in the format of a traditional stitch-bound album with an embroidered silk cover.

Titled ‘Subzoology,’ Yao’s Biennial casts the problem of ecology as one or many mythological beasts, positioning the animal as the perfect ‘Other’ of contemporary art. As one ecological case study after another fills the scholarly leaves of the folio catalogue, one senses again the diad of continuity and rupture playing out again, with indigenous bioart occupying the localist outsider art pole and ecological mythology sitting alongside the autopsy of republican politics.

Further down, beneath the colonial, past the indigenous, and below the ecological, one encounters the geological. Familiar as we may be with cultural dispersion and evolutionary shifts, the space-time of the geological is something else entirely, helping make a form of chaotic sense out of the way that names are given to particular pieces of land, and then erasing and rewriting these same chunks of earth. This seismic space is naturally one of the key territories of ‘You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet,’ allowing a return to Yung-Ta Chang and his scape.unseen series (2020).

Two distinct sets of work were included in the Biennial. One, positioned indoors, presented a mashup of data—most of it illegible to the viewer—centred on the readings of a seismometer sensitive enough to read the creaks and wobbles of the exhibition space itself. The second, situated in an indoor-outdoor space, recreated the dynamics of erosion and other geological systems in tall, 102 | 103

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thin columns, etching the surfaces of round sheets of rock and essentially turning them into phonograph records, of a sort. This work was produced through a residency that spanned both Taroko Gorge, one of the most geologically active features of Taiwan’s north-eastern seismic zone, and GFZ-Potsdam, a major geology laboratory. Su Yu-Hsin took part in the same program, which uniquely positioned cultural differences at the heart of how the geological scale of the earth might begin to be understood. Her installation, Frame of Reference I-II (2020), takes the form of a multichannel video installation drawing from live data feeds and from her personal ethnography of the scientific personnel involved, playing with the illegibility of the information we are told accurately and objectively depicts the world around us. Here is your planetary home, these numbers tell us; can you feel it shifting? Martin Guinard and Bruno Latour’s Taipei Biennial fittingly closes with an almost invisible hand-drawn diagram on a liminal wall between two corridors: James Lovelock’s Diagram of Gaia (1970). Labelled ‘The Earth System,’ an arrow takes feedback from temperature, water, oxygen, acidity, salinity, and sun. That arrow? “LIFE.” LAND, TRADITION, AND ENVIRONMENT: WRITING THE PRESENT As a subject of analysis and as a material for artistic practice, land is uniquely exciting because it literally contains all of these layers. History, prehistory, ecology, geology: a core sample, angled downwards at the will of gravity, will come up with a stratified and abstracted picture of where we are now and how we got here. If there is a unique contribution to the discourse of land art from this place and time, it might come from a surprising corner—the plein air watercolours of Lin ChuanChu, who spends many of his days making sketches or taking photographs of notable geological features along the northern and eastern coasts of Taiwan, completing larger paintings in his rural studio before organizing them into poetic series that depict the same landscape vistas in varying conditions of light, wind, precipitation, and season. His archive of the island’s shore, as romantic as it may seem, is not actually a romanticist’s vision. Lin has spent his entire life on the land (which may seem a strange statement: few of us, save ship captains and flight attendants, ever really live anywhere else). He worked his family’s rice farm until he was nineteen, and, later, as a contemporary artist, replanted an urban construction site intended for a private museum as a rice paddy (Rice for Thoughts, 2007). He also studied ink-wash and landscape in China, and positions his practice as a painter within this hallowed tradition, though his intimacy with land would be foreign to the literati class, who preferred to appreciate the labours of agriculture from a distinct remove. Lin’s practice is rounded out by a series of performances and photographs of rituals tied to the elemental components of land. Reading his paintings, the relationship between land and history is never straightforward but instead lurches back and forth between sustenance and aesthetic experience.

Adopting this particularly situated approach to the relationship between land and tradition opens up a new window of inquiry, one through which traditions and histories (personal or social) are not tied to particular territories but rather to chunks of earth and stone that are more mobile and less predictable than we might assume, drifting across straits or sliding into the sea at a moment’s notice. This is the thrust of Ting Tong Chang’s Betel Nut House, Shansu Bed and Snail Trap (2020), which was recently awarded the Grand Prize of the Taipei Art Awards. Chang spent several weeks in the mountains teasing out the interactions between the three titular organisms and the human technologies constructed around them. While these relationships are often taken for granted,

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assumed to be the product of prehistoric ecological networks or ancient indigenous knowledge, this video makes clear just how marginal and even random many of the decisions linked to the continued existence of life on this planet actually are. A farmer decides to plant one crop over another because the market for the latter has crashed; it has become part of the local ecology, but the wider regional economy no longer has any need for it.

What is new in these approaches to art is not the introduction of an environmental awareness, but rather the genesis of an environmental politics that writes the possibilities of geological time into the ways that art is produced and consumed. Lin Chuan-Chu and Ting Tong Chang are no longer simply professional artists, nor are they activists with a definite and goaloriented campaign ahead of them. Instead, they make their creative practices available through a broader concern for how we live with each other, what we owe to each other, and what we are to each other, where the collective ‘we’ shifts from the audience for contemporary art into the agglomeration of rocks, trees, and people who make up our ‘piece of land.’ Curator Gong Jow-Jiun has spoken about the particular power of working as an artist in a small polity, where aesthetic labour can create shifts in consciousness that quickly exert pressure on political mechanisms.

He points to examples like Lai Chun-Piao, whose documentary photographs of rampant logging in the otherworldly forest landscapes of mountainous Nantou, when published in the mainstream media, helped spur the birth of the Forestry Bureau out of the ashes of a state-owned for-profit logging corporation.2 Participatory aesthetics shifts here from a model in which the artist shakes the floor for her audience to one in which the artist and the audience register the quaking of the earth together as one.

A POLITICS OF SEISMIC ENGAGEMENT Seismic activity registers on our cultural equipment because it makes geological time instantly legible. As biological beings with finite lifespans, social pressures, and generational traumas, it is naturally difficult to think beyond the here and now, to consider our lives on a planetary scale or to imagine a distant future in which we are little more than forgotten ancestors. And yet seismic logic —the moment of the earthquake—shakes everything into focus. When the innermost layer of our core sample is proven to be unstable, everything else looks like ashes in the wind. This is the drifting of an island further out to sea; this is the fusing of two continents via land bridge; this is the birth of a new islet; this is a mountain that slips and becomes two hills. The poetry of land and sea demands a politics of participatory observation to engage with these seismic shifts, to map the shape of a world yet to come. Practices of cartography will be the next logical step, as artists and writers attempt to document, predict, and ultimately influence where our geoaesthetic fault lines appear, and what shape they might take. Core samples, after all, are not purely objective registers of an external reality, but rather influence the topography of the territory with which they interact. When artists reach downwards into the dirt to feel the tremors of the earth, they have the right and responsibility to shake the world back.

Notes 1 Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015 2 Gong Jow-Jiun, ‘時延與微感覺：懸置於一九八○年代的兩個未來美學思想命題’, ACT: Art Critic Taiwan, Vol. 44, October 2010; http://act.tnnua.edu.tw/?p=513&fbclid=IwAR2mBpl9Fv2LH5JSV_GZeKAZ4s9cQjTrB1YKgUR8FqHEGntqOzJFJjmVa1o

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The Poor Image and Royalty: A Battle Between Two Thai Pops What does it mean to be Thai? Historian Saichon Sattayanurak contends that the concept of ‘Thainess’ was constructed by the government and conservative academics to uphold a hierarchical social and political order.1 As surrounding imperial powers expanded in the early twentieth century, King Rama VI (r. 1910–1925) deployed media and the arts to popularize a concept of modern Thai nationalism centred not on a geopolitical or cultural identity, but on the body of the king.

He established three pillars of Thai identity, or Thainess, that still define the country today: nation, religion and king. In November 1952, as the US Central Intelligence Agency accelerated training the Thai military in combat and social control, the passage of the Un-Thai Activities Act, or the anticommunist act, codified the tremendous power of Thai law enforcement. This legislation defined “un-Thai activities” as acts that might undermine any of the three pillars. Praised by the US for combating communism and sedition, the law was used to justify four decades of institutionalized suppression. To the current chagrin of the Thai government, whose legitimacy throughout the twentieth century relied on performing a well-made image to foreign powers, the three-pillared definition of Thainess has received increasingly critical international attention.2 While this conservative definition of Thainess persists and is strictly enforced through martial law and the lèse-majesté law—which makes it illegal to defame, insult, or threaten the Thai monarchy—young Thais are using protest to imagine a more inclusive picture of what constitutes Thainess.

Because Thainess has historically been constructed through visual means, visual culture is not the ‘weapon’ of choice of these protesters, but a necessary site of contention to meaningfully challenge current conceptions of national identity. In 2020, global audiences witnessed Thai protesters appropriate a wide cross-section of imagery—from nationally specific references to international global popular culture. Over that summer, protesters their shifted focus from the resignation of ex-army general and Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha’s government to unprecedented calls for the reform of Thailand’s most inviolate institution: the monarchy.

To challenge unified, official royal iconography that has been codified and popularized over generations, protesters traded international pop iconography at high frequency, injecting Thai visual culture with unprecedented diversity and volatility.

During the post-Second World War era, the Thai art establishment was dominated by stable, state-sponsored image production in which the monarch symbolized the nation. Following an overt silence from the arts establishment during the 2010 protests, most Thai artists have approached political subject matter from an oblique angle, if at all. However, many artists directly participated in the 2020 protests, blurring the line between acts of creative protest and politically engaged works of art. l

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This text investigates how Thai visual culture and aesthetic taste shift when they are motivated not by the ideologies of a centuries-old dynastic regime, nor sponsored by the US government, but rather led by a grassroots movement for democracy. The effect, I argue, is the laying of a parallel track of highly legible imagery that reads as easily as photographs of the monarch. First, I discuss the construction and consolidation of Thainess in the image of the king in the latter half of the twentieth century. Second, I discuss 2020 protesters’ attempts to negate or hijack these statesponsored, and highly regulated symbols of Thainess. Third, I discuss how protesters and artists have appropriated global pop imagery to appeal to an international audience. Unlike stable, resilient royal iconography designed for national unification, the lifespan of highly legible images utilized in the protest movement was short. This suggests protesters are more interested in visibility as an instrument of safety than in creating a new dogma of Thainess. Finally, I discuss how politically engaged artists in galleries and on the streets have moved towards more progressive and candid work to match the standards of legibility of a grassroots political movement. The emergent image of Thailand is an unresolved mosaic of diverse voices that may reject traditional Thainess as an aspiration altogether. But then again, maybe that is what democracy looks like.

CONSTRUCTING THAINESS IN THE IMAGE OF THE KING From birth, Thai people internalize the iconography of royalty as thoroughly as they are excluded from the sacred class it signifies. Both mundane in their ubiquity and sacred in their signification of dharmaraja (divine kingship) status, symbols of royalty manifest through colours, language, songs, picture-framing styles, and most of all, photographs of the royal family. Since the 1960s, the visage of the king has been the common denominator of Thai visual culture: printed on every Thai baht (the Thai currency), hung in every home, illustrating every day of printed wall calendars, and watching over every city.

This was not always the case. As early as 1920, it was noted that every Thai home possessed at least a humble lithograph of the monarch to “show its loyalty in this easy and practical manner.”3 However, the image of the king receded from public view following the 1932 revolution, in which the People’s Party or Khana Ratsadon overthrew absolute monarchy and deployed new symbols to promote belonging, through national citizenship as opposed to royal subjecthood. When the United States Information Service (USIS) conducted a survey in rural Thailand in the mid-1950s, the majority of respondents did not know the name or visage of the then king.4 As the legitimacy and ideology of the military-dominated political system was called into question, the regime of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat (1957–1963) began to promote the royal image of King Bhumibol Adulyadej or Rama IX (r. 1946–2016) to cohere national identity.5 Sarit’s regime fused military power with royal legitimacy, initiating a pattern of royal involvement in politics, although the monarchy has taken a public position “above politics” since student-led uprisings in 1973.6 In 1957, state-controlled media began presenting daily photographic and film coverage of the royal family’s projects that established the king as the father and moral leader of a sovereign Thai people.7

This project to unify Thailand around the image of the monarch was supported by the CIA and USIS as an integral component of the Cold War strategy in Southeast Asia. In 1956, there were eight US teams producing film and music with the aim of “contrasting the beloved King and Queen with the evil spectre of communism,” and making the monarchy more ‘real’ in the eyes of Thai people.8 In the early 1960s, the US Agency for International Development and USIS printed hundreds of thousands of posters and calendars with pictures of the king and queen each year.

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These were distributed throughout the country and were often the only wall image in the homes of the rural poor.9 In 1965, USIS films were estimated to have been seen by as much as fifty-nine percent of the population of Thailand.10 Anthropologist Rosalind C. Morris characterizes this aggressive promotion of the monarchy via mass media as a “commandment to not only revere the king, but to revere him by revering his image.”11

Royal portraits, paradoxically both mass products and sacred objects enjoy the ubiquity of pop culture but via the consistency of government-regulated assets. The Royal Household Bureau maintains regulations for how and where the public may display royal photographs in physical and online contexts. Often incorporated into household or neighbourhood shrines, they testify to one’s personal relationship to and investment in the monarchy and thus conformity to the three-pillared definition of Thainess. Many believe these images evidence a intimate relationship between the king and the commoner, in which the monarchy operates paternally for the believer or as surveillance of the naysayer. Love of the monarch is so embedded in the concept of Thai nationality, that if a Thai person does not worship the king, many see them as “not Thai” or “nation haters” and believe they should leave the country.

The inextricable link between the monarchy and Thai sovereignty that characterizes Thai politics today was far from assured, but rather “born through an entire industry of image makers who lovingly reformatted, retouched, and reworked—in other words, reproduce—the image of divine kingship.”12 In addition to creators enlisted to mass produce official imagery, artists rose from a new class of professional image makers who enlarged and embellished photographic prints at a time when prints larger than postcard size were costly. Artists competed for commercial success by bringing Thais closer to their king through convincing images, which expanded the market for images of the monarch. Thai modern art was thus reciprocally born “in the image of [an] imported nation form” that necessitated the performance of state cohesion to both foreign and domestic audiences.13 In the broadest strokes, this close promotional relationship between artists and the state homogenized dominant Thai art in the latter half of the twentieth century. Gridthiya Gaweewong, artistic director of the Jim Thompson Art Centre in Bangkok, who has led research projects on the legacy of Sarit’s regime, notes, “It is [necessary] not only to revisit but also [to] deconstruct the influence of this period, because we see that the core problems of today are rooted in that time.”14

Constructed and wielded for political control, the image of Thai monarchy historically has been self-aware and oriented toward both domestic and international audiences. King Rama IV (r. 1851–1868) purposefully changed into a French-style military uniform and sat according to Western portrait conventions, which made his power and worldliness specifically legible to European leaders.15 King Rama V (r. 1868–1910) dressed in Western-style clothing to assert the civility and cosmopolitanism of his rule under the pressure of encroaching British and French imperial forces.

Rama V was the first Thai king whose likeness was widely accessible amongst domestic audiences (eg. stamps, postcards and coins) which made the monarchic image more available to the perversions and caricatures of King Rama VI.16 In contrast, King Rama IX (r. 1946–2016) donned saffron robes with traditional Buddhist significance to declare his moral fitness as the rightful Thai king when he returned home from a European education.17 Rama IX also made frequent, strategic appearances before the Thai public and international news that aligned the Chakri monarchy with other constitutional monarchies. By formalizing official royal iconography and strengthening prosecution of iconoclasm under lèse-majesté, King Rama IX’s reign reconstituted the monarchy’s sacred power through consistent appearance to domestic and international audiences. l

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The image of King Rama IX functioned as the nation’s “pillar of stability,”not only domestically but also in the eyes of global media’s uncritical analyses of Thai politics.18 While touring England in 1966, Queen Sirikit’s fashion style successfully captured the attention of British and American press, garnering support for Thailand in the face of communist insurrection, and the explosion of a US military-fuelled prostitution industry. Time magazine reported, “nearly every Thai household boasts a picture of the king,” as King Rama IX has “taken it upon himself to mould his emerging nation’s character” in which “the easygoing Thais simply do not care very much one way or another” whether they have democracy or a constitution.19 While a patronizing portrayal of the political will of the Thai people, this image of Thailand as an equanimous, ambivalent “land of smiles” has endured to this day and clouds both foreign and domestic judgment of the urgency, earnestness, and depth of political division in the nation. King Rama X’s 30 October 2020 statement that “Thailand is the land of compromise” to a UK Channel 4 News reporter thus had deep historical precedent.20

King Rama X has made fewer appearances before foreign media, and the current monarchic image is more exposed to the anarchy of global internet culture in the forms of digital manipulation, memes, and the decontextualization of social media. Foreign media viewed the king’s press conference and his consent to ‘selfies’ with the crowd as a gesture to improve his international image in the wake of challenges to his rule.21 However, for the Thai people, this proximity to the sacred body of the king was highly abnormal. Typically, Thais would only be able to photograph the royal family from a significant distance, as in the royal funeral of King Rama IX. In 2016, European tabloids published “unflattering” photographs of the current king wearing a tank top, which authorities declared were doctored.22 These images contradict strict scripts about the role of the king, and authorities have attempted to curb their resurgence during the 2020 protests. For example, sixteen year-old Napasin Trirayapiwat was charged with lèse-majesté for wearing a tank top to the October “People’s Runway” protest that year.23 Later that December, high-profile protest leaders dressed in revealing tank tops to demand the repeal of the lèse-majesté law. Protesters interpreted the images of the monarch wearing non-traditional clothing as evidence that the official image of royalty is meticulously constructed rather than a consistent reality, leading to the circulation of hashtags claiming that royalist imagery is ‘a show’.

Recently, the Thai people’s changing perception of national identity has enabled spectacularized protests before a global audience. For performance artist Teerawat Mulvilai, casting familiar foreign characters in Thai protest productions is key to both gaining an international audience and cloaking critique of taboo topics through comedy. Artistic director of B-Floor Theatre and a founding member of the Free Arts Movement, he debuted on 19 September 2020 a ‘nude’ three-metre marionette that required three people to operate. Like Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the emperor without clothes who surrounds himself with yes-men, “the king believes only the people who are supporting him,” explained Teerawat.24 He designed the puppet with a rotund stomach and a crown that resembles horns, referencing the extreme wealth inequality in Thailand.

The puppet was a favoured subject for international news photography at the sensational 11 November 2020, Mobfest protest in Bangkok. Teerawat successfully captured Western audience attention, but the puppet’s ‘nakedness’ also held particular significance for Thai audiences.

Following a lineage of monarchs whose particular attention to dress not only covered the sacred dharmaraja’s body but also acted as a layer of charismatic armour against domestic and international critics, the puppet presents a conspicuously exposed contrasting image of Thailand.

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The Poor Image and Royalty: A Battle Between Two Thai Pops

COMMANDEERING THE IMAGE OF THAINESS FOR COMMONERS One of the 2020 protesters’ primary visual strategies, to both gain widespread recognition and to challenge conservative notions of Thai identity, was to hijack sacred royalist imagery. The specificity and performativity of royal iconography, which was successfully designed to captivate a national and international audience, made it an identifiable target for spectacle in contemporary protests.

Royal iconography is so embedded within Thai culture it can be referenced indirectly, through situational elements such as (picture) framing, placement, object type, and timing. The state’s success in teaching and controlling not only the royal image, but also the standards of its staging, make these contextual aspects of the so-called ‘show’ ripe for distortion by protesters and artists.

On 10 August 2020, a video of political refugee Pavin Chachavalpongpun was introduced to protesters at Thammasat University. Announcers foreshadowed Pavin’s appearance with the phrase “the image that every household has”—the title of a famous royalist song. The Royal Guard March trumpeted out through speakers, and a screen transitioned to a glittering gold background—both characteristic of the royal news broadcast on every television channel at 8pm nightly. Pavin’s portrait appeared, framed in gold and flanked by the symbols on the flag of the king—iconography typically reserved for royals. This evocative introduction expropriated the government’s decades-long work of manufacturing consistent, universally recognizable media for framing and distinguishing the royal family, in order to make a widely accessible joke. The use of these rarified symbols to herald a lowtech video of a dissident was disarming. The effect was not to deify Pavin, whose video appeared to have been taken on a smart phone, but rather to suggest that those for whom these symbols are normally reserved may also be human.

In contrast to the highly regulated and produced royal iconography, Pavin’s phone-camera video shared the characteristics of Hito Steyerl’s “poor images.”25 These fast travelling digital “popular images” are “made and seen by the many” in defiance of “patrimony, national culture, [and] copyright.”26 ‘Poor images’ are the Achilles heel to institutions like the monarchy, historically constructed on “the fetish value of visibility” and reliant on totality and regulation.27 As Pavin’s sign-off, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to come home” beamed across borders impassable to the former diplomat, from Kyoto to the Bangkok crowd, his pixelated ‘poor image’ clarified the inadequacies of a policed image of Thainess constructed upon exclusion: Pavin’s passport was revoked in 2014 following his criticism of the government and recurring accusations of lèse-majesté. The video’s appropriative introduction lampooned extant “visual bonds”in the audience28—their alleged unity under patriarchal media—by placing them in an inappropriate context. It called out the protesters’ affective synchronization with Pavin, “organizing its viewers” despite the author’s physical distance from their shared home. Pavin’s foreign-made, yet undeniably Thai video demonstrates that a national identity that disowns and physically ejects those who question it is doomed to dissolve in the age of the globalized, ungovernable, “digital no-man’s land” of poor images.28

In addition to sound and visual iconography, the material context of an image can signify its connection to royal imagery. Artist Nibhon Khankaew distributed calendars at the biennial Khon Kaen Manifesto 2020, printed with the image of a dissident Isaan monk arrested during Sarit’s regime in 1962. The calendars not only made a ‘disappeared person’ visible again, they also replaced the standard image of the royal family printed and distributed on annual calendars by private and public companies. On 25 November 2020, the Ratsadon group came under criminal investigation for forgery and lèse-majesté for distributing 3,000 ‘banknotes’ to protesters at the Siam Commercial Bank’s headquarters, where King Rama X is the biggest shareholder.29 The design replaced the 110 | 111

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familiar image of the king on Thai baht with that of a rubber duck wearing a crown—grounds for lèse-majesté charges. Protesters took up the symbol of the rubber duck in multiple contexts, calling it “protector” for its function as a barrier against water cannons and its innocuous appearance which spectacularizes power imbalance in photographs of police brutality. The ‘banknotes’ were hardly a convincing ‘counterfeit’—the Garuda, the national emblem of Thailand, was replaced with a white dove, and the People’s Party Plaque of 2020 was replicated on the left side of the note. The upper left read “this banknote can be used to purchase items from CIA stores”: the participating vendors around the protest site were nicknamed “Central Intelligence Agency.” The ten baht cash coupons functioned similarly to systems used at festivals and food courts across the country. Although the Ratsadon group faced charges of forgery, the notes seem more so to have drawn authorities’ attention for their use of the rubber duck in the place of the standard image of the king, which validates the currency and the symbolic security of Thai sovereignty in global markets.

The king’s image has long been positioned respectfully in places of physical prominence, but its position in digital space also matters. On Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, social media is usually filled with images of the king and queen. In 2020, student protesters hijacked prominent hashtags, such as “long live” with images of K-pop idols, rather than the royal family. In these instances where artists and protesters reference contexts where the Thai public expected to see the king, the presence of another figure reads as replacement or omission. Nalin Sindhuprama contrasts the purpose of the state spectacle, which is to “actualize” and “naturalize” the sacredness of the royal family, with that of protesters’ appropriation of the spectacle, which prompts audiences to realize “the performative framework of the royal spectacle and pushes the sacred monarch from reality into artificiality.”30 For the younger generation, the exclusionary and hierarchical social order, justified by Buddhist karmic categories and exemplified in dharmaraja status—which positions the monarchy above accountability—stifles diversity and economic possibility. Perhaps royal imagery and ceremony are so ripe for satire because as protesters have commented widely, they “know it’s a show,” and are ready for a reality of Thailand that includes them.31 CAPTIVATING GLOBAL AUDIENCES FOR SAFETY The question “are you Thai?” has been used by royalists since 2005 to publicly and privately accuse other Thais of a lack of patriotism. For the 2020 protesters, the question, “are you still human?” was used to combat this sentiment that one’s human rights depend on their adherence to standards of Thainess. By inserting themselves into the official imagery of Thainess, protesters “are reclaiming their place in this nation,” explained Nalin Sindhuprama.32 For many young people, critiquing the government is no longer an un-Thai activity but rather the warp upon which they weave their own identities. Teerawat Mulvilai stated that asking how protesters are redefining Thainess is beside the point. Rather, the protesters’ philosophy is better described by the hashtag circulated by the 2020 Citizen’s Committee, “reduce Thainess, add humanity.”33

Rather than redrawing borders around who and what is and is not Thai, protesters are building on historiographic efforts to expand, perhaps even explode Thainess as a bounded category.

In his paper, ‘Is “Thai” Studies still Possible?’, historian Charnvit Kasetsiri recalled the efforts of historians of the 1990s who questioned the dominant national narrative which excludes the political and ethnic “Other.”34 Inclusivity, a strategy to recruit a robust base of constituents, is emblematized in the 2020 People’s Party slogan, “tolerate more diversity.”35 The current movement is diverse across lines that traditionally divide the population: geography, class, and ethnicity. The movement spreads l

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far beyond Bangkok and the historic centre of Thammasat University, with universities in the majority of national provinces serving as loci for organizers. The movement thrived among people typically excluded from participation in traditional Thai politics, including LGBTQ+, feminists and the disabled, high-school students seeking education reform, as well as seasoned syndicates such as the Red Shirts, Labor Party, and Dao Din Group. Unlike the proletarian Red Shirts movement of 2010, however, many of the loudest leaders of the current movement are students from elite universities who are the children of the Bangkok middle- and upper-class. The Malay-Muslim population in the south, often counted as ‘not Thai’ by royalists, has also found a voice in the movement. Such diversity of constituents lends the protesters safety in numbers, the leverage of intersectional advocates and privileges, and alignment around the core value of a representational democracy rather than a particular dogma. For the arts community, it has prompted similar decentralization as critics look towards centres of activism and ingenuity in the South and North.

In 2020, protesters sourced punchy, globally legible imagery, not only to perforate the borders of official Thai visual culture, but to captivate the world with their cause. International attention lends the protesters the safety of hyper-visibility to protect against a state with a history of using brute force and clandestine ‘disappearance’ to handle political dissent. The protesters’ primary fear and the driving strategy of leaders is to avoid “another October 6,” referring to the infamous massacre at Thammasat University in 1976.36 Current student protesters have grown up during the post-2006 escalation of lèse-majesté arrests and witnessed the government’s crackdown on the Red Shirts in 2010 that resulted in ninety-four deaths and over two thousand injuries.37 On 4 June 2020, unrest escalated following the abduction of Wanchalearm Satsaksit, a self-exiled Thai political activist, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He was the ninth prominent Thai dissident to suffer ‘disappearance’ since 2014: a potentially frightening fate, as police confirmed that the bodies of two other dissidents were found floating in the Mekong River in 2019.38 One thing which the Thai have learned from the royal strategy of image promotion is that remaining visible is a form of power.

In 2020, protesters sought to bypass state media censorship by appealing to an international audience to gain visibility. In July, when thousands of protesters rallied at the Democracy Monument in Bangkok—the largest demonstration since the government declared a state of emergency in March due to COVID-19—the Thai media remained silent. Such self-censorship is characteristic of Thai media and the general population, and even though the government cannot control foreign media, they are still subject to allegations of lèse-majesté. Teerawat Mulvilai recalled, “There was no news, we had to get media from Facebook.”39 In the weeks and months that followed, protesters whose Thainess was symbolically and bodily on trial opened a space for political discourse through what cultural theorist Ariella Azoulay terms the “civil space of photography.”40 Protesters appeared in photographs before international audiences as “member[s] in the citizenry,” creating a mediasphere to “present their grievances” to a state that would rather disown them or, better yet, make them disappear.41

To gain international media attention and generate coverage in Thailand, organizers such as student @judythecatz called for the use of global pop imagery on social media via the hashtag #ideaformob. This same Twitter user organized the first major Thai protest on 26 July 2020 when protesters adapted the lyrics from the Japanese cartoon ‘Hamtaro’, about a hungry hamster, to critique irresponsible government spending. Carrying sunflower seeds and running around the Democracy Monument the protesters sang, “The most delicious food is taxpayers’ money!”42 This light-hearted appropriation of a foreign cartoon to lodge serious critiques against the Thai 112 | 113

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government caught the attention of Reuters and was republished by The Independent UK, Japan Times, and others. Following the success of this ‘Hamtaro Run’, organizers repeated this strategy —students from the Mahanakorn for Democracy Group and Kaset University organized a protest in which activists dressed as Harry Potter characters, fighting the ‘dark forces’ and “You know who” (in reference to the king, so as to circumvent lèse-majesté laws).

This strategy of global pop appropriation successfully increased Thai media reporting on the protest movement. On 15 October 2020, the government banned news and online information that could “affect national security” and launched an investigation into four news outlets including Voice TV, The Reporters, and Prachathai, for reporting on the protests.43 This provoked a backlash from other Thai news organizations which criticized the government for further restricting freedom of the press. In December, the movement was featured on the front page of The Nation, a popular Thai English language newspaper that protesters had boycotted for its earlier unfavourable coverage of the movement.

In addition to international pop culture, foreign language signage has been a key component of the protesters’ address to a global audience. Activists have long used foreign languages as a protective mechanism as, ostensibly, it is more challenging for the government to read and censor texts in other languages. For example, in February 2020, students at Chulalongkorn University attended protests condemning the Court’s decision to dissolve the Future Forward Party and laid messages around a funeral wreath that read “RIP Democracy.” The languages included Thai, English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Khmer, Hindi, and Pali-Sanskrit.44 Some messages in non-Thai languages were directly critical of the monarchy in a way that would not be permitted in the Thai language. Now, foreign-language signs are also widely used to address international spectators.

English or English-Thai signage is used at key protests even though only a small fraction of the populace speaks English. The clearest example of protesters directly addressing a non-Thai audience was the 26 October protest at the German Embassy, in which speakers were appointed to read an open letter in Thai, English, and German. Although the German government did not intervene, the protesters accomplished their goal of making front-page news across the world. Protesters say they are far more interested in increasing the accountability of the Thai government to its people and deterring an escalation of violence than foreign government intervention, which could erode Thai sovereignty.

Beyond its humour, familiarity and international recognition, global pop imagery has another key advantage: to puncture the visual landscape of Thailand with imagery that is not Thai, with such symbols of resistance. In addition to referencing Hunger Games, Hamtaro, and Harry Potter, protesters have trended hashtags such as #milkteaalliance, made memes that retool Game of Thrones and Japanese animes, and circulated images of K-pop idols in place of royals. These copyrighted images relieve individuals from the burden of authorship and create ambiguity of intent (that might provide plausible deniability in any charge of lèse-majesté). Low-brow global pop is perhaps the only type of imagery with levels of distribution to compete with royal iconography. By associating foreign-owned images with the democratic movement, activists are outsourcing the cost and labour of distributing protest iconography. If the image of the king has been the lowest common denominator of Thai visual culture since 1957, the protesters have altered the equation, expanding ‘the picture’ beyond Thainess by enacting the porousness of the Internet’s visual culture.

For democracy protesters, the legibility of imagery is a solution to a time-specific problem (the need for safety in overt visibility) rather than a means to communicate ideology. Since at least l

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2008, royalist protesters have brought their own, beloved gold-framed images of the monarch to function as their protest signs. The precedent of deploying royal photographs in partisan politics traces back to the October 1973 student union protests, in which photographs of the king and queen were raised as “virtual shields against the threat of army,” a barrier that would later prove impotent.45 The 2020 democracy protesters, seeking safety from a royalist-backed regime, have interchanged their protective icons from week to week. These volatile yet true ‘poor image’ protectors “express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression… its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction.”46 What emerges from this motley brigade is the language of protest as a globally legible form, one in which entertainment is put to work to energize and protect human bodies. Whereas the legibility of the monarch’s image serves to unify royalists under the ideology of Thainess, the visibility of global pop, vacant of dogma, invigorates a broad base for a pluralist, political movement.

DECENTERING ART AND CO-CREATING DEMOCRACY In taking up global pop images as a communication strategy the student protesters left the artworld to play catch-up. “The art of resistance starts from ordinary people, not the artists,” reflected Teerawat Mulvilai.47 He noted that as opposed to the ‘safe space’ and sympathetic audience of a gallery or theatre, protesters on the street have been forced to refine their communication to contend with the threat of physical violence from the government. “[Artists] can’t do the same thing anymore because this new and fresh idea is on the street,” he said, describing how students’ unprecedented level of directness and creative appropriation of low-brow pop has pushed artists towards experimentation and raised the bar for meaningful contribution. Teerawat continued, “If you’re still doing indirect work, you stepped backward.”48

Cutting-edge visual and political strategies utilized by the protesters have emboldened contemporary artists towards more explicit critique. Thailand’s contemporary art scene has long been dominated by conservative, Bangkok-based institutions, such as Silpakorn University, that uphold the ideals of nation, religion and monarchy. Though the history of Thai art has a close relationship with royal patronage, makers in the northeastern region of Isaan, long stereotyped as backward by the Bangkok elite, have led challenges to the national visual culture. The Khon Kaen Manifesto, launched by curator Thanom Chapakdee in 2018 and based in Isaan, is one of the more significant examples of artists incorporating highly visible protest iconography. Heavily promoted by the Bangkok-based Free Arts movement, which has been active in the protests, the Manifesto has received international critical acclaim. Nibhon Khankaew’s goals for Manifesto predate the protests, but align with the push towards highly visible, engaged art. In 2018, he encountered the general sentiment that art should be separate from politics, saying that “the art at Manifesto sent messages to people in power and people within society.”49 Manifesto’s early aspirations were apparent in the unusual directness of the works of art selected, which did not go unnoticed. Within the first week of Manifesto’s launch, it was reported law enforcement officials asked curators to remove any works related to lèse-majesté, including artist Sermsilp Pairin’s painting of Jatupat Boonpattararaksa, or Pai, the leader of the activist group Dao Din of Khon Kaen University who had been convicted of this law. Thai contemporary artists have become experts at manipulating the opacities of their media, as works of art that are legible to an audience outside the art world risk being read as lèse-majesté.

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Philosopher and writer Édouard Glissant testified to the indispensable value of opacity to resist “enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy” and colonial attempts to flatten irreducible divergence—contrary to the “principle of unity” and omniscience embodied in the image of the king, opacity “saves” artists from “irreversible choices,” such as those which might result in charges of lèse-majesté.50 Opacity proved to be an effective salvation, for example, on 15 June 2017, when soldiers and plainclothes police entered Cartel Artspace and Gallery VER in Bangkok. This was the first time a visual art exhibition attracted the attention of state officers who were following a false warning that Prontip “Kolf” Mankong, convicted of lèse-majesté for her play Wolf Bride (2013), had organized the exhibition at Cartel Artspace.51 The works of Paphonsak La-or and Tada Hengsapkul did in fact allude to political prisoners and dissidents, but did so opaquely. Due to their “illiteracy with regard to visual art,”52 officers dismissed Phaponsak’s Far From Home series (2017) at neighbouring ARTIST+RUN gallery as innocuous landscapes. An American critic for example, might read the series as a remix of Ed Ruscha’s Mountain Paintings but Paphonsak traces his inspiration to a compilation of King Rama V’s travelogues from Europe, titled ‘Far from home’53—the mountain peaks representing countries where Thai exiles have lived since the May 2014 coup. The officers’ stop at ARTIST+RUN bought time for Tada to deinstall The Shards Would Shatter at Touch (2017) at Cartel Artspace, a series fashioned with literal opacity opposite to Paphonsak’s approach of ‘trick’ transparency. Tada’s installation invited viewers to embrace what appeared to be blank black images, using their body heat to activate the portraits rendered in thermochromic paint. The images of the dissidents may have remained invisible to law enforcement, whose engagement with Paphonsak’s paintings stopped at an equivocal surface level. Non-expert viewers felt content to classify Paphonsak’s landscapes with the simple nomenclature of ‘landscape’, but the challenging blankness of Tada’s works may have invited closer scrutiny. Although the efficacy of Tada’s black cloaking remains untested, the incident suggested that lighter shades of opacity that hide in plain sight were likely to satisfy the skimming eyes of law enforcement.

Although the state pressured Manifesto curators to censor works transparently related to lèse-majesté, oblique references to oppression did not raise any concerns. Artist Nutdanai Jitbunjong installed a folding chair made of tamarind wood, hanging upside-down from a noose, referencing Neal Ulevich’s famous photograph of a right-wing vigilante using a chair to beat the corpse of a student lynched from a tamarind tree at Thammasat University on 6 October 1976. Although Ulevich’s photographs have been widely appropriated by artists—notably Rirkrit Tiravanija’s installation Who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green (2010)—Nutdanai’s work succeeded in its intentional subtly to a general audience in 2018. When asked whether such an audience, including the military, understood the work Nutdanai said, “I think most people could get the underlying message.

But many may not…. [It] is history that the powers-that-be are attempting to sweep under the rug.

And as for the military, they came because it was their duty.”54

Some of the art exhibited in 2018 Manifesto however, has moved from the realm of opacity to broad legibility due to the work of activists increasing visual literacy of political content. Ulevich’s taboo photographs resurfaced to broad viewership in the 2020 protests. On 10 August 2020, protesters gathered at Thammasat projected Ulevich’s photographs from the 1976 student massacre to the University’s anthem song, the Yoong Thong March, composed by King Rama IX. Nutdanai Jitbunjong’s folding chair reappeared on the anniversary of that event in 2020, in the group exhibition Status in Statu at WTF Gallery in Bangkok, under the title A Massacre. Curator Thunwalai Thaiprasert’s exhibition description noted the potential for art to deepen viewers’ awareness of l

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political resistance, writing Status in Statu was “specifically for the Bangkokians, who have little or no knowledge or interest in the history of the decades-long struggle between Isaan and central power in Bangkok.”55 In the political landscape of 2020, Nutdanai’s work, once opaque to a general audience, was retooled to address the Bangkok art world’s myopia. Artist Prakit Kobkijwattana, who exhibited in the 2020 Manifesto, has long used the more vernacular language of memes to make a similar point. Prakit manages a Facebook Page (Living in the pretentious city, your life must be pop) which lampoons middle-class Bangkokians following the April-May 2010 government crackdown.

As protesters have made certain historical images and characters more widely accessible, artists have entered into iconographic dialogue with the protest movement, building from the imagery circulating in the public sphere.

The 2020 Manifesto saw artists move beyond the safety of operating within the arts community to incorporate protest iconography associated with open critique. Prakit Kobkijwattana’s Untitled poster series (2020) of former Prime Minister Sarit Thanarat connected Thai history with international imagery and contemporary icons of the protests in a gallery context. The six posters were on view at Khon Kaen Manifesto in December 2020 in the Northeast region of Isaan near the Laotian border. The series of digitally altered traditional-style portraits of Sarit Thanarat asserts the lasting impact of his anti-communist campaign, which deepened Thailand’s relationship with the US and Thai peoples’ relationship with the monarchy. The work has site-specific resonance, as the legacy of Sarit’s vigorous anti-communist policy left especially deep scars on the Isaan in the form of persistent poverty, dilapidated American military bases and abandoned brothels, one of which was a venue for the 2020 Manifesto.

Prakit Kobkijwattana’s posters are particularly arresting for their evocation of 1960s pop art, with chunky colour separation in the dictator’s clothing, abruptly cut forms, serial iteration, and flat neon backgrounds. Sarit’s headshot is infiltrated by a motley cast of characters which seem to mock the dictator, betray his shadow motivations, and draw a lineage between Sarit and today’s situation. The installation featured an image of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha emerging from former Prime Minister Sarit’s head, with a rubber duck sitting like a cherry on top of Chan-o-cha.

The next three posters also featured yellow ducks popping playfully into Sarit’s portrait with the infuriating levity of a computer virus. The fifth and sixth images replace Sarit’s brain with stacks of cash, and lastly, the iconic image of ‘Uncle Sam’. He attributed his inspiration to old posters and those of net idols hung on a bedroom wall, calling Sarit “an idol of the coup d’etat and far-right in Thailand.”56 Prakit posted five of the six images, omitting the one with Chan-o-cha, on Facebook in which each image had a resolution of 1000 x 1500 pixels, inviting followers to print their own copies and take them to the streets. One could just as easily see these portraits framed in flashing neon on a billboard as in a white cube setting. Prakit’s images, like those of the monarch, were made to adapt to both mundane and elevated contexts of display.

To an American viewer the most striking of this group, the ‘Uncle Sam’ image, addresses us with an intensity that exceeds his accusatory gaze. He occupies the region of the image with the highest resolution, commanding the most information-per-inch in the image file. Viewed in an abandoned brothel, this image’s quality betrays its foreign origins—a transplant, reborn into the pixelated head of native dictator Sarit, who has been decapitated at the neck from his decorated uniform. Uncle Sam ruptures the visual landscape of Thai imagery, conscripting the attention of international viewers who are all too familiar with American military propaganda. His persistent, pointing finger, a rude gesture in Thailand used mainly to indicate objects and animals, demeans l

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Thais. Prakit’s posters remind us that although today there is no image more Thai than that of the monarchy, it was the US’ financial and military resources that supported King Rama IX’s ascension in Thai cultural imagery.

In 2020, as politics became the most popular subject for young Thai artists, with exhibitions ranging from formal gallery settings to pop-ups at protest sites, international critics looked to Khon Kaen. That symbols appropriated by protesters from international pop culture were now being represented as fine art reflected a rising tide of a more forthright conversation between protesters and artists, and a more democratic co-creation of Thailand’s visual culture. David Teh, author of Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary, described this shift towards legibly critical work at Khon Kaen: “In a country where artists have excelled in cryptic forms of political expression for so long, the art is really evolving and maturing in a really nice way.”57

This collaboration between artists and protesters is a marked shift from 2010, when the former, who were active in the leftist movement of the 1990s, were conspicuously silent. In 2020, protesters received much wider support from prominent artists and cultural workers. On 13 August, the Arts and Culture Network for Democracy published a statement in support of the protests, which accumulated over 1,000 signatures, including artists who supported the 2014 coup.58 Later in October, twenty-five artists from the Bangkok Art Biennale 2020 released a public petition for the Biennale and the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre—one of the biennial venues and a site of protests and reactive police violence—to support the protestors and oppose state violence. While it might be conjectured that the signatories were exercising protective privileges of foreign citizenship, their visibility and publicity presented tangible outcomes for the protesters’ safety. There may have been some protection in numbers from members of the Bangkok art elite signing the petitions, but the issue of authorship might still pose safety concerns. Most of the artworks at 2020 Manifesto were anonymously displayed, the organizers explaining this was to protect the artists and promote a ‘collective spirit’.

While some artists may have used the moment to gain traction in their work, others saw their role as supporting protesters by creating festive resistance, increasing the visibility of the cause, and even creating sites for mutual aid and economic exchange. Thai hip-hop group Rap Against Dictatorship, who have performed at key protests, released a music video of the song ‘Reform’ filmed at previous protests that aimed to bring the reform agenda before a broader audience.

The song also references one of the wider-known acts of protest art when, on 28 August, lead singer Ammy of The Bottom Blues threw royal blue paint on police at Samranrat Police Station. An offer was made to buy a stained uniform, and Ammy has since set up three-metre canvases printed with the faces of government leaders for passersby to pelt with the royal blue colour.

Participatory art capitalizes on anonymity to protect individual artists and adapt to the needs of the movement. From the beginning, protesters have followed Hong Kong’s model in declaring themselves to be a leaderless movement. This has become even more valid since the arrests of key people between mid-October and December 2020. While critics of the movement point to its lack of organization, the diversity of goals between different factions and the lack of consensus among faction leaders, this decentralized approach has served to sustain it. On 16 August, Teerawat Mulvilai organized a fifteen-minute performance of ‘Paper Work,’ one of B-Floor’s more stage-style shows. It featured a military leader and lawyer writing a constitution for the people on a long scroll of paper which the audience rips up at the end. Following the arrests, Teerawat changed tactics towards more impromptu, participatory works, “to release the tension.” Since December, 118 | 119

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B-Floor has been leading pop-up drumming groups, a model that anyone can join or replicate on their own without prior experience, and one with a less didactic message than “Paper Work.”

Teerawat recognized the importance of joy and flexibility as strategies, saying that “the mob has to be something people want to come to any time… The art changed because the movement changed.”59

Free Arts, a Bangkok-based collective that has been active in protest art, collaborated with three other groups—the Bad Students, Free Youth, and Women for Freedom and Democracy—to organize Mob Fest, one of the most successful examples of artistic leadership in the movement.

Thousands of protesters and hundreds of food carts and creative vendors convened at the Democracy Monument for the day-long festivities. Mob Fest served as a site for economic exchange to aid street vendors and service industry workers who had been hit hardest by Thailand’s crumbling economy in the wake of COVID-19. Organizers have solved the challenge of taking over the street for mass protests by tipping off vendors as to where and when they will host an event. The targeted street floods reliably with food carts, blocking traffic. For vendors, the mobs provide an economic break to relieve the financial pressures of the pandemic, increasing earnings by over 330%.60 Organizers were happy that vendors were gaining exposure to the movement as well, as the protesters’ demands for more robust government economic policies align with their needs. This example of an artistorganized event with an uplifting material impact on a disadvantaged section of the population exemplifies values of the movement. Rather than prioritizing a unified symbol or dogma, the protesters seek basic material support and accountability to Thailand’s taxpayers and a seat at the table for diverse constituents.

Mob Fest organizers planned three main stages to be more resilient to state obstruction, and to facilitate a non-hierarchical experience of the event. Attendees enjoyed K-pop dance lessons, DJs, Rap Against Dictatorship’s debut of ‘Reform’, and Isaan folk music. A plurality of expression was also evident on the white cloth that protesters wrapped around the Democracy Monument, decorated with responses to prompts, “what the future of democracy will be, what will the tomorrow of Thailand be, what do you hope for?” Responses included “eat the rich”, the hammer and sickle, “no more dictators”, #milkteaalliance, and references to the recently banned website Pornhub.

“This is democracy,” said Teerawat of the divergent visions. “Sometimes it is chaos, but this chaos is how we build a society, rather than a dictatorship where you have to listen to one thing.”61

If the monarchy’s project of domestic and international profile was one of consolidation and unification under one nation, then the protesters have used this same visibility towards an opposite end. For the protesters, global visibility has created the safety of international recognition needed to have a blunt, forthright conversation about democracy. Protesters’ images not only appeal to international spectators, but also implicate them in the Cold War politics that created the current situation. Seemingly flat, ‘poor images’ have empowered artists and the broader public to break beyond the wall of censorship into unprecedented and rich depths of critique. The plurality of voices invited into the collective visioning of the country’s democratic future cannot be compressed or enclosed within traditional notions of Thainess. In their irreducibility, the 2020 protests should be characterized not only by legibility, but also by the Thai artist’s familiar medium of opacity. Édouard Glissant describes the state which recognizes constituents’ right to open unknowable identities as one in which, finally, “every Other is a citizen.”62

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This text is in response to one of the framing questions from the Asia Art Archive in America’s annual Leadership Camp, ‘Other Racisms’ (held November 2020), which explored race and ethnicity from and within an Asian context, addressing racism not only against Asians, but also among and by Asians. For further information see https://www.aaa-a.org/programs/asia-art-archive-in-americas2020-leadership-camp-other-racisms/ Notes 1 Phasit Wongngamdee, 'จาก ‘การเป็ นไทย’ สู่ ‘การเป็ นมนุษย์’: การประท้วงในประเทศไทยและการนิยามชาติใหม่', ประชาไท, Prachatai, December 4, 2020, https://prachatai.com/journal/2020/12/90677 2

Nicholas Farrelly, ‘BEING THAI: A Narrow Identity in a Wide World’, Southeast Asian Affairs, 2016, pp. 334–335

3

H. G. Quaritch Wales, Siamese State Ceremonies: Their History and Function, London: Bernard Quaritch, 1931, p. 173

4

Thanavi Chotpradit and Chanon Praepipatmongkol, The Iconography of Protest in Bangkok, interview by Ariana Chaivaranon, Podcast, 4 October 2020, College Art Association Conversations 5 Irene Stengs, Worshipping the Great Moderniser: King Chulalongkorn, Patron Saint of the Thai Middle Class, Singapore: NUS Press, 2009, p. 15 6 Thongchai Winichakul, ‘Toppling Democracy’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 38, no. 1, 2008, pp.11–37; https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00472330701651937 7 Chanon Praepipatmongkol, ‘Postwar Abstraction and Practices of Knowledge: Fernando Zóbel and Chang Saetang’. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2020, p. 105 8

Paul Handley, The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej, New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 124 9

Ibid., p. 149

10 R. Sean Randolph, The United States and Thailand: Alliance Dynamics, 1950-1985, Research Papers and Policy Studies 12, Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1986, p. 108 11

Rosalind Morris, Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009; https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391821 12

Chanon Praepipatmongkol, ‘Postwar Abstraction and Practices of Knowledge: Fernando Zóbel and Chang Saetang’, pp. 114-115

13

David Teh, Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017, p. 10

14

Fabian Drahmoune, ‘Artists Lead Push for Change in Thailand’s Northeast’, Nikkei Asia, 9 January 2021; https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/ Arts/Artists-lead-push-for-change-in-Thailand-s-northeast?fbclid=IwAR1CPZsNyHxvAb09NKPhxlUTN-crxdhw9AEdXhg8CNPaUBsJp7qyfDsT 9fw 15 Clare Veal, ‘The Charismatic Index: Photographic Representations of Power and Status in the Thai Social Order’, Trans-Asia Photography Review, Local Culture/Global Photography 3, no. 2, 2013; http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0003.207 16

Maurizio Peleggi, ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Royal Portraiture in Thailand’, Ars Orientalis 43, 2013, pp. 89-90

17

Praepipatmongkol, p. 114

18

Stengs, p. x

19

Handley, p. 181

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20 Jonathan Miller, Kocha Olarn & Helen Regan, ‘”Thailand Is the Land of Compromise”, Thai King Says in Rare Public Comments’, CNN, 1 November 2020; https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/01/asia/thailand-king-vajiralongkorn-protests-intl-hnk/index.html 21

Miller, Olarn and Regan, ‘“Thailand Is the Land of Compromise”, Thai King Says in Rare Public Comments’

22 Adam Ramsey, ‘Wife of Anti-Monarchist British Journalist Detained in Thailand’, The Guardian, 22 July 2016; https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2016/jul/22/andrew-macgregor-marshall-anti-monarchist-thailand-wife-detained 23

‘Students Accused of Royal Defamation for Protest Fashion Show Hear Charge’, Prachatai English, 18 December 2020; https://prachatai. com/english/node/8976

24

Teerawat Mulvilai, interviewed by Ariana Chaivaranon, 22 December 2020

25 In the spirit of poor image, the publishing collective ‘alley‘ posted Google docs of Thai translations of In Defense of the Poor Image and three other Steyerl essays on their Facebook page (@thisissoisquad) in August 2020. The series received such wide readership in connection to the contemporary moment, they published a book in December 26

Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal 10, 2009; https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

27

Ibid.

28

Ibid.

29

‘Ratsadon’s “Duck” Currency Violates Currency Act: Activist’, The Nation Thailand, 26 November 2020; https://www.nationthailand.com/ news/30398615

30 Nalin Sindhuprama, ‘The People’s Runway: Breaking off the Spell through the Mockery’, Primary Source Analysis, University of California, Berkeley, 2020 31

Ibid.

32

Nalin Sindhuprama, interviewed by Ariana Chaivaranon, 5 January 2021

33

Wongngamdee, ‘จาก ‘การเป็ นไทย’ สู่ ‘การเป็ นมนุษย์’: การประท้วงในประเทศไทยและการนิยามชาติใหม่’

34 Thak Chaloemtiarana, ‘Postscript: Re-examining the Dominant National Narrative and an Interpretation of the Sarit Monument in Khonkaen’, Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism, 2018; https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501721106 35

Wongngamdee, ‘จาก ‘การเป็ นไทย’ สู่ ‘การเป็ นมนุษย์’: การประท้วงในประเทศไทยและการนิยามชาติใหม่’

36

6 October 1976 refers to the violent crackdown by Thai police against leftist protesters at Thammasat University and adjacent public square with hundreds killed and wounded. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_October_1976_massacre 37

Tyrell Haberkorn, ‘A Hyper-Royalist Parapolitics in Thailand’, Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 172, no. 2/3, 2016, pp. 225–248

38 Associated Press, ‘Thai Police Says Bodies from River Were Missing Activists’, Associated Press, 22 January 2019; https://apnews.com/ article/46be62385c4e40aea66fe5881a7492ed 39

Mulvilai interview

40

Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2008

41

Ibid., pp. 81–82

42 Patpicha Tanakasempipat, ‘“Delicious Taxes”: Thai Protesters Use Japanese Cartoon Hamster to Mock Government’, Reuters, 26 July 2020; https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-thailand-protests-idUKKCN24R0IB

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43 Patpicha Tanakasempipat and Thepgumpanat Panarat, ‘Thai Police Probe Media, as Thousands Again Defy Protest Ban’, Reuters, 19 October 2020; https://www.reuters.com/article/thailand-protests-idUSKBN2740JF 44 Nalin Sindhuprama, Thailand’s #mobfromhome: The Performativity of Hashtag and the Affordance of Twitter, University of California, Berkeley, 2020, p. 16 45

Maurizio Peleggi, ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Royal Portraiture in Thailand’, Ars Orientalis 43, 2013, p. 91

46

Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’

47

Mulvilai interview

48

Ibid.

49 Mike Eckel, ‘Nibhon Khankaew: Art Is No Longer the Same’, The Isaan Record, 30 November 2018; https://theisaanrecord.co/2018/11/30/ interview-niphon-kangaew/ 50

Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing trans, Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 192

51 Thanavi Chotpradit, ‘Of Art and Absurdity: Military, Censorship, and Contemporary Art in Thailand’, Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture 3, no. 1, 2018, pp. 5–25 52

Ibid.

53

Thanavi Chotpradit, ‘Living in Exile: Far From Home by Paphonsak La-Or’, Arts Cabinet, September 2017; https://www.artscabinet.org/ repository/living-in-exile-far-from-home-by-paphonsak-la-or 54 Patrick Huang, ‘Art And Politics In Post-Coup Thailand: An Interview With Nutdanai “Nut” Jitbanjong’, New Bloom Magazine, 2 November 2018; https://newbloommag.net/2018/11/02/nutdanai-jitbanjong-interview/ 55

Status in Statu, WTF Gallery; https://www.wtfbangkok.com/events/status-in-statu

56

Prakit Kobkijwattana, ‘#KhonkeanManifesto’, Facebook, 29 December 2020; https://www.facebook.com/prakit.kobkijwattana/ posts/3485636954823722

57

Fabian Drahmoune, ‘Artists Lead Push for Change in Thailand’s Northeast’

58 Arts and Culture Network for Democracy, แถลงการณ์จากเครือข่ายศิลปวัฒนธรรมเพื่อประชาธิปไตย, 13 October 2020; https://docs.google. com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf6Bb89JTdyEJNRCu3lpXhjgTD-vMklgtSW-ezM7zOXi3vqdQ/viewform?usp=embed_facebook 59

Mulvilai interview

60 Rebecca Ratcliffe, ‘”An Army Marches on Its Stomach”: The Food Vendors Sustaining Thai Protesters’, The Guardian, 2 November 2020; http://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/02/food-vendors-thai-protesters-bangkok 61

Mulvilai interview

62

Glissant, p. 190

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The Spectre(s) of Non-Alignment(s) The significance of staging an exhibition around the Non-Aligned Movement in Singapore is underscored in Naeem Mohaiemen’s three-channel film installation Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), one of three works presented in Non-Aligned, an exhibition curated at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore by Ute Meta Bauer around the legacy of the union of nation-states born out of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung, which sought to remake the world after colonization.

Composed largely of archival footage of and around the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement summit in Algiers and Mohaiemen’s tracings of its echoes in the present, the film opens with a speech being delivered by Sinnathamby Rajaratnam at that 1973 NAM meeting. The author of Singapore’s national pledge scathingly points out the gathering’s reliance on the world powers at the time, later offering a warning about a horizon of new cold wars to follow the old one that has just ended, the rumblings of which he observed in the very room in which NAM was assembled—an observation that echoes sociologist Stuart Hall’s description of a dissolving politics of the centre that “reveal[ed] the contradictions and social antagonisms… gathering beneath,” as expressed in John Akomfrah’s Unfinished Conversation (2012), the second work in Non-Aligned, which tracks Hall’s life and times.

Broadly seeking to navigate a decolonial path out of Western imperialism and Soviet communism, a Cold War binary that divided the world along American and Soviet lines (plus to a lesser extent China), the Non-Aligned Movement formed a key component of the so-called Third World project—what historian Arif Dirlik dubbed “the neoliberal avatar of what would become broadly defined as the Global South.”1 The first NAM summit was held in 1961 in Belgrade, after the Declaration of Brijuni was signed in 1956 by three of NAM’s founding leaders, Josip Tito of Yugoslavia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt—an event that historian Vijay Prashad, who appears in Mohaiemen’s film, has called “The Third World’s Yalta.”

That year, the Hungarian Revolution and Suez Crisis erupted—both instances of colonial aggression, whether on the part of Britain, France and Israel or the Soviet Union, and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of Egypt and Hungary. Both events marked for Stuart Hall “the beginning of [his] new left experience”. Hall notes in Unfinished Conversation that somewhere between the invasions of Hungary (the Soviet Union entered the country to suppress the popular uprising against it) and Egypt (prompted by Nasser’s nationalizing of the Suez Canal), “the idea of a democratic, socialist anti-imperial politics was born.” For Hall, this politics included a future where hybridity would become the norm, as the legacies of colonialism would continue to shape generations across the world who, like him, could claim no single point of origin in the composition of their cultural and historical identities. (As Hall proposed, identity, like history, is an unfinished conversation.) Such was the politics of the Third World, in which an anti-imperialist transnational movement connected the peoples of the ex-colonies with the diasporas living in the colonial centres. l

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But as demonstrated in Otolith Group’s Nucleus of the Great Union (2017), the third work in Non-Aligned, this transnationality was not singularly defined or by any means neatly unified.

Unfolding as a series of collapsing and expanding windows and clicks on a desktop, one of the first frames in the video essay is archival footage, posted on YouTube, showing an interview with Kwame Nkrumah in 1957, the year Ghana gained independence. Ghana’s first prime minister, Nkrumah was a key figure in the former Gold Coast’s emancipation from British colonial occupation and a leading voice in the pan-African movement. Nkrumah spent ten formative years studying in the United States, where he encountered the writings of Marcus Garvey, “which he described as the most influential texts on his political thinking,” and began “translating Garvey’s black nationalism into a vision of pan-African federation.”2 In 1945, he organized the fifth Pan-African congress in London with the likes of Marxist historian C.L.R. James and Pan-Africanist journalist George Padmore, which “developed an account of decolonization in which self-determination was the first step towards African union and international federation”—thus shaping what political scientist Adom Getachew describes as “the first phase of anticolonial worldmaking in the age of decolonization.”3

Nucleus of the Great Union tracks the Black Atlantic thread of Nkrumah’s legacy from the outset, as the window playing his interview is joined by other frames, including a letter from Nkrumah welcoming African American novelist Richard Wright to the Gold Coast, a newspaper clipping announcing Wright’s arrival in 1953, marking his first time on the continent, and a google image search of book covers for Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, which Wright published in 1954 on his experiences of the political campaigns for independence in West Africa.

What follows is an unfolding of the roughly 1,500-image archive of photographs that Wright took throughout his travels, which he intended to show with his book yet was blocked from doing so by his publisher. Amid the frames, some accompanied by captions drawn from Wright’s notes and correspondence with Nkrumah, are windows tracking Otolith Group’s attempts at gaining access to the negatives and paper prints from Wright’s archive, which is housed in the Special Collections at the Beinecke Library in Yale University in the United States. Voiceover narration is provided by historian Saidiya Hartman, who reads excerpts from the book tracking her own experience of Africa as a Black American, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2006), which relates to Wright’s feelings of estrangement and alienation from the continent.

As scholar Kevin Kelly Gaines notes, Wright’s writings on Ghana garnered much criticism, plus a late endorsement—after an initial rejection of the book—by an eventually-exiled Nkrumah.

Rather than play into “expectations of romantic solidarity” in “the diasporic discourse of ‘return’ to the ancestral homeland,” Wright produced an “unsentimental account of the poverty and alienation of Gold Coast Africans” that was critical of the traditional cultures he witnessed, which he apparently saw as being tied up with colonialist manipulation and control.4 In Hartman’s case, she is heard in Nucleus of the Great Union talking about “appearing a foolish woman”—who “acted as if slaves existed only in the past” and “dispossession were her inheritance alone”—to “boys [who] imagined the wealth and riches they would possess if they lived in the States” and “wished their ancestors had been slaves.”

Apparently, George Padmore defended Wright’s writings on Ghana to a critical W.E.B. Du Bois, “pointing out that whatever its flaws, Wright had captured ‘the challenge of the barefoot masses against the black aristocracy and middle class’.”5 Put another way, to quote Gaines again while invoking Fanon’s analysis of colonialism’s conditioning of its colonized elites, Wright connected “the profound alienation, both material and spiritual, of the diaspora condition with 124 | 125

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the devastating psychological impact of colonialism on Gold Coast Africans,” and regarded “rural poverty, illiteracy, and otherworldly religion as emblematic of… a repressive social order maintained by racist brutality.”6 In this frame, Gaines posits, Wright “doubtless saw himself as the beneficiary of a black experience of Western modernity whose secular, rational character would give rise to universalist antiracist struggles.”7

One year after publishing Black Power, Wright would attend the 1955 Bandung Conference and write a book about the experience titled The Colour Curtain (1956), in which he similarly grapples with that double bind of constructing an anti-colonial, anti-imperial movement through the very system that the post-colonial nations sought to resist and indeed overcome. In a chapter titled ‘Race and Religion at Bandung’—what Wright called “two of the most powerful and irrational forces in the world”8—he quotes a number of speeches by state representatives, concluding with Filipino diplomat and public intellectual Carlos P. Romulo, whose observations Wright calls “straight and honest.”9 Romulo proclaims the age of European empire over and cautions against continuing the racist doctrine of the Western colonizers. He then, quoting Wright, “squared up to facts” by acknowledging that aside from the white world’s fostering of racism, it has also fostered art, literature, “and, above all, political thought and an astounding advancement of scientific knowledge.”10

All of which aligned with Wright’s understanding of the African diaspora’s contradictory roots in the traumatic confrontation with modernity as a result of kidnap, dispersion and exile in the West, which “in turn,” writes Gaines, became “the catalyst and means for the expression of an emancipatory modernity through black radicalism.”11 Not to mention Hall’s point, per Unfinished Conversation, that the social and political crises rocking Britain from the 1960s to 1980s was “not a crisis of race” but rather a crisis that was punctuated and periodized by it. That is, a crisis with roots in the capitalist conditions of class, empire, history and modernity, not to mention a (racist) imperialist exceptionalism (and supremacy) whereby any understanding of colonialism’s imposed ramifications was—and is—either dismissed, forgotten, or unseen by the colonial classes (and peoples).

That contradiction could also be located in the United Nations, which Romulo described at Bandung as a young institution that operates “more [as] a mirror of the world than an effective instrument for changing it,” since it is “subject to all the pressures and difficulties of national rivalries and power conflicts, large and small.”12 At the time of the UN’s establishment, writes Getachew, “the deep continuity between the imperial world order and the United Nations was embodied in the presence of Jan Smuts” at a UN conference in San Francisco in 1945.13 The fact “that the l

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same man who had developed the mandates system and envisioned extending apartheid from South Africa to Kenya was now appealing for a preamble that affirmed human rights,” writes Getachew, “struck W.E.B. Du Bois as deeply ironic.”14

It was from this complex, enmeshed web of incongruities that a revolutionary period of decolonization arose, with the 1960s proving a high point in the struggle. By the start of that decade, writes Getachew, “anticolonial nationalists had successfully captured the UN and transformed the General Assembly into a platform for the international politics of decolonization.”15 This seachange became evident in the unanimous passing of UN Resolution 1514 (XV) in 1960—which proclaimed “the necessity of bringing colonialism in all its forms and manifestations to a speedy and unconditional end” and declared that “all people have a right to self-determination”—bar nine conspicuous abstentions from Australia, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, France, Portugal, Spain, the Union of South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States16—followed by a resolution recognizing the right of the Algerian people to self-determination and independence.

The establishment of the Special Committee on Decolonization followed in 1962, the year that six million Algerians voted in favour of ‘Algérie algérienne’ in a referendum to approve the Evian Accords.

Then in 1964, the G77 was formed in the interests of developing countries, and the first United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was held in Geneva to respond to “growing concerns about the place of developing countries in international trade.”17 The intention was to address increasing imbalances in the post-war economic order designed to “provide a framework of monetary and financial stability” and “foster global economic growth and the growth of international trade”—as characterized by the Bretton Woods Agreement, which reflected the economic upper-hand the United States had gained as a result of World War II.18 Signed in 1944 at a global conference organized by the US Treasury, Bretton Woods was characterized by the establishment of a stable global exchange rate that pegged currencies to the US dollar and in turn the US dollar to gold, and saw the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

It was amid these strides that the Non-Aligned Movement was established, and for a time the UN was the mechanism through which much of the decolonial struggle was at once legitimized and advanced. In 1963, for instance, the UN Security Council’s membership saw the expansion of its permanent five-member council, composed of the victors of World War II, to increase the number of non-permanent members from six to ten—as pointed out in 2018, the only enlargement that has occurred to the body since.19

But amid the victories were ruptures. In 1961, Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the newly-independent Republic of Congo, was assassinated; in 2001, a parliamentary inquiry found that Belgian “officials, ministers and even Belgium’s King Baudouin either plotted to kill Lumumba or were aware that others were doing so.”20 Then in 1966, Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in a coup described in one US Government memo as “a fortuitous windfall” given Nkrumah’s “strongly proCommunist leanings” and the new military regime’s “almost pathetically pro-Western stance.”21 As Getachew writes, “Although the coup was backed by the United States, it was not without popular support among Ghanaians reeling from economic crisis and political suppression.”22 Writing on Ghana in 1966, William B. Harvey describes an economy “shattered by a disastrous drop in the international price of cocoa, by the waste of resources on non-productive prestige projects, and by increasing corruption among governmental officials.”23 126 | 127

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Of course, the situation in Ghana was not unique. In 1976, NAM scholar A.W. Singham described the 1960s as a time when developing countries were being encouraged to borrow, whether from private banks or international institutions like the IMF, in order to pay for “essential imports” and developmental projects.24 (The UN officially termed it the “Development Decade,” writes historian Giuliano Garavini, which aligned with US foreign policy of “win[ning] over international communism through common aid policies and by stimulating growth in poorer countries.”25) The conditions of this borrowing accelerated in the 1970s, when the US abandoned the convertibility of its currency to gold in 1971 and effectively untethered the international exchange rate system, with the resulting fluctuations heavily impacting the debt load—not to mention the interest rates therein—of developing countries.26

Soon enough, writes Getachew, “To be a small postcolonial country in a big world of uneven trade relations would soon entail being caught in indebtedness,” with an increasing reliance on aid and debt “exacerbat[ing] dependence on powerful states and institutions.”27 All of which illustrated that neo-colonialism—a term coined by Kwame Nkrumah to describe “the main instrument of imperialism,” whereby foreign capital is used to control and exploit those less powerful28—“was embedded in the very structure of the global economy.”29 After all, to quote political scientist Latha Varadarajan, “Imperialism has never been strictly about colonial acquisition”—that is about occupying and controlling territory—but “the quest for secure markets, resources, and profits.”30 Plus, as Dirlik and others have pointed out, “obstacles to autonomous development do not lie outside alone, as there are groups and classes in most societies of the South who are already parts of a transnational economy and its social formations, and have a stake in its perpetuation and expansion.”31

That economic embeddedness was made explicit at the fourth Non-Aligned Movement summit in Algiers in 1973, which is why Mohaiemen’s film performs a critical, temporal anchoring in Non-Aligned. Stitched into edits of archival footage from the proceedings in Two Meetings and a Funeral is film of Zambia’s President Kenneth Kaunda speaking at the event. Having just presided over his country’s transition from a multi- to single-party state, he acknowledges the military coup against the first democratically elected socialist president in Latin America, Salvador Allende, taking place as the NAM meeting unfolded.

By now, enough documentation has been released to show how Allende’s fate was tied to the wrath that his administration’s reforms—to “end the monopoly structure of the Chilean economy, break Chilean dependence on imperialism, and begin the construction of socialism”32—incurred from a United States hellbent on protecting its massive investment (reportedly US$1billion) in the country, resulting in what Allende described to the UN in 1972 as an invisible blockade, whereby the US denied Chile new credits through the World Bank, the Export-Import Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and “hinder[ed] the re-negotiation of Chile’s foreign debt.”33 As Kyle Steenland wrote in 1973, “These pressures, added to the drop in the world price of copper (from 64 to 49 cents a pound, costing Chile $400 million in two years)”—a situation that also impacted Zambia, at the time among the largest producers and exporters of copper34—and “led to an extreme scarcity of dollars for imports, a lack of parts to keep the machines going (most parts in Chile, as they did in Cuba, come from the US), and general economic privation.”35

It is within this context—what scholar Taimoon Stewart describes as the making of a debt crisis that resulted in “developing countries… becoming crippled by the heavy debt burden and trade deficit” amid a global economic slowdown that worsened in the early 1980s36—that the 1973 NAM meeting unfolded. At the top of the agenda was the call for a New International Economic

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Order (NIEO), which sought to restructure the prevailing international economic order. Beyond seeking fairer terms of trade, debt and aid, was the demand for “redistribution on the basis that postcolonial states had in fact produced much of the wealth the West enjoyed.”37 This approach to the economy, through which “anticolonial nationalists represented the postcolonial world as workers of the world,” writes Getachew, “fashioned Third World solidarity as a form of international class politics.”38 Crucially, the view “that sovereign equality had material implications… offered a radically different account of global justice.”39

That stance was palpable at the 1973 NAM summit in Algiers, with the presence of revolutionary leaders like Fidel Castro calling for NAM to take a broad anti-imperialist approach.

(In Two Meetings and a Funeral, we see him introducing Yasser Arafat, who goes on to salute liberation movements across the world, from Angola and South Vietnam to the Black struggle in the US.) Among the clips in Mohaiemen’s film is one of Marcelino dos Santos, founding member and then-deputy president of FRELIMO, the Mozambican Liberation Front, giving an interview about FRELIMO’s participation in NAM ’73, just one year before the colonial war in Mozambique ended, followed by independence in 1975. Reflecting the ethos of post-colonial development, he talks about how the control of national resources contributes to the independence of each non-aligned country, and how the struggle for independence is linked to economic independence.

With all that in mind, it is notable that Two Meetings and a Funeral opens with an address to the 1973 NAM meeting by Rajaratnam, at the time the first foreign minister of Singapore, which joined NAM in 1965 following independence from British rule (and ejection from the Malaysian federation). The former journalist and mentee of George Orwell uses a technical breakdown to emphasize an issue that continues to resonate in the field of decolonial politics, past and present, when thinking about the technologies and infrastructures of statecraft that constitute the international system of nation-states, the asymmetries that lie within a global system of interlinked economies, and indeed the positions of thinkers and scholars like Richard Wright and Stuart Hall, when it comes to questions of entanglement and disentanglement. “All the equipment that we are using to threaten the big powers is provided by them,” he says in the clip. “They turn it off, we are lost.”

There is a sense that Rajaratnam is talking both figuratively and literally—aside from the reliance on the developed world for technological expertise, knowledge and equipment, there was the sticky issue of the global economic system to which every nation-state in the movement were inevitably connected and often indebted. Across the spectrum, Rajaratnam seems to be imploring his fellow NAM attendees to consider what it would mean to find a way through the web of mechanisms that had until then kept the world system just so. As Rajaratnam speaks, Mohaiemen stitches scenes into the edit to emphasize the fact that, “a large portion of the audience, including the charismatic liberators, all had their headphones off”—“a tell-tale sign,” Mohaiemen points out, that “they were not really listening to him” or his call “to control the means of technological production.”40

It was the way that Rajaratnam framed the “question of technology autonomy, of trading blocs, of shared industrialization”—a “type of focus on trade-driven growth, minus Soviet, OPEC, or other subsidies”—that “was an unwelcome formulation within the socialist-leaning rubric of NAM,” Mohaiemen has noted, which rubbed uncomfortably against the fact that “Oil wealth, Cold Wardriven subsidies, and imported labour underwrote some of the rapid infrastructure development of the 1970s” across NAM states.41 This of course points to some of the internal contradictions that existed within the Non-Aligned Movement when it came to the regimes and administrations that intersected in its community, and the allegiances that criss-crossed through them.

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Aside from the political and structural differences among states and the external unions to which they belonged, whether OPEC or ASEAN, were the varied approaches towards the postcolonial moment, as characterized by Rajaratnam’s intervention. While some of NAM’s members were “consciously anti-colonial” they were “not necessarily anti-imperialist,” points out Singham, and while “Many of the nations of the world and indeed even the capitalist nations opposed colonialism, very few of the capitalist nations would oppose imperialism.”42 This distinction between colonialism and imperialism is key when it comes to understanding the entanglements that any attempt at re-balancing the global economy would have to unpick, and what effectively split NAM.

While a power bloc in its own right, Non-Alignment was ultimately a coalition of nascent, neutral states—neutral in their refusal to take sides or become wholly subsumed into a superpower battle between capitalism and communism by officiating allegiances—and their paths forward were multiple, messy, at times contradictory, and not always clear. Take Singapore, which took a “positive-sum” approach in working with both sides of the Cold War’s bipolar conflict according to historian Daniel Boon Chua, though Singapore and the US did share “the similar objective or curbing communist influence in Southeast Asia.”43

This sense of individual autonomy within NAM’s collectivity of nation-states comes through in Chua’s history of US-Singapore Relations during the Cold War. Chua references the scholarship of Tuong Vu, who has asserted that “Asian actors—while possessing limited military and economic capabilities—were neither victims nor puppets of the superpowers as conventionally believed.”44 Amid a diversity of priorities, limitation and common interests—whether international, regional, national, local, or even oligarchical—countries were not only exploited, but were also able l

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to exploit the superpowers and their anxieties to suit their own ends; or as Chua points out, quoting Michael Szonyi and Hong Liu, “tails could wag dogs.”45 Which is not to deny that the Cold War “profoundly shaped the context in which regional and national change unfolded,” or contest Prashad’s view that what ultimately did the Third World Project in was the neoliberal Atlantic counter-revolution;46 but rather to also affirm that the “history of Asia in the late-twentieth century” —not to mention histories elsewhere—“cannot simply be subsumed within a Cold War narrative.”47

The main point is that the currents which affected the world’s populations were and continue to run thick with difference and nuance, and certainly ran in more than a one- or two-way direction, and some of those currents are made visible in Two Meetings and a Funeral. 1973, after all, was a watershed year, what Garavini describes as “the high point” of a “battle in which oil producers and other Third World countries were on the same side in the effort to achieve similar goals.”48 The NAM summit in Algiers took place just before the Arab-Israeli War would initiate an oil crisis prompted

by Arab oil-producing countries cutting the production of oil and establishing a total embargo on the delivery of oil to nations supporting Israel, including the United States, which was followed by a December decision by OPEC nations to raise the price of the barrel to four-times its cost compared to 1970.49 Both events contributed to an “oil shock”—a point from which, according to Eric Hobsbawm, twenty years of instability and crisis commenced, and the Third World project was subsumed by an overwhelming global debt crisis.50

One particularly neglected cause of the so-called oil shock, writes Garavini, is “the cooperation between oil-producing countries and the rest of the developing countries of the Third World.”51 Two Meetings and a Funeral, however, seems to take a different view. The film’s second titular meeting is the inaugural gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which took place in 1974 in Lahore, the year the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3201 (S-VI): Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order.

Mohaiemen’s film presents the OIC meeting as a rupture in NAM’s socialist momentum and unity, as tracked by the admission of Bangladesh into NAM in 1973 and the country’s attendance at the OIC meeting in 1974, where Pakistan’s recognition of Bangladesh following the territory’s separation in 1971 was regarded as a highlight of the event. “As the film’s intertitles invoke,” notes curator Sarah Lookofsky, Bangladesh’s “participation in this second meeting marked a shift from socialist aspirations to a new Islamic alignment shaped by the geopolitical oil bloc.”52 Those same intertitles explain that after the OIC meeting, in 1975 Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheik Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in “an Islamist allied coup with alleged CIA backing,” with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the latter a driving force behind the OIC, being the first to recognize the country’s new military regime. Just before the cut, Rahman appears in Two Meetings and a Funeral addressing the 1973 NAM meeting about eliminating the values and legacies of colonialism, harnessing technology for the common good, and socialist revolution. “We are fighting what appears to be impossible odds,” he says.

At the time, Bangladesh’s split from Pakistan had been preceded by a brutal response from the Pakistani Army, supported, as declassified documents and White House tapes show, by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.53 This was followed by Saudi Arabia’s refusal to recognize the new nation-state (it did so in 1975), and the People’s Republic of China’s casting of its first Security Council veto against Bangladesh’s UN membership, citing the hand of Soviet Socialist Imperialism54—a rich accusation given the PRC’s past and contemporary global intentions, which architectural historian Cole Roskam traces through China’s architectural projects in Africa from the 1960s onwards, from temporary exhibition halls built in Conakary and Accra in 1960 and 1961 130 | 131

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respectively, to the African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa, completed in 2011. Whether or not China’s early or later interventions in Africa signal international class solidarity or opaquer nationalimperialist interests, such architectural projects, to borrow Roskam’s words, “allowed China to transmute its diplomatic and economic exchanges into real projects that demonstrated idealistic objectives, while enhancing and internationalizing China’s political and economic influence.”55

All of which brings us back to Two Meetings and a Funeral, and the titular ‘Funeral’ chapter that concludes the work. In Dhaka, Mohaiemen’s camera follows Bangladeshi politician Zonayed Zaki as he walks through a bustling trade fair taking place on the grounds of the Bangabandhu International Conference Center (BICC), renamed in 2013 to replace its former title, BangladeshChina Friendship Conference Center. One of the many construction projects directed by China in the country, BICC was designed by Beijing Institute of Architectural Designs and Research and built with Chinese money. The Centre was completed in 2001 and was originally intended for a NAM summit,56 until the finance minister of a newly elected government called the movement a dead horse and said the country could not afford to spend millions on its burial57—a statement that echoes the man who demands Mohaiemen stop filming at BICC in Two Meetings and Funeral, proclaiming: “There is no Non-Aligned Movement anymore.”

The Bangabandhu International Conference Center feels like a metaphor—the visualization of a drift from a transnational anti-imperialist movement to that of neoliberal (read: insidiously imperialist) free trade. But in truth, what the building symbolizes is far more complex, as evidenced by a scene at the start of Two Meetings and a Funeral where Prashad stands inside La Coupole, an indoor sports stadium in Algeria, and claps his hands so that the echoes emphasize the empty building’s cavernous form. Designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer and opened in 1975, Prashad is apprehensive about the structure. He likens it to “an inter-galactical egg”—a “monumental construction” that in “about fifty years… will look like a Mayan ruin.”

Prashad’s critique is connected to the history that La Coupole embodies. It was constructed in the years following Algeria’s independence from colonial rule, when the state’s international anti-colonial activism and domestic policies of resource nationalization, land redistribution, and universal health care and education constituted “a developmentalist, state-capitalist project aimed at what Samir Amin refers to as ‘delinking’ the national economy from the global imperialistcapitalist system.”58 Back then, writes Garavini, the revolutionary Algerian state was a leading force in the Non-Aligned Movement, yet Prashad finds no motifs of the anti-colonial project in La Coupole’s construction. He calls the stadium an example of architectural gigantism—emblematic of its time, when projects spoke to ambitious nationalist visions, like Brasília, an entirely new capital city in Brazil designed by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Joaquim Cardozo and founded in 1960, and Chandigarh, “the dream city” of India’s first prime minister Nehru, constituted as a “Union Territory” in 1966 and planned by Le Corbusier.59

Returning to La Coupole, Prashad asks, “How are you supposed to maintain something so enormous?” Beyond the building itself, the question seems directed at the systemic and ideological architectures from which it emerged. As with other construction projects like it, this was an anticolonialist design realised at a time when newly independent nation states—hard fought, hard won —not to mention regions compromised by the tendrils of historical capitalism, were vying to create a new world order in which they, too, had a place. But as Prashad suggests, many of the buildings that stood for this moment have since been emptied of the ideals that infused them. Take Constantine 1 University in Algiers, a campus designed by Niemeyer after Colonel Huari Boumedienne, l

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chairman of Algeria’s Revolutionary Council, commissioned him for the project in 1968—”the year,” wrote Dirlik, “of the Third World,” which had come “to represent a revolutionary way out of the dilemmas presented by capitalism and actually-existing socialism.”60 In Mohaiemen’s film, archival and contemporary footage of the campus are shown side by side in a segment where Algerian publisher Samia Zennadi talks about a crisis of contact and transmission between older and younger generations. “To return to the memory of the Non-Aligned Movement,” she tells Prashad, “there’s not much left.”

Standing inside that empty La Coupole stadium in Algiers, Prashad not only seems to contemplate the enormity of the stadium and the echoes it contains, but also the waves that brought it into being and those that have diluted its memory since. In this frame, the building is at once dead and alive, void and sentimental—not so much a spectre as a zombie kept standing, constantly revived and reformed as it evolves with the passage of time, much like the Bangabandhu International Conference Center. In the temporal warps and wefts of Two Meetings and a Funeral, in which time is stretched out and folded in so as to amplify the gaps in a thickly woven historical fabric, these buildings function like prismatic objects of contemplation and interpretation, not unlike an artwork. Not unlike, perhaps, Two Meetings and a Funeral itself, or the exhibition in which it finds itself in conversation with other affective documents of a transnational inheritance that Stuart Hall succinctly sums up when describing history as “not yet finally wrapped up.”

But while a study of history and its residues in the present, Two Meetings and a Funeral is not exactly a historical work, much like Nucleus of a Great Union and Unfinished Conversation, insofar as they piece together documents to explore facets of a broad and divergent intersectional movement in order to open its legacies to the present. Considering the position of scholars of diplomatic history, in particular John Lewis Gaddis and Melvyn Leffler, this goes against the grain of historical study and 132 | 133

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highlights the different registers that art enables when it comes to exploring the legacies of the past and their implication for the future. As Chua writes, Gaddis and Leffler advise against the synthesis of diplomatic history with other disciplines like social or cultural studies, because, quoting Gaddis and Leffler, “[t]he pursuit of synthesis will not lead to consensus; quite the opposite. Controversy over the relative weight [that] we should assign a multiplicity of variables will open new interpretative vistas.”61 Those new vistas are precisely what works like Two Meetings and a Funeral seek to open up.

Across Mohaiemen’s film, the camera captures historical architectures almost passively, as if to reflect the excerpts drawn from the archival footage of the NAM meeting in Algiers that feature so heavily, much of which focuses on the seemingly non-descript moments between speeches, when leaders are but men (and some women) gathered in a room as both individuals and embodiments of varying collective interests: dis-united yet together. Caught between the lines in this moving portrait of a moment in history, collectively shared yet divergent, is a moment of radical, active imagination, in which real-world attempts at crafting new trajectories for a global future did not only happen collectively albeit imperfectly, but in many ways succeeded. That is, before coming up against the unavoidable challenges, not to mention divisions and fragmentations, that such a bold attempt—at renegotiating a post-imperialist social contract defined by a world economy fashioned from histories of racialized, colonial occupation, exploitation, and expropriation—ultimately triggered.

For Singham, this is what has been missed in critiques of Non-Alignment in general.

Far from “an ideological movement that demands total submission to its particular stance of those who join the movement at a given juncture in history; it is, at best, a broadly defined anti-imperialist front in world politics that is seeking redress for the ravages of nearly three hundred years of capitalist exploitation.”62 Thinking back to La Coupole, this overlooked point extends to the fact that the building is still standing. Just as Two Meetings and a Funeral, beyond being a film about the demise of a broadly leftist, anti-imperialist transnational coalition within NAM—the Non-Aligned Movement, after all, is still going—is an act of re-connection rather an explicit study of breakdown: the marking of an end in order to open up a new beginning for a movement that, in the long view of a global history in which imperialism continues to shape the world, is far from over. To quote Hall again, “Another history is always possible; another turning is waiting to happen.” If only we might remember rather than forget.

Consider here Niemeyer’s spectre, which seems to hover over Two Meeting and Funeral.

Though he is never mentioned, there is something to be said about the confluence of ambiguities when it comes to the man, his modernist designs, and the politics they serviced. Take Brasília, whose construction, writes culture writer Carolina A. Miranda, “might have seemed like a wildly authoritarian gesture”—just as Niemeyer’s leftist solidarities at times felt questionable, if stretched —yet was in fact “a way of shaking off the legacy of colonialism.”63 This anti-colonial positioning, Miranda asserts, means Brasília “was about rejecting northern paternalism and showing that Brazil was capable of devising its own design solutions—ones that could resonate at an international level.”64 Through Niemeyer’s architecture, continues Miranda, “Latin America was finally able to see itself—in ‘all its grandeur and its poverty’, as he once wrote. In its time, few ideas could have been more radical.”65

That loss of radicality, or rather, the forgetting of that radical audacity to imagine and demand otherwise—in which a group not only of nation-states but people, mobilized to challenge the neo-colonial, neo-imperial post-war world order—is at the heart of Mohaiemen’s film, and perhaps Non-Aligned as a curatorial gesture: a counter-forgetting to the amnesia of colonial and l

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imperialist powers past and present who end up projecting their own failures—and transgressions —onto those whom so much of their existence is owed. But rather than settle on making that point, Non-Aligned seeks to open it back up in order to make visible a track already laid, but perhaps neglected; particularly when it comes to what Getachew calls the last great project of the Third World, the New International Economic Order, that was ultimately blocked by neo-imperialist interests.

Indeed, while ostensibly about a failure of imagination, there is a critical clue in the opening of Two Meetings and a Funeral that suggests a more optimistic, if hopeful undercurrent. At the outset, Prashad mentions the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and the science-fiction that it inspired across the Global South—a genre predicated on envisioning and realizing future worlds. What follows are open horizons and possibilities; an ongoing struggle, a dream to be reimagined, and a challenge worth taking up.

Notes 1 Arif Dirlik, ‘The Bandung legacy and the People’s Republic of China in the perspective of global modernity’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 16:4, 2015, p. 625 2

Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 5

3

Ibid., p. 8

4

Kevin Kelly Gaines, ‘Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana: Black Radicalism and the Dialectics of Diaspora’, Social Text 67, vol. 19, no. 2, 2001, pp. 77–79 5

Ibid., p. 80

6

Ibid., p. 82

7

Ibid., p. 83

8

Richard Wright, The Colour Curtain, The World Publishing Company: Cleveland/New York, 1956, p. 140

9

Ibid., p. 150

10

Ibid., p. 153

11

Gaines, p. 77

12

Wright, p. 150

13

Getachew, p. 72

14

Ibid.

15 Getachew, p. 72. See also David A. Kay, ‘The Politics of Decolonization: The New Nations and the United Nations Political Process’, International Organization, vol. 21, no. 4, 1967, p. 786. “By the end of 1966, the percentage of newly independent territories gaining membership to the UN stood at 45 percent compared to 13.2 percent in I955.”

16

Kay, p. 793

17

From the ‘History’ section on the UNCTAD website; https://unctad.org/about/history

18 Michael Bordo, ‘The operation and demise of the Bretton Woods system: 1958 to 1971’, VoxEU, 23 April 2017; https://voxeu.org/article/ operation-and-demise-bretton-woods-system

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19 ‘Member States Call for Removing Veto Power, Expanding Security Council to Include New Permanent Seats, as General Assembly Debates Reform Plans for 15-Member Organ’, United Nations Meetings Coverage and Press Releases, 20 November 2018; https://www.un.org/press/ en/2018/ga12091.doc.htm 20 Stephen Castle, ‘Belgium admits role in killing of African leader’, The Independent, 17 November 2001; https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/africa/belgium-admits-role-killing-african-leader-9215790.html 21 Department of State, United States of America, Office of the Historian, ‘Memorandum From the President’s Acting Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Komer) to President Johnson’, 12 March 1966; https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v24/d260 22

Getachew, p. 151

23

William Burnett Harvey, ‘Post-Nkrumah Ghana: The Legal Profile of a Coup’, 1966. Articles by Maurer Faculty. Paper 1187; http://www. repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/1187 24

A.W. Singham, ‘The Fifth Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement’, The Black Scholar, 1976, vol. 8, no. 3, p. 7

25 Giuliano Garavini, ‘Completing Decolonization: The 1973 “Oil Shock” and the Struggle for Economic Rights’, The International History Review, vol. 33, no. 3, 2011, p. 474 26

Taimoon Stewart, ‘The Third World Debt Crisis: A Long Waves Perspective’, Review, vol. 16, no. 2, 1993, pp. 150–152

27

Getachew, p. 144

28

Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965; accessed at www.marxists.org

29

Getachew, p. 144

30

Latha Varadarajan, ‘The trials of imperialism: Radhabinod Pal’s dissent at the Tokyo tribunal’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 21(4), 2015, p. 810 31

Arif Dirlik, ‘Global South: Predicament and Promise’, The Global South, vol.1, no.1, 2007, p. 16

32 Kyle Steenland, ‘Two Years Of Popular Unity In Chile: A Balance Sheet’, The New Left Review, March/April 1973; https://newleftreview.org/ issues/i78/articles/kyle-steenland-two-years-of-popular-unity-in-chile-a-balance-sheet.pdf 33

Ibid.

34 See ‘As Copper Goes So Goes Zambia’, The New York Times, 4 February 1973; https://www.nytimes.com/1973/02/04/archives/as-coppergoes-so-goes-zambia.html, and John Fleming, ‘The Nationalization of Chile’s Large Copper Companies’, Contemporary Interstate Relations, 18 Vill. L. Rev. 593, 1973 35

Steenland, ‘Two Years Of Popular Unity In Chile: A Balance Sheet’

36

Stewart, p. 155

37

Getachew, p. 145

38

Ibid.

39

Ibid., pp. 145, 175

40

‘The History That Did Not Come to Pass: Naeem Mohaiemen in Conversation with Sarah Lookofsky’, MoMA, post: notes on art in a global context; https://post.moma.org/the-history-that-did-not-come-to-pass-naeem-mohaiemen-in-conversation-with-sarah-lookofsky/ 41

Ibid.

42

Singham, p. 5

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43 Daniel Wei Boon Chua, US-Singapore Relations, 1965-1975: Strategic Non-alignment in the Cold War, Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2017, p. 1 44

Ibid., p. 9

45

Ibid., p. 10

46

Vijay Prashad, ‘Dream history of the global South’, Interface: a journal for and about social movements, vol. 4(1), 2012, p. 45

47

Ibid., p. 9

48

Garavini, p. 483

49

Ibid., p. 480

50

Ibid., p. 473

51

Ibid., p. 474

52

‘The History That Did Not Come to Pass: Naeem Mohaiemen in Conversation with Sarah Lookofsky’

53 Gary J. Bass, ‘Nixon and Kissinger’s Forgotten Shame’, The New York Times, 29 September 2013; https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/ opinion/nixon-and-kissingers-forgotten-shame.html 54 Robert Alden, ‘China’s First U. N. Veto Bars Bangladesh’, The New York Times, 26 August 1972; https://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/26/ archives/chinas-first-un-veto-bars-bangladesh-soviet-union-and-india-are.html 55

Cole Roskam, ‘Non-Aligned Architecture: China’s Designs on and in Ghana and Guinea, 1955-92’, Architectural History, vol. 58, 2015, p. 285

56 That NAM meeting took place in Malaysia in 2003 instead. See Lim Kit Siang, DAP National Chairman, media statement: “The single biggest challenge of the 13th NAM Summit is to rediscover its relevance in the 21st century and one test is whether it would make a greater impact than the global people power manifested in last weekend of world-wide anti-war protests and marches,”19 February 2003; https://www.limkitsiang.com/archive/2003/feb03/lks2114.htm 57 ‘Non-aligned summit in Dhaka next year put off: Official’, Zee News, 16 October 2001; https://zeenews.india.com/news/south-asia/ nonaligned-summit-in-dhaka-next-year-put-off-official_23287.html 58 Hamza Hamouchene and Brahim Rouabah, ‘The political economy of regime survival: Algeria in the context of the African and Arab uprisings’, Review of African Political Economy, 8 August 2016; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2016.1213714 59

Official Website of Chandigarh Administration; http://chandigarh.gov.in/knowchd_general.htm

60

Dirlik, ‘Global South: Predicament and Promise’, p. 14

61

Chua, p. 17

62

Singham, p. 5

63

Niemeyer confirmed the sentiment when he wrote: “We were beginning to show the Old World that there wasn’t much they could teach us Latin Americans.” Carolina A. Miranda, ‘Oscar Niemeyer: Man of the People’, Architect, 23 January 2013; https://www.architectmagazine. com/design/oscar-niemeyer-man-of-the-people_o?o=1 64

Ibid.

65

Ibid.

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IMAGE NOTATIONS

Cover Yhonnie Scarce, Burial Ground (detail), 2012 Image courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne. Photography Janelle Low The manufacture of these glass forms in extreme heat has a parallel to the crystallisation of desert sand during the nuclear tests at Maralinga. The ground temperature was such that the sand at the Breakaway site underwent the same process, reaching its melting point in the infernal heat of the blast and then becoming glass–the dirty, irradiated kind. Daniel Browning, https://www.the-national. com.au/artists/yhonnie-scarce/death-zephyr/

Page 11 Mazen Kerbaj from his blog during the July 2006 War; http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com Left: 16th of july – 11am first 24 hours under the bombs “i don’t know how i slept for 2 hours” Right: beirut 16 july 06 2.10am “how can i show sound in a drawing?” … “i am sorry to decline your proposition”… i am beginning to freak out repeating 5 times a day the same things… everything i am asked is already on the blog. or worst, on tv. i should by the way keep record of these interviews, some are incredible. i was asked twice so far: “don’t you think that your piece of music and bombs is of a bad taste? i answered twice: “do you think that it is of a good taste to throw a bomb on a bus with civilians escaping their village?” it is incredible that some people, listening to this piece in their living room in london or in paris, ask themselves if they like it or not. i think that some people should never stop seeing cnn and fox news. it is made for them. it is “good taste” news… the blind birds the roasted flesh the stars’ sound beirut’s sky and from my tired eyes… today’s joke 20 bombs in less than one minute on the southern suburbs while i am writing that the war is over Images courtesy the artist

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Pages 12, 15 Above: Ali Cherri, Trembling Landscapes (Beirut), 2016 Below: Ali Cherri, Trembling Landscapes (Algiers), 2016 Images courtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris Trembling Landscapes are black and white lithographs of aerial views of Beirut, Damascus, Algiers, Tehran and Erbil with red stamps that mark the polar coordinates of the fault lines running underneath these cities. The maps are reminiscent of… recent images filmed by hovering drones, but without a clear reference about whether the given city is in the state before or after the catastrophe.

What they offer though is retrieval of memory that we share and too often suppress, as well as a possibility to transform this information into a metaphor for the unrest that envelops those cities ceaselessly. ‘In The Presence Of A Catastrophe’, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez; https://12ea757b5bfc-ff0e-3055-35712ceb0684.filesusr.com/ugd/ f814a2_1adb9a3bea9e4edda97d798bb665ab28.pdf

Page 17 Ali Cherri, The Disquiet (video stills), 2013 Images courtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris Earth-shattering events are relatively par for the course in Lebanon, with war, political upheaval and a number of social revolts. While the Lebanese focus on surface level events that could rock the nation, few realize that below the ground we walk on, an actual shattering of the earth is mounting.

Lebanon stands on several major fault lines, which are cracks in the earth’s crust. The film investigates the geological situation in Lebanon, trying to look for the traces of the imminent disaster. https://www.alicherri.com/the-disquiet

Page 18 Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, The Incidental Insurgents. Part 3:When the Fall of the Dictionary Leaves All Words Lying on the Street (video stills), 2015 Images courtesy the artists The Incidental Insurgents is mapped out as a three part multi-layered narrative, with chapters completing and complicating each other, and unfolding the ‘story’ of a contemporary search for a new political language and imaginary…

Contributing to a growing density of material, where the figure of the incidental insurgent, part bandit, rebel, part vagabond, artist, returns and resurges in many forms and characters. Recast into a convoluted script of sampled text, images, objects and sounds… In the last part of the search When The Fall of the Dictionary Leaves all words lying in the street (2015), obsession gives way to hallucination. Times, places and characters recede leaving only the impulse towards that unfullfiled desire for a radically different way of being.

We are somehow in the folds and density of moments, recaptured, retrieved and made anew, embodying all the characters and situations we have lived vicariously… When this free field was finally opened by the noise of the exploding syntax, when the fall of the dictionary left all words lying in the streets, when men and women rushed to pick them up and make pictures out of them, such day dreams would find themselves empowered turning into catalysts for new passions, new acts, new events: situations, made to be lived by their creators a whole new way of being in the world.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme; https:// baselandruanne.com/When-the-fall-of-thedictionary-leaves-all-words-lying-in-the-street-1

Page 22 On 4 August 2020, a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the port of Beirut exploded.

The blast was also felt across Turkey, Syria, Israel, Palestine and parts of Europe, and was heard in Cyprus, more than 240 km away. It was detected by the United States Geological Survey as a seismic event of magnitude 3.3, and is considered one of the most powerful artificial non-nuclear explosions in history; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oKFupx9x0-k

Page 28 Marwan Rechmaoui, Pillars, 2015 Images courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler, Beirut

Page 40 Khaled Sabsabi, Guerilla (detail), 2006–16 Image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Page 30 Sursock Museum after the explosion; https://www. art-insider.com/art-world-announcers-5-millionrelief-for-beirut/1620 Page 27 Vartan Avakian, A Sign of Things to Come, 2020 before and after the 4 August 2020 explosion Images courtesy the artist and Marfa’, Beirut

Pages 32-33 Khaled Sabsabi, Guerilla (detail), 2006–16 Image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane Guerrilla is a deeply personal rumination on the futility of apprehending questions of legitimacy in war, its reasoning and representation… From antiquity until now, scenes of war are embedded with an attractiveness that appeals to humanity’s darker, more atavistic appetite. To take brush and paint to these intimately scaled facsimiles of the real, as the artist does, is to both acknowledge this and attempt to reorder its depressing logic.

Pedro de Almeida; https://www.the-national.com. au/artists/khaled-sabsabi/guerrilla/

Page 37 Khaled Sabsabi, Guerilla (detail, installation view above, details below), 2006–16 Images courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Page 42 Atomic blast during Operation Buffalo nuclear tests, Maralinga, South Australia Australian authorities did not discover the extent of the contamination at Maralinga until 1984, just before the land was to be returned to its Aboriginal owners… radioactive fallout blown by wind was detected as far away as Townsville; https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/ resources/maralinga

Page 44 Yhonnie Scarce, Thunder Raining Posion, 2015 Image courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne. Photography Janelle Low

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Page 47 Above:Yhonnie Scarce, Blood on the Wattle, 2013 Below:Yhonnie Scarce, Weak in colour, strong in blood (detail), 2014 Images courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne. Photography Janelle Low The juxtaposition of the perspex coffin and blown glass also bear significance in this work symbolizing the containment of Indigenous peoples as well as the enforcement of western culture and ways of life. The work was created to provide a place to mourn and remember those who have died during the colonization of Australia; https://www.artbasel. com/catalog/artwork/14930/Yhonnie-ScarceBlood-on-Wattle-installation-view

Page 49 Above:Yhonnie Scarce, In the Dead House, 2020 Below:Yhonnie Scarce, In the Dead House, 2020 Images courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne. Photography Saul Steed In the Dead House is a memorial installation of flayed bush bananas blown in milky white glass, displayed on a mortuary slab in the original stone mortuary of the Adelaide Botanical Gardens, where the Scottish colonial Adelaide coroner dissected Aboriginal people, exporting bones and tissues to universities around the world. Beatrice Spence; https://artcollector.net.au/makingmonsters-adelaide-biennial-2020/

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Page 50 Yhonnie Scarce, Fallout Babies, 2016 Images courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne. Photography Janelle Low In 2015, Scarce created hand blown Blue Danubes filled with her signature bush yams. Blue Danubes are a type of bomb that was commonly used by the British… Scarce has created a confronting and evocative installation using 1960s and 1970s neo natal baby cribs containing hand blown bush fruits.

The cribs are exhibited alongside photographic documentation from the Woomera Cemetery, which contains the graves of dozens of infants affected by the testing; https://thisisnofantasy.com/ exhibition/strontium-90/

Page 53 Yhonnie Scarce, Death Zephyr, 2017 Image courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne Death Zephyr is the outcome of [Yhonnie Scarce’s] research into the British nuclear tests conducted in Maralinga, South Australia, during the 1950s and 1960s. Scarce’s bloodlines trace to the region and she has visited Maralinga twice in an attempt to understand the initial and ongoing effects of the fallout. Numerous Aboriginal communities were displaced at the time and access to Country remains restricted. The full extent of sickness and death caused by the radiation will probably never be known. The work takes the monumental form of a dispersing atomic cloud, like a ‘grim reaper’ moving across the landscape.

Here, Scarce’s use of glass is especially apt–its material transformation during the making process parallels the crystallization of desert sand by the heat of the Maralinga blasts. These fragments remain in the area as an enduring reminder of the land’s contamination; https://thisisnofantasy.com/ exhibition/the-national-new-australian-art-2/

Page 55 Yhonnie Scarce, In Absence, 2019 Image courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne. Photography Ben Hosking … an enigmatic wooden tower rises upwards from a surrounding field of kangaroo grass, murnong (yams) and an undulating path of crushed Victorian basalt… A narrow vertical aperture, slicing the tall cylinder open, bisects the tower leaving a void and creating a passage into two intimate curved chambers. Inside each, hundreds of hand-blown, glossy, black glass murnong (yams) populate the walls and glitter in shafts of sunlight… In Absence invites contemplation and acknowledges the longstanding histories of sophisticated toolmaking, design, construction and agriculture established and maintained by Australian Indigenous communities for more than 3,000 generations.

As Scarce states: “In Absence speaks directly to the richness of architecture, agriculture and industry of the traditional custodians of this land, the presence of which sadly lies hidden within the deep myopic shadows of this nation’s history… [and] discredit[s]… the long-held narrative that the traditional custodians to the land were all nomadic hunter-gatherers”… A slice of nothingness splitting wholeness, the fissure and void at the symbolic heart of this structure is designed to evoke and clarify the false absence implied by terra nullius–a colonial strategy that claimed an absence of permanent Aboriginal settlement, which thus declared Australia as an emptiness awaiting ownership. This system of erasure facilitated the seizure of land for British occupation, initially for grazing and townships, but then ultimately formed the preconditions of Australian society, as it exists today… Seeping out of the cracks between the black boards and rising skywards within the structure are hundreds of ink-black glass murnong (yams)…

Scarce’s practice uses her personal and cultural heritage as a Kokatha and Nukunu woman to highlight the legacy of colonization on Indigenous Australians. She explores the far-reaching impacts of government policies and historical events that Indigenous communities have witnessed and endured. For Scarce, the glass murnong represent many things, including oil from fish or eels, water, medicinal sap from trees, fish, leeches and the metaphorical mapping of waterways and stars.

She intends for these yams, rising within this symbolic tower, to attest to “the pain of this false absence, by filling the space with the glittering light of the memories and echoes of thousands of years of occupation”… This simple building, a small tower in a big city, is intended… to be an exemplar of Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaboration, a place of shared languages, conceived for the telling and sharing of knowledge. Its design utilizes minimal architectural strategies (in relation to site, program, structure and materials) and capitalizes on the semiotic potential of architecture, art and landscape… Ewan McEoin; https://www.ngv.vic.gov. au/essay/in-absence-yhonnie-scarce-and-editionoffice-2019-ngv-architecture-commission/

Page 56 Lord Allenby with his pet Marabou stork in Cairo (date unknown) Image courtesy of King’s College Archive, London

Page 60 Below left: The American military airbase in Wadi Qena used by the US Armed Forces as part of Operation Eagle Claw in 1980.

Image sourced: https://www.military-quotes.com/ forum/help-please-t104403.html Below right: University students climbing the wall of the US Embassy in Tehran, 4 November 1979 Image sourced: https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Iran_hostage_crisis_-_Iraninan_students_ comes_up_U.S._embassy_in_Tehran.jpg

Page 58 Above: First aerial photographs of Palestine (ca. 1900–20), Jordan Valley north of Jericho, 1500m. Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection. The G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph collection originates from the American Colony (1881–1934), a Christian utopian society founded by Chicago residents Anna and Horatio Spafford in Jerusalem 1881.

The society was later joined by members of the Swedish Evangelical Church. Housed in the US Library of Congress, the Collection is made up of over 22,000 glass and film photographic negatives and transparencies.

See https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/matpc Below: Documentation of the stork called Menes after he was caught and detained on suspicion of espionage and of his release by Haitham Mossad in September 2013. Photo courtesy Haitham Mossad Page 62 Above: German apothecary, inventor and photographer Julius Neubronner with his pigeon camera. Photo courtesy of Kronberg Archive Below: The bionic “SmartBird” developed by the German industrial control and automation company Festo. Image sourced: https://www.festo. com/group/en/cms/10238.htm

Page 65 Above left/right: Gunsight footage of 12 July 2007, Baghdad airstrike leaked to the public in 2010 as ‘Collateral Murder’ by Chelsea Manning and the online whistleblower site Wikileaks.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfvFpTiypw Middle: Last preparation before first tactical mission across the Suez Canal in 1969. To the left is Major Shabtai Brill from the Israeli Intelligence Corps, an innovator of the tactical UAV. Image sourced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Last_preparation_before_first_tactical_ mission_across_Suez_canal_(1969).jpg Below: Heba Y. Amin, As Birds Flying (video still), 2016 Image courtesy the artist As Birds Flying is a short allegorical film that uses found drone footage (including aerial views of savannas and wetlands, and Israeli settlements in Galilea) and audio sequences from the 1995 film Birds of Darkness, starring Adel Imam and directed

by Sharif Arafah

Page 60 Above: Map of location of Dandarah Temple complex in Egypt (@2020 Google) Image courtesy the artist

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Page 84 Mustard Seed Garden, a Chinese Painter’s Manual, 1782 Image courtesy the Brooklyn Museum, New York; https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/ objects/17617. Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden is a printed manual of Chinese painting compiled during the early-Qing Dynasty… It is an important early example of colour printing… The volume also entered Edo period Japan, where woodblock printed copies became relatively easily accessible in all the major cities; the Mustard Seed Garden Manual came to be used by a great many Japanese artists and was a major element in the training of artists and the development of Edo period painting.

An English translation of the work, The Tao of Painting–A study of the ritual disposition of Chinese painting.With a translation of the Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua Chuan or Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting 1679–1701, was published in New York in 1956; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_of_the_ Mustard_Seed_Garden

Page 74 Above: Gordon Bennett, Six Warholas, 2003 Below: Gordon Bennett, Notes to Basquiat (Death of Irony), 2002 Images courtesy The Estate of Gordon Bennett Pages 88-89 Joey Leung Ka-yin, Mundane Mind, 2019 Image courtesy of the artist

Pages 68, 71 Above: Gordon Bennett, Camouflage No. 6, 2003 Middle: Gordon Bennett, Camouflage No. 5, 2003 Below: Gordon Bennett, Camouflage No. 1, 2003 Images courtesy The Estate of Gordon Bennett Bennett does not, as he did in his earlier paintings, spell out for us the binary logic at work in national discourses of identity. Rather he plays up its decorative artificiality and the elusive tenuousness of its content. Just as Aboriginal dots camouflage secret designs, so the whole Iraq war seems a camouflage for secrets that may never be revealed… Like his earlier works, Bennett’s Camouflage series show up the effects of terror; in this case the putative rhetorical origins of a war fuelled less by genuine security concerns and more by a desire to forget the terror and trauma that founded and still constitutes the underpinning of the Australian nation. Ian McLean; http://www. shermangalleries.com.au/artists_exhib/artists/ bennett3/essay.html

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Page 80 Joey Leung Ka-yin, The Carefree Stone, 2018 Image courtesy the artist

Page 93 Above: Fei Danxu, Lady and Plum Blossoms, 1839 Collection of Hong Kong Museum of Art (FA1991.0003) Below: Wang Yuanqi, Interpretative copy of Huang Gongwang, 1703 Collection of Hong Kong Museum of Art (XB1992.0129)

Page 98 Jao Chia-En, American propaganda material against Japan during WWII; skull in Egyptologist George Gliddon and surgeon Josiah Nott’s types of mankind (1854): fig. 340 Greek & fig. 339 Apollo Belvedere; Australian political cartoon against Chinese immigrants in 1886: the Mongolian Octopus–his grip on Australia, 2017 Image courtesy the artist The historical, political, and cultural narratives surrounding and shaping our understanding of Taiwan are important sources for Jao’s projectbased practice, which encompasses works on paper, performances, and multichannel video installations. In 30 Proposals of Flag (2009), Jao draws on various emblems of Taiwanese culture and history to present thirty alternatives to the national flag. Using a device that has traditionally acted as a potent symbol of power and patriotism, Jao thus reimagines Taiwanese identity; https:// www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/chia-en-jao

Page 101 Cheng Ran and Item Idem, Joss (video till), 2013 Image courtesy the artists Cheng’s oeuvre consists of video and film, as well as photography and installation works. His video work is praised for its eclectic form in which films are integrated into the poetic culture of contemporary age. His works convey a young perspective on the unsolvable issues in life, such as problems regarding identity and the anguish felt by young Chinese people living through the globalized Chinese culture and cultural policy; https://publicdelivery.org/cheng-ran-item-idem/ His works in general reflect on the existential state of Chinese young generation under the impact of political and cultural globalisation.

From these works, we can see that the artist doesn’t pay much attention on the issue of “identity”, but more on discovering new values from diverse cultures brought by globalization.

It seems that the artist’s self-judgment can’t be easily spotted, while this largely speaks of his autonomy in artistic creation. We can also find this distinguished feature in many of Cheng Ran’s works, which always reflect his deep thoughts on universal themes including the boundary, distinction, and even confrontation, marginalization, etc. in an all-round way; https://www kIIartfoundation.org/en/collaboration/cheng-ran/

Page 102 Above: Jao Chia-En, Arms 17, 2012 Below: Jao Chia-En, Arms 21, 2012 Images courtesy the artist

Page 110 Above: King Maha Vajiralongkorn is seen as pro-democracy demonstrators march during an anti-government mass protest in Bangkok, 14 October 2020; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2021/01/19/former-thai-civil-servantsentenced-43-years-record-punishment/ Below left: Prakit Kobkijwattana, Untitled, 2020 Image courtesy the artist Below right: More than 1,200 Thai royalists gathered to support the monarchy after almost daily student-led, anti-government protests calling for change, with some seeking reforms of the powerful institution. Waving national flags and holding pictures of King Maha Vajiralongkorn, the group of mostly older people, called “Thai Pakdee” (Loyal Thai) many in yellow and some in white, urged Thais to protect the monarchy and the country. Rallying in an indoor sports stadium in the capital Bangkok, some had “We Love The King” written on their bandannas while others held placards with messages such as “Save the Nation”, “Don’t Bully Loyalists” and “Topple the institution –over my dead body”. “The point of our group is to protect the monarchy with knowledge and facts,” said prominent right-wing politician Warong Dechgitvigrom, who launched the group this month as he felt the monarchy was under attack.

Express, 30 Agust 2020; https://www.express.co.uk/ news/royal/1329265/royal-news-thai-royal-familyprotests-latest

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building. At the door, students were running out, diving to their hands and knees and crawling past soldiers who told them to take off their shirts, and coeds their blouses. Slow performance earned a kick. A grenade went off in a classroom above us, showering troops and their captives with glass and plaster. The students crawled toward the center of the quadrangle to lie in the hot sun. I was joined by a German reporter who speaks Thai, and we walked out through the gate. Then we were out on the street–close by the pleasant green trees that surround the Pramaine Ground site of Bangkok’s colorful weekend fair. But then we saw the angry swarm of Thais around two of those trees and their anger was white hot. I saw the body of a dead student hanging from one tree. The scene was being repeated just a few feet away. I don’t know how much earlier the students had been lynched –probably just a few minutes–but enraged rightists felt robbed by death and continued to batter the bodies. Other Thais who witnessed the 1973 student riots here said the earlier uprising, which left 70 dead, never evoked the brutality or hatred of Wednesday’s attack on the students. No one had seen me. I had wandered throughout and taken pictures unmolested. But I had seen enough, and left.” Neal Ulevich; https://apnews.com/article/ e2625859f9a3413e88dd59623c7fe38d

Page 117 Above left: Prakit Kobkijwattana, Untitled, 2020 Image courtesy the artist Above right: Neal Ulevich’s famous photograph from 6 October, 1976 of the violent crackdown

by Thai police and lynching by right-wing paramilitaries and bystanders against leftist protesters who had occupied Bangkok’s Thammasat University and the adjacent Sanam Luang.

“In a real riot no one knows you’re there. So as gunfire crackled over the campus of Bangkok’s Thammasat University Wednesday morning, I pushed my way through an angry sea of rightists and found a hole in the high metal fence surrounding the campus. I paused momentarily while Boy Scouts pushed through the fence the body of a soldier with a chest wound. I jumped through. The police were on the attack and the rightists were cheering their support. Troops armed with M-16 rifles were spraying wild fire across a quadrangle, shattering classroom windows and nicking holes in the walls. With some Indochina combat coverage behind me, I could hear that more than 90 percent of the fire was going in one direction–toward the students. Occasionally it seemed a round came back. On the quadrangle, troopers worked their way toward classrooms.

Some of the troopers tossed hand grenades through the windows. The “garrumph” of a grenade going off was followed by a puff of smoke and the tinkle of showering glass. Then the recoilless rifle crew moved up. It wasn’t immediately clear why the border patrol police were there, or why they thought they needed an armor-piercing antitank weapon to conquer students. The two-man crew moved forward, followed by a shaggy right-winger carrying a box of ammunition. They blasted more classrooms. A few minutes later, about 9:30 a.m., the battle seemed over. Students began to pour out of campus buildings, some wounded. I began to move forward, 50 yards behind the soldiers. I began to feel apprehensive, just as I did in Vietnam when crossing open ground. And with good reason. The shooting began again. The students threw themselves to the ground–I did, too–as the Thai police emptied more thousands of rounds into the classrooms. The fire slackened and the students got up. I reached the nearest classroom

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lynched on a tamarind tree and a civil boy scout slammed a folding a chair on him among an indifferent crowd.” It was taken by photographer Neal Ulevich who later won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977. My work was a folding chair made of tamarind wood. And on the wall, was dried pig skin representing human skin, dried with heat.

The position of the skin was placed in the same position as the folding chair in that incessantly haunting picture. Every time when my gaze was moving between my work and that picture, I felt it was not only an attack on that ill-fated university student but also on every single person who is still crusading for democracy. At the opening, I had two civil scouts stamp “folding chair” on exhibitiongoers’ wrists. I was also trying to communicate that the scouts were a political tool. But this time they were just put in a different context…

I think most people could get the underlying message. But many may not. As I said, it is history that the powers-that-be are attempting to sweep under the rug. And as for the military, they came because it was their duty… The show at Khon Kean is a milestone for me. I could express what I wanted, although the powers-that-be were trying to intervene. Nutdanai Jitbanjong; https://newbloommag.net/2018/11/02/nutdanaijitbanjong-interview/ Below right: Teerawat Mulvilai, Untitled, 2020, taken during the Mob Fest protest event, Bangkok Image courtesy the artist

Page 126 Naeem Mohaiemen, Two Meetings and a Funeral, 2017 Image courtesy the artist

Page 130 The Otolith Group, Nucleus of the Great Union (film still), 2017 Image courtesy the artists and LUX, London

Page 117 Below left: Nutdanai Jitbunjong, A Massacre, 2020 Image sourced; https://newbloommag. net/2018/11/02/nutdanai-jitbanjong-interview/ The military was quite put on alert. They were trying to visit before the opening on October 6th.

Well, to me, it did not come as a surprise. It was a site-specific installation. I intended to dredge up another dark section of Thai history which is still mostly censored out by our powers-that-be. It was concerning the 1976 Thammasat University Massacre. The haunting picture which led to my artwork shows “a dead university student was

Page 133 John Akomfrah, The Unfinished Conversation, (film stills), 2012 Images courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London

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19.11.2020 - 30.04.2021

QUESTIONING POWER

Curated by Charles Merewether Contributing curator Nikki Hwa

Jiang Zhi Sun Yuan / Peng Yu Joshua Oppenheimer Shen Shaomin www.oaf.cc

(852) 2389 8332

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