HISK 01

IN A LONG BLINK OF AN EYE

HISK 2020

In a Long Blink of an Eye Katya Ev Hanane El Farissi Helen Anna Flanagan Che-Yu Hsu Nikolay Karabinovych Diego Lama Štefan Papčo Oussama Tabti Luca Vanello Shirley Villavicencio Pizango

Foreword

Em. prof. dr. Willem Elias

HISK chairman

It is gratifying to see how HISK’s pedagogical concept has evolved from a traditional academy, known at the time as NHISK, or National Higher Institute of Fine Arts, into an experimental workplace. Though its status as a vrijplaats—free space—is undisputed, HISK honors its obligations to the Flemish Government (the Minister of Education). Meanwhile, the Institute keeps forever transforming itself. Its postgraduate education has developed by becoming a quest to find itself. After a stint as a subdivision of the Antwerp Academy, it became a nonprofit organization, and thus it was transformed into an autonomous organization that attracts graduates from all the higher education level “schools of arts” in Flanders. It also needed to further extend its international role, as it has seen a significant influx of postgraduates from a range of very diverse countries, both European and beyond.

The Institute’s mission has remained to offer art education graduates or young artists a chance to further develop their talent, and to do so on the basis of a balanced equilibrium between their individual work within their respective studios, and of active stimulation by experts and coaching by counsellors. HISK has now become a workplace, a peaceful haven where the individual artist can develop his or her singularity. Yet, it is also a place of unrest where, under the coordination of an artistic director, visiting lecturers from all over the world engage in fascinating, critical confrontation with the candidates—much like Socrates’ gadflies. But it is also a safe space where participants share experiences of the working processes and unburden themselves of doubts or misgivings.

A couple of years ago we structured HISK’s didactic model to accommodate three main policies. In a memorandum, Michaël Goris, a member of the Board of Directors, described these as follows: 1. A curatorial pillar: artistic development, creating exhibitions, artistic projects and collaborative endeavors. The curatorial pillar includes lectures, seminars, workshops, studio visits, and visits on location (museums, studios, art events, and festivals) by renowned Flemish and international visiting lecturers from the field of the arts.

2. A research pillar: theoretical development and reflection, developing and mentoring art research through projects, collaborative endeavors, and studio visits. The research pillar includes lectures, seminars, workshops, studio visits and visits on location (museums, studios art events and festivals) led by renowned Flemish and international visiting lecturers from the broader cultural, artistic, and academic fields. Besides which, the research coordinator pays monthly visits to the artists in their studios with a view to supporting their artistic research, for instance by helping to prepare, by coaching, and by promoting their PhDs in the arts.

3. A production pillar: actual production of artistic work and exhibitions, in a context of working in a result-driven manner toward a finalized project, possibly in cooperation with external partners and in external locations. For all projects falling within the scope of the production pillar, HISK facilitates the candidates’ workshops and visits to studios.

The Final Show is the concluding high-point of the postgraduates’ two-year program at HISK. Educational scientists would designate this as an exhibition of their graduation work. It is indeed a kind of final exam, though it is not evaluated by the usual jury, consisting of internal and external experts. It is, instead, exposed to the real-life judgment of the art world. There is no public choice-award to be won, but visitors do freely comment on the exhibits, and art

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critics view them not as they would an exhibition of graduation work, but exactly as they would judge an exhibition that is not devoid of pretensions, but instead sees itself as the presentation of work that is, that aspires to be, exciting and new. Raising such high expectations means putting a lot of pressure on candidates. Although we cannot compare this to a sports match, a competitive spirit is implicitly present nonetheless. Failing miserably and being eclipsed by peers is not an option. So all the candidates present themselves at their very best.

The critics are not exactly gullible, either. In any case, “gullibility” is not a quality in the art world, regardless of the role one aims to play in this arena ...

The Final Show is always accompanied by a publication. In concert with the artists, this time the choice fell on “a collection of 10 (small) artist’s books,” supplemented by a “critical volume.”

The aim reads as follows: “They are a challenge as well as an opportunity for the artists to expand their practice, to think of their work in a book form, to use it as new medium while staying truthful to their works.”

This quote is from a text by Daniella Géo, HISK curator (2019-2020). A word of praise is appropriate here. Curator is a recent term in art jargon, well-established by now, but still relatively new. It is indicative of a new approach to art. A shift has taken place, from the work of art as a unique object on a wall or a pedestal (like the statue of a saint, which refers to the religious origins of art, but with a spotlight on the image instead of a candle flickering in front of it) to a different view of art. This view is, essentially, that the relationship of the work of art to Otherness and the Other has become more important than its own putative essence. In order for such a relationship to work satisfactorily, an intervention by a third party is required. This third party is the curator. As it happens, Daniella Géo has carried out this intervention in an extremely competent manner. Etymologically, curating, or to curate, the verb for the curator’s actions, also means to take care, or to care for. She did this, too, excellently and passionately, like a mother nurturing her plentiful brood. As chairman, I would like to express my sincere and unalloyed thanks to her.

I am grateful as well for the way she articulated the concept behind the book series as book form. Art is all about form. The artist is an “expert in matters of form.” Which is why Géo entrusted its creation to the man I consider to be the best book designer and producer in Flanders: Luc Derycke and his publishing house MER, Paper Kunsthalle, now taken under the wing of Borgerhoff & Lamberigts. I should thank him profusely also, both for his work and for his very educational explanation of the subject to an audience of HISK artists.

Art features a peculiarly inherent ambivalence: word and image never quite coincide, and yet can never quite exist without each other. And so it is only right that various eminent authors from the art world were invited to produce a text to go with the work of an artist they developed an affinity with when they participated in the visiting lectures. Many thanks to them as well for their valued contributions. And, last but not least, as the saying goes, I would like to express my thanks to the HISK team for, as ever, ensuring the smooth running of the two-year program and the Final Show. And to the Board of Directors, for cosseting and protecting HISK like true guardian angels.

In a Long Blink of an Eye

Daniella Géo HISK curator

Time is deeply ingrained in our perception and experience of it and yet completely independent from both. While time follows its course, our memory of it varies according to how we compartmentalize it.

The two-year term I served as curator at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK), which coincided with the residence period of the ten artists featured in this publication, is a paradigmatic case. Nor is this due entirely to the unprecedent differences between 2019 and 2020, a year that has been dictated by the coronavirus pandemic. So much has happened since our first days here, and we have gone through such a rollercoaster of events and emotions together, that it seems as if time had both flicked by, and been stretched out.

As my peers outside the institution kept telling me, two years is too short a time to consolidate a new approach and establish a new dynamic. But the HISK’s intention with the current institutional format was rather aimed at promoting a continuous flux of energy. Although it was not a given, it was still possible, within the allotted timeframe, to pursue a lively, enriching, and empathetic artistic program, and to generate positive renewal.

Besides the frequent studio visits conducted by a carefully selected group of guests and by me, there were seminars, closed and public lectures that explored influential Belgian(-related) art positions, as well as a variety of ways of thinking about art from inside and outside the Continent. The exploration of those positions continued across numerous study trips around Belgium, as well as in the eye-opening study trip to the 13th Havana Biennial—a model of a biennial historically based on cooperation—and to the renowned International Film School in San Antonio de los Baños.

The “master talks” by established actors from different sectors in the art field, who generously spoke about the backstage of their practices and welcomed us (except when the pandemic did not permit it) into their working space, granted the artists information that are not commonly found in books. Amidst all that, we were still able to benefit from the annual HISK Open Studios and laureates’ exhibition, the return of the exchange program with the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden, and more occasions for the artists to exhibit (and produce) their works—fostered, moreover, by a regular curatorship of exhibitions and art projects, as well as by new partnerships with other organizations and institutions, among them the NICC, Studio Koen van den Broek, TICK TACK, Antwerp Art Weekend, Kunsthal Gent, IKOB, M HKA, and the São Paulo Biennial Foundation. Last but not least, we will be together still next year, to finalize exhibition projects in collaboration with Netwerk Aalst, Het Festival van de Verbinding in Damme, and the quadrennial Sonsbeek 20–24’s public program, Conjunctions, in Arnhem, The Netherlands (postponed to 2021 due to Covid-19).

When we look back at everything that we managed to achieve together, when we take in the developments undergone by the work of each laureate candidate, the journey feels quite long indeed.

My first studio visits with Che-Yu Hsu, Diego Lama, Katya Ev, Hanane El Farissi, Helen Anna Flanagan, Luca Vanello, Nikolay Karabinovych, Oussama Tabti, Shirley Villavicencio Pizango, and Štefan Papčo, at the start of this program, seem very distant.

Intensity is a word that aptly defines this period from any and every angle, including the impression that time had somehow been suspended during the first lockdown. The uncertainties and the unrest

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Willem Elias Foreword

occasioned by the spread of the contagion made all of us have ups and downs, and led us to question contemporary society, with its predatory and individualistic behavior, as well as our political being in the world. This has been—and continues to be—a time of much reflection but not of discontinuities.

In an online interview organized by Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro this past August, Jacques Rancière rejected the idea that we are living in a time of rupture, arguing instead that we are living in a time of temporary suspension. He compared this experience to that of the work of the artist, which is itself inscribed in another temporality, in a time that, far from being homogeneous, is marked by periods of self-isolation for the development of the work, of thinking, of maturation, etc. The philosopher concluded that “we find ourselves a bit in the procedure of invention, since invention is something whose temporality, precisely, is broken.” 1 Despite the need to cope with the consequences of the new order imposed by pandemic, many of the artists-in-research, as I like to call them, found resilience in their own practice and workspace—as is often the case for artists in a multiplicity of scenarios.

Even if some of them could not effectively materialize, even if some could not be where, or with whom, they needed to be so as to further develop their works during the period of mandatory social isolation, they never stopped imagining, researching, reasoning, planning, rethinking. Not all artists are the same: even if they felt paralyzed at some point—independently of the situation with world’s health and the attendant relational crisis—many significant creations are the result of (sometimes long) periods of doubt, uneasiness, and internal dispute. You may perhaps find examples of just such works in this publication and in In a Long Blink of an Eye, the 2020 laureates’ exhibition.

As I have recently written2, not every artist gives form to his/her work in a studio. Some artists need to be out in the field, in the streets, on a film set, to interact with others, and so forth. “The relevance of the studio became even more apparent during this time of generalized quarantine. Not only—or necessarily—as a place of production, but primarily as the one place where the artist can gladly be secluded, with his/her own thoughts, archives, books, music, flasks, or teapot. The studio is the intimate space where the artist can step out of the linearity of everyday life, can forget about night and day and shape his/her own time, despite deadlines; a space where he/she can safely question his/herself, break his/her universe apart and give new meaning to its fragments. It is a zone of discoveries, free of errors, where there is no room for uninvited, too-early-in-the-process judgements. The studio is the four walls within which Rainer Maria Rilke would expect an artist to find sufficiently rich material to propel his/ her creations: the station to get into your own self. A place of sanity, if you will, for untamed imagination and conceptualizations. The studio as the extension of the artist’s mind, spirit, and, at the same time, as a home for the body, artworks, the archive, and possible encounters.”

The HISK’s two-year program provides the artists-in-residence with more than just time and space, with its archipelago of individual studios accessible 24/7. With its three pillars (artistic, production, and theory programs), individual guidance, and the assistance of its team members, it offers young and emerging artists a support system and favorable set of circumstances in which to thrive.

The HISK, as an institute for artists, could not afford to retreat and wait for the reestablishment of normalcy. Although virtual lectures and studio visits cannot replace their in-person 1. Available online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5AwPfpO4io, 19’30”-19’40”.

2. Daniella Géo, “A House for Artists,” Kunstmagazine no. 7 (June, 2020): 90-91.

counterparts, they still provided the possibility for meaningful exchanges. While parts of the program were adapted to online platforms, a number of the activities and partnerships mentioned just above happened this year whenever the virus outbreak allowed.

In addition, the special, 2020 HISK screen print collection arose in answer to the covid-19 context. Conceived primarily as a means to financially support the artists, who were faced with a lack of income during lockdown, the project also created an opportunity to experiment with a medium that most of the artists-in-residency were not used to. Under the auspices of the board of directors and the entire HISK team, the twenty-two laureate candidates currently in the program were commissioned to develop their limited editions, in collaboration with Liselotte Van Daele, at Camping Penrose, and the proceeds were to be equally divided between the candidates. The complete set of twenty-two editions is now in private and public collections—notably the Vrienden van het S.M.A.K. in Ghent, the IKOB—Museum of Contemporary Art in Eupen, and Mu.ZEE in Ostend—thus strengthening ties between artists, collections, and institutions.

It is relevant to mention that the HISK is a practice-based postgraduate art institute with an open structure that is free from academic rigidity. The artists may eventually suffer from the contemporary malaise known as “FOMO,” or fear of missing out, if they are unable to attend an event or activity, or feel compelled to invest all their time just on their work. The institute expects them to be present and participative, but the artists are responsible for managing their own time. The two years are meant to be a concentrated period during which laureate candidates can focus on their work while also benefiting from access to knowledges, networks, and facilities that nurture their development.

Building on this format, which prizes artistic freedom, the work dynamic was implemented in a dialogical manner with the residents in order to establish a relationship that acknowledges their agency as artists-in-research, and to devise a discursive program that was tailored to their specificities and needs. One of the goals during my tenure in charge of the HISK’s artistic program, which has been the core of the institute for the past twenty-five years, was to give it more latitude: to promote access to a variety of positions, as well as a greater understanding of the art system, and of an additional set of circumstances that can bolster the practices of each of the candidates. This collection of artists’ books is one of the results of that approach.

Published on the occasion of the laureates’ exhibition, the closing project of the two-year program, this box of individual publications, accompanied by a critical volume, replace the traditional catalogue and give the artists an additional platform for creation and exhibition, one with the potential to inhabit a variety of homes, public archives, and collections alike. And that is to say nothing of the opportunity to collaborate with Luc Derycke, a major bookmaker and art publisher with a distinguished trajectory. And, as was true with a number of the activities, I also put this proposal, in which the artists would take on the challenge to think their work in a book form while remaining faithful to their practice, up for vote.

Artwork in a book form or a book as artwork, the artist’s book also represents a shift in the authoritative character of art publications, a displacement, away from the hands of third parties (art historians, museums, etc.), and toward those of the artists themselves, as Luc Derycke reminded us during a talk, “On Listing,” early this year. Although this collection is being published under the HISK umbrella, and Luc Derycke and I co-edited it and critically followed up the artists’ processes; each of the ten artist’s books is the sole creation of its respective author. Within the

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Daniella Géo In a Long Blink of an Eye

parameters of a collective project, and of the production possibilities it offered, each artist was free to define his/her publication autonomously from the others. Each artist’s book has a life of its own and, simultaneously, each composes a wider project—very much as is the case with group exhibitions, but with the added benefit of being mobile. This text is being written before all the books are finalized, and before the laureates’ exhibition takes place. Still, considering the achievements thus far, I can only be excited to see them come into being.

What is more, this collection includes a critical volume with substantial and incisive essays on each artist’s work—or, in a few cases, conversations with the artists. The contributors, all of whom participated as visiting lecturers in the studio visits program of 2019-2020, were chosen by the artists themselves.

Looking back at the work with the artists, and at how much I enjoyed our exchanges, it seems as if this two-year period just evaporated. But this collection of artist’s books remains as an encouraging contribution to the future history of the HISK: it closes a chapter just as much as it opens another. I would like to conclude by expressing my appreciation for everyone who contributed to this process, and to extend my best wishes for the continuous improvement of the HISK program as a whole, and the preservation of its commitment to the following generation of artists. And, last but certainly not least, I want to mark, here, my gratitude to Che-Yu, Diego, Katya, Hanane, Helen, Luca, Nikolay, Oussama, Shirley, and Štefan for every moment spent together.

B DB: In any case, it may be interesting not to use the notion of “performance.” It’s too re-

M HKA library

A Conversation Between Katya Ev and Bart De Baere

Recorded by Christine Clinckx and transcribed by Sabine Herrygers

Bart De Baere: What is there that should in any case be mentioned in this conversation, other

than Augenmusik, which M HKA has committed to. What other points of reference should certainly be taken into account?

Katya Ev: For me, the first important performance was Axe de Révolution, in 2014. It was the first performative work and the first site-specific work. Like Augenmusik, it was a durational performance: walking for seventeen hours in the city with a six-meter long metal structural element, from north to south. It also linked up to the political context—Moscow and the beginning of war in Ukraine.

There are two other performative works that I consider important. Last year, I did a work in the Musée Zadkine in Paris, performing in an institutional space, which you can see as institutional critique or as an “infiltrated performance.”

In 2018, there was a work called Iceberg: Blue Room, linked to the law prohibiting VPN anonymizers in Russia, thus blocking the access to the dark web and to anonymous apps like Telegram.

This was the most important thing happening politically when I was invited there. In a work like that, I bring together many different parameters of the situation: in that instance, a solo-show, low-budget, for a small institution with pop-up spaces, changing places every time, so that every place was new and not labelled as a place of art. I benefited from this and created what I named a “constructed situation,” a term from Guy Debord. A bed, a chair and a desk, a sleeping pill, and a computer configured to access the dark web.

The only announcements of the event were on an eBay-like website for private persons. People got getting there anonymously by texting and getting instructions. It worked 24/7 for two weeks.

When visitors were finally pushing in the door and getting into the space—an electric blue room—they received a text that said: “Your time is unlimited, just send me a text when you want to leave and close the door.” It was full for two weeks; some people stayed for eight hours, and nobody ever saw any of the visitors, who were alone and anonymous, and I honestly do not know what they did there. They could either go on the dark web, or just take a view and chill; it was a kind of David Lynch-like atmosphere: getting to the basement, being in the blue room, not knowing if the offer was true or not. I was in the café or in a connected studio, three rooms away, not far from the basement, in the same building; waiting to put the space back to zero every time, perfectly clean to re-open the door, and to let myself out.

B DB: Lets come back to what HISK wants with this kind of text, a sort of description of what

you are doing. I think one may distinguish three elements in your work. One is the performative dimension, which leads to the works being categorized as “performances,” and another is the fact that you focus everything onto poignant images. Prior to this double figure of performance and image, there is a contextual capacity, as if your work were something you weave: you look at different elements, and then develop a work that reconfigures those elements. For that reason, I like this notion of a “constructed situation,” which is certainly more precise than that of a “performance.” Your work might be seen as a kind of constructed image, and even as an image, in the sense of a kind of performative image, happening in each of your projects and aspiring to be continued. That’s something very different from a performance, and rather more like setting up a situation.

K Ev: Yes, I am having difficulties defining it.

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Daniella Géo In a Long Blink of an Eye

ductive. It seems to me that calling the works a “constructed situation,” or a “constructed performative image,” might be something that draws more attention to their specificity.

I think there is one more constitutive element of your works, which is their “afterlife.” This “constructed situation” or this “constructed performative image” is very intensely performative, very much in its own time and situation, an outcome of your contextual weaving.

Although it happens on its own behalf, it also, and simultaneously, depicts. One can see the documentation as something of a side effect, an outer element, but it is also a continuation.

This “afterlife” may get its own form of complexity, precisely because it came into existence out of these different elements. This “afterlife,” a kind of an echo, continues all of the components in the kind of weaving you practice: it somehow continues the capacity of the performative image you construct. The components belong together in their initial moment, but they may also be expressed once again afterwards through different modes of documentation. In the end, the work is the sum total of all the materials: the research and its documentation, including and up to their afterlife. None of these has priority over the other. There is no ultimate goal that transfixes the works in time or form—any element may continue to be of help. You may turn a work into a video, you may turn it into a single photo, or a series of photos, or into a contextual documentation, or into a re-enactment: all of these forms are possible. That is what I think we should offer HISK, an analysis of the fact that you have these interrelated phases that constitute your work, each of which has its intrinsic value, like the life cycle of a butterfly.

K Ev: The afterlife of these projects is somehow the most difficult question, one that I feel it is not yet completely resolved; Robert Smithson, for example, was able resolve it pretty well with his notions of “site” and “non-site.”

B DB: Other artists resolve it in a beautifully designed way, such as Francis Alÿs, who accepts

the given limit of the fact that communication happens within and through the art scene, and works towards that moment of appearance.

K Ev: I feel close to the conceptual logic of Smithson, in which a “site” is about an intervention in a place, opposed to the “non-site,” which is about embracing a kind of absence. My formal interest is in process-based works and the temporal structures of subjectivity, not in sculptural or static forms.

B DB: Perhaps the core moment is that of the constructed performative image…

K Ev: Yes, that is very subjective, because it is linked to the experience of a person, and the key

question is how this person feels...

B DB: Moving a Mountain by Faith, by Francis Alÿs, is also a pristine “constructed performative im-

age.” We have a beautiful, lavish installation documenting it, with beautiful videos, and beautiful materials. In a certain way, though, the “resolvedness” of that takes some of the focus away from the performative moment itself. His work exists in-between these two states, in-between the performative and the documentary state. It is as if the performative was already dominated by, or included in, its afterlife. In your work, the fact that this is less clearly the case is certainly a quality.

K Ev: I do think about this. For example, Axe de Révolution in Moscow consisted of a seventeen-hour walk. It started from Moscow’s northernmost point, went to the the city’s southernmost tip, making a speculative cross with the movement of the sun, leaving at sunrise, crossing with the sun in the city’s geographical center, the Revolution Square, and then continuing south as the sun went east. For this, I foresaw seventeen-hour long film, so I organized myself to have the most complete documentation possible, a 1:1 scale with the real thing. The afterlife of this performance has two facets, two parts. There is the abstract one, the cross with the sun formed within the circles out of which Moscow is constructed. And there is the film. It is a completely

different thing: the portrait of the city when you go through it and walk the streets of the urban environment, from the periphery to the center and back to the periphery, with the light going from almost darkness to sunrise and then back to darkness. You have an amazing documentation of the state of the city and the urban landscape. It is something that speaks about the performance, but, actually, it is rather more like showing the face of the city than the performance itself. This was maybe the best way to resolve it, in two complementary parts. For Blue Room, the only way to do it is to re-enact it. That work does not have another afterlife in that sense.

B DB: There are the text messages that people sent you, even if they are anonymous.

K Ev: I lost them. I did not keep them.

B DB: You have a script. This is also a consideration you include, the use of a map, or a script; it

is also one of the possibilities of the work’s afterlife. It is not only about documentation; for Augenmusik, you have, in a way, too much documentation, and for Blue Room not enough...

K Ev: Because I did not want it. I wanted to document the space in between people, and that is the only thing I did. The floor was white. During winters in Moscow, floors become very dirty.

That was the only way to know what happened there. When you switch on the light, you see that one person has been there, or two; you see what their trajectory has been, whether they took the sleeping pill or not…. Those were the only things I noted. For Augenmusik, I was also thinking of a video form as an autonomous work, but I have not had an opportunity to produce it yet. I wanted to make an installation of twenty-four surveillance screens corresponding to twenty-four walking itineraries, to synchronize all the videos into that one timeline, and to insert black screens where the documentation was missing. It would look like windows that switch on and off. I wanted the screens to be exactly like at a real police station, of different sizes, and hanging like a mess. That’s how I directed the video documentation.

B DB: A question I often ask myself is why a person takes on this very strange and lonely job,

being an artist: why does a person decide to move into art? What is the value that gives you the courage to do this? What makes you do this?

K Ev: The answer to that is constantly evolving. I moved from Moscow to Paris, and also from being a brand manager in a multinational American company, Procter & Gamble, to making art. I had experienced how high capitalism works from the inside, with all its internal mechanisms, and it drove me crazy.

B DB: A limit of art, especially if you look at the construction of your art, is that the core is

actually small: a small moment with a relatively small amount of people. It is localized, topical, temporal: and then there may be an afterlife, a kind of memory, some memory of it, but that is rather a memory than the work itself. I believe in art too, that is why we are sitting here together, but at the same time… Having worked as a brand manager, having experienced this incredibly powerful system that really puts out its image and its thinking and its “offer” all over the world, how do you balance this to art? How can this fragile, weak, and powerless thing called “art” be meaningful in relation to the powerful, mighty, and effective reality embodied by Procter & Gamble? What is the relation for you, how to think this?

K Ev: Size is not the criterion. It does not matter. Whether something is big or small is not important. What is important is its symbolical intensity. It may work in ways akin to what Claude Lévy-Strauss calls the modèle reduit, or scale model. You can propose something, a way to do things, a way to be, a way to think: that is enough.

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A conversation between Katya Ev and Bart De Baere

B DB: Is the “enough” then essentially an enough “for you”? Or does it have to get out into society,

with the “scale model” status as a sufficient statement to start from? Does it need to prove itself in its afterlife, or is the issue for you rather the potentiality...

K Ev: I think the potentiality is the most important aspect. I may compare it to the functioning of a neural link between two synapses. Once you’ve created a path, it can be reactivated.

B DB: It sounds very Russian, like Vladimir Vernadsky’s noosphere; once an idea comes into

existence somewhere, it’s everywhere...

K Ev: It is specific, it is concrete: you create the possibility. After that, it does not matter if it is

a highway with heavy daily traffic or a small road… it just has to be used.

How you phrase the question is also important, since a scale model is not that fragile; of course, it is “weak” in terms of the values or ethical positions that it suggests—it is “weak” if you refer to notions of productivity. But it is not weak at all in the way it is constructed, but rather completely takes on the model of Procter & Gamble. If I had not worked for Procter & Gamble earlier on, I would now never be able to manage the whole musical mise-en-scène, with some sixty people, required for the first version of Augenmusik, in Paris.

B DB: So Procter & Gamble is not the source of inspiration but a source of technology...

K Ev: Yes, a source of methodology. The level of complexity and uncertainty is definitely higher

in these performative works in public space, but I managed them easily because of my experience at Procter & Gamble.

B DB: When you decided to leave the Procter & Gamble world and go into the art world, when

you made that jump, what was the initial relation for you? What was the “art world” for you at that moment? What made it relevant?

K Ev: It was a leap into a void. I didn’t know anything about it. It was like going to the woods, an escape into a polar opposite. It started anecdotally. I was on a work trip to Vladivostok and had a huge car accident that involved other P&G people there. By miracle, I was not gravely injured, but I did have a concussion and stayed at home for three weeks on sick leave. In the end, I never went back to the office. Instead, I bought a ticket to Paris to study arts. I simply Googled contemporary art schools all over the world and chose Beaux-Arts de Paris because it is public, because the education is free, and because of its quality.

B DB: Which teachers were important to you?

K Ev: Definitely Jean-François Chevrier. I followed his theoretical classes for five years, and was

his research assistant for two years. He could ask me to research, for example, all the materials on the relation between Dostoevsky and photography. If I had not met him I would not be the artist I am. I learned my methodology from him: the free-floating association between language, image, and historical or political facts, and that’s how I construct my works.

B DB: So, regarding the societal actors that are a reference for you, there’s Procter & Gamble on

the one hand, and Chevrier on the other. You were also friends with Oksana Shachko, one of the founders of Femen. How did that happen?

K Ev: It all happened quite by accident. I moved to Lavoir Moderne Parisien, a theater and an alternative cultural space in Paris’ eighteenth arrondissement. I was separating from the father of my daughter, but I had no money to rent a new place, no family, no support. Occasionally, a girl whom I had met in my studio at Beaux-Arts suggested that I move to Lavoir—she was the daughter of the founder, and was living there herself. So I found myself settled in this crazy theater for six months.

It was a bubbling, politically engaged environment that I spontaneously started to document. It brought together anthropologists, psychiatrists, journalists, filmmakers, as well as people who are

mentally ill. They welcomed the Partie Pirate and did street meals in the area, one of the most problematic and poorer areas of Paris, even more so when Sarkozy came to power and the government started grabbing illegal immigrants who were waiting to pick up their children from school.

When I got to the Lavoir, city authorities were trying to kick them out, and had launched eviction procedures. The Lavoir was preparing a resistance: the idea was to occupy the space in collaboration with militant organizations like DAL and Jeudi Noir. And then—surprise—Femen came into the picture. They had just done their famous action in Kiev, where they cut the cross; they had been threatened and had had to escape. They literally jumped into the first available car headed to Europe and started phoning around in order to find a place to go. They reached the people from the Lavoir Moderne, and—amazing!—the Lavoir team suddenly realized that hosting feminist political refugees was the best plan ever to save the theatre—city authorities would never dare kick them out—and although they did not know the girls they took the risk. Twenty hours later they were there and it became their base. That’s how this started.

B DB: You work on the borderline between what society accepts and what it doesn’t. You must

be quite aware of the fact that there are always conditions, in contrast to our Western societies, which grotesquely pretend that society is free. How do you imagine that political, cultural, and societal changes may affect your work?

K Ev: My work draws its origins from them. It is a constant, fluid back and forth. I couldn’t imagine my works as unrelated to the novelty of the historical presence.

B DB: Instead of starting from an analysis of a context, it starts from an acknowledgment and

a rendering visible of the conditions. If we compare your methodology with Femen—you’ve already offered a beautiful and very consistent answer with the synapses, but I’ll ask this again all the same—we notice that they work with an output-oriented effectiveness. Is that something you would consider for your work?

K Ev: My work makes use of the activism model, yes, it belongs to that family.

B DB: One of our reference artists in Antwerp, Guy Mees, was a hero for us because he was the ulti-

mate anti-hero. We have one of his works from the 1960s in the collection. It is called Lost Space, a prism made of embroidery with black light emanating from its inside. He once said to me: “If I were an American artist, I would have made it room-size, but I’m not.” For him, the scale model was the right scale. In activism, as I experience it, you have a topic, you turn the topic into a specific goal, and you take a path the authorities do not expect. One of the important components in this is the mediatization. Femen is an extreme example of that, in a most precise way. For you, the mediatization is part of it, as is the amount of people who see the work in an art context afterwards. But it is not the ambition. You count it in, but it is not—at least, so it seems to me—part of the performative image. It is something that may or may not happen.

K Ev: You’re right, I am not very interested in mass media. For Axe de la Révolution, it just happened, I didn’t expect it at all, it was crazy. In this specific situation, the performance was seen as such a contestation and transgression that all major television stations came. Actually, I would rather not have gotten that much attention because, in such a tense context, our actions could have landed us in jail. Since then, I’ve moved my focus away from activist performance and towards the subjective experience of time and temporal structures, in an almost phenomenological sense.

Still, activist artists remain an important influence. I like Alexander Brenner, an artist and activist based in Moscow, for example; in a famous performance at the Pushkin Museum, Brenner was naked and shouting, crying: “Why did you not invite me to this show?” It was super radical, but also super fun and humorous. It is very subtly political, in his case. Or Anatoly

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A conversation between Katya Ev and Bart De Baere

Osmolovsky, who, with the activist group E.T.I., used human bodies to write a vulgar Russian word for “dick” on Red Square. Of course, they were counting on media attention, but there is an immediate symbolic efficiency in the proposals. For me, the media effect is only secondary.

What interests me is how a work responds to the place, site, or situation in which it happens.

B DB: If we go through the classical notions of performance, I have a list of them here… The body

does not exist as a body but as an experience, and as an actor in the image. The space is holistic here and now, with all its capacities and all its specificities, expectations, limits, laws, and regulations. I’d name this form “a constructed performative image,” but such a description becomes nearly a mathematics of words. It wants to become something and the something is very focused and precise. If we look at the documentation, it seems that for the afterlife you don’t have an answer, but always a multitude of possibilities.

K Ev: No, I don’t have an answer, and it bothers me: I would like to have one. There may be the afterlife in the form of a new event…

B DB: Like a re-enactment, or like what we did with Augenmusik in Ghent…

K Ev: Not necessarily. There are broader possibilities still. It may be a performative conference, or

any type of live modality. In the case of Axe de la Révolution, I once did nothing more than narrate it through a series of one-to-one conversations with the public. That was for a solo show that lasted two weeks. Or it can be a very distanced re-enactment, because the works are so site-specific, and their site-specificity is part of their nature, so the re-enactment has to contain that as well. It has to keep the key problematics and formal elements of the initial work, though the mise-en-scène can change completely. That is the first modality. A second modality is the archive, in an indexed way. A third are the new and autonomous artworks that come out of or strongly echo the initial performance, as when elements of the performance (documentation, props, etc.) are transformed into a new work. It could be a sculptural work, a video, or an installation. If I were to use Robert Smithson’s terms, this would be a kind of “non-site.” However, it is very paradoxical to try to render the evasive and shifting nature of a performance—an event— within the static form created for an exhibition space. We can almost say that the site-specific practice works against its own final location, be it a museum or a gallery. Another way to think of a site-specific practice for me is through an analogy with the notion of a readymade, a found object: I am working with a “found place” (a term used in environmental theater), or even a “found situation.” This is about approaching the context: the geography of a place, its social, political, and historical dimension—outside of representational terms.

B DB: Is there something else that you feel still needs to be included in this conversation?

K Ev: Since we spoke about synapses earlier, I would like to mention psychomagic acts as well.

Alejandro Jodorowsky uses this notion, though he didn’t invent it. You can understand it by analogy with a speech act: when you say something, you also enact it. However, if instead of speech you use symbolic or metaphoric gestures those become psychomagic acts. This is a hidden, intimate dimension of my performances, I do not speak much about it.

Hanane El Farissi: In a World on Fire

I am a woman. No more and no less.

I live my life as it is thread by thread and I spin my wool to wear, not to complete Homer’s story, or his sun.

And I see what I see as it is, in its shape, though I stare every once in a while in its shade to sense the pulse of defeat, and I write tomorrow on yesterday’s sheets: there’s no sound other than echo.

I love the necessary vagueness in what a night traveler says to the absence of birds over the slopes of speech and above the roofs of villages I am a woman, no more and no less The almond blossom sends me flying in March, from my balcony, in longing for what the faraway says: “Touch me and I’ll bring my horses to the water springs.”

I cry for no clear reason, and I love you as you are, not as a strut nor in vain and from my shoulders a morning rises onto you and falls into you, when I embrace you, a night.

But I am neither one nor the other no, I am not a sun or a moon I am a woman, no more and no less So be the Qyss of longing, if you wish. As for me I like to be loved as I am not as a color photo in the paper, or as an idea composed in a poem amid the stags ...

I hear Laila’s faraway scream from the bedroom: Do not leave me a prisoner of rhyme in the tribal nights do not leave me to them as news ...

I am a woman, no more and no less

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A conversation between Katya Ev and Bart De Baere

Els Roelandt

I am who I am, as you are who you are: you live in me and I live in you, to and for you I love the necessary clarity of our mutual puzzle I am yours when I overflow the night but I am not a land or a journey I am a woman, no more and no less And I tire from the moon’s feminine cycle and my guitar falls ill string by string I am a woman, no more and no less!

“No More and No Less,” Mahmoud Darwish Translated by Fady Joudah Poetry is a combination of words written on a sheet of paper—words written with black ink on white paper. Poetry is an intangible esthetic experience. Hanane El Farissi (b. 1990) writes poetry, but not with ink on paper. Thinking back on my first visit to El Farissi’s studio in the fall of 2019, the first thing that comes to my mind are the white walls of the hallway that leads to her studio. A series of almost identical objects is arrayed on both sides of the door. They suggest a path, they take you somewhere. The objects turn out to be small, white kohl receptacles: Moroccan wooden flasks that contain kohl pigment. Here and there, the black kohl has spilt onto the floor, creating an abstract drawing, a writing on the white floor. As I enter the studio, the black kohl flasks continue to resonate in my head. Involuntarily, a movement comes to my mind: the intimate act of applying kohl under the eyes. The hand that approaches the eyes, the face that softly adopts a different expression. I think of the gaze in the mirror, the inner gaze, too, the confrontation with the self, the sense of joy and expectation for what will come, or precisely the opposite feeling of anger and sorrow that you try to hide. In Beauté et poudre noire (2018), El Farissi writes poetry with objects: white kohl flasks, black pigment on a white floor. Everyday objects, actions, and the memories thereof are her words.

The kohl flasks are objects that are associated with femininity. During my visit to El Farissi’s studio, I quickly discovered how central women are in her work. Women stand for warmth, care, and tenderness. It’s a bit like in the work of her favorite poet, Mahmoud Darwish (Ramallah, 1941–2008).

Hanane El Farissi loves to work with everyday feminine objects and actions—time and again, they recur in the work in ever-changing forms. Sometimes the objects have a particularly stereotypical character, such as a white dress, a high-heeled shoe or a rose (again and again objects that refer to femininity). But it is precisely these objects that El Farissi uses to draw us into the work. The objects seduce us, while at the same time they take us to a world that isn’t always sweet and charming, but that emanates a certain pent-up violence: shards of glass, torn-up canvas... Although human madness has been a recurrent theme in

her work, recently it has started to figure in it more and more. Violence, a world on fire, the energy radiating from this—the human condition. El Farissi grew up in a rapidly changing Arab and Western world: the region and the era she grew up in is characterized by turmoil and unrest, but also by change, which can be positive as well. She travels, but the world around her is always on fire. She asks questions about the violence—questions that bear witness to her as a quiet, caring, but also strong presence.

In El Farissi’s work, the references to violence, on the one hand, and to the everyday, on the other, are countless. But what matters to her is the combination of both. The world is mad and, every day and every hour, people living in this world are reminded of its madness. Nothing is innocent. On a porcelain plate the artist paints an extremely realistic machine gun, a pile of nails, or an electric chair. The painted plates are beautifully arrayed in a wooden display case that would fit perfectly in a bourgeois interior. Elsewhere, however, the cupboard has collapsed and the objects that belong in it have been shattered to bits (Basculement, 2016–2017).

Hanane El Farissi was born in 1990 in Skhirate, Morocco. She studied at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan; after graduating from there, she moved to Brussels, where she obtained a Master’s Degree in sculpture at La Cambre. She now creates installations and stages performances that she often records on video, but she also makes sculptural objects and drawings.

During her two-year stay at the HISK in Ghent, she worked out ideas that had originated in Morocco, but she also delved into the past of Ghent, a city that she did not know. She looked at the violence the inhabitants have experienced, many references to which can still be found in the streets and squares of the city. But in Ghent she also studied the old masters, the Renaissance and Baroque paintings that testify to the violence. Fragments of these paintings emerge in her studies and drawings.

It becomes a recurrent theme. During her stay in Marseille in 2017, El Farissi visited a rundown area of the town; every so often, she would walk about with a dustpan and brush to sweep up the sidewalk, which seemed to be covered in diamonds. The diamonds were actually the myriad shards of smashed car windows—silent witnesses of a night full of violence. She also studied the history of Marseille, the wars that were waged there, the plague that ravaged the city, the horror that filled it. And yet, she somehow added a joyous, forgiving, and compassionate touch to all of this. Involuntarily, I think of Ever Is Over All (1997), by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. A young woman in a sky-blue dress happily prances down a street. Suddenly, she strikes: she smashes the windows of parked cars to smithereens. Repressed anger that is suddenly vented. El Farissi does something different than that enraged young woman. She descends like a caring fairy. She kneels down at the remains of the violence, and, by sweeping them up, she seems to wonder what she has to do about the violence in the world. The caring person recurs quite often in El Farissi’s performances.

In Corps, Espace-temps et Mémoire (Tetouan, 2013), El Farissi added to the work the idea of time, of its passing and its recollection. In this performance, she wears a white dress. We see her, against a black backdrop with a ticking clock, sweeping up shards, or doing other domestic chores: ironing a sheet with a self-portrait of her printed on it, or mending the same sheet. In another performance, the artist stands in the surf that rolls onto the shore. Once more, she’s wearing an immaculate white dress. There’s a chair in front of her, over which she continues to throw buckets full of sea water with all the strength she can muster. The action goes on and on. It’s as if El Farissi wants to wash something off, to remove something, to start all over again from zero. Cleanse.

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Els Roelandt Hanane El Farissi: In a World on Fire

Hanane El Farissi integrates her Moroccan background and the art traditions of her native country into a more Western iconography, media, and formal language. Because she splits her time between Rabat and Brussels, the different backgrounds continue to mix with one another in her work. Actions such as caring and mending, which have usually been associated with women, are her trademark. El Farissi accentuates these stereotypes, but also explores how they steal their way into our memory and define our tastes and identity.

Helen Flanagan: Exhibitions of Mediality 1

John C. Welchman

One of Helen Flanagan’s central interests is in the recursive structures that arise from material and generic spill-overs emerging from the collision or overlay of different formats and protocols of making, delivery, and reception. This results not in a metadiscourse organized around certain privileged items—video distributed by projection or monitors, or an installation understood as a coordinated sequence of sculpture-like objects—but in an altogether different mode of abstracting. Different elements associated with the regimen of the filmic, for example, might be discharged from their integrated functionalities and released into narratively disjunctive but otherwise parallel orders of relation. In this way, various quotients of materialization, color, or the formal consolidation of built space (the “architectural”) become gathering points—or invisible armatures—for the exploration of value-intensive regimes of signification that are context-dependent but at the same time reconstituted as zones or through-lines of both affect and social symbolization. This striving for a kind of recharged experiential partitioning calls into question not only what Flanagan refers to as the “standardized screening format” of moving image media, but also the formal constitution of the artwork.2 The method and wider implications of this reset are clearest, perhaps, not in Flanagan’s work in performance-inflected media, but in a recent project for an artist book, Billy’s Boots. The organization of the book is configured as an assemblage of layers, each of which has its own logic and interpositional axis through the book’s sequence, but at the same time connects situationally with the other modes of appearance. The most “recessive” layer is a kind of wallpaper made up of part-elements appropriated from children’s join-the-dots diagram-drawings of flies, so that we encounter a shifting sequence of common fly part-objects and unconnected numbers from beginning to end.

Secondly, there is a sequence of writings (numbered 1-36), often haiku-like in length, characterized by a mix of description, reflection, dialogue and action—the whole resembling a freeform film script but shorn of its normal connective tissue. A third layer is comprised of black and white “street photographs” taken by the artist in various parts of the UK over the course of several years, some showing male figures walking, standing or sitting in ordinary urban environments, others featuring street-side locations (an alley, a backyard and several more abstract, peopleless compositions and close-ups) or objects (a swing, part of a wrecked car, gas holders). Finally, Flanagan has apportioned doses of green (in a manner that resembles the infill of a child’s coloring book—and thus consorts with the dotted fly drawings) across all three elements. A few words are italicized in green, including the title and final words—“My whole damn life!” (though not the quotation marks); and around half of the photos are wholly or partly greened.

The selective greening process in Billy’s Boots exemplifies Flanagan’s method of layering and abstracting, so that the application of the color infiltrates the other regimens of the book following a range of richly interleaved protocols. While written text is turned green in several places (more precisely at the beginning, middle and end), the first instance of greening within the photographic register of the project occurs in the form of a green inscription that personalizes a beat-up ice-cream van parked at a jaunty angle in the driveway of a semi-detached house: “Billy’s Ices” (we are not sure at first whether this name was a property of the photograph and thus found in situ, or whether it might have been added in by the artist; but it is the former).

The remaining additions of green are staged in a telling variety of formats. Some photographs are “tinted” various shades of green in whole or in part; in a sequence of three photos a single walking figure is greened over; in a couple of photographs the line-dividers and curb-adjacent

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Els Roelandt Hanane El Farissi: In a World on Fire

road markings, normally white and yellow, respectively, are shaded green; in a couple of others, pools, puddles, or water stains are given a limpid green inflection; in one photo the number “4” on the back of a Steven Gerrard (the England shirt of the iconic midfield player for Liverpool Football Club) jersey goes green; on another, part of a London tube train interior is greened over; and, in a re-chromatizing close-up, the reversed Nike swoosh on the outfit of one of two young men pictured in front of a concrete slab goes green. The three remaining instances are rather like exceptions that prove the rule. In one case, a photograph of a small, fenced yard set with flowerpots, a wheelbarrow and garden podia features an ornamental display in which the botanical elements (literally) go green; in the last act of colorization in the book, one sneaker sole on a young boy who is being carried across a road by a mostly unseen protagonist is filled-in with light green; while the most haunting, and seemingly symbolic, example is the image posted at the center of Billy’s Boots. Here a metal column, probably a bollard, has been pasted with the image of a young girl with a large bow in her hair and Mickey Mouse ears, holding her hands to her face and wearing an expression we take as fear or consternation—its anxiety redoubled by the added green coloration of her eyes.

Aligning indexical references to the chlorophyll-inflected outcome of photosynthesis or the turquoise and viridian hues of turbulent and stagnant water with intimations of goo and slime, reptilian scales or a generalized toxicity, the green line threaded through Flanagan’s book offers a spectrum of chromatic license by pressing home its standard deviation. Thus, green effectively refers to things that become it, but also functions as an ambience or an emblem. In a work that sets out to question the modes of behavior and becoming of the adolescent males picked out page-by-page, it makes good on—and troubles—the elision between toxic and stereotypical masculinity by standing for something as yet unlearned, or in development: the green of immaturity. Stuck on the bottom of a sole it is something picked-up and stuck-on in a thin, flattened dose—like a film. Infesting the eyes, it emerges as a body-borne temperament—on the one hand a cypher for bilious irritability; on the other an obsessional envy, what Shakespeare referred to as the “green sickness” or the “green-eyed monster.” 3 How these usages might stack up and their implications be dispensed already presents the need for complex assessment; but this is redoubled when crossed with the metaphorical capacity of other parts of Flanagan’s formatting logic. Reflecting on her upcoming exhibition, Gesticulating Wildly (2021),4 she notes, for example, that “the figure of the fly… is a reoccurring motif…

The fly references ‘the fly on the wall’ documentary genre from 1970s Britain, a documentary strategy that captured ‘real’ behavior by allowing the camera to continuously run, not unlike current-day reality TV programs.” In this light, the partially formed flies that buzz around Billy’s Boots stand for behaviors that aren’t completely captured or rendered, for routines that are interrupted, or for a mode of documentation that is, by default, incomplete—quite the opposite of the earlier appearance of Dipteran figural language in the art world when the critic Champfleury referred, in the context of a discussion of Gustave Courbet, to “the flyspeck school of [Jean-Louis Ernest] Meisonnier,” a manner of slavishly exact pictorial realism associated with certain Salon and historical painters in the mid-nineteenth century. 5 1. Giorgio Agamben correlates gesture, as “pure praxis,” with the sphere of ethics, noting that the “gesture is the exhibition of a mediality, it is the process of making a means visible as such.” See Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1996]), pp. 79, 58.

2. Helen Flanagan, email to the author, May 14, 2020. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from the artist are from this exchange.

3. Shakespeare used the term “green sickness” several times: Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene v; Anthony and Cleopatra, Act III, Scene ii; for “green-eyed monster” see, Othello, Act III, Scene iii.

4. Helen Flanagan, statement on Gesticulating Wildly, her one-person exhibition at IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen, Belgium (forthcoming, 2021).

5. Champfleury, pseudonym of Jules-François-Félix Husson, Grandes Figures d’Hier et d’Aujourd’hui: Balzac, Gérard de Nerval, Wagner, Courbet (Paris: Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1861); trans. in Joshua C. Taylor, ed., Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 328.

The layering, sequencing, and ghostly interleaving that characterizes Billy’s Boots looks onto Flanagan’s attempt in her performance-inflected film and video work—but especially in the breakouts she stages from media formed as installations—to “involve different abstracted elements… materials, color, architecture, etc.” This concern turns, above all else, on the carefully calibrated attention she vests in activations and transactions spawned by gesture. The artist understands the dispositions of gesture in two key dimensions: as a surplus spun-off from the corporeal surfaces of everyday actions; and as a manner super-added, synthetically, to events and exchanges that are more or less preordained, or unfurl in a script-like order. Her Gesture Trilogy draws this dialectic alongside three (temporarily) dominant modes of enunciation: one thought through and around particular material substrates (Gestures of Matter, 2020); another by way of bodies conceived as structures (Gestures of Anatomy, 2019); and the third in relation to a fateful collusion with entropic mimicry (Gestures of Collapse, 2019).

Clearly, then, the structural contingencies we encounter so immediately in Billy’s Boots are also present in the videos. But they are beholden in this significant body of work to a spectrum of refractive dispensations organized by the ways in which gesture is mobilized: in the inflection of bodies and their itineraries; through symbolic objects and their arrays; and by way of language, accent and intonation—each “episode” in the trilogy highlighting the emphasis signaled in its title.

To this weave of incidents, Flanagan adds two further dispensations: one is aligned with the technical parameters of video production; the other unfolds from one emblematic location abetted by a singular gestural formation associated with each video. So far as the first principle is concerned, the artist emphasizes the orchestration of the scripting process in a matrix of notations that includes movement and exchange; characterological development and interaction; the rhythm and tempo of the camera work and the episodic flow and sequence of the “action”; as well as the articulation of expression. Each installment of the trilogy is also furnished with what we can term a location assemblage, a dominant, quasi-architectural or spatial envelope that “sets” the episode.

In Gestures of Collapse this is a gymnasium or sports hall complete with the court markings specific to various ball-games—a regulatory system that infiltrates, associatively, or at any rate implicates as code-governed, the behaviors of the young women we encounter. The battery of washing-machines lining the interior of the launderette in which Gestures of Anatomy is set is also marked as a system-oriented array defined by repetitive, functional cycles of wash, rinse, and dry. Here the modus operandi of the washing cycle is amplified and allegorized so that it comes into contact with larger cycles of life, including basic bodily functions such as ingestion and excretion; exercise and rest; ovulation and menstruation. Set in a fast-food restaurant, Gestures of Matter takes up with the elemental, almost unconscious, rituals transacted in this space—delivered in a rote serialization of movements: reviewing a menu of options; ordering; paying; waiting; and taking (out).

Finally, each of the three videos of Gesticulating Wildly foreground one gesture that acts as an allegorical subtext, “pointing” or consolidating them by way of a signature bodily idiom. In Gestures of Collapse, the news reporter prods one of the female performers with his foot while she is on the ground. This poke or kick immediately establishes a set of power and gendered relations, establishing “authority,” hierarchy and domination—which, of course, can be mapped back onto the “news” that the reporter represents. It also stands for a measure of relational incontinence, as the reporter is immediately associated with a lack of respect and empathy, the effects of which are both underscored and mitigated by the vein of almost caricatural exaggeration that mediates these actions, pointing to a character who is as much ungainly and vulgar as he is exploitative or abusive. But where, the poke seems to demand, is the border between these perceptions? And what is at stake if we accuse or exonerate in pre-set terms? Thinking

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John C. Welchman Helen Flanagan: Exhibitions of Mediality

comparatively, Gestures of Collapse seems to turn the premises of Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words II (written, in French, in the late 1950s) inside out. Beckett’s mime play features two actors, each inside a sack, who are poked by a pole or “goad” in order to prompt their emergence and routines; Flanagan’s video, for its part, begins in the open, its protagonists disgorged, and delivers the motivating act of being poked as the outcome of a different inevitability. To Beckett’s wordless intimation of an existential performance goaded on by the unforeseen jabs of fate, Gestures of Collapse offers a retort that stages the poke as an emblem of the mirage of mediated representation.

In Gestures of Anatomy, the accented gesture is an act of bodily regulation performed by a middle-aged sex worker cutting her toenails. In contrast to the demonstrative, other-directed kicks and pokes of the reporter, the action here is a self-applied moment of personal grooming, normally conducted in private. Its “exposure” on camera is already supplied with a measure of mild taboo, which Flanagan amplifies and resituates in relation to the character’s earlier meditations on the folds and enclosures of her body, its cavities, crevasses, cleavage, and fissures. The caricature implied in Gestures of Collapse is answered here by intimations of the grotesque and the abject activated by the visibility and vocalization of corporeal appearance and function—in this case as a measure of becoming in public, in which mundane function and unvarnished appearance add up to something beyond themselves.

The reflex and regulation of the poke and the cut are confronted by a different—more composite—order of gesture in the third element of Flanagan’s trilogy. Gestures of Matter features an older woman who wields chopsticks not in order to consume a meal but instead to twist and tweezer the skin on her face in acts of pushing and pulling her eyelids, earlobes, and lips. The invasion of the poke and subtraction of the cut are met here by a gesture of deliberative contortion and exposure—which is also, of course, a pantomimic literalization of caricatural distortion—and offers another grotesquerie. As with her other emblematic gestures, the face-pulling in Gestures of Matter looks onto a related matrix of concerns centering on the body as an envelope of meat and the purport of carnivorous consumption, underlined by what the artist describes as the “Frankenstein” appearance of a mound of gizzards and entrails in the form of a rotating kebab-like mound.

The stakes of this intricate structure can be better glimpsed if we open up one of the many implications of the spatial and characterological declensions of Gestures of Matter: the idea of the “line” itself. Commensurate with the management of post-Enlightenment social order, the line or queue signals general acquiescence to the “properly” ordered filtration of public or commercial space based on two social proprieties predicated on a seemingly different logic of singularity. Lines are formed in accordance with an order of arrival (“first come, first served”) and allow a particular entry, admission or service on the basis of “one at a time.” The line thus harvests a geometric filament of singularities from a plurality of bodies coming together as a disaggregated mass or a mob; and it governs virtually every aspect of modern social behavior, from transit and consumption to sports and leisure. Further, the line stands in for efficiency, repetition, prohibition, and selection by way of its function in different sectors: the production line; the chorus line; the police line or cordon; the criminological line-up; or the assistant referees in football (soccer), formally referred to as “linesmen.” Even the general variegation of commodities and their alignment into groups is signaled by the consort of things in the capitalist order into product lines.

Flanagan comes at this key figure of social and economic consolidation by examining what lines might do by way of their self-constitution or actions (for example, the passing of sounds), referring to the effects of a “transactional line” in order to think-through—but also to disrupt by means of accents of absurdity and dysfunction—the construct of the line as preface to consumption. She also thinks-through the role of the line as a mimetic figure—a manner of assisted social self-organization that takes specific and generally similar forms. For lines represent the canalization of desire in a precisely figured format: they have become the very patterns of regimented behavior,

in which clamor is reduced to articulation; exchange is conditioned by sanctioned outlets; and, in the terms of Georges Bataille, all forms of excretory release are replaced by appropriation and incorporation. Thought in these terms, the line becomes a model of social organization that underwrites a mimetic reflex; based on a subconscious call to order, it is a pronouncement of the preordained that gives onto an understanding of social space itself as an elaborate construct—a location, as Flanagan puts it, that is “symbolic, coded and loaded.”

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John C. Welchman Helen Flanagan: Exhibitions of Mediality Author Title

Remember Remembering— Intertwined Memories in Che-Yu Hsu’s Work

Paulo Miyada

“The intrinsic substance of life is language.”

—Chang Chung-I in Che-Yu Hsu’s video work Single Copy (2019)

1.

My first notes suggested that this text should ask itself if it is possible to borrow someone else’s memories. But a careful and sustained look at Che-Yu Hsu’s work raised a different question: is it possible to have any memories that are not at least partly composed of someone else’s memories?

One could examine that question with the help of neurology and neurolinguistics. Che-Yu Hsu’s work offers a different avenue of approach, one that emerges from the strange, though not uncommon, intertwining of literary narrative and forensic science. Each one of his works explores a combination of individual memories, family memories, and collective memories.

To stage them for the camera, these memories are channeled through a myriad of resources, from reenactments to the writing of testimonies and scripts. In this way, that which might exist exclusively as an intangible recollection starts to take shape, giving birth to a process that might include, for example, an invitation for someone to return to the place where a certain event happened; or that might imply the production of digital animations; or involve the work of forensic experts; or set in motion the writing of a literary text. And so on. As these initiatives intermingle, an abundance of images and texts emerges: these are what will eventually be arranged into an essayistic filmic montage—that is to say, into a flux of associations and thoughts that organizes a range of narratives into a coherent form, one that is not necessarily faithful to the conventional borders between document and fiction.

The first effect of this essayistic mnemonic method is to create the impression that each video by Che-Yu Hsu is as much a work about other people’s memories as about his personal reminiscences and reflections. Here and there, scars from family conflicts show through. At other moments, we catch glimpses of the paradoxes characteristic of the unique geopolitical condition of the territory where the artist was born and raised. In a complementary manner, there are narrative lacunae that can be attributed to the subjective choices of an artist who sees other people’s histories through the lens of his own experience—or, rather, of an artist who lives his own history thanks to the possibility of borrowing that of others.

At a second level of reflection, it gradually becomes clear that what motivates Che-Yu Hsu’s work is not so much the desire to show that the intertwining contamination of memories is possible. Its focus, rather, is on accepting that intertwining is inevitable and on proceeding to an exploration of the effects and limits of that contamination process.

There is, for example, an anecdote that seems particularly intriguing to the artist, given that he has referred to it in different works over the years. It is traditional in Taiwan to produce memorial portraits of a family member who is old or deceased and to place these images in home shrines. They are usually full-body portraits, in which the subject being honored is shown seated in an armchair that is placed at the center of a decorated space. What Che-Yu Hsu finds so attractive about these paintings is that, once specialized shops started to serialize them, it became quite common for different families to have memorial images of their dear ones embodied by the same image. The only difference from one portrait to the next is the physiognomy, since the subject’s face is invariably a photograph carefully fitted on the pre-painted body.

Many people might read that as an example of the loss of the aura in the age of the image’s mechanical reproducibility, as Walter Benjamin argued eighty-five years ago. Che-Yu Hsu,

however, seems more interested in the involuntary gains made possible by the image’s lack of specificity: that lack seems to open up the space for an atavistic collectivity to be present in an individual representation through a process of superimposition that, moreover, disperses aleatory and invisible threads that can produce unsettling moments of serendipity.

The premise of A Letter to Su Wanqin (2016) is the artist’s attempt to find the oldest example he could of a memorial portrait that used the same base painting as the memorial portrait of his grandfather. This took him to Su Wanqin, a 103-year old man who had fought in China in the 1940s as a Japanese soldier, and was the oldest living member of the Chinese Nationalist Party. The sharing of the same pictorial body was enough of a pretext for Che-Yu Hsu to send Su Wanqin a letter, which his son answered.

The point is that we do not manage to construct memories without borrowing, because, in truth, subjects are not the watertight entities we might imagine them to be. Language animals, we are also social beings who get by only because we are full of alterity—like the family, social circles, the city, the country, the planet.

2.

Here, I must ask the reader to allow me to say something about the moment in which this text was written. We are in June, 2020, and the world is living with different levels of social distancing in the hopes of slowing down the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. With distancing, the idea of individuals as the autonomous cells of social experience reached an unprecedented level of tangibility. As comings and goings have been restricted, either totally or partially, the social fabric has been torn and grown dependent, for the most part, on virtual mediations and translations (and on a voluminous infrastructure for the distribution of foods and goods). People have started to spend a considerably larger amount of time with themselves and their thoughts, habits, and sensations. And yet, the results of this compulsory social experiment have not necessarily pointed towards the singularity of each experience, but have instead shown just how pervasive certain patterns of behavior and emotion can be among individuals who are seemingly so different. Putting aside social differences (and these were highlighted when they reflected the different capacities for self-care in an emergency context), what stands out in the abundance of narratives and confessions about the experience of social distancing is their relative homogeneity. Experiences, anxieties, fears, solitudes, frustrations, and similar woes are repeated, in a phenomenon that results in the possibility that innumerable messages or commentaries will reveal themselves through one or another of the widely-circulating virtual “memes.”

We are, supposedly, unique individuals. By isolating ourselves, however, we come to realize the extent to which we are part of an organism whose substance is a powerful mass of atavistic memories that passes through time and space. In a text published in the New York Times in April of this year, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk—who says that he has been working on a historical novel about the bubonic plague of 1901—stresses the similarities between our present response and the response to other plagues across history, and in so doing he identifies recurring patterns of behavior towards the unrelenting presence of death: persecutorial delirium and xenophobic arguments that desperately try to find scapegoats—foreigners, enemies, strangers, etc. Thus, Pamuk finds in our memory the roots of our collective behavior in the face of a pandemic that has so often been described as a catastrophe without precedents.

It is precisely in such instances of the reiteration of the collective in the individual that this sort of historical reasoning, permeated by literature and nourished by forensic research, can be so revealing.

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Paulo Miyada Remember Remembering—Intertwined Memories in Che-Yu Hsu’s Work

3.

One of the elements that has been most consistently ignored in the debate about the relevance of public monuments and the legitimacy of their being toppled is the historical specificity of the gesture of erecting, and destroying, collective symbols. Faithful to the explicit symbolisms of the statues, we tend to concentrate our attention on the represented historical figures—and to create in the present a trial to determine whether or not they merit being revered in public spaces. But that is only part of the story. The other part consists in evaluating, first, who built the monument in question, and with what political and discursive intentions; and, second, who will (or will not) bring it crashing down, and with what protagonism and performativity. When seen through that lens, the debate about monuments ceases to be consumed by the effort to separate legitimate from illegitimate heroes and becomes instead a symbolic chess game, an intervention into the fluid and profound morass of a community’s collective memory.

This implies that, whatever the case may be, the action in the present will not undo the cognitive effects that initially prompted the building of the monument, and that has kept it standing to this day. By the same token, the present action cannot ignore the fact that even the most authoritarian creation of allegories is not immune to the entropy of meaning that acts upon symbolic systems. At the same time, this engagement with the question underscores the signifying tenor of the gestures that topple and destroy: much as they may seem eminently negative, they can in fact function as the impetus for the future production of new discursivities.

Single Copy (2019) is an essayistic video in which Che-Yu Hsu investigates the peculiar case of two human beings who were raised to the condition of national monuments. Chang Chung-I and Chang Chung-jen were conjoined twins, and were born in Taiwan in 1977, during the period of martial law that kept the region under strict control and in a tense autonomy from the People’s Republic of China. The separation of their bodies was both delicate and labor intensive: in 1979, the toddlers underwent the first surgery to separate conjoined twins in Taiwan. Broadcast live to the entire country for twelve hours, the operation was subliminally interpreted as a symbol for the country’s desire for separation and national autonomy.

Che-Yu Hsu’s video approaches that history from the present through a multifaceted collaboration with Chang Chung-I, the only surviving twin—Chang Chung-jen died in February, 2019. Chang Chung-I is the protagonist and narrator of his life’s history, and in a first-person narrative he tells us that, prior to the surgery, the hospital had asked an artist to make a silicone mold of the brothers: “two heads, four hands, and three legs.” The molding had not worked, however, as the twins would not hold still for long enough.

From then on, the toddlers whose separation was transformed into a monument grew into an uncanny species of celebrity, and each of them was engaged in artistic activities. Chang Chung-I’s narrative not only navigates through different moments of his life, it also mentions memories related to him by Che-Yu Hsu. As might be expected, a significant part of the narrative focuses on the surgery and the implications it had for someone who lived through the intriguing experience of sharing a leg with his conjoined twin: a living and active limb that could be controlled and felt by two people was removed so that they could exist autonomously. But one also finds, in the narrative’s to-and-fro, clusters of memory that were formed around seemingly banal episodes, around events of representation and projects that had happened in the past and that emerge in the video as dreams or hauntings.

One of these clusters focuses on resuming the task of producing a mold of the body of the film’s protagonist. Che-Yu Hsu hired a technician to produce something that had been impossible to do with the conjoined twin toddlers four decades earlier, resulting in the scenes that organize the beginning and the end of the video, and in a sculpture that integrates its video installation. Yet another cluster complementary to the narrative is formed around a setting

that restages the location in which Chang Chung-I and his brother recorded a film scene twenty years earlier. Something seems to draw the character like a magnet to the reminiscence of that film shoot as he wanders the space like a temporally out of sync double of himself. The point of intersection between these two clusters is the digital insertion of tridimensional avatars of Chang Chung-I children, who were collaterally produced when Che-Yu Hsu took Chang Chung-I and his family to make the digital mold of his body using photogrammetry, a digital process that “sculpts” a tridimensional model from more than hundreds of photographs taken simultaneously.

With these choices, the video slips away from the macro-politics that inscribed itself (biopolitically) into the bodies of the conjoined twins from Taiwan and constructs a memorial portrait of a life lived in negotiation with the symbolic meaning attributed to it. From up close, the lacunas and phantasies of memory become tangible, meaninglessness of such arbitrary attribution of symbolism is intensified, and the monument becomes a rumor.

That could be a desirable fate for many of the monuments that we read today as hauntings or reiterations of the violence of the past continues to perpetrate on the present: that their material and symbolic stability be corroded, that they be transformed into shadows, shards, anecdotes, tales of love and separation, horror stories, props, barricades, projectiles, and, lastly, that they start to exist only as rumors. Thus, metabolized by our collective memory, they would continue to be part of the mold of our existence—which is unavoidable even when they end up being destroyed—but would be devoid of their aura of perennial authority.

For that to happen, we have to undercut the idea that individual experience is shaped by collective memory, and push the idiosyncrasies of life to shatter the assumed stability of hegemonic symbols of power. Doing that is a mnemonic operation: a linguistic exercise.

Nikolay Karabinovych: Zapovit [Testament]

John C. Welchman

1. À la recherche The motor force of the work of Nikolay Karabinovych turns on the fulcrum of historical research, or, more precisely, on a series of inquiries into the production and reception of histories—so that what they pivot around is also part of a shifting system of meaning and value.

The histories in question are set among a wide array of personal, genealogical, geographical, and cultural horizons that converge on what the artist has termed the construction and circulation of “fluid identities” in Eastern Europe after the demise of its socialist regimes beginning in the mid-1980s. In some works, such as The Voice of Thin Silence (2018), the quotients of history and autobiography furnish points of departure and gestures of materialization that are directly orchestrated by the historical record.

In this case, Karabinovych and his father made a journey to the village of Shelek (or Chilik) in Kazakstan, where his great-grandfather had been exiled with those identified as ethnic Greeks—along with other displaced minorities, including Chechens and Volga Germans—after WWII. Predicated on Josef Stalin’s abundant and accelerating paranoia, the deportations were a mode of state-decreed ethnic cleansing that started in the 1930s with the forced relocation of some three million kulaks, peasants, and minorities and continued apace during and after the war, when another three and a half million ethnic minorities were forcibly uprooted and moved to mostly remote locations in Siberia and Central Asia before Stalin died in 1953.

Attrition rates were appalling, with as many as 43% of exiles dying en route, of disease or starvation in their inhospitable new environments.

Ranged along the Black Sea coast and hinterland of present-day Ukraine, Crimea, and the Caucasus, the Pontic Greeks, like the Crimean Tatars and other non-Slavic minorities (Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks and even a small population of Crimean Italians), were condemned en masse as sympathizes of the Axis powers and systematically purged from a region where they had lived for centuries—and, in the case of the Greeks, for some two millennia. One of the largest deportations occurred from May to June 1944, when some 200,000 Crimean Tatars along with 37,000 Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks—the latter numbering around 15,000—were dispatched to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (Karabinovych’s grandfather was deported half a decade later, in 1949, a testament to the ongoing waves of cleansing). 1 The Soviet displacements were part of the larger wave of reflex xenophobia that defined the first half of the twentieth century, from the pogroms in Eastern Europe between the 1880s and early 1900s and the Armenian genocide (1915-16) through to the ultimate atrocity of the holocaust; but which included waves of pogroms in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, the “repatriations” of Soviet citizens sanctioned by the Allied Powers after WWII, and the war time internment of Japanese Americans and the McCarthy “trials” of the early 1950s in the US. Two generations removed from the events of the 1940s, and having lived with almost none of their direct consequences, the question Karabinovych resolved to face turned on how to mark or otherwise intervene in the history and experience of his grandfather’s exile. What could be flagged or put into question in this regard? And on what terms and with what possible consequences and effects?

If The Voice of Thin Silence engages—at least at first—with history as a dark, foreboding, and fateful sentence of exile, Karabinovych’s other work unfolds a series of collisions with

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Paulo Miyada Remember Remembering—Intertwined Memories in Che-Yu Hsu’s Work

1. Karina V. Korostelina, Social Identity and Conflict: Structures, Dynamics, and Implications (New York: Springer, 2007), p. 9.

different—and parallel—effects of historical reckoning. In Ukrainians: The People Who Couldn’t Go Home, for example, the artist makes recourse to a transhistorical negotiation between a popular cultural event and a construct of identity funded by a pair of moments—both animated by what we could term export culture—that were brought together by chance in (the recording of ) a 1981 concert by the Manchester new wave band New Order (formed by vocalist and guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris in 1980, and joined by Gillian Gilbert on keyboards later that year) at the Ukrainian National Home, a speakeasy on Second Avenue in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Around the year that the artist’s great-grandfather was deported to Kazakhstan—roughly the same distance east of Manchester that New York is to the West—the émigré community of Little Ukraine reached a peak population of some 60,000.

Prompted by a seemingly random outcropping of fortuitous symmetry, the premise of Ukrainians: The People Who Couldn’t Go Home (2018) is built on a gesture of transhistorical overlay already present in the artist’s found material. For the VHS tape of New Order’s East Village gig, shot and edited by Michael Shamberg, is launched by establishing shots of a portrait of the Ukrainian national poet Taras Schevchenko hanging above the venue’s stage, after which the recording was titled. 2 This gesture of situational improvisation cross-hatches a live performance of emblematically laconic Mancunian post-punk with the figure of the Ukrainian laureate—also an ethnographer, painter, and illustrator—who was born a serf in 1814, revivified the “Little-Russian” language (as Ukrainian was pejoratively described in the 19th century), and was, like Karabinovych’s great-grandfather a century later, involuntarily dispatched to Kazakhstan. 3 2. Axis [“it’s amazing how rubbery you can be when you’re not expecting something”] 4 Ukrainians: The People Who Couldn’t Go Home amplifies the dissonant conjugation of these events by subjecting them to further rounds of apparently decontextualized insinuation. The structure of the work thus eventuates by way of an axial rotation or selective augmentation of the historical record that crystalizes another order of relationality—governed by neither fate nor decree, on the one hand, nor by the jumps and lacunae of transhistorical juxtaposition, on the other. Instead, Karabinovych twists and supplements the coincident events that funded his points of departure by means of various principles of recasting and restaging. The axis does double service here, standing for both the route between these contingencies and the (sometimes rubbery) turns they necessitate and provoke.

For Ukrainians: The People Who Couldn’t Go Home, the artist commissioned a “cover” of New Order’s “Chosen Time” by eleven members of the Manchester-based Orlyk Folk Dance Ensemble along with two accordionists. The idea of “covering” supplies much of the rotational energy of this work: in addition to another group standing in for the “original”—but utilizing different musical and dance idioms—Karabinovych re-mobilizes the first track on the VHS tape (which broke out after the Schevchenko zoom) and thus uncovers and reaffirms the founding cultural elision between transatlantic post-punk and Ukraine. Further, the grounds of the covering are rooted in a construct of time pointed to in the title of the New Order track.

Founded only a year before their East Village gig, following the suicide in 1980 of Joy Division epigone Ian Curtis, the lyrics of New Order’s first LP, Movement, were haunted by this loss and the questions it provoked. “Chosen Time” seems to allude to these circumstances by negotiating ambiguously between the temporal frameworks of choice and destiny—which correlate, more or less, with the coordinates we have already marked: the free calibrations of the transhistorical, and the tragic eventuations of fate. The covering at stake in Ukrainians: The People Who Couldn’t Go Home thus posits the overlay of these two reckonings with time, but refuses the polarization between them by opening up other rounds of reference.

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John C. Welchman Nikolay Karabinovych: Zapovit [Testament]

In another reprise of the situational logic underwriting the Ukrainian National Home concert and tape, Karabinovych appropriated his title from a 1978 BBC documentary, Ukrainians: The People Who Couldn’t Go Home, a borrowing that simultaneously underscores the association of Ukrainian national identity with emigration and migration and folds in a humorous allusion to the nocturnal nomadism of the post-punk and associated club scenes of the US and UK in the early 1980s. In addition, a number of satellite pieces comment, sometimes mischievously, on the framing devices of the project itself. Notable is an arrangement that interposes a copy of the New Order VHS tape between volumes three and four of a five-book set of the writings of Shevchenko, thus transforming the books into bookends and the tape (now an axis passing through) into a bookmark set in their midst.

For The Voice of Thin Silence, Karabinovych brought fate into contact with contingency by mobilizing another musical commission—this time from the Berlin-based musician, DJ, and producer Yuriy Gurzhy. 5 The artist asked for a work in dialogue with the plaintive, rhythmically innovative rebetiko style, an early- and mid-20th century fusion of Greek and Anatolian musical traditions. Rebetiko emerged as part of the gangster and drug den underworlds of Smyrna, Athens, and Piraeus; it was associated early on with urban poverty, protest, and disenfranchisement, and deeply marked by the genocide of Pontic and Anatolian Greeks in the 1920s and 1930s, often referred to as the Asia Minor Catastrophe. 6 Collaborating with some of the Greek inhabitants of Chilik, Karabinovych set up a makeshift pole in the outskirts of town, topped by a loudspeaker wired to broadcast Gurzhy’s tribute composition into the enveloping steppe beyond the city limits.

Bracketed by almost futile sonic dissemination from a lone high speaker seemingly abstracted from a concentration camp perimeter, the artist offered the project a poetic-cum-theological subtext by way of a title borrowed from the first Book of Kings in the Old Testament.

There, the prophet Elijah is party to a divine exchange on Mount Sinai in the form of what is referred to as a “gentle breeze,” or “the still, thin voice of silence.” As the Russian critic Viktor Misiano notes, the communicative diminuendo (gentle, still, thin … silent) pointed to in the biblical text is prefaced by a series of violent eruptions of natural forces (wind, earthquake, and fire) which order the experience of prophetic inspiration by way of a paradoxical couplet: as earth-rending power is combined with the beatitude of an unfathomable immediacy engendered by (almost) soundless communion.

As my own grandfather, W. E. Booth Taylor, noted in his study, The Prophetic Word, completed in 1945, a few years before Karabinovych’s great-grandfather was sent into exile, however one understand the rule of God over history and the larger “Providence that overrules,” these superscriptions must always be set against “the deadly peril of [the] national and religious exclusivism” 7 that ravaged Europe in the mid-20th century. Yet, the matter is not so simple. First, Yahweh’s divine ordination is not manifest in the dramatic or sublime reorderings of nature with which Elijah is at first confronted—and in which the scripture insists God was not present (though He may have delivered)—but is, instead, camouflaged 2. In 2001 the tape was remastered and rereleased on DVD as New Order 3 16 by Warner Music Vision and London Records, combining the 9 tracks of the November 18, 1981, concert at the Ukrainian National Home (Taras Shevchenko) with the 11 tracks of New Order’s performance at the Reading Festival, August 30, 1998.

3. While in exile in the Russian military garrison in Orenburg, near the Ural Mountains, Shevchenko was seconded on the “Konstantin” as part of the first Russian naval expedition to the Aral Sea in 1848.

4. Peter Hook, last sentence of the entry “19 November 1981: New Order play the Ukrainian National Home, New York,” in Substance: Inside New Order (London: Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 82.

5. Founder of the band Emigrantski Raggamuffin Kollektiv RotFront (a world music fusion of reggae, ska, dancehall, klezmer, and hip hop) in 2003, Yuriy Gurzhy complied Borsh Division: Future Sound of Ukraine, released by Trikont in 2016.

6. See Jim Sclavunos (drummer of Nick Cave’s The Bad Seeds), “So good, they made it illegal,” The Guardian, Sunday April 18, 2004 [https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2004/apr/19/guesteditors3]; and Gail Holst-Warhaft, Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek Sub-culture, Songs of Love, Sorrow and Hashish (Limni, Greece: Harvey & Co., 1975).

7. W. E. Booth Taylor, foreword, The Prophetic Word (London: Carey Press, n.d. [c. 1946]), p. 7.

in that almost imperceptible “still… voice” (sometimes translated as “a delicate, whispering voice”). This voice, secondly, delivers a number of mandates to the prophet about royal and religious succession; proscriptions, followed by Elijah, that give rise to a purge from Syria and Israel of all who do not conform to the monotheistic diktat handed down by renouncing the worship of Baal. The two anointed kings and Elijah’s successor thus act as territorial and providential guarantors of the cleansing from the region of all worship not in conformity with Jewish monotheism.

While Karabinovych’s Chilik project refers most immediately to the disaggregation of futility associated with a sound that peters out into the adjacent vastness—a message that is lost, physically, in its own faint resonance, but endures in the form of manifest destiny—there is a more powerful message caught up in the paradox of prophecy itself. For any attempt to legislate the future, especially one fortified by divine imperative, is predicated on the subjugation of those who are deemed to stand outside the purview of what will be delivered. In this light, any mode of prophesy uttered on behalf of a religious, ethnic, or national formation is itself complicit with the cleansing—or annihilation—of whatever or whoever stands in its way. This uncomfortable paradox is one of the several means by which Karabinovych comes to terms with the contingent imprint of history and the contradictions everywhere apparent in the drive not just to improve or perfect it, but also to remember… and revise.

On Exploiting and Exploring: An interview with Diego Lama by Martin Germann Peruvian artist Diego Lama (b. 1980) has created a body of work that bridges the precarious field between the moving and the still image, history and coincidence, meaning and entropy, nature and culture, and, most simply yet essentially, between object and image. All of this is rooted in a deep knowledge of the eternal rhetoric of history painting—in the sense that all Modernist-informed art still reflects on its preformulated structures of representation.

Lama’s work has unfolded, over the last twenty years, with a particular slowness, moving at its own, thoughtful pace, a characteristic that is in fact present in each singular piece he has produced. They are united by a certain elegance in approaching their respective subjects, as well as a clear and fearless attitude towards effect, sumptuousness, and pathos as essential human needs.

The work’s starting point is the sociocultural reality of the artists’ home country, Peru. He can command a metaphorical and visually bold language to measure that sociocultural reality by following it—step by step, work by work—across many themes and local political issues.

He juxtaposes the nation’s asymmetrical realities—cultural, economic, and political—and in so doing he sometimes even creates images that tilt towards the humorous. It is only through that double-sidedness that his works are able to talk about reality as such.

From here, Diego Lama’s work becomes a metaphor for the global reality, of which Peru is part, as a country on the Western side of South America—and this at a moment in time when ideas about the center and the periphery are finally starting to collapse. Diego Lama found his very own artistic place and language in a space in between, from which he destabilizes reality while simultaneously creating new connections.

Martin Germann: Tell me about your most recent project, from which we can start to navi-

gate together through your oeuvre to this point. What are you working on at the moment?

Diego Lama: I’m working on several works at once, and all of them explore ideas of awareness

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John C. Welchman Nikolay Karabinovych: Zapovit [Testament]

and visibility from different points of view, such as the introspective, the cultural, or the social. The first one is Sisyphus Happy, a film that takes Camus’ philosophical essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” as a conceptual framework to reflect on the artist’s condition. The film focuses its narrative on a factory robot, a tool for automated labor that epitomizes capitalism, and is often perceived as an anthropomorphization of technology. In this case, the robot is programmed to depict images using a burin as a drawing tool and car parts as canvases; this conflation of a high precision tool and an act of vandalism to explore the idea of purpose in purposelessness challenges the reasoning behind profitability in efficacy.

Another piece is Cause célèbre, a film that documents an action performed at MSK-Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, where three art handlers toss a brick between them for a whole hour without dropping it. As the title indicates, the action is an analogy that winks at how a particular political topic is handled, though the set-up introduces several layers to its narrative. The museum holds a large collection of paintings from the Flemish canon, which mirrors a contemporary political standpoint. Historically, artworkers have been underpaid to perform high-risk duties, thus serving as the backbone of cultural institutions that are inevitably engaged in a capitalist model that commodifies the artwork. For the video, they were paid the minimum wage to perform a purposeless task, hence translating governmental bureaucracy into the art system. The brick is an element that represents the potential for construction, but that potential can never be realized while it is trapped in a purposeless game.

And, lastly, there is Theme for a Western Imaginary, a piece that looks at the history of Comet 67P/C-G, from its discovery in 1969, to landing on it in 2014, and to the mythology it has spawned.

What is of particular interest to me is the contextualization of technological development in parallel to the history of my country, since the discovery of the comet coincides with Peru’s land reform, which shifted the postcolonial social fabric of the country, and in that sense relativized elements of visibility and communication.

MG: Did this scientific discovery happen in Peru? And do the themes you work on grow in the

sense that one thing comes out of another? I imagine that one could connect this new project to your impressive film about the deserted radio telescope, a work that left a lasting impression on me. It seems that a more graspable issue has found an entry in the new project, given that you speak about the land reform.

DL: The discovery certainly didn’t happen in Peru, but that’s exactly why this historical relativization is interesting to me. The land reform in Peru restarted a long overdue process of decolonization, one that hasn’t stopped yet. In those terms, the idea of discovering and coveting a piece of land that lies beyond our grasp, together with the technological developments that have followed since, serve as an analogy to the elaboration of a chronological narrative that questions the country’s history. You could say that this piece is connected to the film you mention, Expansion Observable, in the themes of research, exploration, and visibility, and its socioeconomic impact as well, but I wouldn’t call it a continuation. My research shifts in a wave pattern, heavily influenced by scientific and technological development, but also by the natural progress of my language.

MG: Now that you mention it, let’s talk about your language, because … well, indeed, every

artist has some kind of a vocabulary to draw from. What exactly do you mean by “natural progress,” and where did it start?

DL: In my case, I could denote three distinct stages. The first one consisted of media consumption, starting in my teenage years with music videos in a pre-internet era, and cinema, which came later on, from which I learned codes and gathered references. A second stage is marked by the release of digital video technology into the consumer market, which created a technological democratization that allowed me to experiment with media and achieve technical proficiency. And, lastly, a third stage in which I started showing my works in different kinds of venues, like film festivals, biennials, art fairs or exhibitions, where I could have feedback and cater to different types of audiences, thinking about the pieces not only as content but also as an experience. In that sense the evolution of my language came very organically.

MG: But perhaps there is also another stage, or rather level: your imagery is from time to time quite

voluptuous, maybe even sculptural. Recently, you shot a film in a museum about a particular history painting, so please tell me a bit more about how your work connects to painting.

DL: In several ways, actually. Of course, the obvious and immediate one is my training and education. When I set myself on the path to being an artist, I started painting, which means that I shaped my gaze as a painter first. Not surprisingly, when I began experimenting with moving images, I wanted to approach them with the same contemplativeness I had—as a creator, but also as an observer—with painting. On the other hand, the creative process while painting is much more introspective and self-analytical, and unsurprisingly there is a long history of filmmakers who approach topics related to psychoanalysis, such as Kiarostami, Lynch, Schnabel, Van Sant or Greenaway, all of whom were first trained as painters. In that sense, I’m well aware of the parallels between both media. But a completely different aspect of great interest for me is what painting signifies in several other contexts; in the film Threshold, for example, a 150-year old painting is used to talk about postcolonialism, representation, institutionality, social status, patronage, and commodification in the art system and its sociopolitical implications.

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On Exploiting and Exploring: An interview with Diego Lama by Martin Germann

MG: Can you tell me more about this work, and how it relates to the aspects that you mention

about your home country, Peru, and its history?

DL: Threshold was filmed at MALI, or Lima Art Museum, which has an impressive collection that

extend from the precolonial period to contemporary art. Perhaps its most prized possession is the painting The Funerals of Inca Atahualpa, which Luis Montero Rosas painted in Florence in 1867 and then brought to Peru. It has toured several countries in Latin America, which is quite a feat considering its gargantuan size, twenty-four square meters. The painting depicts the corpse of the last Incan emperor surrounded by mourners, priests, and conquistadors; it recounts a romanticized version of the event that cemented the Spanish colonization in South America. Although this painting is of extreme value to Peruvian art history, its curatorial context in the museum collection of that period is of major significance, since it is the only depiction of a native Peruvian, though it is surrounded by portraits of patrons of European descent.

The idea behind the film was to document and question all these articulations between transaction, representation and narrative, while creating a parallel on the current problems of the Peruvian art system. The motivation for doing the film came after the establishment, and first participation, of the Peruvian pavilion in the Venice Biennale, which sparked a large discussion around the role of art as social representation.

MG: How is it that you feel a particular motivation to care for the Peruvian situation?

DL: Inevitably, my country is part of my identity, so it’s only natural to question all these endem-

ic problems as a way of analyzing myself. On the other hand, my country becomes a starting point to talk about all these topics. How could I approach postcolonialism in general, without talking about my immediate context first? A couple of years ago I ran into this exact situation; I was invited to participate in the Havana Biennale, and while discussing my project with the curator, I proposed to make a work about the tensions between the cultural institutions and the Castro regime, to which the curator suggested that I should first look into the political tensions in my own country. That’s how the film The Act came about.

MG: That’s the film that suggests the slow emergence of a giant cocaine heap amidst the Peru-

vian congress building, accompanied by a Debussy composition. This piece works, as many of your pieces, with a juxtaposition, with the collaging of contrasting images. The same mechanism can be seen in De Falso a Legal en Una Toma, where we witness a very slow camera drive through a dangerous area in Lima, only to end up at the Palace of Justice, thus somehow combining those two impossible worlds. Maybe this is a somewhat complex question, but what is your role as an artist in all this, including from a political standpoint?

DL: I’ve always been drawn to dichotomies where the contrast between both elements potentiates each other, and my role as an artist is to point out and reflect on the articulations of these mechanisms of contradiction. I’ve always had a cynical view during my creative process, which has led me to question my own context and role as an artist, effectively making myself dogmatically anti-dogmatic. You can certainly see this in the film Threshold, where I criticize the curatorial decisions of a museum that owns my work. Having said that, I think all art has the duty to have a political aspect, since it’s impossible to engage in creation while being devoid of context, and, in that sense, I believe that anything that does not have a critical dimension but only with an aesthetic one is not art but decoration.

MG: How do you make use of sound or music to underline those notions?

DL: Sound, or lack thereof, is one of the fundamental aspects of my process. More often than

not I come up with new projects listening to music, setting the tone of the narrative to create another level of contrast with the visual content. It is of particular interest to me to reflect on the intention of the compositions and to subvert them, to give them a new reading. You can

observe this in films like Parricidio or No-Latin Party. As I mentioned earlier, music videos were the earliest form of influence during my training, and it is from that notion that certain codes and rules emerge with which to construct new narratives. But even in a film like Baguaja, where there is only ambient sound, playing with the sense of hearing gives a whole other dimension to the way we understand the piece.

MG: I understand, since the music, like the imagery, is embedded in a political context, from

its composition and production to its reception. However, more recently you have been experimenting a lot with what I would like to call an abstraction within your work. You try to approach images through their sculptural appearance, if I don’t misread you. Can you tell me a bit more about those recent tendencies?

DL: When I first started experimenting with moving images, I approached them with the same imaginary as cinema: I thought only about the content. As soon as I started exhibiting my pieces, though, I developed other interests, like the format and its relation to the audience, leading to ideas like materiality and corporeality. Media art brings with it a sense of ethereality, which I wanted to disrupt with physical elements like architecture, travel, and volume, bringing myself to experiment with installation and sculpture. As these experiments evolved, new questions arose around the concepts of media, representation, and functionality in works like the Intersections sculpture series, where the moving image has a conceptual articulation with a material element. Another example of this is El oro del Peru, where a video of a river in the Amazon forest is projected over a piece of gold leaf made with gold extracted from the same place where the video was shot. Although these experimentations bring new challenges, I view them as another branch of my oeuvre.

MG: If you consider your oeuvre as consisting of branches, we necessarily come to the metaphor

of the tree. The interesting thing about the tree is that the roots are invisible, so an oeuvre, from this perspective, is always open to being reformulated. However, and to conclude: is there a particular new direction towards which you think your work is growing, or could grow? Differently put: is there a project you dream of realizing … one fine day?

DL: I’ve been flirting with the idea of documentary for a while, since its language differs significantly from the work I’ve been doing so far, and in that sense proposes a very interesting challenge. I believe there are several problems in the art world that stem from the lack of access and education, and translate into a perception of elitism that makes audiences reject certain ideas intrinsic to art. On the other hand, there has been a lack of archives and access to information regarding contemporary art in Peru, especially those made during the military regime, and I think that a documentary series is a good way to bridge those two elements.

MG: And, to really conclude: would you be willing to tell me already exactly what you’d like the

subject of that project to be? Or would you prefer to keep it to yourself for now?

DL: It’s still a work in progress, something in the very early stages, but I am fascinated by the

generation of artists who didn’t stop producing during periods of sociopolitical stress, and by the fact that this challenges the notion that culture is not as important as other necessities, something that we’re seeing again during this pandemic. At the same time, there is a very noticeable trend in the art world, one that delves into tokenism and exoticization, so it’s extremely important to me to explore certain aspects of political activism without exploiting the subject.

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On Exploiting and Exploring: An interview with Diego Lama by Martin Germann

The Bodily Burden: Some Thoughts on the Citizens of Štefan Papčo

Jeroen Laureyns

Agency of Mental Guest Labour The Belgian Section

1.

The summer of 2019 must have been one of the most terrible of my life. I had had bad summers before, as for example when I couldn’t stop mourning a broken heart, but the paralysing effect that the abuse of power had on me during the warm holiday months that year had set off all my alarm bells.

I grew up with a deeply depressed father, and his depression taught me to be on the alert for signals that announce the onset of such a terrible breakdown. And so, when I noticed during that summer that my appetite, my sleep, even my libido, were all profoundly disturbed—I even grew afraid of my beloved wife when she caressed me—I realised that I had to do everything to overcome this terrible state.

Psychologists say that there are three basic reactions in the so-called reptile part of the brain when the organism feels threatened: I didn’t flee, which would have been my normal reaction, and I didn’t fight—instead, I was frozen. The basic functions of my body (eat/sleep/ sex) were profoundly disturbed and I couldn’t reason my way out: the rational analysis of the injustice being done to me couldn’t get me out of the state I had fallen into.

“Yes, of course freedom of speech wasn’t respected,” the reasonable part of my mind said. “Yes, it goes without saying that it would be precisely institutions such as these, which should guarantee freedom of speech without the fear of persecution, that are persecuting me. Yes, of course they would threaten me just because I used my freedom of speech within the symbolic spaces, like an opinion piece and a debate, that a democracy has created to make a public debate possible.

Yes, of course many years hence a new generation of people in power would settle that old account.” But all these rational thoughts couldn’t help my body out of the paralyzed state it was in.

And I am convinced that it was exactly this personal experience, this sense of paralysis, that made me instantly fall in love with Štefan Papčo’s sitting wooden sculptures of wrapped and huddled figures, which I saw for the first time at the end of that horrible summer.

2.

I saw some of the Štefan Papčo’s sitting and supine wooden figures for the first time in his studio at the HISK in Ghent, where I had been invited as a guest lecturer. HISK is an international, post-graduate program for young artists, who are given a studio and pedagogical guidance for two years. I remember that, after being immediately struck by the power of his work, I was keenly aware of the striking differences with all the other studio visits that day.

I remember that he was just sitting there on a chair, his elbows resting on his knees, waiting for me to show up; he was surrounded by nothing other than some of his wooden sculptures.

There was no trace of any artistic activity in his studio in Ghent: he had carved the sculptures in his studio in Slovakia and transported them to Belgium, using the studio more as a gallery or even just a display. He couldn’t just move his entire wood workshop to Ghent, so he travelled back and forth from Slovakia to Belgium.

The second thing that struck me was to encounter free-standing figurative sculpture within the more conceptual art context that tends to predominate at the HISK. And, even before Štefan Papčo started to tell me more about the historical background of the artworks on view, the art historical associations that came to my mind were yet another indication of the different artistic road that he had chosen.

The way that these roughly carved wooden figures were sitting or lying on the ground immediately brought to mind the social-realist sculpture Het grauwvuur (1889, The Grey Firedamp),

by the Belgian artist Constantin Meunier, as well as the expressionist sculpture Mutter mit zwei Kinder (1932-1936, Mother with Two Sons), by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz.

The way Štefan Papčo depicted these sitting or supine mountain climbers—wrapped in their sleeping bag, their arms crossed over their chest—it wasn’t difficult to see the similarities between them and a mother sitting on the ground with her legs wide open and her arms around her children, holding and protecting them. The crossed arms shared by the two works belong to the same basic, primary gesture.

Similarly, the mother who is bending slightly over the body of her dead son, lying at her feet like a dead Christ, in Meunier’s social-realist statue is very close to the sculptures that Štefan Papčo has made of famous Slovakian mountain climbers, which depicts them at the moment they were seeking shelter and rest in the inhospitable mountains where they chose to climb during communist times.

Moreover, both Meunier’s social-realist sculpture and Štefan Papčo’s work are connected to a very specific political and historical context. Meunier’s sculpture is based on the tragic death of 120 miners in the Borinage, in Belgium, in 1887; Papčo, for his part, returns to the specific historical context of a communistic Czechoslovakia, where the craze for mountain climbing was a kind of “peaceful resistance,” Elena Sorokina writes, trying to capture what the poses convey and to suggest how history can be experienced at the most basic, instinctive level.

It’s this embodied approach to history in a classical figurative medium which led me to wonder if Papčo is part of a broader, fundamental Aristotelean turn in the history of contemporary art.

3.

If we go back to the beginning of this text, it’s clear that a very personal experience played an important role in my aesthetic judgement. Without the acute feeling of being paralysed, the identification with Papčo’s Citizens might not have been as strong. Such, however, is exactly the exceptional artistic quality of this work: the act of copying a visual reality in an almost old-fashioned, figurative way not only made the identification much more direct, personal, and strong, but also showed me how, at a very deep personal level, oppressive political structures that do not guarantee the liberty of thought or the freedom of opinion can be felt and seen in body language.

If the Citizens are cold, it is not just because they are exhausted, or because they are camping in difficult circumstances at high altitudes: they are frozen as well by their lack of political liberty under a communist regime, much as my body was suffering under the abuse of power.

It seemed to me that the old Aristotelean aesthetics of mimicking a visual reality, in which the viewer can identify with and experience a feeling of relief through catharsis, can still lead to a vital form of contemporary art.

Still, it isn’t just the Aristotelean turn in his art: Papčo surpasses the old dialectics of 20th-century art, and that is what makes this artist so important. For much of the 20th century, the main battle, until it was overshadowed by the readymade, was the one between figurative and abstract art.

When Papčo returns to figurative sculpture, it’s not a regressive move, a rejection of abstract or readymade art. Rather, he revives and restores a marginalized medium, like sculpture, and an artistic language, like figurative art, and he also integrates minimal art, performance, video, and the readymade into his work. But to know if this other part of his work could provoke the same profound aesthetic experience, I would have to see these works in real life.

For now, I stick to the idea that his free-standing, figurative wooden sculptures show us a less trodden path in contemporary art: they make us feel like a new wind is blowing through the approaches to art that have been so dominated by the readymade.

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Jeroen Laureyns The Bodily Burden: Some Thoughts on the Citizens of Štefan Papčo

Diary Notes for Oussama Tabti

Jeroen Laureyns

Agency of Mental Guest Labour The Belgian Section

I don’t know if every encounter with a great work of art comes with a shock comparable to being struck by lightening, but that is exactly what happened to me when I first saw Tête d’Arabe by Oussama Tabti in his studio in Ghent. I met the artist for the first time during his stay at this post-graduate program in Belgium in September 2019, during a time in my life when I was facing the paralysing effect the abuse of power had on me, and the fact that freedom of speech isn’t guaranteed in the country I live in, but instead must bend to the most timeless, universal, and primary kind of intimidation that we all intuitively know, but hope not to face.

I don’t know if this state of mind played an important role in my aesthetic judgement of Tête d’Arabe, but it was not difficult to see the role that Oussama Tabti had chosen as an artist: the well-known political conceptual identity, with its ethical mission to reveal plain and painful truths, following the liberal path of modern art that started when democratic states were founded and artists like Daumier used their new-born autonomy to embody the fundamental democratic right to freedom of speech and to use their art to criticize men in power.

But before I get deeper into the meaning of Tête d’Arabe, I have to mention another remarkable event that happened during the first week I spent as a guest lecturer, when I was visiting seven to eight studios a day and talking for an hour with young and promising artists from all over the world. It’s an event that led me to confront the difficult, and unanswered, moral questions that continue to occupy my thoughts, including during the writing of this text.

One evening during that intense week as a visiting lecturer, and without even thinking, I said to Oussama Tabti, who was looking for a chair while attending a lecture: “If I were sculptor looking for a model to make a new Hercules, I would ask you.” I was amazed to notice his tall stature for the first time; I had already talked to him some days earlier, but we were seated at a table. I don’t know if he really understood what I had said: he just laughed and sat down.

However, I immediately regretted my words, fearing that they would elicit an angry reaction, or prompt the revelation of an inconvenient truth about the colonial gaze.

The reason I spontaneously made the association between his tall stature and the Hercules Farnese statue is obvious: both belong to the world of art, the Hercules Farnese being a standard marble statue in Western art history, where the body of this tall, muscled, and naked man is made even more impressive by the height of that Roman statue and by the resting pose of the lion he has just skinned. Still, it was probably the curly beard and hair, which Hercules and Oussama share, that led me to connect them. (Just have a look at the beautiful black-andwhite portrait picture of the artist on his website and compare it with the Hercules Farnese and you will understand what I mean.)

I could start elaborating on how I associate the country that Tabti comes from, Algeria, with Western Roman history, as it is situated in the mental map that I inherited from my classical Latin and Greek education. But that could lead me even deeper into the cultural identity swamp debate that has come to dominate the times we live in. The most important thing is that my remark started to trouble me in such a way that I started to regard it as a necessary effect of the kind of work that he makes.

I profoundly dislike the outworn phrase that art has to raise questions. Still, I realized that the importance of Oussama Tabti’s work lies in its capacity to hit the heart of a collective bad consciousness when I first saw his Tête d’Arabe.

Oussama Tabti was born in Algiers in 1988. In 2010, he said goodbye to his Algerian training as a graphic designer and turned to the arts in France with the work Deuxième Partie, which is composed of three old fashioned television screens where only the middle one shows us

moving black-and-white images with sound, while the remaining two screens show the old fashioned test screen and noise. This televised critique summarizes the reductive official historical vision of the past that, by leaving out the pre- and post-colonial eras, threatens to become a collective kind of victimhood, which is just as much a dead-end street as its Western counterpart, which denies, minimalizes or otherwise finds ways to wash the blood off of their colonial hands.

It’s this moral quality of self-critique that charmed me when Tabti showed me this work, and it made me think of Hans Haacke’s infamous 1970s photographic triptych about the complicity between the electronics company Philips and the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Liberty is one of the foundational values of a constitutional democracy, and so is equality, another value that Tabti was aiming at when he created his Amsterdam Treaty installation in 2013, where the stars of the EU flag are protected by anti-pigeon spikes.

The artistic variation on flags in general, and the European flag in particular are countless: there is Christophe Terlinden’s 1999 reimagining of the stars on the EU flag as a yellow circle that subsumed the twelve stars; there is Banksy, whose mural in Dover, where one of the stars on the flag was cut out following the Brexit vote. Tabti’s EU pigeon flag fits right into that artistic lineage by bluntly showing the double standard and new global apartheid regime that governs travelling and working. We in the West take it for granted that we can go on holidays wherever we want and can work anywhere in the world; non-Westerners, however, don’t have the same kind of rights and are being kept out of the European Union by a brutal anti-refugee and anti-migration policy, as if they were vermin threatening our well-maintained and amply supplied house.

The moral strength of these works is the fact that this confrontation in the mirror isn’t directed only at the West, but also at his Algerian background: Tabti uses the old pedagogical methods of repetition and punishment to show the blind spots both in the collective consciousness of Europeans and Algerians alike. The way that Tabti punishes himself by writing down a famous sentence from a poem by Abdelhamin Ibn Badis—the sentence reads: “The Algerian people are Muslim and belong to Arab world”—is related to the method of writing a sentence as punishment method that John Baldessari used in I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art and Louise Bourgeois used in Je t’aime, Je t’aime, Je t’aime…

Repetition is the key to memorization and conditioning, and that is what Tabti does when he writes down the words “Listen and Repeat” on an old-fashioned green chalkboard. Nowadays, however, it looks like the mainstream and social media have taken over that particular way of indoctrination, either by narrowing down the vocabulary when addressing difficult political subjects (in the case of the mainstream media), or by technologically amplifying the disinhibition outbursts that rule this new and regressive public sphere. The chalkboard and punishment become, almost melancholically, archaeological artefacts of a past era, much like the collection of typical fabrics in the installation Shapes, which gathers the fabrics worn by the first-generation migrants, who came to work in the West after Algeria’s independence.

Like so many other artists, Oussama Tabti is continuing the conceptual, post-painterly tradition of the “artist as anthropologist,” as Joseph Kosuth defined his way of working. But he adds a highly personal and emotional touch to that tradition, much in the way that Tabti’s contemporary, the Lebanese artist Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, was doing just across the street from the HISK in Ghent. Indeed, for his show at the S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Boutros had three different kinds of male shirts hanging, one behind each other; the work, entitled Three Abstractions on Three Histories, subtly reveals the small generational differences in much the same emotional-historical vein as Tabti does in his Shapes.

But the work that really blew my mind was Tête d’Arabe.

38

Jeroen Laureyns Diary Notes for Oussama Tabti

In the version that Oussama Tabti showed me, Tête d’Arabe is a work that unites the covers of six Western magazines featuring Arab leaders, which he presents in old-fashioned painting frames. Seeing that work with the title Tête d’Arabe caused a short-circuiting that led me to write in a short report on the studio visit: if, twenty years hence, I have to explain to my grandchildren how history took place in the first decades of the twentieth century, I would show them this work.

There is no need to explain to the well-educated contemporary reader that a history of the 21th century should start with Al-Qaeda’s spectacular terroristic attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11, and with the War on Terror led by George Bush, whose government started an illegal war that resulted in the destruction of Iraq and whose repercussions can be felt still in the spiral of violence with neo-colonial wars and weapon trade by the West, and in the rise of Islamic terrorism in the East, from the Islamic State to Al Shaabab.

It would lead us too far to get into historical detail of this terrible history, but what is important to understand is how the old racist antagonism between a so-called Enlightened Western civilisation and a barbaric Islamic East became common-sense in Western public opinion, forming a straight line from Pope Urban II, whose propaganda speech against the Muslims, delivered in Carcassonne at the start of the 11th century launched the first crusade, to the terrorists of the Islamic State, who have used the cruel history of the crusades in their bloody propaganda, with videotaped decapitations of Western hostages posted online, and their violent attacks on innocent civilians, both in the West and in the East.

All of this led to a culture of fear that formed the fertile ground both for the rise of extreme right parties and Islamic terrorism. I do not think that I exaggerate when I write that, in 2020, a large majority of the population in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium is deeply convinced that no-one with Muslim roots can ever be as Enlightened as we are in the West. This knee-jerk prejudice has deep historical roots, and it has undergone a terrible revival in the last decades due political history sketched briefly above. But it must be said here racist ideas are still alive in the arts as well.

In recent years, several writers have published important books that call to task the deeply-entrenched ideas about the cultural superiority of the white West. In my personal library, Rachida Aziz’s Nobody Is Going to Sleep Here Tonight, Fikry El Azzouzi’s Malcolm X, and Rachida Lamrabet’s Shut Up You Immigrant are milestones in an emancipatory debate on the blind spots in Western consciousness. And, much like the well-known Critique of Black Reason, they give historical examples of how the double standard of the West is deeply rooted even in the writing and thoughts of the demigods of Enlightenment thinking. To name just one: Alexis de Tocqueville isn’t just the political philosopher who defended democracy and social justice, he is also the thinker who defended the idea of a double standard of citizenship for the French colony of Algeria which effectively turned the non-French inhabitants of the country into children of a lesser God. How deep this conviction still is, even in the art world, was proven when I visited the Delacroix exhibition in the Louvre in 2018. Three paintings stood out as evidence of this double standard: Delacroix glorified French and the Greek revolutionaries in images that are still famous today, and which continue to function as symbols of freedom in the collective memory. And yet, once Delacroix went to Alger, his solidarity with revolutionaries fighting for freedom and democracy disappeared into the most exotifying orientalist views imaginable. Liberté guidant le People for the French, La Grèce sur les ruines for the Greeks, and Femmes d’Alger for the Algerians.

Indeed, instead of pointing out that Delacroix went to Alger at the start of France’s brutal and bloody colonization of that place, the museum text chose instead to inform visitors that he had joined a French diplomatic mission and discovered a new Rome in Alger…

Delacroix was infatuated by oriental women, had no sympathy for Algerian freedom fighters, and dreamt that he was living in a new Rome… So maybe now you understand why I cursed myself for seeing Oussama Tabti as a new Hercules…

What I am trying to say is that West still sees the Arabic world through the binaries of superiority and inferiority, civilized and barbaric. By using the images of Arab leaders on the covers of Western magazines and calling them Tête d’Arabe, Tabti reminds us that those old prejudices are still alive. It goes without saying that Assad, Khadaffi and Morsi cannot be regarded as democratic leaders. But that is not the point. It’s the fact that we can’t imagine that democracy and emancipation can really succeed in the Middle East. Anyone from the East will, sooner or later, be regarded as a Tête d’Arabe, much in the way how, to this day, a painting by the Belgian avant-garde painter Henri Evenepoel at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels is still called L’annonce de la fête nègre à Blida…

We are in desperate need of a Herculean turn in how we imagine one another, a turn that would allow us to overcome the prejudices of the past, and I am convinced that Oussama Tabti’s Tête d’Arabe can contribute to that historical, emancipatory turn.

Luca Vanello: The Everlasting Feeling of Letting Something Go

Matteo Lucchetti

“They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, 2019

In a recent interview, Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia says: “nature is not the kingdom of a constant balance, in which everything has its own place. It is a space for the permanent invention of new living creatures that unsettle any equilibrium. All beings migrate, all beings occupy the house of others. And that, after all, is precisely what life is.” 1 Reading this passage reminded me of my first experience with the work of Luca Vanello in his studio. The pieces lingering on the floor looked in fact like vessels ready for the migration of appearances and meaning, in which familiar things lost their usual shapes and alluded to something else, something that had yet to be deciphered. I recall the unsettling feeling of missing points of reference in reading the white and seemingly lifeless tree branches, which look as if they were made of some plastic material. Next to them, the bent and scarred aluminum tubes looked like they had been infused with some unexpected agency, and that is what had gotten them into trouble.

I learned later that the plants were being treated to a process that removed the chlorophyll, thus halting the energy they usually carry with them; the scars and bend on the tubes, for their part, had been conceived as residues of a past life, where the signs are memories of a life that is no more. Plants and tubes, together with many more repurposed materials, compose Generous Images Unable to Reach. This installative experience, completed in 2018, centers on the emotional journey that accompanies a loss. It explores the space of grief as one of entanglement; it inscribes the many ways in which death can be interpreted, processed, and reinvented, in an open-ended relationship between human and non-human beings. Vanello, in fact, introduced into his installation elements of a recently elaborated discipline, called thanatosensitivity, which tries to blend human-computer interaction, research, and design, into the study of death and mortality, and does so through a humanistic prism that takes into account the emotional implications of such of that experience. For instance, a cerulean light glowed in the corner of the installation, alluding to the tone of the color (RGB #54123124, to be precise) that, following these studies, helps induce acceptance of the loss. On an even more interestingly experimental side, the installation includes materially-reversed plastic components from exteroceptive sensors used in humanoid robotics in an attempt to bridge the gap that separates us from an understanding of the materiality of our feelings. The process enacted here reminds me of the sculptural act of casting an arm or a leg, though here it’s a feeling—or, at least, the synthetic device that mimics it—that is being cast and reproduced.

The artist seems to be asking himself how he can visualize something we cannot touch, but that yet deeply affects us in its absence. What if, starting from technological achievements, we could partake of the metamorphosis of materials into affects, and thus of the subsequent kinships that these newly formed materials generate?

Vanello’s attempt to sculpt affects reminds me of Sara Ahmed’s idea of associating “the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace.” She uses the word impression “to avoid making analytical distinctions between bodily sensation, emotion and thought as if they could be ‘experienced’ as distinct realms of human ‘experience.’” 2 The blurring of bodily and emotional presence one

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Jeroen Laureyns Diary Notes for Oussama Tabti

1. Philosophie Magazine, published on March 26 2020. https://www.philomag.com/articles/emanuele-coccia-le-virus-est-une-force-anarchique-de-metamorphose 2. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 15.

is what allows this artist’s methodology to produce an imagery by stressing the materials to exist in a form that is the result of the impression of an affect on their semblance. This is true also with other elements of the installation: the clothes of a deceased person, for example, were turned into textile fibers and then crystallized through wellness salts. The regeneration process of these clothes originates in the act by which the partner of the deceased sought to preserve them, as a way to ease the suffering and to elude the passing of the event by keeping a reminder of the bodily presence of the loved one. (The artist wisely includes this detail in the lengthy caption of to the work that narrates the complete changes of state that the elements went through.) The decision to transform these clothes, which are linked to anguish and to a ghost of a body, into an object that can soothe and restore the limbs, signals the object’s emancipation and its mutation into the trigger for another perspective, one that allows the viewer to see the potential in such a transformative and yet painful passage. Looking at these seemingly lifeless fragments opens up a broader conversation about death and its social meaning—especially in the light of new interactions between human beings and technology—it is essential, nevertheless, to point out that what happens in the work of Vanello’s work is rooted in a highly factual and sculptural debate. To quote Rosalind Krauss, in Passages in Modern Sculpture, when introducing so-called process art in the paradigm of sculpture: “the process of creating form is, for the sculptor, a visual meditation on the logic of organic growth itself.” 3 It is possible that this statement acquires a new meaning today, especially if we look at how contemporary sculpture, including Vanello’s, is interested in pushing such growth beyond its known limits. If the roots of the artist’s practice are definitely to be found in the processual art of the 1960s and 1970s, with the objects dissipating themselves in space and time through performative gestures, the ramifications we are witnessing today treat in the role of the emotional life of things as the means through which new forms take shape. Vanello’s processual plastic work is therefore built through the role that affects have in our material life; what he does is adopt the ways in which affects regulate our experience of the world. The way to highlight such interventions and transformations is the result of the creation of paradoxical scenarios in which the elements come to play a role in a more extensive dramaturgy. Like the unexpected presence of a thermal blanket in the installation, which owes its part in this elaborate cosmogony because the warmth it produces is equal, in energy, to the consumption of a server that hosts the average amount of data produced by a person in the course of their life. The artist is interested in creating a quasi-ironic twist between an object meant to function with the presence of a human body, against a contemporary representation of what is left of a body in the digital sphere today. Here, once again, we are looking at another fragment of a larger picture, where the artist openly suggests us to reconsider our relationship to mortality, by imagining what he calls “new forms of togetherness as forms of resilience”, places where we can relearn how to exist within a diversity of species that inhabit the world, outside of an anthropocentric perspective. The energy of the blanket is the residue of a digital attempt to gain immortality, namely another sign, in the background, of a human-made unsustainable approach to being.

To understand the importance of such passage, it might be interesting here to turn to Donna Haraway’s discussion of “commonplace thoughtlessness,” which is when “a human being” is “unable to make present to himself what was absent, what was not himself, what the world in its sheer not-one-selfness is and what claims-to-be inhere in not-oneself.” She uses these words to paint the portrait of the Nazi soldier Eichmann, as famously described by Hannah Arendt in the account of his trial in Israel, where he was sentenced to the death for crimes against humanity. The holocaust is, in some ways, the endpoint of humankind, because of the atrocity it represented, and because of the thoughtlessness that allowed human beings to give form to

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Matteo Lucchetti Luca Vanello: The Everlasting Feeling of Letting Something Go

it, and that is characteristic of the “geohistorical conjuncture being called the Anthropocene.”

She continues: “there was no way the world could become for Eichmann and his heirs—us?—a ‘matter of care.’” 4 Haraway suggests that we look elsewhere instead, and that we practice “response-ability,” which means the ability to find responses collaboratively, the skills, essential “for living in ruins,” of “surviving in disturbance and contamination,” Haraway says, quoting anthropologist Anna Tsing. In order to turn the world into a matter of care, we need to start by recognizing the extent to which our life as human beings is entangled with other living and non-living beings: animals, plants, minerals, viruses, and so on. It is not an accident that Vanello decided to focus attentively on the deepest space of vulnerability, which is the one we identify with the concept of death. But what his kaleidoscopic work manages to achieve is to convey a multidisciplinary and multi-species approach to the subject by blurring the ontological boundaries of life and death, in the light of a non-anthropocentric reading of the phenomenon.

Each newly created component of the installation is an exercise aimed at sharing vulnerability across a variety of experiences, fields of knowledge, and individual stories. The exhibition space, emancipated from the modernist and self-affirming device for materials, ideas, and egos, is able to make room for an augmented perceptive space where a general sense of becoming and metamorphosis dominate the logics of interaction between the parts. The use of technology represents an ally in editing the temporality of materials while building new forms of interconnectedness and interdependency across species.

The pandemic we’re living through has obliged us to brutally experience a proximity with a virus that migrates into our bodies to reproduce, and in so doing exposes us to a new precarity while generating new life for itself. This painful paradox involving life and death can function as a reminder of the entanglement that constitutes our biosphere and its inhabitants, much in the same way as Vanello uses the exhibition space as an echo chamber for the times we are living in, and the potential they offer. What if, for instance, the exhibition space could induce an augmented experience of the effect of climate change and thus accelerate a process of social awareness? Could a new magmatic form, composed of plants, minerals, plastic, hormones, and technology, teach us more about these assembled elements than we know on the basis of their formerly separated lives?

The journey that Vanello has embarked on with his artistic practice is also one that has to do with language, and with the expansion of the lexicon we use to describe what we feel, and the repurposing of words that his work generates. Very much like his works, the titles of his projects (Quick caress before departure, then sun; Gratitude permeates childhood; Acre finger harasses your nostril while a petal triggers a moan; Tepid palm sweat, to name a few) are prototypical laboratories where he invents novel connections between things and meanings. Poetic experiments that articulate the gesture of editing time through words, of assembling them in synesthetic and transspecies forms.

In his artistic practice, Luca Vanello explores how the boundaries between the given notions of life, death, beginning, and end are blurred into a new constellation of kinships. His installations are sites for discovering new hybrid forms of existing beings while mirroring the finitude of our lives and of the language that we have so far used to describe those beings. In the passage from Ocean Vuong at the start of this text lies the fear that we are going to be outlived by what we love; but that should no longer be a trigger to reach an actual or symbolic immortality, but rather to reconsider the time we want to invest in regenerating the concept of forever.

3. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), p. 253.

4. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 98.

The concept of “matter of care” is taken from the eponymous work by Puig de la Bellacasa.

Shirley Villavicencio Pizango: The Quest Towards Beauty

Benedicte Goesaert

Every morning in the bathroom, but also at other moments of the day, we see a glimpse of ourselves in a mirrored image. What can be an ordinary passing of time can turn into an obsession. What happens when one starts looking deeply into that mirror, in which one faces an echo of oneself ? What is to be found there? Beauty? Does that reflection really define one’s identity? Does one’s soul speak up during careful observations?

All the hours people spend taking selfies and endlessly looking at their own portraits has resulted in a level of self-awareness that can overrule the attention towards and empathy for others.

A young and beautiful man who couldn’t look beyond himself and disdained the love of others fell in love with his own reflection while sitting next to a pond. This might describe someone you know, but of course it refers to a well-known story from Greek mythology. Nemesis lured Narcissus towards that pond out of revenge for his disrespectful response to Echo’s declaration of love. Echo was so upset that she wandered around the woods for the rest of her life, until she was nothing more than an echo sound. The moment Narcissus realized that he had fallen in love with a mirrored image of himself, with a beauty that he would never possess or materialize, he felt it was impossible to continue living.

The quest for beauty is a challenging road. Shakespeare wrote about beauty in his 1588 play Love’s Labours Lost, an early comedy: Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean, Needs not the painted flourish of your praise: Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye, Not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongues. (2.1.13-16)

Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? This assumption is in line with a subjective understanding of beauty. Since ancient Greece, beauty has been part of many philosophical debates on aesthetics. Until the eighteenth century, beauty was mainly part of a more objective discourse, where intrinsic qualities supported the concept of beauty. One of those characteristics is the proportion of elements the results in a harmonious configuration. A mathematical ratio such as the “Golden section” became a standard for conventional beauty. It’s a beauty found outside the viewer.

When it comes to human beauty, our understanding of it is influenced by a combination of genetic, cultural, and objective parameters. Nowadays, (social) media adds an extra layer of pressure and influence on our perception of beauty.

At a very young age, Shirley became aware of the beauty standards in Peru. Her father regularly pointed out how different her face looked when compared to her siblings. He commented on her darker skin, freckles, big nose, small mouth, and on the fact that she had a more indigenous look. The paler the skin and the eyes, the closer to the ruling beauty conventions.

Her father’s comments had a deep impact on her. Especially as he added that a lack of beauty would make it more difficult to live a successful live—whatever that might mean. She had to address qualities within herself and outside herself to overcome this supposed lack of beauty.

She developed a social and enthusiastic personality where she embraced fashion to disguise her rejected body. At the age of twenty-one, she had a surgery on her ears to adjust their form.

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She identifies herself with a bird of paradise, dressed in a majestic and beautiful coat. A constructed self-confidence and compelling presence that can function as a tool to protect the vulnerable inner self. When other people give the bird of paradise attention, it is direct confirmation of one’s existence and presence. Shirley appears elegant, feminine, and sophisticated.

Shirley is far from the only person to create such a persona. A whole generation of youngsters flirt with self-representation on social media. There is often a multitude of selves merging into hybrid identities. A musician is able to perform in different bands and take different positions and styles. What about a visual artist? Shirley challenges the single identity of a visual artist by creating an alter ego known as Paquita. She’s the sculptor. Shirley expands her practice as a painter by dancing on the edge of applied arts when she makes kimonos with a painting attached to the back, or when she paints ceramics vases.

In these times, when identity politics is part of serious debates and also influences our dayto-day relation to beauty, a tension emerges between the inner search for the authentic self and the outer effort to express oneself to an audience. Will we all become brands in the future, applying different strategies to keep the audience satisfied?

Nowadays, an artist’s audience are her followers. Through sharing generous likes on social media platforms, and by joining a variety of live or online events, they inscribe themselves into a community where the artist and the artistic work take the lead.

It is no longer primarily collectors who keep an eye on what the artist is doing. The audience has become more diverse, driven by a variety of intentions and ambitions, celebrating the age of hyper-connectivity.

When does following someone turn into adoration? Religious leaders, saints, movie stars, sport celebrities, and musicians bring major groups of people together. Are artists next in line?

Can an artist come anywhere close to Beyoncé’s 154 million followers, or Cristiano Ronaldo’s 238 million followers? Jeff Koons considers himself lucky to have an online audience of 385.000. The hashtag Picasso counts 2.2 million posts. Shirley still has a long way to go, but she is on track with more than 6.000 followers on Instagram. The Instagram account (shurleey) is well curated. She reveals what others prefer to protect as the romantic mystery of an artist’s studio, a place usually accessible only to the happy few. She is a fashionable dresser and doesn’t avoid looking into the camera. Although there are no traces of selfie sticks, she does deliberately frame the scene, and often works with a self-timer to create perfect pictures to share with her audience. The selfie cult is omnipresent. She addresses a behavior many people can identify with these days. The individual is highlighted as if she were part of a vital desire to confirm one’s existence and relevance in this life on earth.

The high walls of that once sacred place, the artist’s studio, have fallen down. The artist invites her audience through a digital channel into that space of creation. Shirley experiments with certain stereotypes of how artists behave in their studio, and how they have been portrayed in the past. Looking at pictures of Picasso and Frida Kahlo in their studio has been inspiring to Shirley.

She’s fascinated with the way an artist represents him or herself. A deeper research into the self and self-representation is what unfolds through her Instagram pictures. But not only there, as her own face has become a recurrent motif in her paintings through a series of self-portraits.

Since the Renaissance, artists have integrated representations of themselves into the paintings they made. Humanist values started celebrating individualism and creativity. It’s still uncertain, though highly believed, that Jan Van Eyck portrayed himself in the reflection of the mirror in the famous Arnolfini portrait from 1434. Raphael, who painted The School of Athens in 1509-1511, found a place for his face besides the figures representing the intellectuals Ptolemy and Zoroaster. One of the earliest self-portraits painted by an artist bears the signature of Albrecht Dürer and dates back to 1500.

The first time Shirley painted a self-portrait, it depicted her completely naked body. It could be a metaphor for how she sometimes feels as an artist. She took up brushes four years ago and has been painting at a high pace ever since. There is the need to understand the medium of painting and a drive to explore different techniques. Her desire to paint with a spontaneous dynamic energy explains her decision to use acrylic paint: it allows her to paint wet-on-wet and the time needed for the paint to dry is short. It brings her a sense of freedom and pleasure.

The relation to the model is an intimate one. Most of the time Shirley paints portraits of friends and relatives whom she has invited into the studio. The personal connection towards the models and the possibility of painting a living model add a social beauty to her works. It integrates biographical elements into the bigger narrative.

When Shirley started painting her own portraits, a longing for beauty seduced her to paint herself as an idealized image. The moment she realized this, the need for a more authentic and expressive interpretation of her own face became the driving force. She didn’t want to fall into the practice of constantly upgrading the body, whether by using plastic surgery or by applying filters and tricks when processing her images in order to make her body conform to the supposed models of conventional beauty.

Instead, she was ready to acknowledge all of her imperfections and unique characteristics through her paintings. The face became less of a mask and more of a landscape. The process of painting intensified into a more exciting, adventurous, and liberating accumulation of gestures. A dynamic and spontaneous flow followed. She combines different qualities of acrylic paint and even mixes what she defines as “dirtier” paints into the palette. The brushstrokes are visible and bring texture to the surface.

Currently, she chooses to give every element in the painting an equal amount of attention.

Because there is no hierarchy and no spatial perspective the result is a flat pictorial plane.

Distortions are allowed in favor of an artistic interpretation.

In the course of her research into the medium of painting, Shirley has looked into art history, though her focus has been on the work of contemporary female artists such as Chantal Joffe, Cecilia Vicuna, Emma Fineman, Alice Neel, and Marlene Dumas. The work of Louis Morris, Philippe Guston, and Danny Fox also drew her attention.

On the occasion of the graduation exhibition at HISK, Shirley started a series of self-portraits where her face and hair completely fill the surface. A line suggests the contours of her upper body. Every canvas has the same dimensions. The portraits are smaller than reality. She reduced the color palette scheme to burned sienna, venetian red, Naples yellow, light green, lamps black, and titanium white. This encourages an extended study of her face and skin color. The repetition of the subject creates a distance towards it and intensifies the focus on the process of painting itself. The paintings merge different sources: pictures she takes of herself, images that she finds in her memory, and moments where she relies on a mirror to study her face. Through these self-imposed limitations, she embarked on yet another, and new exploration of composition and the application of color.

In portrait painting, she draws a distinction between representation and interpretation.

According to her, the goal of a representation is to document, to come as close as possible to reality and to the photographic image: it sticks as closely as possible to what one sees. An interpretation leaves more room to experiment and integrate reflections about the model, the gaze, the experiences, and the emotions associated with the model.

Melancholy is an emotional state that intrigues her as a person and challenges her as an artist to translate that state into paintings. Melancholy indicates a gap in the emotional map of a person, one that can never be completed. It’s a void where feelings are stronger than words.

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Benedicte Goesaert Shirley Villavicencio Pizango: The Quest Towards Beauty

It’s an undefined zone, quite different from nostalgia, which in turn implies a desire to return to lived moments in the past. Melancholy is instead about something that has never actually taken place.

When sadness enters her work, she applies more water to the painting process. Happiness is found where bright colors dominate. By reducing the color palette in this series of self-portraits, she eliminated the colorful and exotic, as well as the references to Matisse, of her earlier paintings. She takes a different turn and looks at what it means to challenge some of the cultural frameworks that govern the perception of beauty.

Can a darker skin be the subject of narcissism? For a long time, there was not much space for people of color to be narcissistic, at least not in the public sphere. Their beauty was for too long questioned by the establishment. Movements like Black Is Beautiful and Black Lives Matter disrupt a long-defended, classical canon of human beauty.

In the past, beauty was an exclusive and sacred gift; today, conversely, it has become an inclusive attitude in which body positivity is generously embraced. This development further questions our understanding of beauty and reopens the debate about the impact of subjective and objective conventions.

What happens when the darkness of the skin becomes the subject of beauty in her paintings?

Will Shirley remain that bird of paradise?

In a Long Blink of an Eye

10 artists’ books and 1 critical volume published in conjunction with the HISK laureates 2020 exhibitition In a Long Blink of an Eye from December 16, 2020 till January 31, 2021.

Editors

Daniella Géo, curator HISK & Luc Derycke, publisher MER B&L For this critical volume, Translations

Emiliano Battista, Anne Baudouin, Dirk Verbiest Copy-editing

Emiliano Battista Graphic design

Luc Derycke Printer

Cassochrome HISK Team Daniella Géo, curator 2019 & 2020 Caroline Van Der Donckt, business director Isabel Devriendt, executive assistant Tom De Mette, research coordinator Gert Aertsen, production & multimedia Jan Willem de Haan, administrative assistant Wannes Goetschalckx, technical assistant Ana Rapeanu, maintenance Board of Administrators Willem Elias, chairman Sven Jacobs, secretary, managing director Julie Beysens, treasurer Ann D’Haese, Peter De Cupere, Wim De Temmerman, Michaël Goris, Joannes Késenne, Lies Reynaert, Mireille Schreurs, Carine Stevens, Els Wuyts General Assembly Members of the Board of Administrators & Rob Cuyvers, Willem De Greef, Michel De Wolf, Bart Doucet, Wim LAmbrecht, Johan Valcke HISK

Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten / Higher Institute for Fine Arts Leopoldskazerne, Eekhout 5, 9000 Ghent, Belgium www.hisk.edu

© 2020 the artists © 2020 the authors All rights reserved ISBN 9789079374090

With the kind support of Fedrigoni Printed on Arena Natural Rough 140 grs. and Arena Natural Rough 300 grs. (cover)

Katya Ev Hanane El Farissi Helen Anna Flanagan Che-Yu Hsu Nikolay Karabinovych Diego Lama Štefan Papčo Oussama Tabti Luca Vanello Shirley Villavicencio Pizango