Allan deSouza and Alia Syed: Contents Under Pressure by Van Every/Smith Galleries

Allan deSouza and Alia Syed Contents Under Pressure

Allan deSouza and Alia Syed Contents Under Pressure This publication was produced in conjunction with Contents Under Pressure exhibited in the Van Every Gallery at Davidson College, February 25–April 10, 2016. Van Every/Smith Galleries Davidson College 315 North Main Street Davidson, North Carolina 28035-7117 davidsoncollegeartgalleries.org Publication © 2016 Images © Allan deSouza and Alia Syed and Talwar Gallery, New York | New Delhi All rights reserved. Printed in the United States. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-1-890573-19-5 Essay: Alice Correia Editor: Chris Vitiello Design: Graham McKinney Printing: ImageMark Cover, left: Allan deSouza, Crossing, detail, c-print, 12” x 16”, from The World Series, 2010–2011, Courtesy of the Artist and Talwar Gallery, New York | New Delhi Cover, right: Alia Syed, On a Wing and a Prayer, detail, still from 16mm film and High Definition video transferred to high definition video, sound, 18 minutes 13 seconds, 2015–2016, Courtesy of the Artist and Talwar Gallery, New York | New Delhi

Acknowledgements It is with great pleasure that the Davidson College Art Galleries, in collaboration with Talwar Gallery, and Deepak Talwar, Davidson College Class of 1988, and with the generous support of Malú Alvarez, Davidson College Class of 2002, presents Contents Under Pressure, featuring works by Allan deSouza and Alia Syed. We are delighted to bring deSouza and Syed together in the Van Every Gallery — two artists with complementary interests around identity and migration, and the navigation of new terrain. These works are poignant and important, particularly in light of the escalating Syrian refugee crisis throughout 2015 and into 2016. Images from deSouza’s The World Series and two of Syed’s recent films, Panopticon Letters: Missive I and On a Wing and a Prayer, together map the migrant’s journey — an experience often marked by disorientation, frustration, criminalization, and on occasion, humor.

We wish to thank Alice Correia for her insightful essay, No Entry: The Work of Allan deSouza and Alia Syed. We also would like to recognize the work of our editor, Chris Vitiello, and graphic designer, Graham McKinney. We are grateful to Deepak Talwar (’88) and Sara Langham from Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi. We appreciate the support of Malú Alvarez (’02), whose generosity has helped provide meaningful exchanges between the artists and our community. And last, but not least, we extend heartfelt gratitude to Allan deSouza and Alia Syed for their interest and dedication to this project. Without their commitment, this project would not have been possible. Lia Newman, Director/Curator Elizabeth Harry, Assistant Curator

THE VAN EVERY/SMITH GALLERIES

No Entry: The Work of Allan deSouza and Alia Syed Since the summer of 2015 we have been told that Europe is experiencing a ‘migrant crisis.’ Thousands of people from Syria and the Middle East have made the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean Sea seeking sanctuary in Italy and Greece. In the UK, news reports have focused on the ‘Jungle,’ a temporary camp near the French port of Calais where an estimated 5,000 people live, most waiting for the opportunity to illegally cross the English Channel to seek asylum. But although the news informs us of these events, is it really possible to know or comprehend what these journeys entail, and what they mean for the people undertaking them? Moving beyond the empirical data, the observational photographs by Allan deSouza and lyrical films of Alia Syed presented in this exhibition seek to capture and communicate something of the physical and emotional exertion of the migrant’s journey. Throughout their respective careers, deSouza and Syed have been concerned with themes of belonging, and the 1

contradictions and difficulties of finding and securing a place in the world. Syed’s work as an experimental filmmaker tells migrant stories, often through the navigation of disorientating urban landscapes within which protagonists are presented in states of flux; deSouza’s photographs, installations, and writings explore a diasporic condition that is attuned to outsider-ness, of never being settled, always alert to the possibility that another move may be necessary. Adopting the position of the traveller, Syed and deSouza enact different types of journeys in their work, prompting audiences to consider the conditions in which migrations are undertaken and to reflect on the lengths we would go to for a better life. “We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light.”1

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, [1902] London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994, p. 6.

opposite: Allan deSouza, No Entry, c-print, 12” x 16”, from The World Series, 2010–2011 5

The opening sequence of Alia Syed’s film Panopticon Letters: Missive I (2010–13), presents the gently rippling waters of the River Thames, capped with a narrow band of blank, cloudless sky recalling Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and his haunting and poetic description of the waterway. Over time, and through an aesthetic play with time, the sublime luminescence of the river dulls, and light ebbs away. The horizon lowers and the sky is filled with dark, forbidding clouds. In the meditative environment of Panopticon Letters: Missive I, Syed takes us on a journey of light and darkness, creating a strange and destabilizing space. As the film progresses, the panorama is revealed to be a constructed composite and it becomes evident that sky and water have been sutured along a false horizon. Black strips interject between water and sky, interrupting vision and creating dissonance. These disharmonies are accompanied first by a sung recital of Psalm 139, in which darkness is understood to have little effect on God’s ability to see the truth of his followers, and then a female voice recounting an encounter with ‘a man from across the water’ and the construction of an artificial light. 2

Conrad’s description of light on the Thames creates an atmospheric tenor of profound serenity, within which Marlow recalls his horrific, imperial journey into the depths of Africa, exposing the cruelty of Europe’s colonizing mission. Panopticon Letters: Missive I similarly conjoins contemplative beauty with a profound sense of terror. Syed’s acoustic and visual environment prompts contemplation of the nature of light and its capacity to illuminate, shroud, and control. A third voice — male — is heard reading from Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenth-century plans for an ideal prison: the panopticon. In this penalizing space, detainees are denied visual access to the activities of the guards, while they are made simultaneously aware of being under constant surveillance. According to Michel Foucault, Bentham’s panopticon was an exemplary expression of disciplining power enacted through the establishment of tightly controlled spatial structures and modes of visibility.2 Foucault argued that in modern societies, as in the prison, conforming behaviour is established through spatial control and surveillance. Significantly for Foucault, these

See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin, 1991, pp. 195-228.

opposite: Alia Syed, Panopticon Letters: Missive I, still from 16mm film and High Definition video transferred to high definition video, sound, 22 minutes 46 seconds, 2010–2013 6

modes of control are not overtly coercive, and over time become invisible components of everyday life. Allan deSouza’s The World Series was initially made in response to Jacob Lawrence’s epic narrative, The Migration Series (1940–1), which charted the mass migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in search of a better life. His photographs do not have such an explicit narrative, but instead present scenes and observations from the artist’s travels that locate the viewer in various banal, everyday spaces across North America, Europe, and South Asia. Highlighting the overlooked mechanisms of control that dictate our movements, whether on the daily commute to work or on an international journey, deSouza’s photographs present a collection of routes and throughways, interruptions, pauses, detours, blockages, stoppages. Whereas Lawrence sought to convey a collective experience of migration, deSouza’s journeys are told from the point of view of a single protagonist, exploring both the constraints and possibilities of travel. Sixty framed photographs all hung in a single line would usually suggest a linear journey, with a clear beginning and end. But closer examination of deSouza’s framing and composition

reveals that his traveller does not advance along a single arc, but rather progresses in staccato-like rhythms. Within the series, clusters of images work together to progress the journey, while others abruptly halt it. In a sequence of individually titled images that navigate the spaces of an airport — Point, Revolve, Terminal, and Stop — progress is made only falteringly. The repetition of horizontal forms prohibits easy progression from one image to the next. In contrast, the road, bridge, and graphic line of Pass, Bridge, and Crossing collectively create a diagonal zig-zag linking and traversing the three scenes. Like Lawrence, deSouza is attentive to the ways in which pattern, colour, perspective, and scale can be used productively to both advance the trajectory of the journey and also to repeat and remind. Aerial views of a freeway become reminiscent of, and counterpoints to, views of natural fluvial pathways and eroded rock. Emptied of their usual itinerants, the corridors, escalators, waiting areas, and platforms of deSouza’s airports and railways are eerily still. Thus depopulated, attention is drawn to the details of these ‘in-transit’ spaces and the ways in which signage and lighting inform behavior. These contact zones mobilize powerful technologies to manage movement and insist on particular

routes of passage. A ‘No Entry’ sign on an airport runway could be understood as a common-sense safety measure, but also serves as a reminder that permission to enter is dependent upon our compliance to regulations. The meanings and intentions of maps, road signs, and instructions are not always benevolent. Changes in political attitudes can at any time demarcate the traveller as suspect and unwanted on the basis of gender, religion, race, or ethnicity, resulting in a particular heightened awareness that arrival and settlement is bestowed, granted, or permitted, but not necessarily permanent. But The World Series also questions what happens when there is wilful misunderstanding. Roadways and runways may indeed be systems of control replete with disciplining instructions, but they are variously presented with a sense of humorous curiosity, narrated though the eyes of a newcomer who is attentive to the minutiae of their surroundings. To what extent should we take these instructions literally? Opposites and repetition are used to comically disorientate in the five-image sequence East, Walk, Turn, Cross, and West. The migrant provocateur collates subversive details; road-signs reading ‘Columbus’ remind us of 3

earlier colonial journeys; signs of resistance are noted: ‘Come Back with a Warrant.’ In a sequence of three images — Indians, Mahatma, and Welcome Back — identity is misunderstood, translated and transformed in visual and verbal play. Gestures of qualified welcome are made to the ‘Indian’ who is identified as within and without a national imaginary in both the US and the UK. Despite the open-armed welcome of the British (Indian) policeman, the traveller must also negotiate customs and passport control; but in layering those systems of control with destabilizing humor, deSouza seems to ask, what happens when conformity breaks down, when the systems of power are not simply rendered visible, but challenged? In her most recent film, On a Wing and a Prayer, Alia Syed also challenges authoritarian systems of control but has done so through her own act of non-conformity, reminding us of Michel de Certeau’s assertion that where, when, and how we walk can constitute acts of disobedience.3 On a Wing and a Prayer was filmed in London’s Rotherhithe Tunnel, and relays an attempted passage through the tunnel by foot. Intruding into a space usually reserved for cars, Syed sought to approximate the action of

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, pp. 91-110.

not only illegal but also perilous, and as the film’s title suggests, was undertaken with only a slight chance of success.

Allan deSouza, Point, c-print, 12” x 16”, from The World Series, 2010–2011

Abdul Rahman Haroun, a Sudanese asylum-seeker, who was arrested in Britain after having walked nearly the entire 31 miles of the Channel Tunnel in August 2015.4 Haroun’s journey was

Syed captures the claustrophobic nature of the subterranean space of the tunnel, seemingly without beginning or end. Presented in the first person, On a Wing and a Prayer relays a solitary act of walking in precarious conditions. The footsteps are alternatively steady, stilted, and rapid. The 20-miles-perhour speed restriction is of little comfort as the beams of headlights glisten on the curved wall announcing an approaching vehicle. As cars pass, the walker turns and presses up against the wall, providing details of grimy white tiles. A look backwards ensures that the red tail-lights disappear. Each car could be the one that stops to challenge the protagonist’s right to walk through the tunnel. Every now and then there is a space where the walker can find respite from the proximity to the road. In her evocation of Haroun’s trespass, Syed invites her audience to become emotionally invested in the walker’s success. The environment is inhospitable and dangerous; it might be a walk to freedom, but that freedom is never quite in sight, always just

Abdul Rahman Haroun was granted asylum in the UK on 24 December, 2015. Although the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees states that it is illegal to prosecute asylum-seekers for irregular entry into a country of sanctuary, at the time of writing a provisional trial date has been set for 20 June, 2016 to hear charges against Mr. Haroun relating to his arrest on arrival in the UK; under the 1861 Malicious Damage Act he has been charged with obstructing a railway engine or carriage.

around the next corner. Accompanying the imagery is the voice of British academic and poet David Herd, reading from his essay, The View from Dover, in which he describes the landscape around a Napoleonic fort in Dover, which is also the site of an Immigration Removal Centre. The voice describes the circumstances of detainees and the extra judicial practices of the asylum process, highlighting how immigrants are at once subjected to the law and excluded from it. “Hate skews reality even more than love. If the limits of the world are made by language, we need better words for all this. The idea of the immigrant creates anxiety only because he is unknown.”5 The opportunity to study or work may have prompted our own travels between cities and nations, but in other circumstances fear and desire to escape persecution might initiate more dangerous journeys. What Allan deSouza and Alia Syed share is an appreciation that migration is neither a uniform nor equal experience, and that arrival in the destination does not conclude the migratory experience. Seen together, the work of these artists serves as a reminder that travel and migration is

highly regulated, monitored, and often curtailed, according to legal strictures and the status of those attempting to cross borders. Whomever has the freedom to travel, and the authority to cross borders and move between spaces, is subject to systems of power and surveillance that are at once hyper-present and invisible. Narrated from the perspective of the migrant, the artworks in this exhibition explore the limits of hospitality where the immigrant is concerned. Their destination might be a space of longed-for sanctuary, but it may also be a place of intense alienation and estrangement in which arrival does not equate to belonging. As W. J. T. Mitchell has observed, “The most salient fact about migration in our time is the way it has become not a transitional passage from one place to another, but a permanent condition in which people may live out their lives in a limbo.”6 Instead of rendering the migratory experience as a discrete journey, deSouza and Syed present it as a process — of being in progress — where the migrant is always conscious of his or her precarious right to remain. Dr. Alice Correia, art historian and curator

“ Hanif Kureishi: The migrant has no face, status or story,” The Guardian, 30 May 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/30/hanif-kureishi-migrant-immigration-1.

W. J. T. Mitchell, “Migration, Law and the Image: Beyond the Veil of Ignorance,” in Saloni Mathur (ed.), The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, Williamstown Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2011, p. 63.

Allan deSouza, Arrival, c-print, 12” x 16”, from The World Series, 2010–2011 12

Allan deSouza, The World Series, installation view at Talwar Gallery, New York, c-print, 2010–2011 13

Allan deSouza, Crossing, c-print, 12” x 16”, from The World Series, 2010–2011 14

Allan deSouza, Future, c-print, 12” x 16”, from The World Series, 2010–2011 15

Alia Syed, On a Wing and a Prayer, still from 16mm film and High Definition video transferred to high definition video, sound, 18 minutes 13 seconds, 2015â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2016 16

Alia Syed, On a Wing and a Prayer, still from 16mm film and High Definition video transferred to high definition video, sound, 18 minutes 13 seconds, 2015â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2016 17

Alia Syed, Panopticon Letters: Missive I, still from 16mm film and High Definition video transferred to high definition video, sound, 22 minutes 46 seconds, 2010â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2013

Artist Biographies Allan deSouza was born in Kenya, and has since lived primarily in London, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. He is now based in the East Bay, where he is the Chair of the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. deSouza works across different disciplines, including photography, text, performance, and pedagogy. His works have been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at SF Camerawork; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; the International Center for Photography, New York; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Guangzhou Triennale, China. His current book-length projects include How Art Can Be Thought, an examination of art pedagogy and a lexicon of terms used within the art critique; and Ark of Martyrs, a rhyming “rewrite” and accompanying video installations of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. His writings have been published in various journals, anthologies, and catalogues, including Third Text, London, the online Art Practical, and Shifter Journal, New York. He is represented by Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi. Born in Swansea, Wales, Alia Syed lives between London and Glasgow. She received her BFA from University of East London in 1987 and a Postgraduate degree in Mixed Media from Slade School of Fine Arts in 1992. Her films have been shown at numerous institutions such as BBC Arts Online; The Triangle Space: Chelsea College of Arts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; 5th Moscow Biennale; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; XV Sydney Biennale; Hayward Gallery, London; Tate Britain, London; Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, Scotland; Iniva, The New Art Gallery in Walsall; and Tate Modern, London. Syed is represented by Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi.

THE VAN EVERY/SMITH GALLERIES