8 - 10 JULY 2013 LEWISHAM ARTHOUSE LONDON SE14 6PD Special thanks to Fiona Apps, Stacey Aragon, Zsolt Balogh, Stephen Barns, Nadine Blumer, Árpád Dorogi, Eugen Furch, Réka Hosszu, Tansy Hutchinson, Károly Kisgyöri, András Kulhay, , Henrietta Németh, Anita Németh, Anne Mette W Nielsen, Tibor Polgár, Sue Rigby, David Small, Justin Varney, Gyula Völgyi, Wendelius, Christian von Wissel, Mikey Weinkove, Sárvári Security Service Kft., Kreativ Invest Hungária Kft., Strof-Fer Vasudvar Kftr. and to Ryan Irvan, Gyuláné Halász,Viktor Bedö, Su and Roger Card, International Visual Sociology Association, Methods Lab Goldsmiths
VISUALISING AFFECT RACE | GENDER | SEXUALITY | AFFECT Fifteen artists, visual sociologists and filmmakers provide a compelling argument for an aesthetic engagement with the affective and emotional dimensions of race, sexuality and gender-constructs in art and society.
Foreword
Through the echoing of the bad internet connection she reveals that twenty five years ago her painting We are delighted to present Visualising Affect, an Housewives with Steak-Knives was spat at during an exhibition that brings together works of art from ten exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art. different countries and from a range of disciplines. Last month, while walking home from the National The artists, filmmakers and visual sociologists tackle Gallery two men spat in her face. She explains how issues that resonate across far away borders from the context of aesthetics, beauty and poetry is used South Africa to Bolivia. They force a holding together “to draw the viewer into dialogue. To have an affect. and a dismantling of the affects that we bring to 'crude' To have some kind of empathy. Even if that empathy categories – to borrow Yasmin Gunaratnam's word – is one of disturbance.“ of race, gender and sexuality. Each participant of the exhibition articulates an empathy with the dramatic The deeply personal and thus entirely different of the everyday that derives from an understanding approaches are also evident in the essays that of the fragility of our worlds. We find passion accompany the exhibition and are printed here. shown for example in the romantic gesture of Julio The brief the authors received was to reflect on González Sánchez’s The Kiss, or in the intellectual and their works and the content, style and tone of the experimental interview with Ann Cvetkovich in Karin writings were left open. The result is a beautifully poignant and poetic account of Yasmin Gunaratnam's Michalski’s The Alphabet of Bad Feelings. experience with working with patients of the St. Sutapa Biswas in an interview featured in this catalogue Christopher's hospice and Konstantinos Panapakidis' speaks of her personal experiences of how people contemplation on his visual research on fluid gender have reacted to her work. Sitting at the other end of performances in the Kaukles Club in Athens. the line, a cup of tea in hand, in a warm and trembling voice she recounts a shocking and recurring act.
The organisation of the exhibition in conjunction with the 2013 Annual Conference of the International Visual Sociology Association has allowed the bridging of arts and visual sociology research and the presentation of the works in a way that crosses disciplinary boundaries. The affective and emotional dimensions of our responses to the ever-present references to race, gender and sexuality frames them. We encourage the audience to enter the worlds that have been opened by the works and engage with them – maybe leaving less bodily marks than the abhorrent viewer did on Sutapa Biswas's painting the but none-the-less affectively. Katalin Halåsz Polly Card Curators
Welcome Note Visualising Affect brings together inspiring international arts practitioners and visual researchers concerned with affective and emotional dimensions of race, sexuality and gender-constructs in art and society. Together this work invites the viewer to consider the affective dimensions of these experiences and the social dimensions of ‘difference’.Visualising Affect is an engaging expression of a sociology of the energetic, the physical and the sensual which asks us to pay attention to the ways that difference is both made and made sense of. Our attention is brought to uncomfortable, ambivalent and emerging feelings such as loss, yearning, annoyance and depression: feelings that are often passed over in both the world of theory and our own everyday lives.
The work here exemplifies the affective intensities of photography, film and poetry and how, in our encounters with them, we are prompted or even compelled to re-imagine the normativities of gender, sexuality and race... On behalf of the Centre for Urban and Community Research and the organizing committee of the 2013 International Visual Sociology Association Conference I would like to wish Katalin and Polly and all of the contributors every success with the exhibition, associated events and future collaborations. Alison Rooke CoDirector Centre for Urban and Community Research Goldsmiths University of London
Drawing with Light and Empathy An Interview with Sutapa Biswas Katalin Halรกsz: Your work is often conceptualised in terms of time and memory but there is also a powerful engagement with emotions and affect, embedded in the visual dialogue between temporality and imagination. How is affect useful in thinking about your individual practice? What kinds of connections, if any, does the concept allow you to forge?
Sutapa Biswas: My work is very much engaged with questions of temporality and imagination. But I have always been of the opinion that affect more than effect is one of the most constituent considerations in life and in terms of experiencing art. Something can be effective but to have an affect is to engage with the possibility of identification through empathy. I began to think about how I can construct my artwork to really heighten the experience of engagement between the viewer and the work of art. For example when I produced a work back in 1984 and 85 called Housewives with Steak-Knives, which was then subsequently exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art..
It is an extraordinary painting painted on fragments of paper that are fairly easily taped together and then mounted onto canvas. The white space behind the central figure pays homage to Robert Rauschenberg's White Painting series. These works are quite simply white housepaint on canvas. But it was read at that time to consider the affect and the impact of light on the surface. This concept really activated my imagination, the idea of time and the temporal context became very important. The whiteness that was represented in Rauschenberg's painting became a metaphor for whiteness of the institution in terms of race. British art at the time lacked culture that had a history outside of those parameters. I wanted to confront the viewer with those kinds of questions and I had to think about at what level I wanted the viewer to engage with the work. The context of affect was very important to me. I had to think about the ways in which to heighten sensation, affect, such that the viewer moved beyond a voyeuristic relationship to what remained in front. I was looking for the viewer to have an empathy with it or to hate it. An empathy either to hate or to love, on a very deep level.
Back in 1986 when it was exhibited in the ICA at the original Thin Black Line exhibition somebody spat at it right in the middle of the eyes of the central figure. So either the person who spat at it was a really good shot or they've been practicing. The ICA didn't tell me. They suggested I just clean it up myself. The saliva has all kinds of very degrading properties and effects the surface of this work. On the one hand it was terrific that somebody disliked the work so much that their reaction was so violent. The gravity of the reaction was made evident through that spit mark. So at one level it was very important that it happened. But on the other hand as an individual subject who was at the receiving end of that it wasn't a nice thing to encounter. And I can tell you that less than 3 weeks ago when walking home form a concert at the National Gallery I was spat at randomly by two men. It was really quite shocking. Right on my face. I reported it to the police , I think it’s important to report it. It is a very real set of circumstances that we're having to confront in Europe, and I do worry very much about it.
In terms of the questions that you're asking Kata, they are really important questions. I think that affect is all about empathy. And how you situate yourself alongside or with what it is that you have in front of you. And I feel that looking at Housewives with Steak-Knives 25 years and more after it was first exhibited, the viewer will understand where that work has come from much more clearly than would have been the case 25 years ago. I really hope. I am a great believer in peace but we live in a violent world. The violence is a reflection of what is happening in front of us. And in the case of the person who spat on it - that was violent. How do we understand and how do we confront history. We can't escape history, we have to learn from it and understand where we move and how we move beyond it. KH: Do you think that an aesthetic engagement with affect in relation to the depictions of race, gender and sexuality enhances our understanding of these concepts?
SB: There are many artists, Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, Sonia Boyce - just to mention a few. -
I have felt their work has an aesthetic, and whose imagery functions on and engages with questions of aesthetics. In some cases it's more than others. In my view it is true in the context of aesthetics we began to change our perceptions of time, space and history. Aesthetics is very important. I can't say that all of those artist work deliberately with questions of affect, but the works that I'm more drawn to personally tend to be more of a poetic nature. Poetry is always something that is going to have affect. Because it enters you psychological, intellectual and physical space. I agree that affect enhances our understanding of how race gender and sexuality are inevitable in every encounter that we have. KH: Please tell me about the development of your practice across different media, from early career painting to film and video.
SB: I tend to work across media and I allow the idea to determine the final aesthetic and formal sensibility of a work. I'm trying to look at what I want to achieve in a work and then determine whether film or video or a painting or drawing
might be the most appropriate. So it is really led by the subject. KH: Can you tell me more about the feminist influences of Untitled (The Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker)?
SB: I can't say specifically that those works were influenced by a particular feminist artist's work. Untitled (The Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker) was made in 1996 and I remember a conversation I had with Sonia Boyce when she showed it at an exhibition she curated at Tate Modern in 20012002. She actually said that she had no idea that I was making images like that working with white actors. I try and challenge myself when I work. Certainly I have been aware of people like Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly, Lorna Simpson, the work of Black Audio Film Collective and others. I had been told by people that my pieces were really ahead of their time. In many senses these works are more influenced by film, the works of Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Fassbinder, Frederico Fellini, Jean Cocteau. In these films there is an incredible sense of melancholy and reflection.
KH: Please tell me more about Untitled (The Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker), in which you depict a white man, naked and vulnerable, waiting patiently to be inspected by the viewer. I'm especially interested in how you're turning the gaze of the spectator away from black and female bodies to the white male.
SB: Untitled (The Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker) is a reference to Edward Hopper's painting the Woman in the Sun. The woman in that painting is standing in a very alienated space. The subject in my work was a white male. It was really turning the tables around but not intended as an unkindly act. What you see in Untitled (The Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker) is a real man. Mickey Baker is his real name. As an actor he used to play corpses, dead men. In my work I bring him back to life, standing in the bathing of the light. He is a bit like the M25 that runs around the orbit of London endlessly. It is as if he is always on the outskirts. His experience and his body defines him. Never to be at the centre, but always to be on the edge. His body confines him to that space.
He told me the most extraordinary stories of his life that I empathised with. The work was never planned to be called the Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker but when I heard his story I became empathetic to his story. And it could only thereafter be a beautiful and poetic work, and watching it you want to do is give him your coat to make him warm. The fact that he is white, the fact that I'm not white, an Asian artist, a woman, also, looking at the subject who is a man and putting him in this vulnerable situation, but listening to his story and relaying it in a way that there is compassion was important. I think it is beautiful because it is a response to the fragility of his body, of his age, his position, his time, and the dynamic between my race and his race. And also about light. The work responds to many different questions in a way that is about discussion, about exchange, and engagement. It is not about war. And it is about temporality, because of the light level around his body change constantly. And he can't stand still – although his brief was to stand still - because time doesn't stand still.
KH: How have your main questions shifted since the 1980’s in terms of a feminist practice?
SB: I can only be the person I am. And the person I am is a feminist. I believe in equality. I won't stop being a feminist because the world hasn't changed in any such way to make women equal. Nowhere. Not in the West, not in the East, not on planet Mars. I am a feminist and I make no apology for it, because I believe in moral questions . Do we want to live equal amongst ourselves? Do we want to look at the next human being irrespectively of their race, gender, sexuality, ability or disability? Do we want to to share the world with them in equal way, in a way that is not about the ego, and not about exploiting one section of people in order to benefit a very small elite? Are we at that place? I don't think so. I believe that Gandhi was one of the most extraordinary people on the planet. He changed things in a quiet way.
Reverberations and Fabrications Yasmin Gunaratnam An audio-recorder sits on a table, a bed or settee. I could be in someone’s home. Sometimes it is a hospice or a hospital. No-one knows what will happen next. “Tell me something about yourself…” Arrival scenes. Clouds of asbestos dust. The strange workings of the gut. Sex. The supernatural. Laughter. Tears. Pain. Coughing. Tiredness. Regret. Shock. Nausea. And the things that cannot be put into words. That are suggested by the body or through the arrangement and decoration of a room or bedside table. Nadia Bettega
What we so crudely refer to as ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are always present, but in their entanglements with disability, disease and transnational lives, there is a queering of borders and categories. Disease and its treatment rearrange the body. Hormones, tastebuds, skin and hearing are altered. Memories, hair, breasts and life-long habits can be taken away. I once interviewed a woman whose ethnicity was recorded as Indian. The woman’s face was swollen, her skin yellowed by jaundice. All of her hair had fallen out. Her accent did not sound Indian, but people move around don’t they? As we talked, it turned out that she was from the Phillipines. When I met Jamaican-born Patricia, her larynx had been removed. She spoke using a mechanical valve that gave her a deep, robotic voice. To her ears, she sounded manly and the inflections of her accent had been flattened. She tried to adjust to the change by throwing herself into sociality… “Looking people in the eye and thinking “You’re going to cope with me. I’ve got a problem, but I’m going to cope with my problem.You’ve got to listen to me.” How to interpret the signs of diseased diasporic bodies?
For nearly twenty years now, I have been drawn to the everyday worlds of transnational dying and care in British cities.1 I am convinced that there is much to learn about global inequalities, difference and community from living with each other at the very borders of life, when language, bodies and time are at their limits. These ideas are not new. And gender and racialised differences have played a crucial role in the history of contemporary hospices,even though this history has been selectively passed-over. St Christopher’s hospice in Sydenham was established by the English doctor Cicely Saunders in 1967, inaugurating the modern hospice movement. The allure and the enshrining of difference by Saunders in the very foundations of hospice care as a ‘working community of the unalike’ was more than Nadia Bettega philosophical and abstract. It was of the flesh, what Mica Nava has called ‘visceral cosmopolitanism'.2
For Nava, visceral cosmopolitanism is a countercultural and eroticised orientation and receptiveness to racialised others in consumer culture, the arts and in politics. And it was most often pioneered by women. Nava’s hunch is that women’s marginal social status at the turn of the 20th century and in the inter-war years, gave them affinities with racially minoritised men. Saunders, it seems, was drawn to Polish men. She credits her early ideas about hospice care to her relationship with David Tasma, a Jewish refugee from Warsaw. Tasma died in 1948, leaving Saunders £500 to realise their dreams of a better place of care for dying people. It was the same year in which the Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury Harbour. “I only want what is in your mind and in your heart” - David Tasma Nadia Bettega
Art has always played a part in hospices. Cicely Saunders collected the stories, poems, photographs and paintings of dying people and used them to help her understand and treat pain. Today, art therapy at St Christopher’s is smudging the boundaries between dying people and those in the local community. The hospice’s social programme includes a quilting group, a choir and a thriving café. The artwork of patients adorns the walls and will soon be a part of the outer façade of the building. The work is unapologetically bold and colourful, often witty.
The painting is a group portrait. Each person painted themselves, often working sideby-side, demanding a moment-by-moment balancing of different styles, disabilities and space. The Secret Garden, Nadia Bettega Too much or too little pressure could make itself felt in the fabric of the canvas, distorting or disrupting the image.
Fitting into the genre of ‘Outsider Art’, art in the hospice is produced by people with little, if any, previous training or experience and from a vast array of cultural backgrounds. It is the doing of art, whether creative writing, ceramics, or painting, that brings people together. The Secret Garden is a stunning example of a collaborative work of selfrepresentation by patients in conversation with an Edouard Manet exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in April 2013.
The mundane coincidences and prosthethics of illness, race and gender are there in the gathering, dispersal and listing of bodies. A ragged line of figures, against a background of green and a grey winter sky, extends across the huge canvas. Some people are leaning on their walking sticks or sitting in wheelchairs, others are in conversation, unperturbed by the camera’s presence that lies in a woman’s murky shadow on the lawn. The physiognomic details,as they are painted, are ambiguous,refusing an easy reading.
That man’s face looks tense. Perhaps it is the cold or could he be in pain? Is he marking his difference from the women? The person on the end of the row of seated figures, with a partially obscured body, man or woman? Black or white? It is often said that whiteness is normalised as non-racial.It does not have to account for itself. On the canvas, whiteness, sallowness, browness and blackness had to be thought about and made visible. A fleeting democracy of pigmentation. An integral part of the visual impact of the painting is the golden frame. From a distance, its gaudy surfaces dazzle.
The frame is a delicate filigree of medical bric-abrac, syringes, tubes, nebulisers and pill packets. These technologies, so often out-of-sight, sustain the lives inside the painting. It is here that the work plays with modernist themes, bringing into question what is inside and outside the frame. “What can you see? What can you know?” Those who have walked, limped and wheeled themselves into our field of vision are people whose respective lives play out in a world where bodily vulnerability is unevenly produced and distributed. Deaths from non-communicable diseases, such as cancer, stroke and heart disease are rising, accounting for two out of every three deaths worldwide Between 1990-2010, nearly 80% of these deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries.3
Come closer. Enter another world.
Yasmin Gunaratnam
Six of the world’s wealthiest nations consume 80 per cent of the world’s morphine supplies.4
4
Our installation consists of two audio poems that accompany handkerchiefs and a quilt, made by patients and carers at St Christopher’s. The everyday intimacy of the depicted objects – beds, chairs, make-up, and pills – connects the different pieces.
These inequalities haunt the pharma in the golden frame. The frame is a foil – a participant in the secrecy of the portrait’s title. It demands a closer attentiveness. Play
Nadia Bettega
When you follow the trails of a secret, you are in the realm of secrecy. For the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, secrecy is a transitional space in which there is ‘play’ as external realities are experimented with: terror/beauty
real/not real
“…aesthetic moments are not always beautiful or wonderful - many are ugly and terrifying but nonetheless profoundly moving because of the 5 existential memory tapped.” - Christopher Bollas
me/not-me
It is these themes of play and secrecy that we pursue in our installation, and through the crossing of the senses of seeing, hearing and touch.
Here, I reflect upon the poems that came out of narrative interviews with hospice patients, recorded nearly twenty years ago. The Jamaican-born man and Anglo-Indian woman who inspired the poems, were a part of the UK’s cohort of post-war migrants who are now ageing and dying in increasing numbers. The poems were read and recorded in May 2013 by two people from the Tuesday Group at St Christopher’s. The readings are a meeting point of different biographies and voices. The poems gathered new layers, questions and meanings as they have passed between patient-storyteller, researcher and patientperformer.
“Tell me about the poem. Who is it about? What’s it about?” The performance of the poems has made me think more about the circulation of affects in the acoustic archive. With archives we must always read, hear and feel between the lines of the ‘real’ and the imagined, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan argues. With the spoken word it is the tonality, hesitations, cadence and tempo of speech that bring out the musicality of what is ‘between the lines’ of human experiencing. This is where affects are. For Roland Barthes - writing in a pre-digital age there was always an unbridgeable distance between the leaden image mortified in the photograph and the sprightly ‘myself’ who ‘like a bottle-imp… 6 doesn’t hold still, giggling in my jar.’ If visual images create the illusion of a fixing of a fidgety, giggling self, the human voice in its animation – with its idiosyncratic breath, pitch, volume and dialect - brings matters of bodily tempo as much as sound to the affects of race and gender.
Is what you see what you hear and what you feel? In what ways does the voice connect with a singularlity that can be withdrawn from visuality and identity categories? How is it that a voice can bring us closer to the dead? “…it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things,that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms.” - Gilles Deleuze 7 And so it is that each recorded poem slips into the midst of multiple residues and rhythms in how race, gender and sexuality come to matter at times of illness and dying. The title of the poem The Prince and the Pee recalls and inverts/perverts the Danish oral folk tale The Princess and the Pea. The story is based upon an archetype of white heteronormative femininity in which the noble lineage of a young woman is tested by her hypersensitivity to pain (and of course she gets her prince).
The Prince and the Pee is about black masculinity as it unravels with disease.You can hear the traces of this capacity of illness to undo and remake in the recording. Because performed poetry unfolds in real time,it is open to life’s shifting tides.In an unexpected turn of events,the performer was hospitalised quite suddenly.I found myself being brought into the recording, alleviating the overdetermined loneliness that I had given the protagonist
Princess and the Pea, Tim Walker
From the innards of the improvised performance, as I worked with the differing weights and space given or taken from his voice and mine, new feelings emerged about the negotiation of losses and intimacy in illness and care.
Loss takes another form in the ambivalent affects that weave themselves around the bed in the poem,and that are stitched into the Loss Quilt. It is the unslept-in bed of The Prince and the Pee that speaks of an interiority to black masculinity against currents of history, where as Frantz Fanon recognised, black men are reduced to the fantasised potency of their genitalia, über-physical and hypersexual. 8 “In racialized discourse the black male body functions as a terminal signifier – racism’s degree zero: trapped in fantasies of tribal urban violence, immured in an exorbitant and pathological sexuality, petrified in nature as flies in amber.” -Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy 9 ‘Pathological sexuality’ in a very different constellation of race and sex is the substance of Blind Date. The poem takes its inspiration from an ageing Anglo-Indian femme fatale, Phyllis Dourado. Phyllis was a woman with secrets. She put as much energy into her mask-like make-up as dodging the realities of her cancer and impending death - except for one fleeting moment in our interviews.
In the poem, I inflate and slow down that brave moment, imagining and personifying cancer as her ‘most ardent and agile of lovers’, replacing denial and fear with an irreverent terminal sexiness, parodied so provocatively in the handkerchief. “Don’t I look Slick?” Talk of mirrors, kisses, rouge and lipstick bring an erotic,too often disavowed,register to the diseased body, that even as it depletes is desiring and hopelessly complicit with the outward armature and myth-making of this version of femininity. It is Phyllis’s turning away from modern mantras ‘think positive’, ‘take each day as it comes’ - as much as her last grasping for her make-up that invites us to consider both what is being hidden and the indomitable allure and staging of appearance.
In the closing stanzas of the poem, different layers of pathology collapse in on each other. These interacting sensual symbols force a holding together of race, gender, sexuality and death. And all the time the attentive acoustic performance of the poem by a white British woman, injects the verse with the ordinary mixedness and surprises of multicultural conviviality. The performers found and heard different meanings in my poems, just as I did in the original interviews and then again when I head the readings. These affective relays produced changes of emphasis, tense, or words, so that signifiers metastasised rearranging meaning in unexpected ways. New questions surfaced. Who are you when you are leaving your body and your life? Where are you?
References 1. Gunaratnam,Yasmin (forthcoming) Death and the Migrant: Bodies, borders, care. (London: Bloomsbury Academic) 2. Richard Horton, “GBD 2010: Understanding Disease, Injury, and Risk,” The Lancet 380, no. 9859 (December 2012): 2053–2054, doi:10.1016/S01406736(12)62133-3. 3. The International Council on Security and Development, “ICOS,” Icosgroup.net, October 25, 2007, http://www.icosgroup.net/2007/media/mediapress-releases/european_parliament/ 4. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 5. Bollas, C. (1987) The Shadow of the Object -Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York, Columbia University Press). 6. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New Ed (London:Vintage Classics, 2000).
7. Gilles Deleuze, “Ethology: Spinoza And Us,” in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1992), 624–633. 8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks., Second Edition (London: Pluto Press, 1986). 9. Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, Different: A historical context (London, Phaidon 2001), p.39
A podcast of the discussion of art, illness, ageing, dying and death in the exhibition ‘Portraying Lives’ that involved artwork from St Christopher’s is available to download from the Royal Academy website. www.royalacademy.org.uk/events/talks/portraying-life,2253,EV.html
Reflections on Using Film as a Strategy to Visualise Fluid Gender Performances Konstantinos Panapakidis I recently completed research that tracked the journey of a drag troupe in Koukles Club Athens, moving from backstage, revealing the construction processes involved in drag performances, to centre stage, highlighting the relationships that developed between performers and their audiences. The visual sociology PhD thesis was composed of two elements, the ethnographic film Dragging the Past and a written text. The research addresses the ways in which gender is actualised through relationships and competitive processes, via a visual sociology methodology. Over its course, the thesis traced multiple processes of embodiment and competition in order to demonstrate the complexity of blending gender and selfperformances, desires, and sexualities. The use of visual research methods as a strategy offered an innovative approach to an exploration of the establishment of gender formations through drag,
thus allowing a significant contribution to gender and sexuality theories to emerge. Gradually a collaborative relationship developed between the participants and myself. Working collaboratively infers a reciprocal, give-andtake relationship and I would suggest that this method of producing tangible research material, specifically photographs and films, can impinge on the collaborative process as it has implications for the use of the material beyond the confines of the research. Upon reflection I would offer that it is necessary to consider the potential uses for the outputs of visual sociology prior to conducting research. The film Dragging the Past has proved to have unintended uses for the performers who participated in its making. Marylou, owner of Koukles Club, asked the film to go on the club’s website, offering another platform of visibility and recognition for both the film and for the performers. Recognition and visibility are vital to the performer’s ideas of how they portray and promote themselves. However, there is a vast difference between a promotional tool and empirical evidence derived from an academic study.
This raises concerns about the potential for complicity in the promotion of an individual, location, or type of activity. The material that visual sociology produces can become a form of currency, which the subject may want to utilise beyond the scope of the research, such as Koukles using the video on its website. In this way the visual sociology material becomes part of the everyday lives of its subjects, which can result in it being distanced or removed from the initial intentions of the researcher. The film Dragging the Past and the written text encapsulate the lived experiences observed from the field. The main aim with both components was to let the voices of the participants be heard, evidencing how they found ways to articulate their selves beyond the heterosexual matrix, but also offering an interpretation and an analysis of these articulations, which drew upon existing conceptual and analytic frameworks. In some sections of the text the words of the performers were repeated directly from the film. This overlapping was justified on the grounds of the character of the data.
The video recorded interviews comprised of many layers of meaning. The interviews with performers responded to drag performances. In the text, the words from the interviews were used as individual narratives where they were placed in context with the words of the members of the audience, which revealed different aspects of the same story. There were some parts of the film that I did not discuss in the text but rather left to operate visually on their own terms. These included the photographs in the titles, some of the drag performances, and some parts of the interaction between the performers and the audience. Elsewhere, however, I did discuss some of the effects this data has had on the relationships of the participants. The written chapters and the film are of equal importance. As the reader encounters the narrative in the text, details about my reactions are revealed. The text includes autobiographical elements, reflexive accounts of how I acted while holding a camera, and how respondents perceived me. These were intertwined with the voices of the participants and their reactions were conveyed in the written work.
I did not want to place my reflexive account in the film, as I was aiming to give the participants maximum exposure. However, I was/am ‘present’ in the film, reflected in all of the mirrors backstage and in the club. The viewer can see how I moved within the space in accordance with the performers. It was a choreography that encapsulated my reactions. On another level, I needed distance in order to understand and analyze the data captured on film. The photographer Nan Goldin (1996) compared her visual diaries with her written diaries highlighting the distance that the written works gave her, which allowed her to analyse her life and those of her loved ones in her photographs. Dragging the Past is a good example of the process of ethnographic knowledge production. In Pink’s terms “video is not simply a ‘data collecting tool’ but a technology that participates in the negotiation of social relationships and a medium through which ethnographic knowledge is produced” (Pink, 2007: 168). As such, it can be seen as an often overlooked, yet indispensable part of both content and form of the understandings produced.
The use of the video allows for a certain type of visual reflexivity to be developed. With video, I was able to include myself in the film, by showing my face and my body next to those of the performers. In this way I managed to address the critical points made by hooks (1992) and Flinn (1998) in regard to Livingston’s Paris is Burning: that we do not see the person and the intentions behind the camera. This reflexivity reveals aspects of the relationships between participants and researcher in a different way, compared to the reflexivity in a written text. It is within these aspects one can see how this ethnographic knowledge is negotiated and produced. This reflexivity becomes another entry point to ethnographic knowledge. In the written work I have discussed the visual methodology employed for researching the relationship between drag performance and subjectivity, and also for researching the four key themes of gender, sexuality, embodiment, and competition. I aimed to show the routes my participants followed to express their desires, and aspirations, during their everyday lives.
Their passion and the enormous effort they put into their drag performances was a beautiful image to behold. It is this beauty that I wanted to share sociologically, both through text and also through screenings of Dragging the Past across different platforms. Goldin (2000), in her book The Other Side, reflected on her passion to photograph the drag world in cities, such as Boston, New York, Paris, Berlin, Manila, and Bangkok, from 1972 to 1992: “ I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were. Since my early teens, I’d lived by an Oscar Wilde saying, that you are who you pretend to be. I had enormous respect for the courage my friends had in recreating themselves according to their fantasies...” (Goldin 2000: 5). So too my aspiration was to share a perspective that was the outcome of a relationship, evidenced using photographs, mirrors, performances, and clothes and applying gender theories. Both written and video texts capture flowing moments and fluid bodies and relationships at play.
Bibliography Flinn, C. (1998). Containing Fire: Performance in Paris is Burning. In B. Grant, & J. Sloniowski (Eds.), Documenting the documentary: close readings of documentary film and video. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press. Goldin, N. (1996). The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. New York: Aperture. Goldin, N. (2000). The Other Side. Zurich: Scalo. hooks, b. (1992). is Paris burning? Black looks: race and representation. Boston, MA: South End Press. Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography: images, media and representation in research. London: Sage.
PLATES
Sutapa Biswas
Untitled(The Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker) 1997 (Re-edited and remastered 2002) Video still This video work engages with ideas of temporality, stillness, and the relationship between the moving image and painting. Biswas' choice of subject reverses the traditional power relationship between artist and model. As Richard Dyer has commented, 'the ultimate position of power in a society that controls people in part through their visibility is that of invisibility, the watcher. Consequently, the visual arts present the perspective of 'a white male character scrutinising, appraising and savouring black and/or female characters', far more frequently than vice versa. Biswas portrays the figure as 'undressed' and vulnerable, passively waiting and available to our gaze.
Sutapa Biswas Magnesium Bird 2004 Video still
An evocative and haunting work filmed in the 18th Century garden in Yorkshire. The film represents a rite of passage for Biswas, who in the making of this work recalls that birds were the subject of the last conversation she had with her father before he died, and the first sound she heard after was bird song. Thus, the context for this work is love and loss. The film presents a visceral encounter in which we the viewer, through the rich visual imagery and soundtrack, are transported to a place somewhere within our own past.
Nirmal Puwar Brace Yourself 2013 Installation view
Braces sit on a dress dummy. Red buttons dangle. An unsuspecting fragility hangs on red threads spliced though leather straps. This bare assemblage layers the weight of a fabric, of an embroidery and of failed joining stitches. As a sociologist who works with spatial interruptions Puwar’s installation pulls together an unexpected materiality of words and objects. The audience are invited to participate in an event. With a touch of humour, the piece both incites and disturbs clichÊd associations of ethnicised bodies, dress and ceremony..
aruma-Sandra De Berduccy Qaiturastro 2007 Video still
This video shows in a poetical way four movements in the traditional production of wool yarn. Each movement is named with Quechua words, evoking different elements of the Andean cultures for example "pushka" is a spindle and hair ornaments are called "tullmas". These elements can be considered as cultural symbols that change in the process of migration.
Yasmin Gunaratnam The Prince and the Pee Blind Date 2013 Audio poems These poems were inspired from oral history interviews with hospice patients conducted nearly 20 years ago. Each poem records the meeting point and entanglement of modern taboos: race, sex, disease and death. Passed on to and performed by patients at St Christopher's Hospice, who made the poems their own, the resonances multiple and refract.
Yasmin Gunaratnam The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind 2013 Inkjet transfer prints on cotton handkerchiefs Each handkerchief acts as a portal into the world of persons living with life threatening illnesses. Each handkerchief is a brazen celebration of life, telling us that in the chaos and turmoil of living with dying, there is a radiant lucidity. We are taken on an intimate journey into the mythology of life, desire, humour and death through these intimate accessories. Made by patients and carers of St Christopher's Hospice. Loss Quilt 2013 Applique with hand sewn embroidery Under the appliquĂŠd urban landscape bed cover, are life, love, death and loss. The experience of bereavement is evoked and stitched into the fabric of this handmade quilt made by patients, carers, bereaved people, staff, volunteers and members of the local community of St Christopher's.
Laura Cuch No Ma 2011 Photograph
A photographic portrait project about women who are not mothers and are certain that they never will be. The project looks at the subject of ‘no motherhood’ from diverse perspectives and through varied experiences.
Yvonne F端eg Your Name is Paul 2013 Video still
This work draws on a scene from Wim Wenders film, "Paris-Texas", a monologue that aims to make the observer feel uncomfortable. F端eg is interested in the locations of peepshows. The architecture evokes a kind of a voyeuristic, dominant treatment from both sides, stripper and observer. Both are locked in small rooms of a few square meters, in some the stripper can't see the observer, in others both are able to see each other, some have the option to communicate with each other.
Karin Michalski
The Alphabet of Bad Feelings 2012 Video still An experimental interview with the theorist and activist Ann Cvetkovich. Cvetkovich’s performance, based on conversations with the filmmaker, takes words with negative connotations such as 'depression' and redefines them.
Julio González Sánchez The Kiss 2010 Video still
The piece shows the relationship and meeting of cultures in public spaces. Andrea, who features in the artwork, is a cholita* transvestite sex worker.The kiss is a simple way to make contact with the unknown, a gesture that explores ‘the other’ and the double marginalization of being indigenous and transvestite. *The local term for the rural Aymara women who wear traditional dress
FILMS
Justin Archer, Martin Bleazar and Rosanna Scott Two Stories 2012 Film, 30 minutues
Two Stories profiles the experiences of Jan and Nosiphokazi, two people from different backgrounds who live in two townships in the Eastern Cape. Nosiphokazi Fihlani, a corrective rape survivor, lives in the Grahamstown township and stands against those who discriminate against her and so inspires other lesbians to be open in a community that would prefer to silence them. Jan Blom, a rowing coach from Holland, came to the Port Alfred township after his partner died and started an organization to train disadvantaged children in sports and basic education.
Jack Tan
The Green Women and The Defenders of England 2012 Film, 13 mins 21 seconds The film is the artist's impression of the events of 2010 when the English Defence League (EDL) held a protest in Bradford, a city with a significant Muslim population. The day before the EDL's arrival, a coalition of the city's women's groups organised a Festival of Peace. Decking the city centre with green ribbon and flags, the women attempted to bring calm to the situation prior to the EDL's protest..
Jane Jin Kaisen and Guston Sondin-Kung
The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger 2010 Film, 72 minutes The film follows a group of international adoptees and women of the Korean diaspora. It explores the ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present. Military and patriarchal violence against women and children became central in geopolitical negotiations between South Korea, the United States, and Japan. The film shows how this part of world history has been systematically silenced, but still reverberates..
Konstantinos Panapakidis Dragging The Past 2013 Film, 60 minutes
The film narrates the adventures of a drag troupe based in Koukles Club, Athens and their quest for acceptance and recognition in front of a mixed audience. The documentary presents clips from the club’s most successful drag acts, intertwined with interviews from performers and the interaction between them and their audiences.
BIOGRAPHIES
Sutapa Biswas was born in Santinekethan,
India. Her poignant films and poetic artworks have been shown in museums and art galleries worldwide. She works in a wide range of media including installation, film and video, drawing and painting. Biswas’ works are represented in important public and private collections nationally and internationally, including: TATE Collections; Arts Council England; Reed College, Portland; Graves Gallery, Sheffield Museums and Art Galleries, Cartwright Hall and the Artist Pension Trust New York. Biswas was a Fellow at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1990 and 1992. From 1989 to 2012 Biswas taught Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, where in recognition of her contribution to fine art and her work as a lecturer, in 2006 she was appointed a Reader. Biswas lives and works in London, UK.
Sandra De Berduccy is a visual artist born
in Bolivia. Her work looks for the gesture of a weaver, unfolding through contemporary practices of art, understanding this gesture as a fngerprint, an evidence of the traditional weaver practices that still have validity as collective statement. Through several techniques and technologies, she explores the relationship between processes of the traditional Andean textiles and diverse artistic languages such as performances, photography, objects, video art, mapping, live cinema, and interactive installations. In the last years, she has worked on the TEXT TEXTILE CODE project. It relates concepts, techniques and technologies of these three elements. Therefore, this project prolongs a creative process of multidisciplinary artworks that was undertaken seeking continuity with the traditional textile practice and its meaning in the contemporary context. www.sandradeberduccy.com
Nirmal Puwar is a Senior Lecturer in
Sociology at Goldsmiths, where she has worked for nearly nine years. Her work draws on multiple methods from inter-disciplinary sources to consider the encounters of bodies and space. She has coordinated a number of research projects on politics, space and inventive methods. She is keen to initiate and build on a form of creative and critical public sociology to be considered ‘Curating Sociology’. She is Co-Director of the Methods Lab http://www.gold.ac.uk/methods-lab/ She is the author of Space Invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place (Berg, 2003 and has coedited a number of collections including: ‘Live Methods’ for Sociology Review (2012), with Les Back; South Asian Women in the Diaspora (2003) with P.Raghuram; ‘Post-Colonial Bourdieu’ for Sociological Review (2009); ‘Intimacy in Research’ in The History of the Human Sciences (2008) with M. Fraser; ‘Noise of the Past’ for Senses and Society (2011) with S.Sharma; as well as ten issues of the international journal Feminist Review, including Celebration Issue 100.
Yasmin Gunaratnam teaches in the
Sociology Department at Goldsmiths. Her research is interested in narrative and stories at times of biographical change. She has a particular interest in migration and death and what the predicament of the dying migrant can tell us about the ethics and politics of multicultural hospitality.Yasmin also writes short stories and poems, her new book 'Death and the Migrant' will be published in November by Bloomsbury Academic.
Julio González Sánchez lives in Santa
Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. An award-winning, selftaught artist with a graduate degree in architecture (UPSA) he has participated in many workshops and is a teacher and mentor. He has exhibited widely in galleries, foundations and museums both in Bolivia and internationally.
Yvonne Füeg is currently working on her
bachelors degree on media arts at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in Zürich on themes such as body, voyeurism and dominant behavior. Using sound and text her works are combined with super8 or 16mm flm works.
Karin Michalski lives and works as
independent flm maker, artist and flm and video art curator in Berlin. She studied Film Directing and Producing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) as well as Journalism and Political Science in Mainz and Berlin. With her flms and videos such as i.e. The Alphabet of Feeling Bad (2012), Working On It (2008, Co-Director: Sabina Baumann), Monika M. (2004) and Pashke and Sofa (2003) she has been invited to numerous festivals and exhibitions. She is working as an independent feminist-queer curator for exhibitions and conferences such as the 54.th International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia in 2011 and the lecture series 'Engaging with Bad Feelings' at the Humboldt University Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts in 2012.
Laura Cuch is a documentary and fne art
photographer as well as a researcher at the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. She currently teaches in the MA in Photography and Urban Cultures (which she graduated from in 2006), the Urban Photography Summer School and the BA in Social and Cultural Studies, also at Goldsmiths. From December 2010 to April 2012 Laura was a research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, which led to a solo exhibition, as part of the East London Photo Festival, and the conference ‘Negotiating Subjectivities: A One-Day Symposium on Photography, Health and the Body’.
Jane Jin Kaisen & Guston Sondin-Kung have worked
collaboratively since 2009. They are invested in contested and emerging histories, places where historical truth is actively being disputed and its effects felt through traumatic dislocation. Through the mediums of flm, performance, and writing, we are drawn to multilayered, fragmented, and diasporic perspectives, which recognize the subjective within history and take into account the various dynamics of power in a transnational perspective. Their flm The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger (2010) has been exhibited at places such as Videonale 13 Kunstmuseum Bonn, The Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival,Yamagata International Film Festival, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Korean American Film Festival New York,Vox Populi Galley, University California Los Angeles, DePaul Art Museum, among others. itinerantsendsforitinerant.org
Jack Tan works in art and politics. He is
especially interested in the performance of political structuring and social change (e.g. grassroots organising, urban ritual, law/policy-making, and social movements). He also considers their connections to place, habitations, material, objects and use. So far, Jack has made sculpture, video, writing, performance, teaching, discussion and exhibition. Currently, Jack is researching the performativity of civil rights and protest movements at the Drama, Theatre and Performance Department of Roehampton University, and is a Tutor on the Sculpture Programme at the Royal College of Art.
Justin Archer, Martin Bleazar & Rosanna Scott co-directed Two Stories
while students at Rhodes University completing their B.Journalism degree in 2012. Justin Archer, from Cape Town, also majored in economics. Martin Bleazard, from Johannesburg is passionate about flm, representation, narrative and unearthing South Africa’s hidden stories. They both now work for non-proft organisation, the Sustainable Seas Trust producing flm and animation on marine issues in the Eastern Cape. Rosanna Scott does freelance videography and documentary work.
Konstantinos Panapakidis is a Visual
Sociologist (PhD) with a background in photography, and graphic design. His research interests are gender, sexuality, and visual methodologies. He has taught photography, digital media, and research methods at Goldsmiths College, Kingston University, and University of Greenwich. His photographs have been published widely in magazines, and music websites. He lives and works in London.
Texts by Alison Rooke Yasmin Gunaratnam Konstantinos Panapakidis Works by Sutapa Biswas Nirmal Puwar aruma-Sandra De Berduccy Yasmin Gunaratnam Laura Cuch Yvonne Füeg Karin Michalski Julio Gonzáles Sánchez Films by Jane Jin Kaisen and Guston Sondin-Kung Jack Tan Justin Archer, Martin Bleazar and Rosanna Scott Konstantinos Panapakidis Designed by Ryan Irvan
Curated by Katalin Halász Polly Card visualisingaffect.weebly.com