منيرة القادري - معرض أساطير الصحراء بقاعة ميونيخ الفنية

 منيرة القادري - أساطير الصحراء

يدرس معرض الفنان في Haus der Kunst ، ميونيخ ، عدم اليقين في تصوراتنا وخيبة أملنا في السياسة

تاريخ النشر 20 مارس 2020

المؤلف: Hanno Haunstein

يستكشف فيلم "الحارة المقدسة" للفنانة الكويتية منيرة القادري في "بيت الفن" الأساطير المتعددة وخلق الصحراء.

 قلب العرض هو مقطع الفيديو الذي يحمل نفس الاسم ، والذي يبدأ بقول الراوي "نحن  وبار": في إشارة إلى حفر النيزك والآبار في المنطقة الصحراوية المعروفة باسم ٱلرُّبْع ٱلْخَالِي ، والتي تغطي أجزاء من عمان والمملكة العربية السعودية , الإمارات واليمن.

في الفيلم ، تلتقط طائرة بدون طيار الكثبان الرملية والتكوينات الصخرية بينما يروي الراوي قصة اكتشاف الحفر. وتصفه باستعارة ووصفته بـ "اضطراب النوم". كانت هذه حاشية مشهورة تشير إلى الدعم الاستعماري للحملة.

في عام 1932 ، عبر المستكشف البريطاني هاري سانت جون فيلبي الربع الخالي ، على أمل العثور على مدينة أوبار المفقودة ، والتي وصفها القرآن بأنها دمرها الله. ما وجده بدلاً من ذلك كان الحفر ، التي ظن خطأ أنها بركان. إن رغبة فيلبي في إعادة ثروة الصحراء إلى الوطن تشبه تلك الموجودة في صناعة النفط ، على الرغم من أن رحلات النفط لا تأخذ في الاعتبار الأهمية الدينية والتاريخية للمنطقة.

منيرة القادري ، هولي لين ، 2020 ، صنع. © مجاملة: الفنان. تصوير: منيرة القادري

في حين أن رتابة الصوت المخيفة والمحاكاة الحاسوبية تبدو غريبة ، فإن الكلمات نفسها شعرية ، ويبدو أنها تأتي من كل من المستقبل والماضي البدائي: "نحن جسد من الغبار ، ندمج ونرقص في دفعات من الحرارة والحب الذري". في الوعي الذاتي الهزلي ، يصف الراوي تأثير النيزك بأنه نداء: "هذه الأرض اقتربت منا".

تتجلى أساطيرهم بشكل أكبر في موسيقى جوقة الخلفية ، من تأليف أخت فاطمة القادري. يتم تعزيز الإحساس بالأصل المقدس للؤلؤ من خلال 46 منحوتة من الزجاج المنفوخ باللون الأسود مضاءة بمهارة أمام الشاشة ("Wabar Pearls ،" 2020). غالبًا ما يتميز عمل القديري بتقزحًا للمواد ، والتي تأخذ جودة عضوية بدلاً من استخدامها للأشكال الوظيفية. يتجلى ذلك في سلسلة "Alien Technology" (2014-19) ، وهي سلسلة من المنحوتات على شكل لقم الثقب.

Monira Al Qadiri, ‘Holy Quarter’, 2019, installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Maximilian Geuter

منيرة القادري ، الحي المقدس ، 2019 ، منظر طبيعي ،Haus der Kunst، ميونيخ. مجاملة: فنان؛ الصورة: ماكسيميليان جوتر.

 تم تركيب إحدى هذه القطع في بهو Haus der Kunst ؛ يقف على ارتفاع ثلاثة أمتار مع حواف مسننة وسطح أسود لامع يشبه الزيت ، يبدو وكأنه حضور عنيف. يمكن العثور على الصلة بين البترول واللؤلؤ - وكلاهما ظهر مرارًا في أعمال القادري - في تاريخ الكويت: قبل اكتشاف النفط هناك في عام 1938 ، كانت الصناعة الرئيسية للبلاد هي صيد اللؤلؤ.

تتغير ألوان الحي المقدس أيضًا وتتعرج. يُظهر المشهد الافتتاحي الصحراء غارقة في ظل أحمر يشبه المريخ. في مكان آخر ، تغادر الطائرة بدون طيار البانوراما وتركز على واحة بنفسجية. تذكرنا صور العالم الآخر للقادري بأفلام مثل سولاريس أندريه تاركوفسكي (1972) وفيرنر هيرزوغ لدروس الظلام (1992). إنهم أيضًا يظهرون غرابة الصور الواقعية.

Monira Al Qadiri, ‘Holy Quarter’, 2019, installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Maximilian Geuter

وفي نهاية الفيديو: "احذروا ، فالأرض عطشان وممزقها المرض" مثل الملاك النبوي ، تدل اللآلئ الأسطورية على مستقبل بائس: مستقبل يهزه الجفاف والفيروس ، وهو العصر القادم. لكن الفيلم الفني يقدم مخرجًا: "لنختار مصيرًا مختلفًا" ، كما يقول الصوت ، بينما تدور الكاميرا مغناطيسيًا نحو الحفرة. "تقبيلنا. تعبدنا. لا داعي للخوف". إنه هروب بديل من الواقع ، والذي يفضل الشهوة الخيال على الواقعية - وبالتالي يشعر بالخصوصية في دلالات عصرنا.

Access to the Iraqi Field

In between a trip to Prague, I have been reading books on the modern history of Iraq, the legal history of women's rights in Iraq, and biographical narratives of diasporic Iraqi women. This coming month also marks the third year since I permanently moved from Beijing, which was my home for many years. Many reflections on diaspora and the meaning of living abroad came up when I read books on Iraqi politics as well as Kundera's classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I also compare diasporic conditions cross cultures during my time spent with the Pakistani student community in Gottingen. While the background of my interest is mostly personal, this blog post will mainly address the political issues and questions of methodologies that surfaced when I read the books on Iraq.

In her book Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present, Dr. Nadje Sadig Al-Ali presents material she gathered through interviews with women from four different diasporic communities, including Amman, London, San Diego, and Detroit. There are many similarities between the Iraqi communities I am reading about in Dr. Al-Ali's work and the Pakistani community I encountered, such as the highly contested narratives of the twentieth century. Given the hetergenous makeup of the Iraqi diasporic community, with different ethnic groups, sects and classes occupying different social and political lives, the matter is evidently complex. Generations also mattered: the order of persecution entailed a different relationship with politics. This was also spelled out to me during a conversation with a Kurdish friend, P., who comes from Syrian-occupied Kurdistan. He has stayed in Germany for many years and most of his family is here. He works, studies, and likes the idea that his future would be bounded with Germany. I told him during a conversation about the sufferings of my other Syrian friend who lives in India right now and has been separated from his family since the war started. He replied that indeed, it is a hard life for my friend and other recently exiled Syrians, but his own family had established themselves abroad earlier because they have been persecuted earlier as a religious minority. In other words, my friend may suffer now, but it's because he didn't have to think about it earlier. We each receive our own due in time.

Al-Ali also addresses the sectarian issue through her experiences in the field. During her research in the U.S., she stays with various Iraqi families and acutely notices the differences in locale and socialization. During her research in Dearborn and the broader Detroit Area, the issue of sect becomes strong enough for her to voice her own opinions in this particular situation:

As I talked to the group of young women refugees, it became evident that at least this group of recently arrived women had a very strong sense of their roots and identity, both as Iraqis and Shi'is involved a strong sense of entitlement in terms of rights and privileges in the new Iraq. It also entailed a very strong and, for me personally, disturbing sectarianism that was directed not only at Sunni Iraqis but also at Iraqi Chaldeans. Khadija, just like Fatima and her sister Zeinab, criticized Iraqi Chaldeans for having been supporters of the previous regime and for failing to engage in anti-government activities in previous years. I was puzzled by this sweeping generalization and condemnation of the Chaldean community. Although several Chaldeans I talked to had clearly appreciated the generally secular nature of the previous regime, especially before 1991, which allowed for the relative religious freedom of minorities, many of the more established and well-to-do Chaldean families have been active supporters of the Bush government and his war on Iraq. (p38, emphasis my own)

I also encounter this question of methodology when I conducted research in Germany and Lucknow. When I encounter South Asian and Iraqi Muslims and explain that one of my research interests include Shi'ism, it often sends a message that I am someone who has affinity with the imagined community of Shi'as. The scope of the imagined community depends on the world view and values of the person in question, and how he or she would answer the question of "who is a Shi'a." For me, the question is extremely delicate and variable on situation.

A picture of Imam Hussain in a food store owned by Iraqis. Louisville, KY,  2016

The paragraph by Al-Ali also raises the question of politics and religion: to what extent can one draw the line between sectarianism and political activism? Many of the NGOs and charities related to Iraq claim that they service all sects, which clearly shows there are many NGOs and charities that have particular sectarian identity, subtle or not. When does a "sectarian" conversation or situation call for an activist scholar, such as Al-Ali, to intervene? This also goes back to the debate within race and sociology: is one studying a social group for the purpose of an empirical understanding, or is there an ethical obligation to that group's future? When one labels and understands situations through the lense of sects in an informed manner, the research is usually empirically rich and analytically strong. But what are the additional methodological concerns?

In evaluating narratives of women's rights in Ba'athist Iraq, historian Noga Efrati has noted in her book Women in Iraq how positionality affects the written historical accounts.

Doreen Ingrams and Deborah Cobbet present the clearest examples of following only one narrative. Whereas Ingrams favors the Iraqi Women's Union narrative, Cobbett bases her work on the League for the Defense of Women's Rights narrative. Their contrasting historical probes were probably influenced mainly by their conflicting attitude toward the Ba'ath regime as well as by their personal connections with different Iraqi women. Ingrams, at least at the beginning of the 1980s, sided with regime supporters, whereas Cobbett sided with its opponents. (p134, emphasis my own)

Furthermore, what happens when one relies on one's own group identity to gain access? Researchers such as Nadje Al-Ali (p29) as well as anthropologist Hayder al-Mohammad have mentioned how their family introduced them to certain contacts in the field. Al-Ali has also met many contacts through her own activism in London and Hayder al-Mohammad established contacts from arising circumstances over the length of five years in Basra. Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod also discusses her father's role in her field:

[M]any people remain intrigued by what I wrote about my father having introduced me to this community, perhaps because it makes us think hard about our inevitable positionality in fieldwork. I understand my father’s motives a bit differently now that I am a parent, but I also worry that people exaggerate the importance of this introduction. I still treasure the ways I was able to participate in the intimate and lively women’s world. I know that it was a bit easier for me to be part of this family because of this identity. But even though being perceived as Arab, Muslim, and respectable (under the protection of my father) was important, I don’t think we should overstate its importance. Fieldwork is intense and interpersonally complicated for everyone. Once you are there, no matter how introduced, it is you—as a person—who develops the relationships you do, even as you never escape your locatedness.

It would be an overstatement to say that their research would have been markedly different without the family contacts; still, the question is unresolved in my mind. Al-Mohammad does a wonderful job of historicizing the idea of "tribes." He questions the method which sees tribes as the dominant form of social organization in his 2011 article "You have Car Insurance, We have Tribes." Still, access to tribes were crucial in the field, and the male Iraqi identity was no doubt a gamechanger in terms of on-the-ground research. He writes, "Many leaders are very generous, not only with their wealth and power, but also with their time. Many have also been tremendously protective of me, with no hope of ever seeing anything in return other than friendship and gratitude." Identity plays such a crucial role in these sites, and thus to present oneself with an established lineage (sect or locale) affects how one is perceived in the field. I would like to read more about the implications of this approach.

Al-Mohammad passionately argues about his positionality in an interview and invokes his "brown eyes" that sees what non-brown eyes fail to see--

I have skin in this game, to invoke an idiom I am rather fond of. I’m an Iraqi. I consider Basra my home and not London where I have spent more than twenty years. The problem is, then, where can I turn to that has been relatively untarnished by the theorizers and fly-by-night Iraq specialists? What I noticed was that events, local happenings and moments, are too small for the young bucks, trying to make their name in this racket, to get their hands dirty in. They also did not have access to such experiences, nor did they have a grasp of the background knowledge and ways of life of ordinary Iraqis, hence struggled to notice the significance of certain events. Many have conducted interviews in the north of Iraq in Erbil, or outside Iraq in Amman and Cairo with Iraqi refugees, but essentially, everyday life in Iraq has been beyond the reach of the machinery.

Finally, it is appropriate to end with this observation on academia by Hayder al-Mohammad, to understand the importance of entering the field with his particular approach:

The reason why anthropologists have turned to institutions, cults, groups, and scholars is because of the obvious difficulty in locating one’s fieldwork. Not being natives of the region where they are working in, most anthropologists have few doors open to them. But what starts off as a difficulty in locating where one should, and actually could, conduct fieldwork has a very serious impact on what is studied and how it is studied. Clearly, working with religious scholars and Imams will give you a very limited picture of Islam as it is lived.

...

Most anthropologists do not make clear at all how extraordinarily artificial the pictures they draw of Islam and the life of Muslims are because of the limitations of where they do their fieldwork. So artificial indeed that I have on many occasions sat with my ethnographies of Islam and translated it into Arabic to small crowds in Iraq for most to eventually breakdown into fits of laughter. The comments I hear on many occasions tend to be: “They must think we are really stupid in the West.” (emphasis my own)

Dialogue in the Dark, Hamburg

This May Day, I went to this museum called Dialogue in the Dark in Hamburg, Germany. Here, "visitors are

led by blind guides through a specially constructed and completely darkened space. Conveying characteristics of a familiar environment such as a park, a street or a bar, a daily routine turns into a new experience." This was not my idea but I have always been open to understand different lives. I went with 8 other people in a group who I just met that very day; it was a trust building experience with them as well as with our guide. I just started learning German so our group had an English-speaking guide, who went by the name Ray. He "showed" us his "car," which we had to guess the brand; his "door," where we had to find the doorbell; as well as his "boat," all simulated in the dark.

image from internet

In the end we chatted at the “cafe." He helped us identifying the coins and paying for the drinks and snacks. He could see 7%, has traveled overseas, and enjoys Chinese martial art films. He also learned Taekwondo as a hobby. He is  enrolled in university and uses learning aid (I have seen a couple of visually impaired students guided only by walking sticks at my own university campus as well). At one point he said that his parents were Turkish. This struck me that I was assuming he was German all the time and it revealed a lot about the differences in epistemology. So I asked how do visually impaired people judge others if they cannot see their appearances. Ray said that people like him usually respond positively to sounds that are warm and enthusiastic, which was exactly his kind of speech.

When it was time to say goodbye, I asked if we could see what he looked like. Ray joked that if we see anyone who looks like Johnny Depp it would be him. But in the end he wanted us to remember him as a blind person would remember a new person, and we did not see him. I shook hands with him instead.

I looked up his full name "Rasim" means the one who draws. It reminds me of this visually impaired artist John Bramblitt who painted extraordinary paintings with the help of other senses.

I expected to understand the experience of the blind and visually impaired. As a student of social sciences, we work with categories, such as class or race. The same applied for people with disabilities. But this experience showed that people are not defined exclusively by their most salient feature. It is a cliche to list the achievements that blind people have accomplished, but after this time, I realized that it is so true that one should not judge anyone based on their disability. After spending 90 min in the dark with simulated environments and a walking stick, I understood myself better. I am that I am. Even visual disability cannot change certain aspects of myself. This is not to say that gender, class, and race does not matter--Being from an educated family helps. I could imagine sexual assault would also be more of an issue for women-identifying visual impaired than the men. (See film "Night on Earth") Still, disability is only one aspect and does not decide one's life once and for all.

Two Music Live Shows in March

Both of the musical personalities written below experiment with concepts. Both are considered as extraordinary pioneers in their own musical milieu. I had the privilege to watch them in the same month and I thought it would be a really cool post to write about them together. 

3/15 Xi Ban (戏班) at Kulturpalast, Hannover, Germany

I was delighted to learn that the band Xiban, which means "Theater Troupe," toured in seven cities in Germany starting in March. As students with semester tickets, we had two options to travel without cost: Braunschweig or Hannover. The train left earlier on Saturdays in Braunschweig than Hannover on Sundays, so we opted for the Hannover show. I joked to my companion Maaz that in China, "Kulturpalast" or wenhua gong (文化宫) was an actual place in cities where privileged young children would go for their weekend art activities. The venue was intimate and some audiences were standing by the bar, while others opting for a closer look sat around the stage. We sat against the wall and were duly impressed. Maaz compared the band's traditional styles to qawwali folk songs that he loves.

Xiban  is a really mind-blowing band in the way that they experiment with elements from the South Asian sitar, jazz,  and a lot of folk instruments and oral traditions from China. Their fusion does not aim to entertain and display the exotic with superficial crossovers, but to alarm and shock with the transgressive potentials of sound. I only learned about them in February, and I I did not know much about traditional Chinese instruments, such as the different "luo" and drums used in Xiban's double albums.  It was a musical education to see the different instruments in action, something more than what I expected of a live show. The lead singer Zooma has stated in Chinese interviews that he would like to see more people using Chinese instruments and hopes to revive that part of the culture by introducing it to a new context. 

A type of luo; though Xiban uses hands rather than the sticks to drum on it

As a northerner by speech style, I was really amazed to learn that the lead singer Zooma 竹玛 was from Shanghai, because he mastered the northern style of singing very well. My favorite song is sung in a northern style--Counting People for Fun. His multi-linguistic ability also helped him perform songs in southern languages as well. I was most impressed by Li Xing's sitar-playing with his guitar in the last song, 藏相守. I even asked where he had learned it, and he said in China, from an American born Chinese guitarist called Gu Zhongshan (Lawrence Ku). 

Music and film critic Mengjin Sun, a very active figure in the Shanghai jazz circle, also put on his own improvisation that night, although that was less musical and less agreeable for the ear... The band toured for their album 《太平有象》 & 《五石散》. You can listen to some tracks here.

3/21 Vijay Iyer Trio at Bergamo Jazz Festival, Italy

This was the first live show I went to alone in Europe, first jazz performance I ever attended, and first time ever traveling to Italy. I was understandably nervous about whether or not I would be able to procure the ticket. Luckily I got one and there were many seats close to the front rows when I entered.

I heard about pianist and composer Vijay Iyer first through Heems (Himanshu Suri), a rapper vocal about his South Asian identity. I had no clear understanding of jazz at the time and I was intrigued by the possibilities of collaboration between rap and jazz. Even though I had not seen the Open City performance, I have been more on the lookout for opportunities of jazz musical education. Vijay Iyer, with his insightful opinions on race and art, such as this phenomenal speech at Yale, served as an opportunity for a person with a liberal arts background like me to this daunting subject. 

I’ve found myself right in the middle of conversations about race for most of the past 20 years. Now I’ve managed to maintain a stable and consistent presence in the jazz world; by any measure I’ve been one of jazz’s success stories, and at this point I have no bitterness; I just observe how things unfold. For example, I’ve seen my work described repeatedly (mostly by white men, who tend to do most of the talking in jazz) as “mathematical,” “technical,” “inauthentic,” “too conceptual,” “jazz for nerds,” “dissonant,” “academic,” and just last month, a “failure.” Over the years a racialized component emerges in such language—basically a kind of model minority discourse that presumes that Asians have no soul and have no business trying to be artists, especially in proximity to Blackness, which is, in the white imagination, a realm of pure intuition, apparently devoid of intellect. No such critique, I should add, is typically leveled at white jazz musicians, of which there are many.

I really appreciated the album Revolutions as well as some parts of Accelerando. Vijay Iyer has been influenced by Thelonious Monk and Henry Threadgill, but also maintains his own style through incorporating improvisation as well as Carnatic inspirations. During the show Vijay introduced the trio members several times, bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore. I unfortunately could not grasp the beginning and ends of each jazz track, so I was lost in the music (in the bad sense). I experienced the frustration of not "getting it." Compared to the controlled environment of my own computer, the live performance was even more challenging to my musical sensibilities. But when I saw Stephan Crump sweating at the end and audiences clapping with much enthusiasm, I knew the performance was something special. Vijay disclosed that there will also be a show in Italy again in June, and he looked forward to seeing the crowd again. I was determined to read more about jazz, and I found his illuminating conversation in 2005 with jazz sax player and South Asian American Rudresh Mahanthappa--Sangha: Collaborative Improvisations on Community (PDF available for download here) . This was my favorite segment from the conversation:

Vijay: I guess I still have twinges of bad feelings about it, because I find that barriers are maintained in the way that music functions, in all these different cultures and subcultures. I find that what’s true in the mainstream superstructure gets transferred even to these little fringe subcultures, like the South Asian underground scene. And in particular, the role that jazz has today, or anything affiliated with or having any relationship to jazz: it’s sort of a pariah. It’s true what Wadada said; it’s the sort of thing that nobody wants to like. And that continues to be true even in the club culture scene. And what’s funny is that if you go to these Desi club nights where there’ll be DJ’s and people playing tabla and dholek and stuff, the way they promote the events and the way they talk about it afterwards, they’re using all this idyllic language about improvisation and freestyling. You know the kind: these people are “on some next shit” because they’re making it up off the top of their heads. And it just strikes me how that same language is never used by those people to describe what we do. 

Rudresh: Yeah. I think when people think of jazz, the younger generation thinks it involves too much homework. Somehow this idea of just going and listening and not trying to understandit is kind of inconceivable. Somehow when jazz comes up, people feel like they always have to have a background, they have to understand it. I was online and I found some blogs about your quartet shows at the Jazz Standard in June. And some singer had posted to her blog, and it was this whole rant about how she’s been trying to get down with modern jazz but she just can’t deal with it. And the whole thing was so laden with—it wasn’t about the music, really. It was about her feeling like she’s supposed to understand this but she can’t understand it. And obviously there was this psychological thing happening there, where she was maybe on the verge of feeling ignorant or stupid or something like that. So that’s actually seen as a reason for not liking it. I mean, do you feel like when you go to the museum and look at some crazy modern art, do you feel stupid? I generally don’t, but I kind of decided a long time ago that I was just going to deal with it on my own terms....So jazz just challenges people—just the word “jazz” challenges people in all sorts of bizarre ways. It’s really a shame that people can’t just come to it with a blank slate and then decide if they like it or hate it, or just be able to groove off the energy or the emotion of it…

In this sense, both jazz and experimental music such as Xiban challenge the audiences. 

This was my favorite performance of Vijay and Rudresh together, from 2008:

Bonus: Vijay Iyer talking about the importance of participating music events (even when one does not know what is exactly going on)

I was checking out a lot of these South Indian classical concerts in the Bay Area, mainly in Palo Alto, which had such a strong South Asian population because of the Silicon Valley. They were able to bring over artists from India to perform, so there was a regular concert series and I was going to that twice a month. And that was where I learned a lot about just the basics of listening to Karnatak music. Not that I’m an expert or know anything at all, really, about the details of it, but I know how to participate in that kind of event. That is something you don’t get from listening to records — some of those extramusical factors that you can’t really get from books or pedagogy, really. You learn a lot from being immersed in this community that’s participating in these events. 

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What's next? Post-rock band Wang Wen (惘闻) will be playing in Dortmund. Looking forward to seeing them again. The last time I saw them play was in Chengdu, June 2012.