Excerpted from A Game of Shater Hassan, an artist’s project by Haitham Ennasr printed in FUSE issue 36-2. To see the rest of this artist’s project please click here.

A Game of Shater Hassan is a nonlinear, semi-autobiographical project that explores notions of memory, oral history and the diaspora. The project is described as a retelling the story of Shater Hassan when in fact it actively denies you most of the story itself, and takes you somewhere else instead.

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Haitham is a New York based new media artist and game designer. His work ranges from digital and analog games to fake organizations, and has been featured on Mondoweiss and Indiecade. Haitham completed his MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons (New York NY), and his bachelors from the Arab American University in Jenin, Palestine. He is a decent bellydancer, but there is room for improvement in that department.

Related posts:

1. States of Coloniality/ Palestine–Palestine
2. 36-2/Editorial
3. Inside Decolonizing Architecture: The Politics of Visibility in Common Assembly

By Sarah Pupo in collaboration with Josh Pavan

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

She may have traded her microphone for a megaphone, but you would be hard-pressed not to recognize that signature hairpiece above the crowd. Lady Gaza has recently emerged as her latest reinvention, this time from international superstar to – if you can believe it – Palestine activist.

“I just really felt that, as an artist, it was my time to give back. Everyone talks about Darfur and the Congo, but what about the West Bank?” she says, pictured at Montreal Pride in a custom Thierry Mugler.

Her latest transition hasn’t pleased all the fans however, and despite how nonchalantly she plays it off, the subject can still stir her infamously well-documented temper. “I’ve been blessed with some amazing fans,” she tells us from her Ramallah home, “but at the end of the day you have to be true to yourself. These Disneyfied faggots, they love queens as long as you’re decorative, don’t say anything political, but open your mouth and they cry that you’re highjacking their parade, that you’re not a ‘real gay’ concerned with ‘real gay’ issues.

I’m Lady m**********n Gaza! I am realness!”

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Sarah Pupo was born in Toronto, Ontario and lives in Montreal, Quebec. Through painting, drawing and animation she works with methods of making that place value on intuition, ritual, associative thinking and the flux of chance and control. Her practice is rooted in a desire to undermine hierarchies privileging rational, linear experience over that which lies beyond traditional means of perception and understanding. Recent projects include a solo show at La Centrale in Montreal, Quebec, group shows in Vancouver and Berlin and a collaborative animation with the Norwegian recording artist, Nina Nielsen.

Joshua Pavan is an Alberta-bred queen relocated to Montreal where he works as a trade unionist and community organizer. In the summer of 2007, he was one of the co-founders of Pervers/Cité, Montreal’s radical queer summer festival. When not figuring out political drag as the Lady Gaza, he can be found defending the honour of misunderstood popstars.

Related posts:

1. 36-2/Editorial
2. Signposts from alQaws: A Decade of Building a Queer Palestinian Discourse
3. Inside Decolonizing Architecture: The Politics of Visibility in Common Assembly

Introduction and interview by Gina Badger for FUSE.

The following text is excerpted from FUSE Magazine 36.2 (Spring 2013). In order to read the full text, you can purchase the article below.

Cuisine is a vivacious and mutable cultural practice that has history and politics folded right into it. The privileged eaters who make up North American foodie culture may often miss the specific histories of conquest and migration built into their eclectically global palettes, but they are present in each bite. Israeli appropriations of Palestinian ingredients and dishes are illustrative; for instance, the rebranding of tabouleh as “Israeli salad,” and maftoul (a small, round pasta made from wheat and bulgur) as “Israeli couscous.” The complex etymology of the word sabra, commonly known as the name of an Israeli-produced hummus, reveals a complex history of linguistic colonialism. In Arabic and in Hebrew, sabra is a generic word for cactus, plantings of which were used pre-1948 to delineate borders between Palestinian villages. More recently, in Modern Hebrew sabra has become the descriptor for Israeli-born Jews — metaphorically and literally, the beneficiaries of the clearing of the Palestinian cacti. In 1982, residents of the Sabra Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon were massacred by a Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia, in collusion with Israel, one of the most brutal events in the history of the occupation. The name of the hummus, so cunningly appropriated, can’t be separated from this settler-colonial history.

Palestinian cuisine — in Gaza and the West Bank, in camps and in cities worldwide —reflects a history of occupation and displacement. But more than that, it reflects the skills, proclivities and ingredients required to survive those conditions. Basil AlZeri has captured hours of Skype video of his mother teaching him how to cook from her impressive oeuvre of Palestinian dishes. This archive of cultural knowledge is the private counterpart to a series of public food-based performances he has presented since 2011. The first performances were mezze-style dinners in which AlZeri presented his guests with an array of Palestinian recipes in tiny dishes resting on his body. Lying face-down on the table, the uncomfortably shifting body of the cook became an antidote against the commodity fetishism of foodie culture. These early performances established the labour politics of AlZeri’s work by highlighting two kinds of unrecognized and often unpaid labour: gendered domestic work and artist’s labour. Next, AlZeri began cooking live as a performance with his mother, Suad, instructing him from Dubai, over Skype. Most recently, AlZeri has been working on The Mobile Kitchen Lab, which he will use as an itinerant stage for future cooking performances. AlZeri performs simple and generous gestures, inviting his guests to identify the Palestinian stories of land, resources and labour that are built into his recipes.

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FUSE – When did you learn to cook?

Basil AlZeri – After I left home, at age 17. My sister Karmel and I were living together in Cairo, and we were sick of eating out all the time. So she proposed a deal where I would wash the dishes and she would cook. She said, “I’m not your wife or your mother, if you want me to cook, you have to wash the dishes.”

FUSE – Was she a good cook?

BA – She just copied my mother’s dishes exactly.

FUSE – So it was your mother who cooked at home?

BA – Yes, my mother was always in full control of the kitchen. It was her domain.

FUSE – So you always had these women cook for you. How did you get interested in cooking yourself?

BA – I became really good friends with Rina, a Japanese student at the American University in Cairo where we were both studying. She was really well traveled and adventuresome. She was really knowledgeable about world food and introduced me to so many new ingredients.

She also taught me about street food in Cairo. We started cooking together and she eventually moved in with Karmel and I. She was very proud of Japanese cuisine, and so I wanted to learn more about Palestinian food so I could share with her.

FUSE – Eventually, you began to incorporate food into your artistic practice. How did you come to that?

BA – Cooking became an entry-point for me to introduce myself, as a human being who is also a Palestinian, to my peers in Canada. Cuisine became a way for me to express myself, my history, my cultural identity, with a lot of specificity but without being over-determined by certain politics.

FUSE – Mezze is a form of cuisine you’ve drawn on in your recent work. In Arab cuisine, is mezze an appetizer course within a larger meal, or more its own style of eating?

BA – People don’t necessarily eat mezze and then a main course and then dessert. Mezze can be the whole meal. The meal is made of many different little dishes, and that’s all you eat. For lighter meals, or lunch, or even a lighter dinner. It’s usually the type of meal for when you have a little time to sit around and talk. It has a social aspect to it. Where people sit around and eat for longer, and the plates keep coming.

FUSE – How many times have you done the mezze-style dinner party performances?

BA – The first time I experimented with that gesture was very informal, in a private space, in 2010. It was Mother’s Day, and I dedicated the first dinner party performance to my mom. I kept working with the idea of the body and cooking and food preparation. I did a short residency at Don Blanche in August 2012, where my role as an artist was as a cook’s assistant. I realized that I’d like to present something there towards the end of my residency, and it seemed like a really great chance to re-enact certain elements of the food gestures, but in a different context.

[…]

To continue reading, purchase the single article or the whole issue below, or subscribe to FUSE for as little as $24! 

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Basil AlZeri is a Toronto-based Palestinian artist working in performance, video, installation, food and public art interventions. His artwork is grounded in his practice as an art educator and community worker, and engages with the intersection of everyday actions and life necessities. AlZeri’s performance work has been exhibited in Toronto (FADO, Nuit Blanche, Whipper Snapper Gallery), Quebec (Fait Maison 14), Winnipeg (Central Canadian Centre for Performance) and Mexico City (Transmuted International Performance Art Festival, Performancear O Morir). Upcoming projects include a public performance project with the Ottawa Art Gallery/Creative Cities Conference and performances in Chile and Argentina in 2013. On 15 March, FUSE and Israeli Apartheid Week Toronto will co-present AlZeri’s performance at Xpace Cultural Centre as part of the FADO Emerging Artists Series, .sight.specific.

Related posts:

1. Inside Decolonizing Architecture: The Politics of Visibility in Common Assembly
2. 36-2/Editorial

By Nishat Awan and Cressida Kocienski

The following text is excerpted from FUSE Magazine 36.2 (Spring 2013). In order to read the full text, you can purchase the article below.

The Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) [1] is part of a long-term project that deals with the spatial complexities of decolonization through an interrogation of the relationships between law, spatial production and colonial practices in Palestine and Israel. A significant body of DAAR’s work attempts to reveal how the operation of Israeli spatial and legal regimes within the Occupied Territories can produce extra-territorial spaces and grey zones wherein legal jurisdictions fade. For DAAR, these spaces of ambiguity are significant for their role in revealing the workings of power — they are places where such colonial and territorial power can be understood, challenged and perhaps undermined. Their work experiments with narrations of the landscape under occupation, and strives to be both intellectually and architecturally propositional.

In this article, we will consider the rhetoric of DAAR in relationship to their work Common Assembly, which was produced during a summer 2011 residency in which we participated. The work was conceived in response to the unfinished Palestinian parliament building in the West Bank, the prospective Palestinian bid for recognition at the United Nations [2] and the unfolding backdrop of the Arab Spring. Considering the recent expansions and contractions in the possibility for a viable two-state solution within this contested territory, [3] we feel it is an important time to examine the ways in which this work renders visible vital questions about the constitution and agency of the Palestinian body politic, and its viability in terms of its own claims of decolonization, both within and outside the West Bank.

Standing as a disused and incomplete structure, the Palestinian Legislative Council building (its official title, but known to DAAR as the Palestinian parliament) was designed by noted Palestinian architect Jafar Tukan. It is located in Abu Dis, an outlying Jerusalem neighbourhood that used to be a separate village, but has now been subsumed into the expanding city. Much of Abu Dis falls outside the Jerusalem line, Israel’s unilaterally declared 1967 border of the city. Close to the parliament building, severing it completely from Jerusalem, passes the wall that separates the West Bank and Israel. Significantly for the project, the positioning of the building is entirely ambiguous: it sits on the Jerusalem line, partly in and partly out of the city, yet entirely physically cut off from it. The exact reason for this placement is unknown, and its potential political fallout is also in disagreement. Rumours, theories and conspiracies abound — in the tug of war between Israel and Palestine, and between the various Palestinian factions, how did the building land so fortuitously, so awkwardly? Nevertheless, it is certain that the building’s positioning was the result of political manoeuvring.

The Palestinian parliament site was the starting point for the research, design, and film production work that the DAAR residents helped to produce, which also sat within a previously established framework of discourse and exhibited work. The planned outcome of the residency was the touring exhibition Common Assembly, to be shown in Switzerland, the UK and the US. [4] As the title of the exhibition suggests, the nucleus of the work was intended to be an exploration of the commons, informed by Hardt and Negri’s definition of this concept as “the incarnation, the production, and the liberation of the multitude.” [5]

Several months into the Arab Spring, there was a tangible sense of political elasticity in the region brought about by the collective uprisings, and it seemed pertinent to raise the question of the Palestinian struggle from within this wider context. The DAAR participants were keen to transpose this idea of collectivity onto the site of the parliament building, taken to represent a form of politics under threat in the region. A principal reference was the February 2011 cleaning of Cairo’s Tahrir Square by volunteer members of the public, in the wake of mass protests demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. This was seen as a manifestation of the triumph of the political power of the commons, and the claiming of common ownership of civic space.

One of DAAR’s primary strategies is to work with and inside the lines that slice up the landscape. [6] In Common Assembly, the physical space taken up by the Jerusalem line as it cuts through the parliament was cleaned to create an ephemeral and symbolic strip of common space. This was a staged performance-for-the-camera that, because of the inaccessibility of the space to the Palestinian population, was performed symbolically for them in absentia by the DAAR residents.

The exhibited work was the installation of a 1:5-scale sculptural cross-section of the parliament as it appears inside the Jerusalem line, transporting this fragment to the site of each gallery in various configurations alongside this intrusive element were projections of both the six-minute film of the cleaning performance, and grainy black and white images of crowd scenes from historical meetings of the various Palestinian parliaments-in-exile. [7] These images produced a spectral assembly of dispersed discussions, removed from their specific context, and with the key figureheads supplanted by images of the audience (although still members of a political elite) to create an image of a de-localized collective assembly. There were also four brief extracts of interviews with political figures [8] displayed on monitors with headphones. The lines of their narratives, set against the figures of the multitudes and the parliament, often cut across one another, producing a microcosmic view of the terrain in all its complexity.

[…]

To continue reading, purchase the single article or the whole issue below, or subscribe to FUSE for as little as $24!

NOTES:

[1] DAAR is described as a platform for collective production. It is based in Beit Sahour, a small suburb of Bethlehem in the West Bank, within the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It was founded in 2007 as Decolonizing Architecture, by Beit Sahour-based architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, and London-based architect Eyal Weizman.

[2] In September 2011, there was a formal request by the Chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, for Palestine to be recognized as the 194th full member state of the United Nations, by the General Assembly, based on the pre-1967 borders, as part of a campaign called Palestine 194. At press time, this has not yet been voted on, and at the prospect of a veto from the US, the request was scaled back to an upgrade to non-mem­ber observer state.

[3] In November 2012, Palestine was granted status as a non-member observer state in the United Nations, which then “express[ed] the urgent need for the resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestin­ians leading to a permanent two-State solution.” (See “General Assembly Grants Palestine Non-member Observer State Status at UN,” UN News Centre, 29 November 2012, online.) This unprecedented rise in support for the political legitimacy of the Palestinian diaspora, however marginal it may be in concrete terms, immediately provoked plans for a retaliatory measure of architectural occupation from Israel—the building of 3,000 new settlement homes in the E1 area, to the East of Jerusalem, previously kept clear under international pressure (see Peter Beaumont, “Israel approves another 1,200 settlement units around Jerusalem,” The Guardian, 25 December 2012, online). The insertion of this territorial expansion into the remaining fragments of the West Bank, if it materializes in the months ahead and remains unrevoked, will effectively sever the territory completely in half, and obliterate the chances for establishing a contiguous neighbour state for Israel.

[4] Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; The James Gallery at The City University of New York (CUNY), US.

[5] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 303.

[6] Previously, DAAR has worked with the Green Line, which was drawn following the 1949 Armistice Agreement, and the lines of the 1994 Oslo Accords. In each case, they have interpreted their ambiguous physical and legal definition as bestowing these geopolitical borders with a spatial thickness.

[7] These videos were from publicly accessible video archives available online, and ranged from depictions of the first parliament appointed by the PLO in 1964 to the first popularly elected parliament established in 1996.

[8] Ahmed Qurei, PLO Member and Former President of the Palestinian Legislative Council; Basem al-Masri, First Director General of the Palestinian Parliament; Fajr Harb, an activist; and Khalil Tafakji, a cartographer (a highly politicized occupation in the region). The fifth video of Oxford academic and former PLO Representative Karma Nabulsi was from a lecture held in Ramallah organized by Fajr Harb.

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Nishat Awan is a writer and spatial practitioner whose research interests include the production and representation of migratory spaces, inquiries into the topological as method and alternative modes of architectural practice. She holds a PhD in Architecture and is co-author of Spatial Agency (Routledge, 2011) and co-editor of Trans-Local-Act (aaa-PEPRAV, 2011). She was architect in residence with DAAR in 2011. She is a member of the art/architecture collective OPENkhana and is a Lecturer in Architecture at University of Sheffield, UK.

Cressida Kocienski holds an MFA in Art Writing from Goldsmiths, London. Working between video, performance and text, her research concerns spatial production and modes of narration. She collaborates with architects Nishat Awan and Phil Langley as OPENkhana, and is co-editor of the experimental publishing platform The Institute of Immaterialism. She was filmmaker in residence with DAAR in 2011. She has worked collaboratively with Art on the Underground; James Taylor Gallery; South London Gallery; Whitechapel Gallery; ICA, and Resonance FM. Her films have been screened at the Benaki Museum, Athens (2010); FormContent, London (2010); and Pleasure Dome and TSV, Toronto (2012).

Related posts:

1. 36-2/Editorial
2. Decolonizing the Occupations: Shortlist of Links
3. Talking Politics with Strangers

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

Review by Mike Hoolboom

When I slip Nadim Mishlawi’s Sector Zero DVD from its sleeve, my heart is already in my throat. I am expecting to be hurt by these pictures from Lebanon, and the cruel accident of this country’s geography, but from the very opening images I am assured that beauty will be a regular accompaniment. The camera seeks out the light, it caresses the broken walls of the hospital in which much of the film is shot, the touch is tender and sensitive. The word “camera” has its roots in the Latin for “room,” which cinematographer Talal Khoury seems aware of in his lyric exploration of spaces in a factory, a slaughterhouse and a tannery. People are secondary here, the figures have become the ground, while the walls and floors are carefully and slowly observed. Slow, the looking is so slow, as if there were time enough to gather all the lives that lived between these walls, that touched this table and looked out these windows. The worn surfaces shimmer with a flickering, hopeful light, as the camera draws its focal planes in and out of focus, breathing with the architecture. Not unusually, this formal, nearly studied beauty is both cover story and uncovering. It offers the qualities of touch.

Where are we? Mishlawi’s architectural explorations are perched at the edge of Beirut in what one commentator names “a city of outsiders… a reflection of Lebanon.” [1] As architect and urbanist Sandra Frem notes, “Beirut’s earliest experience with globalization dates back to 1888, when it was proclaimed the capital of the Ottoman province.” [2] A growing population in the new port required that its quarantine facility (karantina in Ottoman Turkish) be moved from the city centre to its outskirts, and a hospital was built around it. Though the facility didn’t last, the name stuck, as the region’s outcasts came to find a home in this outlying area. In the 1920s there were Armenians fleeing the Turkish genocide, and in 1948 Palestinians came rushing from their former homes at gunpoint as the new nation of Israel expelled its native sons and daughters. Kurds flowed in from what had been Kurdistan as boundaries shifted, traders came from Jordan and Iraq. Eventually, the sprawl extended to encircle Beirut in what came to be known as the “misery belt,” and city officials decided to build a wall to hide its unwanted residents.

How do you make a portrait of a neighbourhood? Three men, ghosts of light and shadow, appear in succession, often in voice-over. First, political historian Hazem Saghieh details the waves of immigrant outcasts that gathered to form “Beirut’s only ghetto.” He recounts that during Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990), many in the densely populated Palestinian refugee camps were massacred by Christian militias. In one stand-alone sequence, historical footage is introduced. It is shot from the streets, and shows mostly teenagers, some of them dressed like soldiers, crouched in the rubble of what used to be home, staring through rifle sights, or else rushing out to save a wounded friend, only to be gunned down.

The second ghost voice belongs to Beirut architect Bernard Khoury — designer of the renowned nightclub B018, built eight years after “the end” of the civil war and whose office is nestled squarely in the Karantina — weighs in with personal recollections: I came back to Beirut in 1993 and obviously did not find any work… I thought I was going to be a great architectural warrior that was going to take part in the reconstruction of his country… Not only rebuilding buildings, but the reconstruction of a nation, only to realize a few years later that the reconstruction never really happened. In order for such a project to be politically feasible, you have to have some kind of political consensus, you have to go through a scarring process. This never really happened in Beirut. After 1990, we went through a long denial period which we’re still in. [3]

According to the director, the film was once going to be named In the Freudian Slip. [4] Little wonder then, that the third voice of Sector Zero belongs to psychoanalyst Chawki Azouri, who at one point states, “Historically, primitive tribes arrived at the idea of monotheism and of government simultaneously. Once government had been formed on the ground, God was formed in the sky.” [5] Does a nation have an unconscious? How many can fit on that couch? Azouri argues that the creation of group identity requires an enemy that must be found within and then cast out. He goes on to conjure a national Oedipal narrative, arguing that the beginnings of democracy arrive in a collective killing of the father. “In Freud’s view, we become what we cannot have, and desire (and punish) what we are compelled to disown.” — Adam Phillips [6]

Azouri argues that the Karantina is at the heart of Lebanon’s national life, precisely because it is home to so much that is unwanted. The outskirts of Beirut are thus figured as a national, even international, dumping ground, a refuse container for all that cannot be contained within the city’s globalized crossroads. It is home to a slaughterhouse, a garbage dump, a metal factory. Can we perhaps look to the Karantina’s bloodied streets for the necessary glue, the binding agent, that will re-imagine Lebanon’s national project?

“It is the individual who remembers, while groups forget because it is in their interest to forget.” [7]

NOTES:

[1] Dr. Chawki Azouri in Sector Zero.

[2] Sandra Frem, “Reclaiming the Infrastructural Landscape: the Case of Nahr Beirut,” Transnational Tides and the Future of the Arab City (lecture, American University of Beirut, Beirut, 2 October 2009).

[3] Bernard Khoury, “New Wars in Progress,” (lecture, University of Michigan Art and Design, Ann Arbour, 8 October 2009).

[4] Leah Caldwell, “Nadim Mishlawi: Behind the Walls of Sector Zero,” Al-Akhbar English (7 April 2012; online)

[5] Quoted in Sector Zero.

[6] Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 76.

[7] Azouri, quoted in Sector Zero.

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Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian media artist whose work can be found at fringeonline.ca and mikehoolboom.com. His most recent movie is Lacan Palestine (2012), a feature length, found-footage essay.

Image Credit: Nadim Mishlawi, Sector Zero (2011). Film still. Courtesy of MC Distribution.

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

Years ago, on my way to work, I ran into my friend Barb [1] who was trembling with rage. She’d just been told that her cash settlement as a residential school survivor not only made her ineligible for social assistance, but that she’d have to pay back months of benefits she’d already received. Barb successfully fought that decision, even though it shouldn’t have been necessary, and in any case, no amount of money could compensate her for past and current traumas. That day, I arrived at work shaking with rage myself.

Then I got a call from my co-worker Tarek, a Lebanese-born Palestinian solidarity activist. During the 2006 Israeli incursion into Lebanon, I’d commiserated with him when he lost touch with family members who were living in areas the Israeli Defense Forces had bombed and invaded. I felt moved by his plight, frustrated in my helplessness, and gratified to eventually learn his family was okay. This experience solidified my resolve as a Palestinian solidarity activist. Similarly, since the day I’d met him, Tarek expressed and acted on his solidarity with First Nations peoples in a variety of ways. This time, however, he was calling to share some good news: his father had just bought him and his partner a house. I expressed happiness for him, but underneath I was angry at the injustice. Tarek, born in another land, was now a homeowner in mine. Barb, then in her 50s, had lived all her life on Turtle Island, a descendant of its original caretakers, yet she was always falling in and out of crisis, trying to survive. I struggled to articulate the relationship between the very different lives my friends were living.

Seeing Barb after that incident, speaking and singing in solidarity with Palestinians at community events, filled me with respect and admiration for her. Yet, I still grapple with my contradictory feelings. I question how they impact my activism. While I understand the history of settler colonialisms, here and in the Middle East, as well as complex issues of privilege and solidarity, I remain emotionally unsettled by this and many other similar stories.

Some of my Indigenous friends believe the Palestinian solidarity movement seems unwilling or unable to interrogate the complexities of settler colonialism on Turtle Island. There are legitimate concerns. Palestinian solidarity activists fly the Two Row Wampum [2] or Hiawatha [3] flags, even when their meanings aren’t clearly understood. Such activities betray a lack of awareness of the specifics of settler colonialism here, as well as other nations’ relationships to the land on which Toronto is built, such as the Anishinaabe, Wyandot and many others.

Years ago, some Palestinian solidarity activists I was working with in Toronto approached me about their experiences within the movement. They expressed frustration that their organization was insincere in its support for Indigenous struggles on Turtle Island. They feared my involvement in the movement was being tokenized. They had seen First Nations spirituality being ridiculed and denigrated behind my back, in some cases by central organizers. They were concerned that I was invited to co-organize, speak and sing at events only to lend credibility, to appear as if they were doing something meaningful about settler colonialism in Canada. While I had sometimes felt tokenized, I trusted that the work I was doing would eventually heighten awareness of Indigenous struggles for some, if not all. The awareness of these activists was actually proof of my impact. In fact, their assumption that I was unaware of being tokenized hurt me as much as confirmation of the fact itself. Though I’m not proud to admit it, I enjoyed the celebrity that accompanied my continued activism.

In any case, these young folks insisted that any and every settler activist had a responsibility to centralize and prioritize Indigenous struggles. Furthermore, they themselves felt ostracized by their organizations because they were practicing Muslims. While they continued to engage with their own faith communities in speaking out strongly and publicly against oppressive interpretations of Islam, their activist communities failed to respect their spiritual practice. Consequently, their questions left me wondering if solidarity organizations so grounded in secularism and hostile to spirituality could be genuine and effective allies with First Nations peoples. I still wonder. [4]

Indigenous activists, artists and academics like Robert Lovelace [5] (who sailed on the Tahrir [6] to Gaza in 2010) continue their activism, not allowing criticisms of the solidarity movement to deter their unflagging support for justice in the Middle East. Likewise, Palestinian solidarity activists have created educational websites around Idle No More and round dance with the rest of us in sub-zero temperatures.

Generally, discussion of relationships across our movements raises issues of integrity, honour and respect in struggle. While I see many activists whose organizing is consistent with the values they espouse, I also see too many who role-model insincerity, tokenism, dishonesty, manipulation, as well as other oppressive and abusive behaviours that are inconsistent with how activists need to conduct themselves in order to be effective. I’ve had my own issues in this regard and these days hold my activism to a high standard. This includes learning humility and ensuring that it’s my love for people and hope for a better world, rather than anger, that drives my activism.

In any case, our movements have evolved. It’s possible now to discuss issues that we couldn’t ten years ago because we didn’t know each other’s stories very well — as communities or individuals. Today, I’m optimistic about the potential for closer relationships and more effective mutual solidarity. Toward this end, I pose this question to Palestinian solidarity activists on Turtle Island: “If you were a settler living in Palestine right now, what would you consider to be your responsibilities?” The query hardly begs a one-size-fits-all response.

Were I living in Palestine, I would follow the lead of Palestinian communities and organizations in recovering their lands and sovereignty: to understand the many ways in which I was complicit in genocide there, and to do everything I could to minimize that complicity. That might mean leaving the country, hopefully for a safer place. Even if I were living in Palestine, I would still feel a sense of responsibility to Turtle Island and the communities that sustained my physical, mental, emotional and spiritual development here — particularly when those communities experience crisis.

In this interconnected world, struggling against settler colonialism anywhere is struggling against it everywhere. Any settler living on Turtle Island owes their ability to do so to ongoing genocide and colonialism here. I include myself as a settler. Even if I invoke my Tsalagi ancestry as lending me the right to identify as an Indigenous person, I’m still living on the ancestral lands of others. Furthermore, those of us who have agency in Canada, limited though it may be, cannot escape our complicity in the actions of this nation-state in Palestine, Afghanistan, Haiti and any number of places around the globe.

The answer to my question will shift across individuals and contexts. I trust that an awareness of the contradictions of our social locations, a willingness to dialogue about allyship, as well as efforts to honourably role-model honesty, sincerity and integrity in our relationships, will take us to the compassionate, cooperative and socially just world we all aspire to create.

NOTES:

[1] To maintain privacy, fictional names are used in this text.

[2] The flag is based on a wampum belt that signifies one of the early treaties between the Haundenosaunee and at first Dutch then British settlers, enshrining the principle of noninterference in each other’s affairs while sharing the land.

[3] The Hiawatha Flag is also a depiction of a pre-colonial wampum belt that represents the agreement by the original five nations of the Haundenosaunee who agreed to form a confederacy informed by the Great Law of Peace.

[4] For a more thorough discussion of this issue, see my article “Why Indigenous and Racialized Struggles Will Always be Appendixed by the Left,” Rabble
(19 July 2011; online).

[5] Elder, activist and retired Co-Chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation.

[6] The Tahrir was a Canadian-led boat, part of the larger Freedom Flotilla movement, protesting the Israeli blockade and the Canadian government’s complicity in military violence against Palestinians.

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Of African-American, Cherokee and European descent, Zainab Amadahy is a mother, singer/songwriter, activist and author. Her publications include the feminist science fiction novel Moons of Palmares (1997) and Wielding the Force: The Science of Effective Activism (2012).

Related posts:

1. 36-2/Editorial
2. From Turtle Island To Palestine: Reflections On the Indigenous Youth Delegation To Palestine
3. Signposts from alQaws: A Decade of Building a Queer Palestinian Discourse

By Maiko Tanaka

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

Making it Work

Through this column, I will document the particular economies of contemporary art that emerge through the discursive events that accompany and supplement exhibitions, curatorial projects and other mainstage productions. For many public art institutions, the presentation of workshops, roundtables, artists’ talks and the like is a mandated activity, one that is also crucial in terms of securing public funding. Despite the predominance of these activities, they are unevenly documented and hardly ever assessed critically. With this column, my task is to engage critically with the economies of attention, care and reproduction that are manifested through public programming. Discursive events are often expected to perform a buffering or recuperative action — to educate, create dialogue or mediate conflict. Through responses to specific programmed events, I will endeavor to activate useful concepts, images and actions that can lead towards creating a new vocabulary of solidarity between actors who are entangled in these economies.

Shifty Consent
Living in 10 Easy Lessons
Gallery 44 (Toronto)
26 / 10 to 01 / 12 2012

The event at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times theatre was initially publicized as a panel discussion. However, from the beginning, it was clear that it had been modified into something less formal. There was no panel of experts on the stage but rather a circle of chairs implying that the invited speakers would be mingling with the audience. Another change was the addition of a third-party facilitator, who opened up the event with a request for the audience to participate from a place of respect. She also had us all take a minute to speak to the person on our left and right about our own expectations and hopes for the event — a moment that turned out very useful for me as I began to understand why there was so much tension in the room. Despite these efforts to open up a horizontal scenario for participation, the event seemed destined from the start to turn into a highly polarized discussion. Clearly there were participants who arrived with their minds set on condemning the socially engaged artwork in question, which had apparently crossed some ethical lines.

Linda Duvall and Peter Kingstone, “Living in 10 Easy Lessons” (2012). Installation shot at Gallery 44. Image courtesy of Gallery 44.

The concerns arose from a controversial exhibition featuring new work by artists Linda Duvall and Peter Kingstone, Living in 10 Easy Lessons, exhibited at Gallery 44 (26 October–1 December 2012). A series of videos, posters and educational booklets depict the artists being instructed on everyday life by ten “street-involved” workers, on skills such as doing good business as a freelance drug dealer, faking sex with a client and panhandling etiquette. The controversy centred on the capability of the workers to give informed consent. The artists, along with the programmers of Gallery 44, and even the representatives from Ryerson University’s Masters of Social Work who co-presented the programme, were all targets of critique, and the condemnations came from various members of the social work community, as well as the press and general public. The debate around the exhibition featured critical questions that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the recent history of socially engaged art practice: Had the artists taken advantage of the workers’ vulnerable material and legal realities? Was the knowledge produced from the work gained at the expense of the safety of the workers? The panel discussion had been planned in order to draw out the debate, and perhaps dispel some of the tensions around the work. Unfortunately, the instructors from the videos were not present to give their position on the matter, as they had earlier that day opted out of participating.

The motivation behind outreach programming in the context of publically funded artist-run culture in Canada is to enhance accessibility to exhibitions and other core productions by educating publics and reaching new audiences. This trend is reflected in the aspects of Gallery 44’s mandate, which emphasizes maintaining an accessible, open space of exchange and dialogue. In relation to the programme for Living in 10 Easy Lessons, Gallery 44 director Lise Beaudry shared that the aim was to provide a space for concerned communities to address “what the exhibition proposed: to critically disrupt social assumptions and challenge us to question.”[1] Asking questions and disrupting assumptions is standard fare and a commonly accepted and reproduced ambition in the public sector of contemporary art. There is value in these practices of outreach in themselves, but when taken for granted as a standard, we risk missing out on the need to respond differently to other, more urgent, matters.

Does focusing on the questions proposed by this exhibition mean overlooking its claims? Embedded in Kingstone and Duvall’s work are the strong claims that the instructors featured in the videos do in fact have the ability to give consent, that they can consent to sharing their knowledge, and that the very fact of this sharing affirms the value of this knowledge. These claims and affirmations are evident through the materials and process of the artwork, and are supported by the Adelaide Resource Centre for Women, the community centre that mediated the artists’ interactions with the instructors. Despite their clarity, these claims were undermined in the programming of an event that failed to acknowledge them, thus losing out on an opportunity to develop a critique consistent with the strength of the artwork’s most challenging claims. What can we make of those claims put forth and retracted? Of the consent given, refused and still shifting?

In reading the exhibition text (a critical response from independent curator and writer cheyanne turions) and talking to the artists, one quickly learns about the efforts made to foster dialogue and consent during the making of the work. These included the very pivotal support of the Adelaide Resource Centre for Women. The artists worked with the centre to frame the instructors’ participation in the project so that each of them could each make a decision based on full, prior and informed consent.

During the public programming, it was revealed that although the instructors signed consent forms for the use of their images in exhibition material, objections arose as the poster series, which distilled scenes and quotes from the lessons, hit the streets in the neighbourhoods of the instructors. One of them objected to the specific image used, and despite the signed consent form, she managed to renegotiate the image with the artists, and was able to change the text into something they all felt more comfortable with. In this sense, consent was negotiated in varying degrees at different moments in the project. Not only was informed consent possible for the workers, but this case also demonstrated a position of agency by being able to contribute to critical matters of politics — the framing of their representation and making a difference in the artwork’s outcome.

The exhibition work itself represents scenes or expresses moments when the agency of the instructors themselves is quite evident, as can be seen, for instance, in the non-hierarchical videos featuring conversational Q&A sessions with the instructors. Consistent throughout all ten videos is a shot of either Duvall or Kingstone sitting side by side with one of the instructors, the seating arrangement signifying reciprocity or equity between parties. There are clues in the performative execution of the works as well. It becomes obvious in the videos that the questions were prepared beforehand, but the instructors are also clearly speaking from their own experiences, in their own words, sometimes even ignoring the format of the question and answering on their own terms.

Furthermore, the artists’ responses to each lesson are measured and calm, as demonstrated by their facial expressions and the genuine curiosity in their voices. The tone is consistent throughout all the videos, just as one would expect from a reaction to everyday living skills, no more special or shocking than other, less socially stigmatized skills. Rather than affirming outright the value of their knowledge, this consistent response helps destabilize the notion that the artists are providing some kind of service to the instructors via a legitimization of the knowledge they offer.

While these aspects of the work and process may support the agency of the instructors and redeem the artwork in some way, there are nonetheless certain flaws that should be acknowledged. Perhaps these can be best framed through the questions: Who is asking the questions, who is controlling the means of presentation, and who benefits in the end? For example, although set up to play off the archetypal student/teacher dynamic where the artist asks the worker to impart their knowledge for their own benefit, the former in fact has all the power in the presentation of this knowledge.

Also, by critically asking who asks the questions, we confront a hierarchy of knowledge, with serious implications for those giving the answers. When the instructors impart knowledge required for their street-work, they are simultaneously revealing the impact of the gendered, material and economic conditions of their work on a day-to-day basis, which are always attached to social stigma. A reciprocal revealing of the conditions of the “students” or artists does not take place.

These flaws were brought out during the public programming, particularly from the social work community. However, the potential constructiveness of these critiques was thwarted because the artists and the gallery staff were unable or unwilling to reinforce the artwork’s claims on the notion of consent. In fact, the programming actually worked to contradict and undo the strong positions that the work takes.

This resulted in creating further discrepancies between those whose knowledge was meant to be valorized and those whose knowledge was actually valorized. For example, at the beginning of the event, when asked by the facilitator what the goal of the evening was for them, Duvall said she wanted to learn, while Kingstone’s wish was to include more diversity in his community. What gets unravelled from these two statements is that learning from diversity is not an innocent endeavour, nor does it carry an automatic value. It reveals that this position is one that emphasizes questioning and learning more than providing answers — and this is made possible through the privilege that the artist affords, which is opposed not only to the street workers’ daily existence, but to social workers’ outcome-based roles. This says a lot about the differences between the material and working conditions and professional ambitions of the various workers involved. For instance, as one commentator observed during the discussion, the project may reap benefits for Ryerson’s Faculty of Social Work in terms of re-examining the nature of quantitative and qualitative research and challenging the foundations of neoliberal outcome-based education. But when it comes to the instructors themselves, as one social worker astutely pointed out, their material conditions remain intact despite the benefits their knowledge produces for other fields.

During the public programming, the reluctance of the artists to defend the claims of their artwork also paved the way for the opposing social workers to make assumptions and patronizing statements about both the artists and the instructors during the event. It was clear that an explicit recounting of all the measures the artists took to build consent would not have made a difference. In the discussion of the controversial poster campaign, the chastising of the artists went on well after Duvall’s explanation of the direct action they took to resolve the dispute with the instructors. One speaker pleaded for humility in working with such vulnerable people. “There is a lot of literature on this,” someone else added in a condescending tone. The disciplinary chauvinism these arguments engendered spoke much louder than any nuanced critique they encompassed, adding fuel to the shaming fire. Even when someone from the audience asked what the practical danger for the women being represented in the posters actually was, no one provided a thoroughly convincing response, and instead continued to resort to hearsay, scandal and moralizing to maintain their position and discredit the artistic work.

In response to an online thread on NetTime regarding the consent practices of sex work, Alessandra Renzi asks how consent informs our own lives: “Ideally, consent is not just about a yes or no, but about degrees of freedom to negotiate something, to ask questions that shape informed choices, to understand one’s own boundaries, to say ‘stop’ or ‘I changed my mind’ if necessary and, especially, to create safe spaces within which consent can be given and respected. How does consent inform our unpaid daily sex lives? And our labour lives” [2] Could this rich and politicized notion of consent ground a new position from which to counter the neutralizing and recuperative aspects of open-ended outreach mandates for artist-run centres? If anything, the definition of consent here suggests that what the instructors have been negotiating through their withdrawal and renegotiations for participation is founded less on whether they or their knowledge should be made visible or not, but rather on the degrees of consent in the framing and distribution of their knowledge and skills in various contexts. As such, their withdrawal from the public programming may have been the sharpest and most revealing intervention of all.

NOTES:

1] Email exchange with Lise Beaudry, January 2013.

[2] Alessandra Renzi, “Re: <nettime> Sex Work and Consent @transmediale” (16 February 2012; online).

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Maiko Tanaka collaborates on curatorial projects at the intersection of art, pedagogy, cultural politics and collective action. Since 2010 she has co-curated the ongoing research, exhibition and touring project “The Grand Domestic Revolution (GDR),” with Casco in Utrecht. Prior to that, Tanaka organized the international conference exhibition, “Extra-curricular: Between Art & Pedagogy,” which presented alternative structures for mobilizing radical pedagogical art practices, as part of her curatorial residency at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery. She is currently an active member of the Read-in collective, participates in the Unlearning project group and serves on the Programming Committee and Board of Gendai Gallery. Tanaka is a candidate in the Masters in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.

Related posts:

1. Living In a Place With No Prisons
2. States of Coloniality/ Palestine–Palestine

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

“We’re Indian… we’re political by default,” stated Ryan Red Corn at a panel where he and a fellow member of the often “politically driven” comedy group the 1491s were discussing their formation, work and what drives them at a Native American Heritage Month event held at the University of Texas at Arlington this past November. I heard this line, agreed, chuckled a bit, then took a look around me at the capacity-filled room and noticed the excitement on all the listeners’ faces, thinking of all the possibilities. I circled my focus back to the front of the room but could not shake the thought “Political? We’re not political, we just need help surviving this occupation against us.”

Months earlier, while corresponding with my friend Ahmed, whom I’d met in the summer of 2009 during The Indigenous Youth Delegation to Palestine, a similar conviction caught my attention: as Native Americans and as Palestinians, we are not necessarily political, nor all of us activists. We are inheritors of history trying to survive ongoing colonization.

While attending Haskell Indian Nations University in 2008, I met two fellow students, Melissa Franklin and Marei Spaola, who quickly became lifelong friends and fellow founding members of 7th Generation Indigenous Visionaries (7th GIV). The group helps build and strengthen solidarity among Indigenous peoples everywhere, with an emphasis on youth education. In March 2009, we began organizing a one-month delegation to Palestine to take place that summer.

I had never left the US before and had no idea what to expect. Upon arriving at Tel Aviv airport in July 2009, I was detained. “What are you?” I was repeatedly asked, to which I answered “Native American.” “NO, no, no… where did your father immigrate from?” to which I answered “Nowhere!” After being released from the security office, I found my fellow delegates, we gathered our thoughts and made our way to the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in the West Bank, where we would stay at the Ibdaa Cultural Center.

During The Indigenous Youth Delegation, we held many events and workshops. We showed our Palestinian friends what our round dances and two-step dances looked like, and they in turn shared their debkeh dance with us. A beat-making and lyricism workshop resulted in a song being recorded and included in the following issue of SNAG (Seventh Native American Generation) magazine. We held silk-screening and mural-making workshops, which allowed us to express ways to combat the issues associated with the Israeli apartheid wall. Both parties taught history lessons on each occupation, and then discussed the eerie similarities between the historical contexts. “Teach the youth media!” was something exclaimed by the delegation constantly, in hope that stories would be shared within, around and outside the camps. The delegation also facilitated workshops on writing, magazine-layout and setting up wordpress blogs.

We spent time in several places inside and outside the West Bank, from Dheisheh to Al Khalil (or Hebron) where Shufat Camp is located, which is entirely surrounded by the apartheid wall. We also spent time in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Balata Camp, Nablus, Beit Ummar, Jenin Camp, Aida Camp, Qalqiliya, Qalandia, Lyd, Akka, and everywhere we could stop in between. At times we strongly felt our own privilege of holding passports when we were allowed to enter places our Palestinian friends could not, traveling through or outside the West Bank.

We had a very memorable and emotionally taxing day when we took a trip to Lifta. Our friend took us to a mosque that Israeli settlers had turned into a trash dump, and which was also vandalized with awful ethnic slurs. Our youngest US delegate was brought to tears as he began to scrape the racist graffiti off as best as he could with a rock, and then a young Palestinian man he befriended on the trip began to help him.

There were times when we were frightened as well. IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) soldiers armed with machine guns would step on our bus to check passports and cameras. One incident that sealed our love and care for one another, and emboldened our strength to combat the occupation, occurred as an Israeli soldier in a watch/sniper tower shot the tire of a bus we were on. We continued our trek to the ominous wall on foot, as we learned about the environmental issues people in that particular camp, Qalqilya, were facing. Apparently, the shot was a result of us being too close to the Wall.

We grew on so many levels through how we related to each other. We shared our many affinities for hip-hop, dance, the necessity of humour, graffiti, and silk screening.  But we were also aware of the effects of violence caused by a perpetual military occupation, and learned to share our feelings about it as well. We wrote together, and I still read and share these writings with others. Back home in Dallas, I was asked constantly by my peers, “Why not help your own people?” I always replied with “I do!” and then proceeded to share how it is important to keep connected to other situations affected by settler colonialism. Solidarity across borders will always matter.

Idle No More has taken hold in my particular urban community of Dallas, Texas — a site for the “relocation” of Native Americans by the government in the 1950s — and with the knowledge I gained as a part of the Indigenous Youth Delegation to Palestine I am helping this extremely important movement grow and thrive. Because of the delegation I learned important skills, such as conference calling, keeping note of times and places (not just recording your feelings), planning trips, fundraising, as well as the harder skills of organizing, such as being able to speak about occupation without crying. 7th GIV is not afraid to stand in solidarity with all Indigenous people. That is what being Indigenous is about, that is what our delegation to Palestine was about, and that is what the Idle No More movement is about: protecting each other and standing up for one another.

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Jodi Voice, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, is Muscogee Creek, Oglala Lakota, and Cherokee. She is a founding member of 7th GIV (7th Generation Indigenous Visionaries) and met fellow founding members as a student at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. Voice currently lives in Dallas, where she organizes educational and cultural events with a local Native American Parent Association. She also plans events to connect her Indigenous community to the Idle No More movement.

Related posts:

1. States of Coloniality/ Palestine–Palestine
2. 36-2/Editorial
3. Palestine–Palestine launch at IAW Toronto

By Richard William Hill

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

Close Readings

I proposed this column to FUSE because I was concerned about the poverty of critical response to recent exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art. For a number of good reasons, our best and brightest art writers—with a few notable exceptions—have invested their energies in curating rather than criticism. A healthy art discourse is predicated on a balance between exhibitions and their critical assessment; we have a lively art scene and it merits sincere consideration. This column is my modest effort to address this imbalance by providing frank reviews of recent exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art, assessing both the work and its presentation. The commitment I have made is to write only when I feel I can be entirely honest. That’s not always easy, but I don’t see the point otherwise. We’ll see how it goes. There’s no fool like an honest fool.

Alex Janvier
Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton)
18/05 to 19/08 2012

Alex Janvier’s retrospective at the Art Gallery of Alberta could easily be divided into two distinct exhibitions: one a brilliant tour de force of energetic, lyrical abstraction, the other a dreadful series of experiments with figuration bordering on the stereotypical. As a senior Indigenous artist (Janvier is of Dene Suline and Saulteaux descent) and one of the first to declare himself a modernist, Janvier is due a serious retrospective. This exhibition, with its apparent desire to represent all aspects of the artist’s long career with equal emphasis, winds up making a strong case for the abstract side of his practice and, sadly, an equally convincing demonstration of the weakness of his figurative efforts.

The seeds of both tendencies are evident in some of the artist’s earliest work on display. In Subconscious #3, a small pencil drawing from 1960 when Janvier was still in art school, the elements of his finest work can be seen in embryonic form. Sinuous lines radiate out from a central point, snaking across the drawing’s surface with a graceful, lively energy that is immediately contagious. However, the exhibition opens with a pair of very early figurative works — Our Lady of the Teepee (1950) and Sacred Heart (1952) — which make a less auspicious beginning. Granted, these works, painted when the artist was at the Blue Quills Residential School, are juvenilia presented primarily for their biographical significance. My intention then is not to assess their quality, but rather to note how they anticipate the artist’s later, troubled relationship to figuration. Both works are painted in the Catholic votive tradition with the usual pre-Renaissance approach to scale and reliance on familiar, well-codified symbolism, although in this case with an Indigenous twist. Our Lady of the Teepee, for example, features a Madonna and Child with Indigenous features standing over a tipi and dressed in clothing decorated with abstract Plains motifs. It pleased the Catholics and won an honourable mention for Canada at the International Vatican Exhibition in Rome.[1] Such early achievements (however conservative the venues) paved the way for Janvier’s entrance into art school, where he appears to have received a first rate introduction to modernist abstraction. Unfortunately, neither of his formative artistic experiences provided the artist with the formal or conceptual tools that he would need when he returned to figuration later in his career.

In all, the exhibition lingers longer on Janvier’s early work than is strictly necessary to demonstrate the route he followed to reach his mature style(s). And given the understandably uneven quality of his early efforts, this is ultimately not to the artist’s credit. Assuming we accept, for example, the career significance of a series of relatively weak line-drawing portraits from 1962, do we really need to see all three? Wanting to focus primarily on Janvier’s considerable strengths, however, I was especially interested to see his early experiments with automatisme, such as Automatiste Ink Caterpillars (1962). This ink drawing is composed of clusters of line-forms scattered across the centre of the work. Most are organized around a single vertical line, with whimsical dots, lines and dashes projecting or radiating out from the original mark with tremendous variety. The influence of this sort of spontaneous mark-making is evident throughout Janvier’s abstract work to the extent that it becomes clear that it is a driving engine of his creative process. Many of his most successful abstractions are structured around bold, sweeping lines or brushstrokes that arc out to occupy or divide the canvas and then are elaborated with a dense variety of lines, shapes and colours.

His enthusiastic engagement with automatisme and other movements in modernist abstraction are what place Janvier in such an unusual position as an Indigenous artist of his generation. That said, his path was nearly blocked at the outset by the paternalism of the federal government. After a successful first two years at the institution that would later become the Alberta College of Art and Design, Janvier decided to major in fine arts. Without his consent, the Department of Indian Affairs chose instead to enrol him in the commercial art program. Supportive faculty members Illingworth Kerr and Marion Nicoll advocated on his behalf and Janvier was eventually allowed to major in fine arts (albeit with reduced financial support), graduating with honours in 1960. The fact that he was able to go on to forge a compelling personal style within the modernist movement, in a milieu that was dismissive of or openly hostile to signs of cultural difference, is a tribute to Janvier’s persistence and ability. This is why he is something of a legend within the Indigenous art community, despite being less known outside these circles and neglected in the major histories of abstract painting in Canada.

Familiar with the intense racism and assimilative pressures that Janvier experienced — he once described the situation he grew up in as “Rhodesian”[2] —I feel compelled to respond to the swirling space of his abstract canvases as an arena of defiant freedom. Each canvas becomes an opportunity to perform this freedom on the most personal terms, giving spontaneous life to dynamic combinations of line, shape and colour that the artist quickly made his own. But the liberation of abstraction was a double-sided gift for an Indigenous artist in the 1960s. One could be free to the extent that one remained non-objective; if subject matter was to enter one’s practice, it often had to do so under the cover of a pseudo-universality that was in reality, as is now obvious, the projection of the dominant ideas in Western thought at the time. Think, for example, of the iconic American critic Clement Greenberg criticizing the Toronto abstract painter Kazuo Nakamura for being “too captured by Oriental ‘taste.’” [3] Janvier himself insisted at one point that, “I am an artist who happens to be an Indian. I am an Indian self that is identified with the Great Spirit and not with the art.” [4] This disavowal gives a sense of the conundrum Indigenous artists faced at the time: it was impossible to be both Indigenous and modern.

In trying to recover the Indigenous influences on Janvier’s modernist works, art historians, and the artist himself, have noted the inspiration of northern Plains traditions of abstraction. [5] Yet his core stylistic elements — the spontaneous, asymmetrical compositions, the swirling, undulating lines, the arcing, tapering shapes — all seem to be his own. Questions of his Indigenous identity do erupt from time to time in his early abstractions in less predictable ways, most notably in his choice of titles. The relationship between abstract paintings and titles is often a vexed one. In the absence of explicit subject matter, a title can easily overdetermine a viewer’s experience of the work, and many painters simply numbered their canvases to avoid this. Janvier’s abstractions do tend to have subjects though, however oblique, and in his case the significance of titles becomes complicated. At times they relate directly to the subject and inspiration of a work in a way that is immediately graspable, while at others they seem more cryptic or personal.

Fly, Fly, Fly (1979), for example, was inspired by watching swarms of cluster flies moving across the window of his studio in northern Alberta. The work sets thin radiating spokes of black, dark blue, turquoise, purple, orange and red against a tan linen surface. Other colours appear as well, particularly in the central grouping of marks and shapes. Several pale yellow globes also stand out at various points across the surface. The lines are thin and elegant, but spiky and barbed with hooks. The painting becomes at once a stylized record of the flies’ swarming movement and an evocation of their dark bodies and bristly limbs. For the artist to have been able to so effectively bring forth the unlikely beauty of this experience is a gift of insight to the viewer.

By the mid-1980s many of Janvier’s titles related directly to Indigenous politics. Lubicon (1988), one of the finest works in the exhibition, is a lively riot of shapes, lines and colours set against an intense, red background. The core of the composition appears to grow out from a densely patterned centre and then tapers in elegant arcs and curves out toward the edge of the canvas. How this image relates to the political battles of the Lubicon Lake Nation is not at all explicit in the work. Janvier has reportedly claimed that the use of red in the painting was symbolic of his political anger about the degradation of the environment on which the Lubicon depend, but I don’t see how one might deduce that meaning from the work itself; the red appears to me as a beautiful field upon which the astonishing activity of the painting plays out. [6] Before learning of Janvier’s own characterization of the work, I read it more as an homage to the spirit of the Lubicon struggle. It seems to be a lively and affirmative show of political solidarity: less defeated than Robert Motherwell’s elegies to the Spanish Republic, but functioning in a similar modernist tradition.

Janvier’s Indigenous identity was also referenced through his oft-noted act of signing his pre-1977 artworks with his treaty number. This may seem at first like a modest form of protest, but I suspect one shouldn’t underestimate the anger condensed into that small series of marks at the edge of the canvas. They become little black holes that affect the gravitational field of the entire canvas, threatening, maybe, to swallow all that affirmative, lively energy. But perhaps that’s what it means to be a successful Indigenous modernist: productively trapped between hope and negation. The artist claims both Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee as influences, [7] and in Janvier’s art one can see the former’s joy in lively movement and life-energy tempered to a harder edge at times by a dose of the latter’s sardonic wit. The constant tension between the freedom of pure rhythmic energy and the small eruptions of political anger that occur in their margins and titles make the liberty he takes for himself in the abstractions that much more exhilarating.

Although Janvier included representational elements from time to time in his early paintings, in the late 1980s he took up figuration and figure in the landscape scenes as a primary concern. The move made a certain sense in the context of the period. Modernist abstraction had lost its avant-garde status under the postmodern assault. It was, among other things, representative of the old establishment. At the same time, it was suddenly possible, at least in some corners of the art world, to address questions of ethnicity outside the limited parameters of the modern and the primitive, without being dismissed as parochial. Janvier courageously took up the challenge, creating a series of large figurative paintings in which he addressed his political hopes, fears and anger directly and explicitly in large-scale works for the first time. The project was ambitious enough to fail spectacularly.

The exhibition features one of these mural-sized works, Nehobetthe (Land before they arrived) (1992). Janvier divided the canvas with his familiar sweeping arcs, but now these shapes describe what are, in effect, a series of imaginary windows through which to view scenes of life before European contact. In each scene Indigenous figures and animals occupy a colourful cartoon paradise, a fiction so Romantic and sentimental that it would gag Walt Disney. The figures themselves verge on the stereotypical, and one is reminded of the criticism of some Harlem Renaissance painters who, it was said, could not look beyond internalized stereotypes to imagine a liberated vision of the African-American body. [8] This is a pity given the rich figurative Plains tradition. But there is more convincing freedom, liberation and celebration of life in any of Janvier’s abstractions than in this work, and for that reason a more convincing political expression as well.

Many artists, including those of tremendous ability, have uneven oeuvres, and I am happy to work my way through Janvier’s lesser works if the reward is Fly, Fly, Fly and Lubicon. But to make the best case for his art in an exhibition, a more judicious selection of works is necessary. I don’t know why this didn’t happen — whether the artist insisted or the curator was genuinely impressed by all the work — but the result under-serves the artist, and therefore the institution and its publics as well. This is most evident in a centre gallery that exemplifies the divided heart of the exhibition, where Nehobetthe and Lubicon face off on opposite walls. Together they produce a cacophony. Looking one way I find myself thinking of murals I’ve seen on high school walls. Looking the other I can imagine how terrific this exhibition could have been if it had included only the good stuff.

NOTES:

[1] Unless otherwise noted, the biographical information in this review comes from Lee-Ann Martin, The Art of Alex Janvier: His First Thirty Years, 1960-1990 (Thunder Bay: Thunder Bay Art Gallery, 1993). Martin is currently at work on a highly anticipated monograph on Janvier.

[2] Quoted in ibid., 7.

[3] Quoted in Joan Murray, Painters Eleven in Retrospect (Oshawa: Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 1979), 76.

[4] Quoted in Jacqueline Fry, Treaty Numbers 23, 287 and 1171: Three Indian Painters of the Prairies (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1972), unpaginated.

[5] Martin, Alex Janvier, 7-8, and Janvier’s biography as posted on his website.

[6] Ibid., 40.

[7] From Janvier’s official website.

[8] This question has often been raised and debated in relation to the work of Palmer Hayden. For a recent exploration of the question, see John Ott, “Labored Stereotypes: Palmer Hayden’s The Janitor Who Paints,” American Art 22, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 102-115.

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Richard William Hill is an independent writer and curator, and Associate Professor of Art History at York University.

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

Signposts from alQAWS: A Decade of Building a Queer Palestinian Discourse [1]

The Palestinian organization alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society is a group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning and queer (LGBTQ) activists who work collaboratively to break down gendered and heteronormative barriers. Based in Jerusalem, alQaws seeks to create an open space for all our members so that they may be engaged and energized in the struggle of transforming Palestinian society in regards to broad sexual and gender justice. This report focuses on key signposts of the changes that alQaws has experienced over the last decade in developing a large grassroots foundation. AlQaws is connected to our Palestinian reality and context, and it is a group that has played an influential political role in the queer scene on a local and even international level. Recently, unlike in the early years, we have been able to measure and observe this political role through various discernible changes. But before demonstrating these major signposts, I would like to share with you three criteria that alQaws has used in the last ten years as a compass for our work, for our success, and most importantly for dealing with the many challenges we face.

The first criterion is that we measure success in our ability, as a LGBTQ movement, to change the political and social discourse around sexuality. The aim is not only to change this discourse, but also continuously develop it in order to ensure that we remain connected to our reality and our general context. This includes challenging both the external discourse (how representations of sexuality and sexual diversity play out in mainstream society) and our own internal discourse (how we as LGBTQ groups discuss our roles, our homophobia and prejudices). The presence of such a gap between discourses points to the need to reconsider our goals and practices.

The second criterion is practice. At alQaws, we do not believe there is any need or usefulness for a radical discourse if we do not practice what it represents. The values and strategies of alQaws, whose successes we continue to explore (and change when necessary), are inspired by a continuous self-reflexive analysis of our field of experience. The existence of the gap between discourse and practice has always motivated us to revisit our work. One of the lessons we found useful was the importance of creating a constructive and ongoing debate as a necessary strategy for organizing within the group, which is just as significant as practical strategies.

The third criterion has to do with our position that our capability for social change starts with our capability for internal change. In that sense, being open to inevitable changes that we will be facing, whether we like it or not, is important for us as an LGBTQ movement connected to both members of LGBTQ communities and society in general. The illusion that we can get through a month or a year or a decade of activism without having to take risks and make changes is a dangerous obstacle in our path. Being flexible in this area guarantees that we remain influential and ensures a precise assessment of the opportunities and challenges, and of the strengths and weaknesses, in our group.

The main signposts that I mention below all centre primarily on the journey of change alQaws experienced on individual, collective, social and political levels. These are usually marginalized at the expense of showcasing more practical achievements, which I will not be going through here. When we think of the progress of alQaws’ discourse over the last decade, we can see it as a story with two main parts.

The first has to do with how alQaws is dedicated to ongoing transformation, which is what defines our group. The source of our self-definition is the field of our work; determining our strategies stems from translating and analyzing this experience. In 2001, alQaws was a group embedded within an apolitical Israeli organization. Splitting off in 2007, we became the first official organization for Palestinian LGBTQs. Two years after becoming a formal NGO, we redefined ourselves as a grassroots activist group, whose main mission is to work on changing lived reality, altering and breaking the existing gender and sexual hierarchy in society. AlQaws saw the immense importance of defining our role as a group with large ambitions and political goals, but consciously chose that “representing LGBTQs” would not be one of them.

In addition, alQaws saw a need to establish our work as an organization, but we always believed that our main contribution lies in building and contributing to the larger Palestinian movement connected to promoting a new sexual discourse. During this time, alQaws led a big campaign challenging the stereotypical images of the “gay” Palestinian — an image representing decades of sexual taboo, repeatedly exploited for political ends that serve the imperialist interests of the Israeli state. The primary change in the image was from that of a victim — of society, family and institutions — to an individual and activist with agency with respect to themselves, their peers and their society.

This is an important issue for alQaws: we have no demands from society, and we do not place ourselves outside of or opposed to society — we don’t want to reproduce destructive divisions and binaries. Thus, over the years, we have taken many terms out of our discourse, such as “acceptance” (we are not working so “you” can accept us), and “equality” (we don’t want “your” privileges), replacing them with other words that better communicate our vision as people working to create society.

The second part of the story highlights how our discourse and our work has allowed us to see our reality from a new perspective and has given us the opportunity to define our goals and our struggle with new terms. Many LGBTQ groups (Arab ones included) fall in the trap of promoting LGBTQ oppression and struggle as special and unique. However, our struggle lies in opposing patriarchal institutions and systems that regulate our sexuality, as well as challenging gender and sexual standards and norms that have always been depicted as fact (such as heterosexuality). This framework has affected how we view alQaws’ relationship with our own society, and how we determine our strategies for social change and transformation. These strategies can be summarized in three major points.

First, as mentioned above, alQaws rejects the inorganic division between “inside” and “outside.” If we want to strengthen our position and legitimacy in this community, it’s important that we begin to dismantle the polarization between the outside and the inside, and stop thinking of ourselves as separate from the rest of society. We’re not interested in building bridges between the LGBTQ community and society: we want to swim in the same river in order to change its course altogether. If we can’t promote our struggle as an expansive social struggle, we will fail at having a sustainable impact.

Second, we focus on unique experience and the local context in order to understand the structure of sexuality and the attitudes around it in Palestinian society. We are cautious about importing strategies that are irrelevant to our reality. Adopting Western concepts and notions linked to homophobia [2] (such as coming out, visibility and pride) brings up a binary, which reinforces other affects associated with shame, repression and fear. A focus on homophobia limits goals and strategies, which then defines the ultimate purpose (i.e. coming out of the closet) and suggests that visibility and pride is what is often at stake. AlQaws’ position on this extends to a critique that highlights the perception of these concepts and Western LGBTQ hegemony as a new reflection of cultural colonialism. [3]

Third, alQaws considers that struggle cannot be separated from political action against occupation and colonization. The Palestinian LGBTQ movement is part of the political cause, even if it doesn’t actively participate in the fight against the symbols of colonialism and occupation, which do not distinguish between gay and straight. It’s also important to remember that the LGBTQ Palestinian movements have become hostage to political games. For example, the Israeli government uses its gay rights rhetoric to tarnish Palestinian LGBTQs’ image, [4] and to pinkwash [5] its crimes against the Palestinian people. Indeed, campaigns against pinkwashing have become important elements in our struggle against the occupation.

Thus far, I have outlined some major milestones of alQaws’ journey in the past decade by discussing the importance of transforming LGBTQ discourse, and developing a different strategic framework of struggle. Based on these pivotal aspects of alQaws’ organizing, we are aware of a few significant and urgent challenges we faced. We responded to them with a thorough study of different initiatives in a new strategic plan outlined briefly below.

The first challenge revolves around the individual’s position and role in this journey. After focusing on building a wide leadership, strengthening social and political activism inside alQaws, and committing to social change, we had to take several steps back and wonder how we could link these concepts, and our perception of the struggle, to the individual, psychological and social needs of the LGBTQ community. AlQaws has been making huge efforts in recent months to build new and appropriate frameworks that place the individual at the centre, with the aim of continuing to build a proactive Palestinian LGBTQ community that doesn’t marginalize the personal.

The second challenge we face is in relation to the discourse of those who supposedly accept homosexuality only if it is restricted to the private or social sphere. When our work takes place in public and political spheres (and not behind closed doors), we often encounter certain liberal discourses critical of LGBTQ groups. They consider, with direct or indirect accusation, that our attempt to group ourselves is fragmenting society and disrupting change toward unification and equality. Our struggle reads as incoherent with the liberal mandate that is tolerant of difference (to an extent). Such a sentiment is dangerous because it works to devalue the LGBTQ struggle, both historically and presently, under the pretext of acceptance. In response to this position, alQaws is committed to working directly with politically and socially active youth to co-create a new discourse that does not reduce our challenges to assimilationist strategies that induce fear or shame. [6]

The following questions sum up the third challenge: Do we want to change society, or do we want society to change us? Can we resist the temptation of imitating heteronormativity? Do we really need to confine ourselves to the family establishment and construct, and adopt sexual norms and patterns so that we are more tolerated and accepted? AlQaws has set itself the goal of destabilizing the foundations of existing powers and breaking society’s moulds. But that won’t be possible unless we can propose a comprehensive discourse that sheds light on how every individual’s sexuality, gender and desires are controlled by patriarchy’s institutions, how heteronormativity limits our choices, and imposes what is acceptable and unacceptable. The struggle for sexual difference must not be reduced to human rights and sexual freedom, but should fundamentally revolve around resisting, dismantling, and continuously criticizing patriarchal and heteronormative institutions, while also working on raising awareness about the images and behaviours through which these constructs are embodied in our daily lives.

AlQaws believes that the Western definition of an “exclusive heterosexuality” — and consequently of an opposing homosexuality as an abnormal reflection of heterosexuality — is a successful bourgeois attempt to impose a structural division between straight and gay. The effect is social control over gays through acceptance, but only under the condition of segregation in the sense that “we are here and you are there.” This is somewhat analogous to the Zionist Left position, which originally established the principle of segregation in Palestine. We at alQaws challenge this discourse and seek to be an organic part of an extensive LGBTQ movement that is against all forms of social and political hegemony. We have adopted discourse that places queers at the centre, not as emotional or proactive cases, but as individuals re-formulating social and political relations from a queer perspective, from the perspective of the “formerly oppressed.”

NOTES:

[1] Based on Maikey’s 17 May 2012 presentation at the Active Voices conference, organized by Aswat – Palestinian Gay Women. Translated to English by Claudine and Deems of Bekhsoos feminist and queer Arab magazine. Read the original online, in English at Bekhsoos and in Arabic at Qadita.

[2] See Haneen Maikey and Sami Shamali’s article, “International Day Against Homophobia: Between the Western Experience and the Reality of Gay Communities,” Bekhsoos: A Feminist and Queer Arab Magazine (23 May 2011; online).

[3] For further reading on this specific topic, see Lynn Darwich and Haneen Maikey’s “From the Belly of Arab Queer Activism: Challenges and Opportunities,” Bekhsoos: A Feminist and Queer Arab Magazine (12 October 2011; online).

[4] The image of Israeli society is built on the colonial logic that promotes Israel as progressive and Palestinian society as backwards. Palestinian LGBTQs in Israel are often deemed victims of their own society. This logic ignores Palestinian LGBTQs’ work by enforcing an image of victimhood that predominates representations of Palestinian LGBTQs, and also ignores, for instance, the radical work of Palestinian queer groups present in Palestinian society.

[5] For further reading on pinkwashing, see Sarah Schulman, “Israel and Pinkwashing,” New York Times (22 November 2011; online): “‘pinkwashing’: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.”

[6] AlQaws’ youth work is based on the understanding that the way of change doesn’t have to pass through mainstream institutions like family, school or NGOs. There are multiple ways to engage with young people through creative and direct means outside institutional environments.

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Haneen Maikey is a Palestinian queer community organizer based in Jerusalem, and is the co-founder and director of alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society. In addition, Maikey co-founded the independent activist group Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (PQBDS), which works to promote BDS within queer groups around the world, exposing Israel’s pinkwashing campaign.

Related posts:

1. 36-2/Editorial
2. States of Coloniality/ Palestine–Palestine