Cassandra Voices

Author: Marina Azzaro

  • Featured Artist: Manar Al Shouha

    How would you define yourself as an artist?

    In fact I feel more like a researcher trying to find the truth about herself, her uniqueness and her art fingerprint. For me art is a kind of meditation where I reach the inner self.

    Each painting is not only a scene. It’s a journey through my deep self.

    I believe that the reason we are here as humans on earth is to try and reach our inner selves.

     Was there a particular moment in your life that you felt an artistic awakening?

    As a child I was slow to develop my speech and writing abilities. I always favoured drawing. Even at school, I used to sneak out of classes and go to the drawing room instead. Since I came to the realization of this art world, I can’t believe for a second that I can work in any other career.

    How did your teachers assist in the development of your artistic practice?

    My teacher is called Bassem. He taught me that my only teachers in life should be myself and books. He used to tell me that he is only there to encourage and guide me. By the time I started studying art at university, he had already left teaching because of the war conditions and had gone to another university. In order to reach him, I had to walk for miles, just to have him look at my work. His opinion was more important to me than the mark I received.

    Your mother is one of your recurring subjects. How did she influence your creativity and personality?

    She was a teacher of mathematics in the same school that I attended. She used to come and check on me during the day, any time she didn’t find me in the class. She would take me from the drawing-room. She used to get angry at my begging her to relent, but after a while she understood my nature and began providing me with materials and even booked me into art classes. She was always talking to me as a unique person and saying that when choosing anything I should follow my heart. She used to energize me mentally and physically. My mother used to help me prepare canvases before I started painting, organise my studio and tidy it up in a way that didn’t distress me. She always tried to interpret my work and was always happy with my achievements. More than I ever was.

    Ultimately, she is the reason I am here now.

     Which of your works do you feel best represents your oeuvre?

    There are two of them in particular. The first is one of a woman sitting down, painted with two colours only and a font. It’s painted in a highly impressionistic way. I completed this work in 2021.

    The second painting shows a social gathering for two women painted in a sketched style with warm neutral colours. I made this in 2016.

    In what way does politics enter your art?

    On account of my lack of freedom in expressing myself, and because the media doesn’t always show the more interesting angles in the news, I decided to reveal my nation’s suffering in my own distinctive way, through my art.

    Damascus is always appearing in your work and your thoughts, would you like to say something about this city?

    Damascus was the capital of the Umayyads, the dream of Abbasids, and is one of the oldest capital cities of the Islamic world.

    In spite of the war, I felt safe walking down its alleys and roads. This is not an ordinary city. It holds a lot of energy. Looking at the ancient monuments, I used to feel its greatness. I represent Damascus as a lady who has faced hardship through the years, but has managed to preserves an elegance. One day prosperity will return, as has occurred throughout the city’s history, for it possesses a wealth of energy.

    Has any artist from history had a particular influence on you?

    I like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Honoré Daumier and Egon Schiele.

    What particular technique is at core of your practice?

    Sketching. I like the strong impression of a sketch. I find myself attracted more to the expressive school, through the use of neutral translucent colours and heavy fonts.

    Have you integrated other disciplines or artistic forms into your painting?

    No, but in my first year of university I studied five general artistic fields. I liked sculpture and engraving, especially Honoré Daumier works. I think one day I will study this discipline more deeply.

    I particularly love your paintings portraying people commuting and traveling. What is so enticing for you about these subjects?

    Regarding the painting of the bus scenes, when I start painting, I always ask myself why I am doing it? When I used to take the bus, I watched people gazing out the windows, some were angry but couldn’t express themselves, and some were looking over their shoulders as if they were waiting for time to go back.

    I felt it was not a bus, but a boat taking us away from our country and away from our present and making us live in the past. Then I started painting it again. I wanted to apologise, but somehow I was painting to say that what happened wasn’t our faults.

    In future I want to make fingerprint through my art. I want my paintings to be alive so I can live through them. Not for a moment have I felt that I am Picasso or Goya. They are dead. But when I looked at their paintings, I always felt that I am talking to them.

    Follow Manar on Instagram

    Kindly translated by Jennifer Boktor and Nermine Abdel Malak

    Manar is preparing for a new exhibition in September in Rathfarnham Castle, and recently moved to the Lodge Studio with the organisation Common Ground.

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  • Artist of the Month: Bordalo II

    The Dublin Red Squirrel was taken down last week. I’m not mad about that as I’m the first one to say that my work is ephemeral, just like everything in life. I also incentivate [sic] progress, rebuilding when necessary, the use of dead areas of towns to make something better, the rehabilitation of the abandoned to give a new life to the city, definitely that’s the right way if it respects the environment and the local culture.

    I’m just sad that that company didn’t keep their word and didn’t wait until Tuesday as had been agreed, because we were making a special plan try to move the piece to a new location and document all the process.

    (Instagram post from b0rdalo-ii, August 6th, 2019)

    That was the Portuguese artist Bordalo II’s reaction to the removal of his installation from Tara Street, Dublin: a massive red squirrel on the window-less side of walls next to Tara Street DART Station. The simple and predictable reason for this sad amputation is the building of a new hotel on the same site.

    The Red Squirrel is part of a series call ‘Trash animals’ spread over twenty-four countries. These are intriguing and provocative installations of endangered species, constructed from discarded products; scrap we don’t need any more, but which are destined to last forever, and contribute to the extinction of these animals.

    Damaged bumpers, burnt garbage cans, and discarded tyres are among the materials that stimulated the artist’s inventiveness. He has transformed these into the shapes of a fox, an ostrich, a stork, a bear, a possum, a racoon, and a lemur. Whether walking through Paris, Los Angeles or Pattaya, it’s better you don’t know when you are going to come across one of these.

    You are greeted by massive, curious creatures: first their vibrant colours from huge murals; after that you make out the ropes and chicken wire used to fabricate hair, the bicycle frames used for bodies, the ball bearings for eyes, and then the appliances and plastic fencing shaping their expressions.

    Bordal II began his career as a graffiti artist, but as he matured, felt a need to express his disgust with the environmental problems of our time. He was inspired, and challenged, by the classical art world, in particular that of his grandfather, Real Bordalo. This brought out new creative processes – active, laborious, and multi-technical – what he calls ‘free-style.’

    He situates his pieces in abandoned places, recycling centres, car body shops, hidden streets; from a simple sketch he begins cutting, drilling, assembling, and finally spray-painting.

    The Dublin Red Squirrel

    The Dublin Red Squirrel project was developed in collaboration with filmmakers Trevor Whelan and Rua Megan, who filmed Bordalo II for two years, bringing him to Dublin, creating with the producer Glenn Collins memorable footage of his installations around Europe in an acclaimed short movie called: ‘Bordalo II: A Life of Waste.’

    Bordalo II chose the red squirrel for Ireland as the animal has been under serious threat of extinction from deforestation and a virus carried by the non-indigenous grey squirrel.

    The piece sends out an acute message, drawing attention to our wastefulness. Forming a creative dialogue with the city and its people, it became a much-loved and effective public art work.

    On August 6th of this year, however, employees of Ronan Group Real Estate, or agents on their behalf, who are reconstructing the building, removed the installation, without warning, and despite a meeting with the filmmakers and the artist, where it had been agreed that they would film the demolition on an agreed date.

    Bordalo II’s sculpture is a masterpiece of its kind, depicting an ongoing environmental crisis. It begs the question as to whether an art work such as this is really ephemeral, when the public take it into their hearts. Is a sculpture simply rubble and rubbish that can be disposed of at the whim of a builder, without considering the artist or those who appreciate it?

    I wonder was this allowed to happen simply because no institution owned or funded it. Is it simply that patrons of the arts are only interested in the old masters and expressions of individual nations, allowing developers to demolish our contemporary inspirations?

    This episode confirms the vision of the artist. The Red Squirrel has reverted to waste products, an experience that reminds us of our own endangered status, our own endangered art.

    If you enjoyed this article you might consider purchasing our new hard copy Cassandra Voices II.

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  • No Comment: Istanbul Election Week

    [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”49″ gal_title=”No Comment: Istanbul election week.”]

  • Displaced – Abdalla Al Omari

    All our biographies, if they went back far enough, would begin by explaining how our ancestors came to be more or less enslaved, and to what degree we have become free of this inheritance.

    Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London, 1995), p.7

    We are facing a world in a state of perpetual conflict, which urgently requires solutions on many fronts. The sense of belonging to a place or nation has been universally and irreversibly destabilised.

    Integration is a burning question, with unresolved arguments and extreme resolutions: blockages, indifference and walls.

    The Refugee Crisis of 2015 was a complex phenomenon, but it was also a simple request for help: individual choices to escape miserable conditions of political and social degeneration.

    I found the best response to these exhausting debates in the art of Syrian Abdalla Al Omari. His work silences the state of fear and anger flowing through news and social networks, where intelligence and compassion is failing in front of our eyes, giving way to widespread ignorance and emotive anger.

    Terrified by the ‘Other’, fear reigns instead of constructive ideas and creativity. We need to re-activate the empathic part of our brains that makes us see ourselves in others, chasing a conspiracy of life instead of death.

    II – Fragility

    Marina Abramovic’s 1974 performance Rhythm 0 shows the fragility of the human condition. Laying on a table seventy-two objects, she invited her audience to use them in any way they chose. Once invited, they did not hesitate to select the pistol with bullets rather than feathers and roses. The performance ceased when the audience became too aggressive.

    III – Empathy

    Omari’s brushstrokes confront bizarre laws and bullets, and transforms his anger into an unexpected visual awakening. He portrays political leaders as refugees. Beyond the obvious comedic value this develops empathic responses.

    He says:

    While depicting my subjects and developing the series, I eventually arrived at the paradoxical nature of empathy, and somehow my aim shifted from an expression of the anger I had, that I thought was the trigger, to a more vivid desire to disarm my figures and to picture them outside of their positions of power.

    It is a ‘sweet revenge’ on politicians and powerful leaders, whose decisions displace innocent civilians. He continues:

    I wanted to take away their power, not to serve me and my pain, but to give them back their humanity and to give the audience an insight into what the power of vulnerability can achieve.

    This ‘celebration of vulnerability’ is for the artist a surrealistic experiment revealing the inner face of the problem: the inner face of both refugees, political leaders, and ourselves:

    It’s  time for not only artists but any other kind of profession to be more involved in what is in the social-political situation universally.

    IV – Identification

    According to Daniel Trilling:

    In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that the inability of states to guarantee rights to displaced people in Europe between the world wars helped create the conditions for dictatorship. Statelessness reduced people to the condition of outlaws: they had to break laws in order to live and they were subject to jail sentences without ever committing a crime. Being a refugee means not doing what you are told – if you did, you would probably have stayed at home to be killed. And you continue bending the rules, telling untruths, concealing yourself, even after you have left immediate danger, because that is the way you negotiate a hostile system.

    Similarly Abdalli Omari writes:

    When you only talk about quantity of people you totally ignore the fact that all these numbers are persons, are individual stories, are people.

    What would you do in the shoes of a refugee? Would you keep moving despite the impediments?

    What have we in privileged societies to fear from refugees? These are people in search of fresh opportunities, new arrivals looking to reinvent themselves. Are not many of us searching for the same thing?

    *******

    Portiamo Omero e Dante,
    il cieco e il pellegrino
    l’odore che perdeste
    l’uguaglianza che avete sottomesso

    We carry Homer and Dante, the blind man and the pilgrim,
    the smell that you’ve lost, the equality you’ve repressed.

    Erri de Luca

  • Ibrahim Mahama: Negotiations of spaces

    Ibrahim Mahama grew up in Tamale, north Ghana, where he was in daily contact with objects and materials that developed a double meaning for him. His artwork began as a collage and patchwork of items surrounding his daily life, without being explicitly political.

    Out of his own lived experiences he re-contextualises spaces and working processes, capturing the body and skin of functional tools.

    From a point of crisis Ibrahim starts and develops his artwork.

    Used jute sacks sewn together in Ibrahim’s artwork are the skin, containing Ghana’s main export commodity, cocoa beans. Consumed and re-purposed for carrying rice and other commodities across borders, their final use is usually to transport charcoal.

    The artist, however, involving local collaborators, revives these in creative re-composition. He began by covering some of his country’s public buildings, which are often out of sympathy with the surrounding lives and spaces.

    Now his works cover walls and palaces all over the world, and bring together local collaborators from different cities. The creative process itself is part of this negotiation of spaces, with the collaborators jointly sewing every sack, reviving a use for them after carrying charcoal.

    Global transactions and capitalist structures are an important reference, but Ibrahim Mahama has a greater motivation: he intersects occupation and coexistence in creating a new language of objects and signs, revealing their own reasons and story.

    Ibrahim’s work develops a new convivial shape, an architecture in dependence, as he called one of  his latest exhibitions, inspired by Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s book by that name, which is a 1960s love story between a young Nigerian who had moved to study at Oxford, and the daughter of an ex-colonial officer.

    Shoe-shining boxes, used to carry tools to repair and polish shoes, are the tiles of Ibrahim’s new mosaics, a massive assemblage that recalls rural workers migrating to Accra, the capital of Ghana, and their role in the local economy. The boxes, like the sacks, incorporate a personal dimension of life and character, their bodies are covered with stickers and names, just as the sacks have printed codes, the skin of immigration in political tattoos.

  • Against the Muses: Dragana Jurišić

    I first came across Dragana Jurišić’s work in the National Gallery of Ireland, when her ‘Tarantula’ was displayed as part of the ‘After Vermeer’ exhibition in 2017. ‘Tarantula’ was a contemporary response to the Vermeer exhibition, which featured a series of photographic self-portraits of overlapping dancing figures. Jurišić says she was ‘immediately struck by the two main subjects of Vermeer’s paintings: ‘women in domestic settings and the light’. Depiction of women in Vermeer’s portraits led Jurišić to consider the female condition, and ‘pre-conditioning’ more generally, in terms of the rules women must follow in life; their pensiveness and meditative status, which gives way to a mesmerised storm.

    Jurišić recalls the main character of Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, first performed in 1879. Nora leaves her designated role in life, daring to partake in the dancing ‘struggle for life’. Similarly the mythical Tarantati women of Italy, once bitten by the spider, succumb to ‘trance-like dancing’, as the only way to access the euphoria of free expression. Jurišić’s dance, without resorting to provocative suggestions or techniques, traces a visual experiment that almost fulfils the lines of a classical figure, a preparatory drawing disclosing the artist’s creative process. As in Michelangelo’s sculpture ‘The Dying Slave’, these are unfinished sculptures, undressing themselves in the social marble, liberating their true shape from a carcass, not fully, but without shame, while displaying the melancholy and conflict of the process of self-cognition. Vermeer’s women are stuck in a composed, but not acquiescent pose, which recalls contemporary anxieties. Jurišić untangles Vermeer’s forms and empowers the female, and herself as a woman, unmasking the muses, symbols that still inform contemporary culture appreciations.[i]

    Some months later I walked through Jurišić’s latest exhibition, ‘My Own Unknown’, at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin’s Temple Bar, which recalls women who wanted to free themselves from patriarchal constraints. Into Jurišić’s personal story is sewn the mysterious life of her aunt Gordana Čavić. Čavić, like Ibsen’s Nora, disappeared from her assigned role, and native country, Yugoslavia, in the 1950s, dying in Parisian exile in the 1980s: ‘A life shrouded in mystery, it involves tales of multiple identities, illicit sex and espionage’. Out of Jurišić’s archival photographs, the artist recreates a diary of a personal rebirth from a cryptic loss, defining her life as woman and artist:

    My initial questioning of this statement took me to Paris to commence an exploration on L’Inconnue de la Seine, the name given to a young woman whose body was allegedly recovered from the River Seine, and whose death mask was cast in a bid to identify her. Her serene and quiet beauty became a muse for artists.

    The mask and idealistic form is an object of veneration: the fake perfection of a muse, veiled by cultural layers, and detached from any real process of accomplishment. Jurišić’s own undressing, displaying her true ‘body’, provides an unflinching interpretation of her own form.

    What Jurišić knew for sure was that Gordana Čavić was made of much harder stuff than L’Inconnue de la Seine:

    Suddenly I was back at 11 years old, looking at a funeral procession that was beyond extravagant. … Who was she? I asked my grandmother, She just shuffled uncomfortably in response. Behind me I could hear whispers of two men from down the road.

    L’Inconnue de la Seine represents the inspiring  perfection ‘protecting’ the viewer from experience of the real body; the ‘other woman’, which could alter the common sense experience, and reinforce devotion to old beliefs. Who is she? Who is Gordana Čavić, Nora, or the artist Dragana Jurišić?

    In Ibsen’s Women Joan Templeton observes the muse’s path through the centuries. Her powerful analysis of femininity recalls Jurišić’s artistic ambitions: ‘For Gilbert and Gubar … the lady is our creation or Pygmalion’s statue. The lady is the poem.’[ii] The lady is the sculpture, the statue Pygmalion carved and fell in love with, like L’inconnue de la Seine. This is a cast and frozen idealization of femininity. Templeton approvingly cites Simone de Beauvoir:

    But women exist without men’s intervention and thus while ‘woman’ incarnates men’s fantasies, women proves the falsity of the fantasies … Man’s need for woman to remain always the Other. … Woman is necessary to the extent that she remains an idea into which the man can project his own transcendence; but she is danger as an objective reality existing for herself and limited to herself.

    A more urgent consciousness is emerging in our daily experience, beginning with many women’s revelations of sexual violence during the #MeToo movement, and willingness to alter a passive condition of acceptance. Contemporary women are fighting back against an old, still unresolved disadvantage: their objectification as muses.

    Why is ‘the woman’ still an ideal, mythical presence, her real body still censored by intangible projections? Why do many men feel an inadequacy in front of real presences, to the extent of displaying hostility or aggression – real or unconscious – towards that which is not a fantasy? Why are artists still confronting opposition to representations of real existing forms, from ludicrous rules against displaying women’s nipples on social networks, to outright censorship of nudes in exhibition advertisements, while at the same time, our visual environment is filled with sexualised content? Are these taboos veils that hide the truth? Is it the ideal of the muses we are still battling against?

    Not only is the idea of woman in need of revolution, our concept of masculinity needs to be reappraised. According to Dr Arne Rubinstein in The Making of Men: ‘in the healthy man’s psychology, a man sees himself as part of the universe, not the centre of it; he takes full responsibility for his actions, he deals with his emotions and he looks for a healthy relationship with the feminine.’ But ‘the role-modelling and mentoring for boys and teenagers is very poor, and the messaging is terrible.’[iii] Rubinstein’s organization attempts to reconcile the masculine and feminine in men.

    In her 1929 novel A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf endeavoured to awaken awareness of gender inadequacy. She suggested society should reconsider and re-educate our basic perceptions of sexuality, and the condition of women in the world, beginning with the artistic and creative processes:

    For certainly when I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to cooperate … But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness?[iv]

    In the last part of her exhibition ‘My own Unknown’, Jurišić explores her self-portraits and diaries, concluding the exhibition with a previous work made in Dublin in 2015, employing the same technique as ‘Tarantula’, but overlapping photographs of one hundred women posing as nude muses in front of her. They direct their own poses using a chair and a veil, each identify themselves with one of the nine muses of Greek mythology: Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania.

    One of the final portraits is ‘The Mother’, an overlap of all the muses. This is Mnemosyne, mother of all the Muses, goddess of memory. On top of one another the bodies look like layers of negatives, memories overlapping into a majestic image. This conveys a scribble, an incomplete creative process, an operation of cognition in the ‘struggle for life’. Jurišić writes:

    The idea of the muse often evokes images of a male artist and a passive female muse. The female muse is often depicted as nude in visual art. And in turn “the nude” – one of the biggest clichés of Western art tradition, is a genre predominantly inhabited by male artists. At the beginning of April 2015, I began the task of photographing 100 female nudes over a period of five weeks.

    A powerful expression of ourselves is still needed, not only a female view on female gaze, but an entire recreation of feminine and masculine interpretation. An ‘ownership over their body’.

    Gordana knew that she came to Paris to survive. Survive at any cost. Shed her skin. Shed her past. Forget about the people she left behind. Or not. But she is not going back. She will never go back.

    The goddess mother of all the muses is the goddess mother of a faded memory, like Jurišić’s aunt Gordana Čavić who ‘was so beautiful, like she was her own creator.’[v]

    [i] National Gallery of Ireland, ‘Dragana Jurisic: Tarantula’, https://www.nationalgallery.ie/dragana-jurisic-tarantula, accessed 15/11/18.

    [ii] Joan Templeton, Ibsen’s Women, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp303-305

    [iii] Quoted in: David Leser, ‘Women, men and the whole damn thing’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9th of February, 2018, https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/the-great-sexual-reckoning-how-did-we-get-here–and-what-happens-now-20180124-h0npcc.html, accessed 23/11/18.

    [iv] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, London, Hogarth Press, p.113

    [v] Dragana Jurišić ‘My Own Unknown’, 2014, http://www.draganajurisic.com/my-own-unknown/4587594312, accessed 15/11/18.

    Dragana Jurisic, ‘Tarantula’. Archival pigment print, 2017. © the artist.

     

    L’Inconnue de la Seine, http://draganajurisic.com/my-own-unknown/458759431
    Dragana Jurisic, Erato. © the artist.
    Dragana Jurisic, Euterpe. © the artist.

     

    Dragana Jurisic, The Mother. © the artist.