TWO VIEWS OF A BATTLEGROUND
Artists’ shows linked by memories
Violence in Mexico and the role of the “war hotel” in shaping our view of conflict are the subjects of two new exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain.
Teresa Margolles, a Mexican artist who, in her words, “shows horror without showing it,” uses blood to infuse her works with a human dimension. She explores the killings that are endemic to parts of Mexico where drug gangs hold sway, and ties it to the cross-border exchange of drugs for money and weaponry.
“You give us the bullets, we give you the blood,” is how Margolles described it in an interview at a preview of her exhibition, Mundos. She evokes this sentiment in works like Irrigation, a video of a performance in which dried blood from autopsy rooms in Mexico is added to a water truck in Texas and sprinkled on a highway.
Emanuel Licha, a Montrealborn artist, explores the idea of the war hotel in his exhibition, Now Have a Look at This Machine.
The war hotel is the gathering place where journalists and their local fixers, aid workers, politicians and even the protagonists converge to exchange information during a conflict. It’s a highrise building that offers a vantage point on a site of conflict and offers relative safety and access to electrical power and communications.
“The war hotel is an integral part of the conflict,” Licha writes, “conditioning the way it is seen and represented.”
It “trains the gaze of journalists in how they should look at the war,” he added in an interview.
Margolles, who represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2009, uses minimal means in her work. Her provocative Irrigation performance took place during an exhibition in Marfa, Texas, the desert town near the Mexican border where American minimalist sculptor Donald Judd’s legacy is preserved and celebrated.
Her works are as spare as Licha’s are dense with video, text and documents.
Margolles’s 36 Cuerpos (36 Bodies) is a string of suture threads that occupy a gallery. The sutures, stained with the blood of murder victims, were used to sew bodies back together following autopsies in Guadalajara.
Soap bubbles descend from the ceiling of another gallery. Each bubble represents one body and is created with water from morgues where bodies of victims of violence have been cleaned. (The water is uncontaminated.)
The central piece is La Promesa, a low wall made of concrete rubble from one of the homes built for an influx of immigrants to the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, where they came to work in the maquiladoras (factories making goods for tariff-free export to the U.S.). But thousands of homes were abandoned during an economic downturn and in reaction to drug gang violence. This is a wall that suggests how a promise of a better future has failed.
Margolles is particularly concerned with the epidemic of missing and murdered women — a problem she attributes to gang violence and a macho culture that allows the perpetrators to act with impunity, she said.
The Irrigation project spilled blood-infused water on a highway so hot that the water evaporated. The sizzling sound it made echoes “the pain of the mothers whose children have been killed,” she said.
But there is hope, Margolles added. Ciudad Juárez is still vibrant, which shows it is capable of offering more than violence, and mothers of the disappeared women have banded together to help each other.
“These women are an example. I learn from them,” she said. “I make my work with an ingrained sense of hope, but I must also speak out.”
Memory is a point of convergence between the work of Margolles and Licha.
“Hotels retain a memory,” Licha said. “I listen to objects and try to make them speak. I invent strategies to let hotels speak.”
One strategy is to talk to the managers, chambermaids, kitchen staff, porters and security guards who were working
when their hotel became a war hotel. Many of them tell their stories in the 64-minute video Hotel Machine, the centrepiece of Licha’s exhibition.
Licha’s ongoing project, of which this exhibition is the latest iteration, began when he attended a U.S. training centre for soldiers going to Iraq and Afghanistan. There were make-believe villages, but Licha was surprised to see the only real building was a hotel overlooking the site.
It made him aware of the strategic importance of the war hotel, which ensures that soldiers are always aware of being watched. But it is also a place from which few journalists venture without armed guards, which affects anyone they want to interview.
Licha visited Kabul, Tripoli, Kyiv and Gaza, and the hotels that had been used by journalists during past conflicts. “I wanted to see how wars are represented and how we who are uninvolved are introduced to those events,” he said.
To observe journalists at work, he went to a city in Turkey on the Syrian border, but arrived just
after the media horde had moved on to another story. Exhibition curator Lesley Johnstone writes in the catalogue that “being too late” is the “time of the artist, as opposed to the time of the journalist.”
Licha describes his art as being within the realm of documentary. “No invention, but a description of those places.”
He lays out his research in texts, documents and images in five stations set around the video screen on which Hotel Machine is playing.
One example of many: he cites the Egyptian uprising in 2011, when images broadcast from hotel balconies prompted more people to join the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, but also led supporters of President Mubarak’s regime to start shooting at the journalists on their balconies.
Licha also shows an example of a television station framing the
scene to disguise the fact that the reporter is inside a hotel.
Hotel Machine includes an interview with a BBC correspondent in Angola who describes the difference in perception of reality between reporters like herself who lived in a regular house in the capital of Luanda during the country’s civil war and the “dropin, drop-out” reporters who stayed in the bubble of a hotel.
“You go into those hotels and it’s like you’re in another world,” she says. “You leave behind the street,” with all its noise, the car horns and “the ladies walking past with fish on their heads, shouting they’ve got fish to sell.”
In the age of ubiquitous cellphone cameras, Licha recognizes that citizen journalists are bringing new imagery to TV and computer screens.
There are many sources of photos now, he said, but the concept of the war hotel remains, at least for now.