Unexpected guests trapped
The outsider, the stranger, has always held a fascination for artists and writers, helping to shape our view of those who exist in a state of perpetual transition
Parts of the Western world are gripped by a crisis of strangers. Men, women and children — collectively we describe them as civilians, citizens and humans — are fleeing violence, poverty and competing definitions of sovereignty in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia and other states.
Some are seeking refuge in Europe; others are placing their hopes in refugee settlements such as Za’atari in northern Jordan and Dadaab in northeastern Kenya.
These movements — some small and unrecognised, others highly visible and epochal in character — are of interest to artists. This makes perfect sense. The stranger is, after all, a recurring figure in paintings, films and novels.
This recurrence is particularly noticeable in contemporary art. In his recent book, The Migrant Image (2013), art historian TJ Demos offers a timely look at how “documentary engagement” with the subject of migrancy is refiguring artistic practice and theoretical debate.
He describes the refugee as a “repressed figure of the last century’s otherwise celebrated glorious nationalisms, utopian political projects and vaunted technological achievements”. Like many writers grappling with the slippery subject of homelessness, Demos endorses the “insistently political” analysis of migrancy offered by exiled Palestinian literary critic Edward Said.
“Our age,” reads a passage from Said’s well-known 1984 essay on exile, “with its modern warfare, imperialism and the quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers — is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass migration.”
Many of the artists discussed by Demos — including Steve McQueen, Mona Hatoum and Hito Steyerl — use the camera to produce still and moving images. Still photography in particular has played a prominent role in shaping our collective recognition — I hesitate to say understanding — of displacement, migration and exile.
Whether one looks at the grim photographs produced by Gilles Peress in 1994 Rwanda or the on-the-move work of Iranian documentary photographer Abbas [Attar] in Serbia a year later, it is hard to refute what critic Lyle Rexer calls the “factitious insistence” of a photograph.
But photographs are silent, or at least they tend to operate in a way that both invites and rebuffs language. In his startling biography of Somali refugee Asad Abdullahi, whose miserable wanderings lead him to Cape Town, writer Jonny Steinberg renders in words what is not always communicable in a photograph.
“A refugee has lost control,” offers Steinberg in A Man of Good Hope (2014). “Great historical forces have upended him and he no longer has a place in the world. He has become an in-between sort of being, suspended between a past in which he belonged somewhere and a future in which he might belong somewhere once more.”
Documentary photographer James Nachtwey has observed much the same thing. “Refugees are not only sequestered in space,” wrote Nachtwey in a short essay accompanying photographs he took in the Za’atari refugee camp in 2013, “they are incarcerated in time, walled in between a past that’s been obliterated and a future that no longer exists.”
This notion of time interests me. Is it possible for an artist to show or visualise what it means to be a refugee incarcerated in time? I have my doubts.
In 1998, after a wilderness period that included working as a news photographer in Palestine, Moroccan-French artist Yto Barrada began her long-term photographic essay A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1998-2004). Widely exhibited, it is a work of quotidian splendour.
Barrada’s essay records facets of everyday life in northern Morocco, a place she has described as “the destination and jumping-off point of a thousand hopes”. People are pictured waiting, seated, doing nothing; in many instances we observe them from behind.
One portrait compels. It presents a young man leaning against a broken wall overlooking a small flock of sheep. The grassy l andscape around him is littered with the flotsam of modern consumer life. But it is his prospect that intrigues: a Mediterranean beach in North Africa.
It is a place of pleasure and estrangement, as Albert Camus recognised. The Algerian-born French novelist often sought gratification in the Mediterranean, but he also made it the site of a murder in his celebrated 1942 novel, The Outsider (also known as The Stranger).
This fictional murder has been a source of great argument among scholars. Possibly the most elegant retort to Camus’s Orientalist tendencies is offered by Algerian journalist and writer Kamel Daoud, whose debut novel, The Meursault Investigation (2013), retells Camus’s novel from the perspective of the anonymous Arab murdered on the beach.
“If the sea and war separate the two countries, we remain neighbours bound to one another by a common sense of grief, denial and unease,” said Daoud in an interview in June.
This unease is registered i n Barrada’s photographs. It also figured in a work created by Francis Alÿs, a Belgian-born artist who studied architecture and engineering. In 2008 Alÿs got a group of children holding sailboats to form a human line extending into the sea. The project formed part of a speculative proposal to build a bridge across the Strait of Gibraltar using hundreds of boats and followed a 2006 project where the artist lined up 150 boats from Key West, Florida, in the direction of Havana in Cuba.
Whimsical in conception, Alÿs’s projects are a meditation on mean- inglessness and aspiration. In 2002, for instance, Alÿs and 500 volunteers formed a line along a massive sand dune in Peru and began shovelling. Their aim: to move the dune. There is an ethical imperative to his work. When he exhibited his quixotic human bridge project at the Marrakech Biennale in 2009, it included a strident question: “How can one at the same time promote global economy and limit the movement of people around the globe?”
Right now, walls and barriers are being erected in Hungary to stem the flow of refugees from the east. This is unsurprising. Walls and barriers are a correlative of migratory passages. This fact has in turn spon- sored an open-ended type of artistic practice in which border towns such as Tijuana, Melilla and Musina are locales for speculative thinking, and also action.
Starting in 2009, United Statesborn South African artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi organised a series of art projects in close proximity to the formerly electrified fence on South Africa’s northern border with Zimbabwe. Her collaborators were chiefly farm labourers in the Musina region, many of them migrants from southern Zimbabwe.
Nkosi helped locals to establish a theatre group. “The idea of creating an arts network emerged from conversations that a group of Johannesburg-based artists had with young artists in Musina, who said they felt isolated in terms of access to information and opportunities, and sorely lacked an organised arts community,” says Nkosi of her project.
Equal parts civic action and collaborative performance, the project culminated in an arts festival. Hospitality is an important facet of addressing the crisis that exists among strangers, for artists as much as citizens and governments.
In December 2011, Serge Alain Nitegeka, an athletic Burundian artist living and working in Johannesburg, hired a truck to deliver 100 handmade pine stools to a site on an open plot of land