MAZEN AND 'THE GUCCI REVOLUTION'

11 september / 11 september 2001 / 11 september 2007
"today i am celebrating 6 years of friendship with the customs of the civilised world airports" (credits: Mazen Kerbaj)

By Jessie Emkic

Humour and irony may make you laugh, but can a blog filled with political comics serve better as a source of information than traditional media? The Lebanese Mazen Kerbaj succeeded in creating such a blog.

It was last year during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that I encountered Mazen’s work for the first time. His blog drew my attention. He would regularly post cartoons depicting his impressions of the invasion, adding a good portion of self-irony to make his point clear. Throughout the entire invasion he would draw, make music and write everyday ceaselessly to “keep his sanity”, as he says. His work drew large international attention. “Sometimes I meet people after a gig in Europe. They come to me and say: ‘We spoke to you during the war’. I don’t know what I should answer. It was in fact quite a frenetic period back then, and I barely have any souvenir of all the people I spoke to.” Sometimes he would receive more than hundred of emails per day. A large majority of these were supportive, but there were some detractors too. Mazen takes it with humour: “In a way, I was more capable of answering these than totally cheesy comments of some supporters. Receiving a comment like: ‘I am with you from Costa Rica,’ while you are in a really incredible, but interesting state of mind as you hear bombs fall on your city, trying to cope with the situation and continue your ‘art’ - it brings you back to the real world. In a sense it shows you clearly what the reality is of support that you and the country and getting.”

Unfortunately, some people totally misunderstood the message he was conveying with his drawings. It made him appear a victim, although he was simply discharging his fear on paper. He was trying to protect himself from going insane. “I even got the greatest comment one day,” he says, “after a drawing where I’m vomiting because of too much whiskey: ‘You shouldn't drink alcohol, it is bad for your health, you know.’ Reading this while a bomb is falling 3 kilometers away from your house is pretty surreal.”
He spent his childhood in the Lebanese civil war until he turned fifteen. The food and medical aid the Lebanese would receive consisted of goods which had expired years earlier. This is customary with humanitarian aid regardless of the country it’s sent to. He says ‘divide and conquer’ seems to be working very well in his region. But not everything is dusky. Beirut is known as the “Paris of the Middle East” glowing with glamour. People are fashion conscious to such an extent that during the great riots in 2005 citizens of Beirut would refer to them as the ‘Gucci Revolution’.

Mazen started drawing at the age of three and hasn’t stopped since. Many of the comics he draws deal with politics and war, but he doesn’t want to do what many Occidental artists do, namely use war as a primary topic for a study. “In a sense, I wanted to prove - to myself - that it was possible to do interesting stuff without stressing your ‘difference’.” The assassination of the notable journalist Samir Kassir in 2005, his friend and mentor, left a deep scar. “I couldn't stop drawing during the week that followed. It was a sort of a therapy.” Mazen ended up printing 10.000 copies of these drawings with the help of some friends and donators. They were published under the title ‘UNE SEMAINE SANS LA VOIX DE SAMIR’ (Engl. A Week Without Samir’s Voice) and distributed with Le Monde - Edition Proche Orient.
Mazen explores his creativity also in music, engaging in international collaborations with other musicians. He’s regularly invited to play gigs in Europe, many in of them in Austria. With neighbouring countries it’s different. There’s no collaboration with Israel whatsoever. According to a Lebanese law one is not even allowed to speak to an Israeli. And yet, he received many supportive mails from Israeli musicians during the Israeli invasion and was astounded how many of them knew the Beirut music scene - a proof that art surpasses all borders.
Mazen performed live in Minoritenkirche in Krems, Austria on
October 5.

www.kerbaj.com
www.mazenkerblog.blogspot.com

published in Art in Migration, November 2007

bey212 (credits: Mazen Kerbaj)

BORDERS OF THE MIDDLE EAST: TAL ADLER

khirbet alwatan (credits: Tal Adler)

By Jessie Emkic

The Israeli pro-Palestinian artists are in a precarious position. Facing hardliners at home, they also face rejection from Palestinian institutions. About acceptance and rejection of political art.

Tal Adler is an Israeli artist living and working in Jerusalem. He occasionally teaches at art institutions and is passionate about traveling to other countries. Currently, he is involved in the Israeli Film Festival in Vienna taking place in November this year and is organizing the USA tour of his campaign “Unrecognized”. In May 2008 he will be co-curating an exhibition in Sammlung Essl in Klosterneuburg, Austria.
“Unrecognized” is a project documenting the lives of Bedouins made refugees when their land was taken away in 1948 in the course of the establishment of Israel. Today they live in unrecognized villages. About this project, Tal says: “I chose to deal with a specific social and political situation in which the Bedouins of the Negev desert are involved. The project is part of an ongoing movement to recognize these villages and to establish civil equality. The situation in the Negev is nowadays really unequal and urgent, and I felt I had to contribute something to interfere with it and join the movement for change.” Although topics such as these are not mainstream, Tal doesn’t see himself as a part of the left underground art scene in Israel. He rejects definitions, since things constantly change and are more complex in the Middle East. It’s choices and circumstances of individuals that are in question, not scenes. “I usually don’t deal with politics, but do politics. It's not ‘talking about’, it's ‘doing’. More so, it’s a way of examining ‘political art’ - if the project has a quality of change/ interference/ creation or just observation/ discussion. It’s passive vs. active.” But definitions can confuse and oversimplify. They change and are usually dichotomous, whereas life, particularly in his region, is much more complex.

I asked him about collaborations with artists from neighbouring countries. “I only have few connections with artists in Egypt,” he says, “that is if you don’t consider Palestine as a neighboring country. I have good relations with Palestinian artists. Unfortunately, Jewish Israelis find it almost impossible to have meaningful or creative relationships with the other countries like Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia etc., because of our political circumstances. From experience, these artists will not and cannot collaborate with us. They refuse to participate in shows with Israelis. I can find maybe a Syrian blogger and maybe do some long distance internet thing, but this is shallow. I'm interested in real relationships or collaborations in projects, which is impossible at the moment. However, I think I do have some kind of a possibility of beginning in Egypt.” The reasons for a lack of collaborations are political and also involve politics of the art world and local art scenes. Most Palestinian art institutions and artists now have a new automatic answer to refuse to exhibit with Israelis, no matter what the context is. “I can understand the rejection,” he says, “and in many cases I can agree about the refusal when the context is being imposed on the artists and they feel that it's inappropriate. But lately, as I experience it, the refusal has become an automated refusal which, as most automated processes, is not so coherent and not so intelligent.” According to Tal, this total exclusion doesn’t reflect life, especially not in the Middle East, where it’s complex and multilayered. For him, a total boycott is a clear aspect of racism. Another serious hurdle in collaborating together is the danger it imposes on Arab artists who collaborate with Israelis. It can even be fatal to their careers. But as Tal puts it, “...the separation which both ‘mainstream’ sides wish for is a utopia and will never be really possible.” The exhibition which will be shown at Sammlung Essl involves Tal’s work, the Institute for Research and Creation of Rites and Ceremonies (www.ritesinstitute.org) and the works of some 15-20 artists from Israel and Palestine.

More on Tal: www.itemz.com

published in Art in Migration, November 2007

um ratam (credits: Tal Adler)

MÃO NA BOCA (HAND ON THE MOUTH)

mão na boca

By Jessie Emkic

Turning paintings of vomiting monkeys and aborting women into a dance performance may sound like Sisyphus’ labour, but to Joana Providência it was sheer pleasure. In 2009 she will be celebrating twenty years of her work.

The Portuguese choreographer Joana Providência was commissioned by the Fundação de Serralves in Oporto, Portugal, to produce a performance based on the work of the famous Portuguese painter Paula Rego. The performance was shown in parallel with the exhibition of Rego’s work in Fundação de Serralves in 2004.
“To me this work is very important,” says Providência. “What I consulted first was a book with graphics from Paula Rego. These graphics were based on tales and children’s stories.” Rego researched Portuguese fairy tales in the 1970s with grants from the Gulbenkian Foundation, using characters that appeared in the fairy tales she read, to paint provoking images. In one of her paintings, a red monkey vomits as his wife cuts off his tail. “As soon as I encountered Rego’s work, I knew it would be a strong experience,” Providência continues. “Her work has a great power and I realized I would have to find a way to transport that power onto the stage.”

Transporting Rego’s work onto the stage was rather challenging. Rego’s paintings don’t appear static and can be described as somewhat organic. They change their meaning with the spectator, exposing ambiguities and combining extremes. In her 1987 painting ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’, an obedient daughter is polishing her father’s jackboot and at the same time holding her arm inside it in such a manner as if she were saying ‘up yours’. Obedience and rebellion, humiliation and submission, violence and revenge: these themes are the foundation of Rego’s work.

“The title of the performance appeared before I began producing it,” says Providência. “To choose the title, I did an exercise while watching a documentary about Paula Rego.”
She would note down the words she’d hear in the documentary. Some of the words appeared to be too strong and far too direct. The words ‘mão na boca’ seemed open without being offensive. “Somehow, Paula Rego holds her hand over her mouth because she uses the hand to scribble and while doing so, she is expressing everything that happens inside of her. The hand functions as a mouth,” says Providência. “When a work is developed by being commissioned or by an invitation, there is a goal that is set at the beginning. I realized I would need performers for this show who were already known to me.” Knowing they were available for this type of work, she also knew how they would respond to this material that “...demands literary everything from a performer.”

For Providência, “...the creation of Mão na Boca developed in two ways: On one hand, the drawings and paintings as universes of tales, fables, and novels, were generating impulses. On the other hand, the hidden or less readable marks in Rego’s work of memories, fears, sounds, and imagination, worked as a motor for the performance. To the performers it was proposed to improvise using their shadow as a way of reducing the body to a smudge that transforms, deforms, and folds itself in scales, shapes, and tensors. The body was interpreted as a technique of physical narration, filled with conflict, evolving through various states, having skin, flesh and tendons.”
With the strong visual character that endorses her work, Providência achieved the likely impossible: to breathe a life into paintings by turning the imagery into movement, and to evolve the movement into an epic of extraordinary stills.

Providência belongs to a generation of choreographers who have been influencing the development of contemporary dance in Portugal significantly for the past twenty years. She has been the director and professor of the Movement Department for Interpretation Studies at the Academia Contemporânea do Espectáculo in Oporto since 1995. She is a part of the theater company promoted by the ACE/Teatro do Bolhão and is a member of their artistic board. She teaches choreographic composition at various schools and workshops in Portugal and abroad. Her work has been shown in Glasgow, Salamanca, Madrid, and several dance festivals across Europe.

published in Art in Migration, November 2007

mão na boca


Joana Providência

A LETTER FROM TENTLAND

letters from tentland (credits: Franz Kimmel)

By Jessie Emkic

IT was clear from the start that Iran’s Islamic Revolution would not bring equality to women, since just 15 days after it the government abolished the 1963 Family Protection Act, which had banned polygamy and the sole right of men to divorce. Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters then went on to exclude women from public life by making it impossible for them to work (1) However, the situation has improved a little in the past few years and a few women have gained more access to public domains reserved for men, becoming more visible in the arts.
Those with international recognition, such as the young film director Samira Makhmalbaf, have been treated fairly tolerantly because of fears of protest outside Iran, while those working only for a national audience, such as the state television presenter Shirin, still struggle. Although her salary was good, her work became so restricted by her male bosses that it became impossible for her to continue.
“I loved my work,” she said, “but every day I had to change my speech and presentation, which always seemed to be too erotic, no matter what I did . . . if I smiled the reaction would be ‘Oh, no! You shouldn’t smile at all and if you do smile, don’t have your teeth showing.’ After some months I had to quit the job.”
Shirin had previously worked as an actress and dancer. She claims that even organising an authorised performance of dance is risky. “My colleague Leila did a performance with a group of female dancers in Tehran [for female audiences only] . . . The choreographer had a formal authorisation in writing from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. As they were performing on the second night, a police minibus came behind the building and stopped the performance in the middle. The police told the performers to complete the last scene and after it ended they checked the dancers one by one and took them in the minibus to prison. A 14-year old among the dancers was taken to prison, too.”
Leila’s greatest love is singing, and she has trained to sing since childhood. Since there is no chance of her performing publicly she occasionally works as a dancer and actress: “I have to live on something, and dancing and acting offer a possibility of working in the arts. As a woman you don’t have many choices. We have no female singers in Iran, it’s prohibited for a woman to sing. There is an all-female choir: this used to be forbidden, now it’s allowed, but with restrictions. The choir can be heard on television, but you can’t see the singers. Their faces must remain hidden. In concerts you see them on stage, fully covered of course.”
The lack of clarity about the rules is a problem for women. Even the punishments for not observing the dress code are unclear. Leila said: “We are apparently all against God. Or against Muslims depending on how a local judge sees it. If my veil falls down I might be offending God or Muslims or both. The sentence might vary from a simple fine to two months in prison or even the death penalty. The authorities can do as they please and . . . the rules change daily.”
Leila has observed other changes in the mood of her city, Tehran: “To escape their gloomy everyday lives, many Iranians have turned to opiates. Alcohol and drug usage have exploded.” She says that it is no longer uncommon for people to die of liver damage because of alcohol abuse, that illegal distilling of hard liquor is widespread, and that marijuana and hash are smoked like cigarettes. The drug ecstasy is widely used because it cannot be easily detected. “People are bored. They don’t have anything to do, so they go for drugs and alcohol.”

A Life in Tehran

One less destructive way of channelling boredom and anger is through the arts, such as contemporary dance. Due to lack of facilities and training, though, performances remain rare. In dance schools traditional dances are taught to women, although with strictly prescribed choreography. And women can dance in public only if fully covered, their eyes and hands included.
Hava has toured the world performing with contemporary dance companies: “People are very surprised when I tell them I am from Iran. Nobody ever heard of an Iranian contemporary dancer before.” She attends workshops abroad whenever she has a chance because “there really isn’t much in Iran . . . I was lucky to get a chance to perform on stage. Even when we performed in foreign countries we were obliged to wear the hijab, on stage as well as privately.”
She complains of Iran’s misogynist puritanism, of the way that religion is pushed into everything, which “stops you from everything. You cannot enjoy your life because it’s a sin, you cannot walk because it’s a sin, you cannot be seen because it’s a sin.”

‘Letters from Tentland’

The Iranian government officially claims that it invests large amounts in arts and culture, but the money is rarely evident within the country, and there is little international co-operation. A notable exception was Letters from Tentland (2), 2004, the first ranian dance production to employ a foreign choreographer, which was created with support from the Dramatic Arts Centre in Tehran and the Goethe Institut in Germany. It was directed by Helena Waldmann, a German choreographer whose speciality is concealing the visible, and showed six women dancing and moving inside tents on stage.
“I loved coming to Tehran”, Waldmann said. “The first day I was going to meet the actresses the chief of the arts centre told me: ‘They are inside waiting for you. By the way, they are the most famous actresses in Iran.’ I was worried about this, but they all turned out to be great. They were the divas of Iran and I had to tell them to get into a tent as if we were going camping.”
The performance premiered at the International Fadjr-Festival in Tehran in 2005, and afterwards “we invited the women from the audience for tea and a chat behind the curtain,” Waldmann said. “It was very intense. Many women told us they couldn’t believe the performance was not censored. We kept the tea-and-chat after the performance idea throughout our world tour.”
Waldmann is interested in hiding performers from audiences. In her 1997 Vodka konkav she installed five glass panels behind which the dancers performed; the audience, sitting in front of the fourth panel, saw them only indirectly. Therefore Letters from Tentland was “was a logical continuation of what I’ve done since The Malady of Death in 1993, a play with visibility and invisibility . . . The craziest thing is that this game of visibility/invisibility is exactly the case in Iran. Women are inside tents, their hijabs as well as actual tents. I continued in the same artistic direction. I went to this country, Iran, where it is mandatory for women to be hidden.”
Letters from Tentland toured 17 countries and was performed 43 times, but was censored this year in Iran. Waldmann was not discouraged and has directed a new piece, Return to Sender — Letters from Tentland, with Iranian dancers in exile, which premiered at the 2006 Montpellier Dance Festival. In the original performance the final scene showed dancers huddled in a tent, who shyly looked towards the audience wondering if there was anyone out there hearing them. They invited people to come into their tent. At a performance in Vienna, just as they were about to zip the tent closed, a Mexican woman in the audience got up and went to join them. They smiled. A beautiful act of solidarity could not have been expressed more honestly.

Some of the names in this story have been changed to preserve privacy.

(1) Akram Mirhosseini, “After the Revolution” in Peters and Wolper, eds, Women’s Rights, Human Rights, Routledge, New York, 1995.
(2) www.lettersfromtentland.com


published in Le Monde diplomatique, October 2006
www.mondediplo.com/2006/10/17iran

edited version on letters from tentland official site
www.lettersfromtentland.com/return/theater/text-theater-engl.html

return to sender - letters from tentland (credits: Gerardo Sanz)

Helena Waldmann (credits: Bettina Stöß)