Sourballs of the Revolution

By Meghan Clare Considine M.A., Williams College, 2023 Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art

“ The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning? ” 1

“ Which came first: the desire to fly, or the desire to see oneself at a distance? ” 2

Seeing histories of liberation, revolution, and solidarity at a distance means reckoning with their tenuous afterlives and the varied scales of their reverberations. The artists in to see oneself at a distance propose a kind of looking against the grain, resisting spectacular media landscapes that privilege oversimplified images of singular digestible heroic moments. This reexamination of past movements for freedom by artists Hương Ngô, Kapwani Kiwanga, Maryam Jafri, and Suneil Sanzgiri makes a case for the political power and ever-changing precarity of memory.

Theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay writes: “How treacherous it is to equate decolonization with independence.”3 Similarly, the artists in this exhibition are concerned with the neocolonial logics still haunting liberated geographies. The artists in the exhibition, while intergenerational, came of age as the utopian energies characterizing the 1960s around the globe began to falter, and collective translational solidarity against colonialism and capitalism steadily calcified in favor of competition, privatization, extraction, and individualism. The artists here also share personal histories of diasporic movement that shape a unifying thread across their practices: decolonization cannot be understood as an event horizon, but rather a series of gestures, ruptures, and fragments that might ripple across time and space.

These artists’ cross-cultural, multidisciplinary works also propose history not as a lineage of inevitabilities, but as an ongoing storytelling process of often discordant narration. Through attention to archival imprecisions, material and linguistic translations, and transcontinental collaborations, the works in to see oneself at a distance offer pathways toward reviving histories of radical optimism and collectivity. What we are left with are traces that suggest that liberatory projects will always remain unfinished, improvisatory, and as galvanizing as they are fragile.

Since 2014, Hương Ngô has investigated the gap-ridden archives of Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai (1910–1941), a lionized martyr of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Here Ngô reproduces and reaffirms a pseudonymous anti-fascist political tract attributed to Minh Khai, Vấn đề phụ nữ (1938), which can be translated as “The Question of Women,” or “The Problem of Women.” The text explores the role of women and motherhood throughout feudal times in Asia to the then-present colonial age and Confucian society. It takes an anti-Fascist stance, attempting to balance calls for equality with the rise of the popular front and thereby navigating tricky waters of class-based versus gender-based identities and their corresponding priorities. Ngô reproduces the entirety of Vấn đề phụ nữ in its original language, refusing to translate for non-Vietnamese-speaking audiences. This illegibility acknowledges and aims to rectify the fact that, in her lifetime, Minh Khai was denied what postcolonial theorist

Édouard Glissant called “the right to opacity,” as her movements were heavily tracked by French colonial surveillance. The laborious act of pressing text into fibrous paper affords Ngô intimacy with both Minh Khai and the material histories embedded in this golden surface: Dó paper handmade by the Hanoi-based Zó Project, which uplifts traditional papermaking practices. Dó paper has been sustainably crafted from the bark of Northern Vietnamese rhamnoneuron balansae trees since the third century. Crucially, Ngô elevates the text and its author’s radical legacy: because of its inherent durability and beauty, Dó paper has historically been reserved for special purposes such as official record-keeping.

Fig. 2: Hương Ngô, It was her Handwriting that Ultimately Gave Her Away (detail), 2020. Exhibition view, “Nine Lives,” The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2020. Photo: Useful Art Services. Courtesy of the artist

Since 2013, Kapwani Kiwanga has studied the archival traces of ceremonies, treaty signings, and other official events marking newly independent African nations. These events often featured decorative floral arrangements, which for the artist serve as silent witness to moments of profound change. Kiwanga’s Flowers for Africa recalls art historical traditions of “vanitas” paintings popular in 17th-century Netherlands, which were meant to evoke the fleeting nature of worldly pleasures through depictions of rotting and wilting food and plants. Inspired by this tradition, Kiwanga uses flora to make political transformations visible through a series of living sculptures. Her time-based works recreate a moment of celebratory liberation but gradually dry and wither throughout the exhibition, calling attention to the care required to sustain new social and political formations. For the Flowers for Africa series, Kiwanga works with local florists who interpret the work for each presentation.

Here, she collaborates with local multidisciplinary artist Tu Le. As a queer Vietnamese refugee, Le is sensitive to the questions of diaspora, care, and the enduring resilience of memory asked by Flowers for Africa. Le has researched, grown, foraged for, and assembled arrangements that materially translate records Kiwanga sourced from Namibian, Tunisian, South African, Libyan and Cameroonian archives.

Fig. 1:

Kapwani Kiwanga, Flowers for Africa: Libya, 2017, protocol of assembly and display including archival iconography to guide the reconstruction of a floral arrangement consisting of cut flowers, variable dimensions. Exhibition view, "The Sun Never Sets," Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (ZA), 2017. © Photo Anthea Pokroy. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris. Collection of Léopold Meyer © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Fig. 3:

Kapwani Kiwanga, Flowers for Africa: Namibia, 2017, protocol of assembly and display including archival iconography to guide the reconstruction of a floral arrangement consisting of cut flowers, variable dimensions. Exhibition view, Marcel Duchamp Prize, Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR), 2020. © Photo Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris. Collection KADIST © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Maryam Jafri is a keen observer of official records; across her practice she looks at archives as infrastructures and is sensitive to systemic patterns that occur across them. She is especially invested in the role that photography plays in the consolidation and solidifying of narratives of liberation in decolonizing Asian and African nations. Her Versus Series pairs archival prints of liberation movements with the same images subsequently acquired by multinational stock photo corporations—highlighting subtle inconsistencies, editing, and visual manipulation. Framing questions of copyright and profit from this imagery as “digital colonialism,” Jafri’s comparisons draw attention to the underlying problems of image ownership and editing as they relate to sovereignty. The question of who owns an image evolves into broader questions: Who owns history? Who owns identity? Acknowledging the bitter irony of iconic images of movements for freedom housed and copyrighted in cyberspace, Jafri demonstrates how the same picture mutates as it traverses public, private, digital, and analog repositories. Also on view is Disappearance Online, a 2021 postscript to this research-based installation that explores pivotal images from Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Jafri’s accompanying text traces their appearance, disappearance, and total absence from cyberspace, emphasizing how the digital realm can both exacerbate violence and render it invisible. Both projects stem from Jafri’s larger research project, Independence Day 1934–1974 (2009–2019), which has brought her to over 40 archives across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

In to see oneself at a distance, Suneil Sanzgiri’s trilogy of short films is presented in a new sculptural installation that proposes a kaleidoscopic vision of national liberation and solidarity in South Asia. In this body of work, Sanzgiri presents archival imagery alongside contemporary footage and animations to illuminate ongoing and overlapping histories of collectivity and dissent. Sanzgiri weaves a robust web of reference, from stories of his father Shashi’s childhood in Goa at the culmination of 450 years of Portuguese occupation to the electrifying sights and sounds of the Muslim women-led Shaheen Bagh protest movement of 2019. Throughout his work, Sanzgiri telescopes between past and present, finding links between intimately familial and (inter)national narratives. The films rely on contemporary technologies of neocolonial surveillance and extraction such as Google Street View, 3D renderings, and drone footage, which ultimately led the artist to ask: “What is liberation when so much has already been taken?” When these surveillance strategies appear alongside more intimate gestures—such as screen-sharing moments of the artist Skyping with his father, or direct animation where the 16mm filmstrip is manipulated with handdrawn pigments or scratching—alternative and even hopeful ways of seeing emerge. The films’ collaged qualities ultimately gesture toward the fragmented, improvisatory, and perpetually ongoing need to strive toward liberation.