Against Art History: Sadia Shirazi

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Against Art History Sadia Shirazi

Against Art History

March Meeting Papers

Against Art History Sadia Shirazi

All views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Sharjah Art Foundation and its members.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Sharjah Art Foundation gratefully acknowledges permission granted to reproduce the copyrighted materials in this book. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyrighted material. The publishers apologise for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this publication.

MARCH MEETING 2021: UNRAVELLING THE PRESENT 12–21 March 2021 Organised by Sharjah Art Foundation President and Director Hoor Al Qasimi Vice President Nawar Al Qassimi MARCH MEETING 2021 PROGRAMME Conceived by Okwui Enwezor Realised by Hoor Al Qasimi Tarek Abou El Fetouh Ute Meta Bauer Salah M. Hassan Chika Okeke-Agulu Octavio Zaya ​ Programme Management Noora Al Mualla Wasan Yousif Programme Coordinators Ryan Inouye Jinan Coulter Lien Ismail Conference Coordinators Alia Al Amri Sana Haroon Nitin Alden Mathias Unnikrishnan Suresh

MARCH MEETING PAPERS Published by Department of Learning and Research Sharjah Art Foundation PO Box 19989, Sharjah United Arab Emirates www.sharjahart.org Editors Hoor Al Qasimi Noora Al Mualla Salah M. Hassan Managing Editors Ahmad Makia Wasan Yousif Coordinator Maria Mumtaz Editorial Consultants KMEC (Karen Marta, Todd Bradway, Madeline Gilmore) Design Dima Bittard Shaikha Al Maazmi Translator Mohamad Al Saadei Copy Editor Eti Bonn-Muller Printed in United Arab Emirates Publication © 2021, Sharjah Art Foundation Text © 2021, the author ISBN 978-9948-8694-9-8 For distribution and retail enquiries, please contact: publications@sharjahart.org Publications are available in SAF shops, located at Al Mureijah Square, the Flying Saucer and Arts Square in downtown Sharjah, UAE.

‘It belongs in a museum’.

—Indiana Jones1

Dig if you will this picture2

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n his essay ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’, art critic Douglas Crimp analyses the modern institution of the museum. He is interested in art as an ontological category and what he experiences as postmodernist art’s ‘radical break’ with a Euro-American modernist tradition. Whilst Crimp has no faith in the museum’s claims to represent anything coherently, he is interested in art’s potential for disruption, arguing that contemporary photographic practices are ‘experienced as producing…a rupture or discontinuity with a modernist past’.3 Following Michel Foucault’s analysis of modern ‘institutions of confinement’, spaces such as the asylum, the clinic and the prison, and their concomitant discursive formations of madness, illness and criminality, he observes that the museum is also in need of archaeological analysis, as is the discipline of art history; the institution and the discipline are interdependent, and together create the ‘preconditions for the discourse that we know as modern art’.4 I draw from Crimp’s analysis whilst questioning Euro-American epistemologies that delimit what constitutes ‘art’ as well as what belongs in a museum.

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Before Crimp, Edward Said’s book Orientalism also took Foucault’s archaeological analysis towards a critique of power that he joined to questions of imperialism. Said defines ‘Orientalism’ as ‘A style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”’.5 Drawing from Said’s work, Timothy Mitchell argues that Orientalism was constitutive of what he calls ‘the exhibitionary order’ illustrated by France’s Egyptian exhibit at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, or World Exhibition, which included ‘natives’ (not moderns), artifacts (not art) and a replica of the old city (not architecture) in its displays. Mitchell observes a ‘particularly European concern with rendering things up to be viewed’ in a ‘machinery of representation’ or, one could say, into pictures that extended well beyond the world exhibitions, such that visitors to Europe from the Arab World stared at them incessantly and therefore ‘found themselves being placed on exhibition or made the careful object of European curiosity’.6 For Mitchell, the exhibitionary order illustrates ‘the ordering up of the world itself [by Europeans] as an endless exhibition’.7 For our purposes here, it also illustrates the transformation of a person or an object into a thing through an imperial gaze, or what Aimé Césaire called colonialism’s ‘thingification’.8 I am interested in the slipperiness between the objectification of people and objects that undergirds modern institutions, such as the museum and the discipline of art history, and practices of ‘looking’ that turn both people and objects into pictures.

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In the aforementioned essay, Crimp collaborates with artist Louise Lawler whose photographs intersperse his paper. Lawler’s photographs of museum installations with artworks offer a space of interruption, that of the ‘observing subject’ and their gaze, which lies between the institution of the museum and its discourses.

What has not yet been attended to in his essay is that Lawler, like Crimp, unconsciously embodies, or does not challenge the gaze of, Mitchell’s ‘European subject’, even whilst her photographs destabilise the singularity of the art object and the stability of the museum as a site, resituating both within networks of representation and reproduction. These undermine notions of ‘originality’ that Crimp observes are essential to the discourse of the museum.9 Drawing from the work of these artists and writers, I also join the question of power to neo-imperialism, connecting looking and the imperial gaze to objectification within a neo-colonial episteme. I am interested in how museums and curators, both within and outside of the imperial centres of Western Europe and the United States, might continue to think critically about the museum as a neo-imperial institution and what I call the museum’s ‘carceral archives’ in order to consider alternate curatorial and collecting practices.10 How might museums and archives across the Global South, which have the possibility to do otherwise, think critically and self-reflexively about what ‘belongs in a museum’? And what it means to belong to a thing rather than have a thing belong to you, beyond private property?

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I am interested in thinking through museums, archives, the exhibitionary order and the viewing subject, when people and things are not only encountered by the ‘European subject’ but formerly colonised and diasporic subjects. I also remain interested in disrupting the use of photography as an organising device through which artworks lose their material properties and are rendered homogenous. This results in a universalising impetus, or comparative methods, such as those of André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls, which are firmly rooted in the imperial traditions of art history.

The Slideshow and the Sideshow11

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he only photograph that accompanies Crimp’s essay that is not taken by Lawler is one of André Malraux. This picture, captured from an almost aerial perspective at a distance, shows the French novelist dressed in a suit, looking at a sheet of paper in his hands. Photographic plates for his forthcoming book project are laid out, row after row, on the floor in front of him, extending almost to the edge of the image. These plates are from his book Le Musée Imaginaire, which he translates to Museum Without Walls. Crimp writes that Malraux ‘was enraptured by the endless possibilities of his Museum, by the proliferation of discourses it could set in motion, establishing ever new stylistic series simply by reshuffling photographs’. Malraux was also interested in the way the photograph rendered every object with ‘perfect similitude’, giving him the ability

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to create a ‘universal archive’. Photography was used to take incommensurable objects and make them commensurable, flattening them into comparable photographic images. The photographic archive is also the armature of historical study and curatorial research.12 Tellingly, Malraux expresses his universalising impulse through the analogy of family: ‘In our Museum Without Walls, picture, fresco, miniature, and stained-glass window seem of one and the same family. For all alike – … tapestries, Scythian plaques, pictures, Greek vase paintings, “details” and even statuary – have become “color plates”’.13 The European impulse to collect together and order the entire world, like an exhibition, persists in Maulraux’s encyclopaedic museum. Yet his Museum Without Walls ‘revision of values’ simply reinvokes art history’s imperialism, racism and paternalism.

It echoes the binaries that Said describes as the Occident and the Orient and what Stuart Hall calls ‘the West and the Rest’.14 Yet Malraux’s projects, like the world fairs and museum exhibitions, purport to be for a broader ‘global’ audience whilst they are, in fact, produced for a Euro-American white spectator. It behoves institutions, curators and archivists across the formerly colonised world to refuse to replicate art history that is ‘embedded in a theory of history’, which Fred Moten observes is part of a ‘particular geographical ideology, a geographicracial or racist unconscious’.15 It bears mentioning that empire extends beyond Western Europe and the United States,

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to the Global South, and that the European spectator is joined by other versions of hegemonic subjectivity that challenge simple binaries of objectification, spectacle and the gaze. For example, in their report on the restitution of African cultural heritage held by French museums, the Senegalese academic and writer Felwine Sarr and the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy place repatriation of looted objects from former colonies alongside questions of memory work and reparations. The authors argue for ‘young people [in Africa] to have access to their own culture, creativity, and spirituality from other eras…’ in order that they might ‘fall under the spell of an object, to be touched by it, moved emotionally by a piece of art…to let oneself be transformed by it: all these experiences – which are also forms of access to knowledge – cannot simply be reserved…to the benefactors of an excess of privilege and mobility…for those residing in Western countries or for those who count themselves among the African diaspora living in Europe’.16 The diasporic viewer with privilege and mobility is thus juxtaposed with viewers in Africa who might never see these works in Europe.

It is here that my curatorial project Exhibition Without Objects (EwO) stages its own interruption – through kinship that bears no relation to the biological family or national belonging in which photographic reproduction is countered by a ‘living archive’ and in which the route of travel is neither Europe nor the United States, nor is the privileged spectator the Euro-American subject.

The exhibition operates with the knowledge

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that objects exceed their capture through photographic images and carceral archives whilst playfully acknowledging the ubiquity of digital reproduction and signalling to the possibility of escape from seemingly totalising systems. It draws its methods from what Stuart Hall calls ‘the living archive’17 as well as Julie Tolentino’s work, which extends Hall’s conceptualisation through her ‘body as archive’.18

Exhibition Without Objects (EwO)

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xhibition Without Objects (EwO) travels the world solely on a hard drive. It transforms as it travels, growing to include artists from each city it visits along its designated route. EwO exists only as a compilation of data and then, at each site, materialises as bodies, events and hardware that manifest the data. EwO has had two iterations, 126 MB / EwO (2012) and 230 MB / EwO (2013), and will have its third, 8 GB / EwO (2021) in the United Arab Emirates.

EwO shifts attention away from the singular art object and focusses instead on artistic practice and discourse. Tracing a line that is poignant for people across the subcontinent, the exhibition’s route connects cities with mirrored experiences of mass migration during its multiple partitions. Within our contemporary context, this route is instead indicative of the flow of networks of capital and labour that extend beyond South Asia. The show’s travel to the UAE reflects these contemporary migration

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patterns, as Sharjah has become an important hub for a range of subcontinental activities and industries, as well as a prevalent node in the wider region’s art market and an important centre for the production of artistic discourse for the region at large.

EwO began with the aim of subverting the narrow expectations of ‘contemporary art from South Asia’ by challenging the predominant format of national ‘survey’ shows mounted by ‘Western’ institutions from the 1990s to the present day. This endless stream of survey exhibitions featuring young, contemporary artists organised around national identity would originate, for example, in a museum in London and then travel to Paris and New York, organised by curators who would fly in and out of cities across the Global South for a few days to conduct ‘research’ and have ‘studio visits’. These curators would often look at artists’ works on laptops and iPad screens instead of seeing them in artists’ studios, and would always conduct their meetings with artists in English. In contrast, this project is intergenerational and the result of a much slower process that involves multiple studio visits and ongoing conversations with artists. These conversations are held in English and Hindi-Urdu, although this still does not encompass all the languages that the artists speak.

The third iteration of EwO builds upon its two previous iterations to include twenty-six artists: Bani Abidi, Khursheed Mushtaq Ali, Thlana Bazik, Alexis Bhagat, Amshu Chukki, Rohini Devasher, Manmeet Devgun, Iqbal Geoffrey, Ayesha Jatoi,

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Ranbir Kaleka, Ohida Khandakar, Sandip Kuriakose, Srinivas Kuruganti, Uzma Mohsin, Mehreen Murtaza, Aditya Pande, Aryakrishnan Ramakrishnan, Priya Sen, Seher Shah, Asim Waqif, Rabbya Naseer & Hurmat Ul Ayn, Ram Rahman, Inder Salim, Hemant Sareen, Saira Sheikh, Jaret Vadera and Zarina. The exhibition consists of two contributions from each artist, a PowerPoint ‘Slide Show’ and an accompanying live ‘Event’, including performances, sound installations, Skype conversations and discussions, amongst other programmes. This iteration foregrounds the most recent addition of artists and events, whilst including the previous two iterations of artists’ works nested as archival components within the exhibition.

EwO focusses on engaging local audiences and building upon pre-existing networks across the region to further strengthen, reinforce and engage knowledge production at each locale.

EwO shifts attention away from the display of the singular art object, providing space instead for artistic experimentation, dialogue and exchange.

The project also plays with the fluctuating role of the curator, which lies somewhere between researcher, administrator, collector, caretaker and advocate.

This third iteration was meant to travel further across South Asia before it arrived in the UAE. Unfortunately, due to the political tensions that escalated in November 2019 across the subcontinent, the safety of the artists was compromised by even participating in an exhibition travelling to a neighbouring country, and so the show was put on hold.

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In the intervening year, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the conditions under which EwO was created only intensified – there are now health issues and new travel restrictions. Whilst I previously resisted putting the exhibition online due to my insistence on prioritising conversation and sociality between artists and publics over the display of artworks – an ethics of investing in people and not simply the movement or capture of objects – the increasing difficulty of crossing borders due to politics and pandemics has lent the show a new valence. With its interest in the (increasingly digital) movement of the art object and difficulties moving people across borders that existed even prior to this pandemic, the presentation thinks through the formal mechanism of the ‘travelling show’ itself. If bringing artists together across seemingly intractable borders remains fraught and our ability even to meet friends and loved ones in the same city is difficult, does the possibility of the virtual show offer itself as an antidote to some of what ails us? If it is unsafe for you to travel, if you may never meet in person, might Exhibition Without Objects still offer a space for gathering and exchange otherwise?

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which followed increasing tensions across the region, 8 GB / EwO uses the obfuscation of Internet server routes to bypass the dangers of physical travel whilst also affording the artists a degree of opacity. This reframing of the project is a curatorial gesture that preserves not just artworks, but the artists themselves.

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Endnotes 1 Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Directed by Steven Spielberg, Paramount Pictures, 2012.

2 This phrase is drawn from ‘Dig if you will the picture’ from the lyrics of Prince and the Revolution’s song ‘When Doves Cry’, Purple Rain, 1984.

3 Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 46.

4 Ibid., 48.

5 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

6 Timothy Mitchell, ‘The World as Exhibition’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 31, no. 2 (April 1989): 218.

7 Ibid.

8 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (London: Monthly Review Press), 1972: 42.

9 Crimp argues that the observing subject marks a shift from techniques of production to reproduction that undermine notions of ‘originality, authenticity and presence, essential to the ordered discourse of the museum’. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 58.

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10 This term is drawn from work on archives in Black and feminist studies and scholarship on immigration detention and prison abolition. See: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2007; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); and Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, Indiana University Press, Number 26, vol. 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14.

11 Thanks to Jaret Vadera for his careful reading of this essay and for improving this subtitle.

12 I would like to thank Kavita Singh for her insight regarding the slideshow’s centrality to art history during a conversation we had at Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi in February 2013.

13 Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 55.

14 Stuart Hall, ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’, Modernity, eds. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert and Kenneth Thompson (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 184–227.

15 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2003), 31.

16 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, ‘The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics’, November 2018, accessed 10 October 2020, http://restitutionreport2018.com/ sarr_savoy_en.pdf.

17 Stuart Hall, ‘Constituting an Archive’, Third Text (Spring 2001): 89–92.

18 See Julie Tolentino’s serial project The Sky Remains the Same (2008–ongoing). See also André Lepecki, ‘The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances’, Dance Research Journal, vol. 42, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 28–48.

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Biography Sadia Shirazi is a writer, art historian, architect, and independent curator whose research focusses on transregional histories of modernism and contemporary art across South Asia, the Middle East and their diasporas with a particular interest in questions of race, gender, postcoloniality and decolonisation.

Shirazi has curated exhibitions internationally, including Soft and Wet, Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts, Project Space, New York (2019); welcome to what we took from is the state, the Queens Museum, New York (2016); 230 MB/ Exhibition Without Objects, Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi (2013); and Foreclosed. Between Crisis and Possibility, The Kitchen, New York (2011). Her work has been shown at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Performance Space New York and the Devi Art Foundation, Gurugram, India.

She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters in edited volumes.

Shirazi’s reviews, essays and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Bidoun, MoMA post, C Magazine, The Funambulist, Jadaliyya and ArteEast, among others. She has articles forthcoming in the journals Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and Journal for Curatorial Studies.

Shirazi is Instructor for Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent

Study Program and has taught at the Cooper Union, Cornell University, the New School and National College of the Arts, Lahore, Pakistan.

Shirazi holds a BA in History from the University of Chicago and a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA.

March Meeting Papers March Meeting Papers is a series of essays selected from Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting 2021 Open Call, which invited artists, writers and thinkers to expand on curator Okwui Enwezor’s influential thinking about the biennial as a platform to engage with history, politics and society. Taken together, the series reveals the extent to which the biennial, such as the Sharjah Biennial now celebrating its 30th anniversary, has contributed to the realisation of new narratives and experiences of modern and contemporary art.

Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting is an annual convening of artists, curators and art practitioners from around the world who come together to discuss vital issues in contemporary art during a programme of panels, performances and events. The 2021 edition examines the thirty-year history of the Sharjah Biennial by bringing together former Biennial curators, participants and interlocutors as well as art historians and critics to discuss its role as a catalyst for critical dialogue and transnational exchange.

The World in Which We Find Ourselves Grace Aneiza Ali The ‘Free-floating’ Srinagar Biennale Melissa Carlson Art Biennials and the Mediterranean Conundrum Chiara Cartuccia Karachi Biennale 2019 Samina Iqbal Hatshepsut the Drag Queen Sarah Johnson The Biennials in Pakistan Sadia Kamran To Avoid or to Embrace? Navigating and Negotiating Identity in the Global Art Market Wided Khadraoui On the Verge of Now: The Crisis of the Future and the Urgencies of the Present in Contemporary Art Biennials Sabrina Moura Redefining the Art Institution’s Role: Democratic Art-Centric and Digital Approaches Silke Schmickl Against Art History Sadia Shirazi Lost Horizons: Revisiting CAMP’s Indian Ocean Projects Murtaza Vali

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Sharjah Art Foundation March Meeting Papers March Meeting Papers is a series of essays selected from Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting 2021 Open Call, which invited artists, writers and thinkers to expand on curator Okwui Enwezor’s influential thinking about the biennial as a platform to engage with history, politics and society.

‘Against Art History’​critically evaluates decolonial art exhibitions and curatorial frameworks. It asks to what extent art history can be decolonial, when its disciplinary and architectural foundation, the museum, is an inherently colonial institution.​​ Shirazi thus examines whether new curatorial frameworks, such as in​Exhibitions Without Objects​ (EwO) which internationalise the modernist canon of non-Western arts, undo or amplify the violence perpetrated by Euro-American historical narratives.

Sadia Shirazi​is a writer, art historian and curator based in New York.

sharjahart.org

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