Pohanna Pyne Feinberg and Wendy Lynn Butler
Photo: Wendy Lynn Butler
PF/WB: When did you become interested in visual arts? Have you always wanted to be an artist?
AH: Well, I am actually trained as an academic. I have a background in social theory and philosophy. I’m just finishing my PhD right now and even at the Master’s level I was doing a lot of work on representation. My Master’s thesis was on the role of the outsider and I used the figure of the “flaneur” to interrogate the margins of the city and the ways in which they have been exoticized. Even at that point, I was finding that within straight-up academic language, there is a way in which things get written over and that the process of representation, or trying to break apart the premises and problematics of representational strategies can be really difficult.
So, I started doing experimental work within an academic structure, using a lot of images and creative writing. And then, when I started working on my PhD which focuses on black Atlantic or trans-Atlantic slavery, I got even more frustrated because I found that the more I was writing, the more I was distancing myself from the sort of subjects I wanted to represent.
So, in 2004, I had an opportunity to do a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, which was very interesting because I was not a visual artist at the time. I was basically planning to transpose my dissertation into some sort of web project, an interactive program that would incorporate the images, text and this idea of non-linearity, in a way which I found was more responsible to the topic I was trying to talk about. So, I did this interactive visual essay, and then I was frustrated with that so I ended up making a video game version of my dissertation as well. It was very lo-tech, but involved the idea of moving away from language and seeing what you could do in terms of replicating or speaking to these issues through gesture. And that’s how I started getting into formal experimentation. There is a way that this kind of work is seen as interesting and experimental within an academic format. But, I was also interested in how that type of research could translate into more art communities. I was trying to make it more accessible. And so then I moved to video and started doing work like that.
The first video I made, in 2005, wasn’t really concerned with the issues that I explore in my dissertation. It has more to do with contemporary migration issues and the detention of people without status, refugees – and was extremely autobiographical. My work became a lot more about my own experience as a person who has lived two countries (India and Canada). This video was called Outer Space. I used appropriated sci-fi sequences from Star Trek and Blade Runner and counter-posed them with images from a detention center in England and then added a personal narrative. Basically, I used a linear format to tell a multi-linear narrative.
PF/WB: Are there any artists that have particularly inspired or influenced your own art practice?
AH: There are many, but a really pivotal work that influenced me for a long time was Stan Douglas’ Nutka (1996). I was really excited about this idea of alluding to a history but not making it too transparent – not actually representing it. Also what was so significant about it was that indigenous people were not given a voice in it, which I think is one of the points in the piece as well. It was a really disorienting and lush retelling of a historical moment.
I also really like the work of the founders of No One is Illegal. No One is Illegal was started in Germany at a Documenta Festival in the 1990s. Their whole premise was to set up a number of campaigns that really straddled both the art and activist communities and they were doing work that had to do with deportation. One of the things I really like about it is that they use these really creative actions: Is it activism? Is it art? There isn’t a lot of work that can exist in both communities, or is as successful or as understandable.
PF/WB: Could you comment on your practice as a media or new media artist? Is video art your primary medium of communication?
AH: It started by wanting to do web-based interactive work and being really interested in the democracy of things that are online. But I am finding that, even within the field of media arts, there is a shift away from things being new media – a shift in the way people use tools in ways that aren’t necessarily new, for example, by blending them with older technologies – and this is also how I find my work is going. The work I am showing in Rearranging Desires is video and performance video, but I also do performance work. I do a lot of work like performance interventions in public, using really simple things like radios and sticks and paper. And I see that as very connected to my interest in media arts, because I think there is a way in which the discourse and the language enables you to see the older technologies in a new way.
PF/WB: Can you talk about how art can be used as a tool to actively bring about social change?
AH: I think art that does that, has to be connected to the communities that it speaks of or to – it has to involve people who are affected, but it also has to be successful as work. So there is this thin line between social responsibility and creativity, and the ability to bring in some kind of epiphany or whatever you might call it – some kind of formal excitement. But, I think it’s a process. People who engage in that kind of work struggle with it because some works, whatever your intentions are, can be very successful and some aren’t. So, you can plan so much but it’s also about constantly finding new combinations…
PF/WB: You have mentioned that your video and installation work explores how "immigration and detention affects embodiment." How did your involvement and experience in the "Accommodate This" campaign influence your artwork – or possibly vice versa?
AH: As a part of the campaign we decided to use creative means, to design a poster that would create a visual document. The reasonable accommodation debate is extremely convoluted, and even engaging with it, is extremely complicated because the idea of tolerance is presented as something that is progressive. But tolerance is also something that speaks to a kind of reluctance or kind of unwillingness, or “ok, we’ll make this concession for you” kind of idea. So we decided to make a poster that would detail Canadian immigration policy, but then to try to make it into a visual document that was accessible and interesting to look at. So that was our mission.
To me that was a really interesting process of trying to find a really visual way to create a document that was accessible, and that people would want to put on their wall. So, that was something I struggled with in terms of trying to think about creative ways to respond to all of this.
PF/WB: What are you communicating in your work entitled |Borders|? How do you express “embodying indeterminacy” through your artwork?
AH: |Borders| is the first performance video I did actually. It was really interesting for me because I tend to do very narrative videos combined with a lot of appropriated footage and I’m interested in that, but I am also interested in what can be expressed non-verbally. I guess it was an experiment to see what gets communicated as author, as subject and object of the work. So that was a part of it, to see what gets transmitted – the other was this kind of gesture that I had been thinking about for a while which is drawing on yourself. I was thinking about the idea of what it would mean to draw a border on yourself. The way that piece was set up is that it is actually just a layer of transparency that is taped to a lens and I am in the background. There is no special effects, no layering. I shot it in a day, but I was really interested in the immediacy of that and obviously the interplay between the lines. Obviously people don’t draw themselves into borders and I was interested in how that goes against how borders are actually experienced by people – it’s not really a choice.
It’s really interesting for me to move from work that is more text-based to performance work because our bodies carry so much history. Whether you intend it to or not there’s a way in which you could do one gesture in one moment and someone else could do it and would mean something so different.
PF/WB: Could you discuss the performance-based video C'Mon In and the intention behind this work?
AH: I started working on it right on the tail end of working on the Accommodate This! campaign and it came out of a real frustration with trying to negotiate the language and the discourse around it because it seemed that, within the mainstream media, the way they were depicting immigrants, even the radical perspective, was that “all these people want is the freedom to do a few things.” So, that was extremely frustrating – even the best-case scenario wasn’t appropriate, because it’s not about tolerating difference, it’s also about a self-scrutiny. Within this whole debate there was no discussion of who this homogenous identity was that was trying to accommodate this “otherness” and of course if you look at Quebecois identity or Canadian settler identity in general, there are huge histories of genocide and writing-out of history.
So I came at this project not with specific questions, but more out of a sense of frustration. I realized when this issue of settler history came up in press conferences, the media didn’t know what to do with it. It just seemed so incongruous, because it seemed so outside of how they understood it. And so it started with that idea. I thought about old Western films and the multi-valent layers where native people fit into them – they are extras and there are often three kinds of characters that they play. So there is already a rich genre to work from. And then I started looking more at how the Western got adapted by different cultures and countries. C’mon In came out of the question: What is the Western and how can we inflect this with talking about the present? I think it couldn’t come out in a linear way and that is why this work is extremely non-linear.
I feel like it’s always going to be a work-in-progress because the discourse is so complicated. Trying to explicate what I am trying to get at makes it so heavy because it is trying to engage with a ceiling that as been drawn about what tolerance should be and saying: “Well, your premise is wrong.” But it’s hard to engage with a discourse and say your premise is wrong and then go into that same discourse.
PF/WB: You described the process of "unmapping" in your conference paper “New Methodologies in Density+Proximity+Tension.” Would you consider these processes of "unmapping" and "remapping" comparable to the exhibition's aspiration to "rearrange desires?"
AH: Yes. That was in the moment when I was really exploring non-linear narrative and hypertext. I feel like Alice has written about that so well in her statement around this idea of the subaltern and this idea of representation and counter representation. I think that really speaks to the instability of voice and the subject position, which is the kind of stuff I was really getting at.
PF/WB: As an artist, how do you feel about culturally-specific exhibitions or shows that feature artists from a culturally-specific background?
AH: I think it’s obviously problematic but it depends, because I think it depends on how people self-identify. If someone categorizes you in terms of an identity then there is an externalized violence to that. But if people collectively self-identify as something and then decide to do work based on that then that’s really important for people to figure out languages and things that are made possible through a shared experience or shared premise. But, with this institutionalization from above – where people are categorized or labeled, especially with creative work – if people’s work is reduced to a few variables, then that is a kind of marginalization that I think does violence to what it’s trying to do. […] There is a silencing involved with that. Enunciation is a fragile thing and there is a multiplicity in the ways in which you might want something to be expressed – or different registers that you might want it to be manifest at. If you lose that agency, or the control of your voice and the context of it – which in turn compromises the ability for an audience to view something with an open mind, i.e. without being told how to frame this work – then I think that’s a kind of violence.
September 20, 2008
Links suggested by Ayesha Hameed to look at:
http://www.emanuel-licha.com/war_tourist.html
http://www.dictionaryofwar.org/
http://nooneisillegal-montreal.blogspot.com/
http://subtopia.blogspot.com/
Ayesha Hameed's video and performance work focuses on borders, topologies, erasures and forgetting in the context of sans-papiers organizing and migrant subjectivity. Recent and upcoming presentations and exhibitions include Reference Check at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Studio XX thematic residency, the HTMlles Festival and ISEA 2008. Ayesha is a former board member of Fuse Magazine, and her work has been published in Public and Topia as well as in a few collections of essays like PLACE:Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts (Cambridge Scholars' Press, 2008). As a member of the No One is Illegal Collective in Montreal, Hameed participated in the Accommodate This! campaign protesting the Bouchard-Taylor Commission in Fall 2007. Her doctoral dissertation (in the Department of Social and Political Thought at York University) examined how the architecture and visual culture of early modern London manifested modernity’s uneasy relationship with slavery in the Americas. Arecipient of the Concordia University Faculty of Fine Arts Award, Hameed is currently pursuing an MFA in Open Media at Concordia University.
Wendy Lynn Butler is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She is currently working on her Master's thesis entitled "Euro-American Representations of Indigenous Americans: Questions of Contact" which explores how the different circumstances of contact between Euro-American artists and their Native American subjects have affected the ethnographic imagery produced during the colonial period.
Pohanna Pyne Feinberg is currently pursuing her MA in Art History at Concordia University. She was the Assistant Curator for Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2007, and from 2003 to 2005, she coordinated the avant-garde music festival, Suoni Per Il Popolo in Montreal. Pyne Feinberg is also a printmaker, makes sound collages and produces radio for CKUT 90.3 FM.