Portraits of the Unseen

Pawiand and The Past

This week with Paiwand we were fortunate to have Sami around the whole time, he is such a supportive person and also provides translation which I need as my very basic farsi is limited in explaining conceptual ideas and emotional experiences.

The approach to the object wrapping was very different this time compared to An-nisa. Since I am intensely aware of how little these boys possess on the material level – everything having been either taken away from them or left behind in Afghanistan – I couldn’t apply the same request as with An-nisa. It took most of the session to reach the wrapping of one object each and the way I did this was to ask them to recall an object from home that was meaningful to them and to write it on paper. Then we wrapped the paper and it stands as a proxy – or is it as real as the original thing ? There’s a philosophical discussion to be had on that one….Getting them to see the relevance of this only worked after giving examples myself and after Javad had raced over to a cupboard and pulled out a series of posters of Afghanistan from the 70’s – technicolour, including an intact Kabul and an undamaged Bamiyan Buddha statue.

Showing these seemed to animate them and they were full of explanations about the images which created enough of a sense of connection with the past to enable an object to be chosen and written. A red racing pigeon, a signet ring given as a gift and lost before leaving home, and a wristband given by a best friend at college in Afghanistan and also lost.

I have a strong feeling that my part in this collaboration re these objects for this particular group , may be to recreate these objects, wrapped. I also still have the UNHCR report ‘Trees only move in the wind’ very much in mind to use in the space. Especially after a conversation with one of the boys who told me that he had spent eight months travelling through eight different countries to get here. Out of a small group travelling together, he was the only one to reach the UK. He had no idea what had happened to the others.

I have consciously chosen not to ask them lots of questions about their journey here and why’s and how’s of everything. I could see they are weary of being questioned , by the many systems they have to interact with and it’s not my role to tell their story in this way but to presence rather than represent. In the report I mention, there are a list of over 100 recommended questions for the interviews and I know that they have been asked many of these repeatedly in different contexts. Keeping to a simple description of an object took a long time but once they had wrapped them – in deep red and green – it genuinely felt like a breakthrough, for them and us. I hope that they will be here to come and see what I actually make with all this, that remains unknown.

All wrapped up…

The last session with An-nisa was a real pleasure and also a pity as it feels like we have just got going and it’s all over (I often feel this with these short-run projects,). I asked the girls to bring objects to wrap in fabric and bind with sari yarn: three things they had outgrown – and they all brought objects that they had obviously thought a lot about before deciding to part with them. I am not going to describe what they brought , I will save this for you for the show! I also asked them to share about and write down what the object was and what it had meant to them, as this will be part of the piece. I then asked them to write on paper two mental/emotional object – something/relationship/experience they value that is in their present experience and something they wish for the future. There was a great depth and sensitivity , as well as a degree of playfulness and poetry in what they shared and I realised this session and request is what has created the most authentic language of connection. It follows on from The Gifts and I should have known its power would translate to other contexts. Which is a relief. I have decided to create three ‘portraits’ using these objects-they will be suspended works, with the wrapped objects hung between two mirrors , as in The Gifts (1-99). I will post up my working drawings in the next blog that I used for the design planning meeting this week.

I had had a delicious time sourcing fabrics for wrapping, based on the colours they had used in the initial weaving session, and it forms a striking palette. They seemed to enjoy the transformation of what they brought into jewel-like textile sculptures. I always get the feeling that the objects themselves like bring reborn in this way …!

Towards the end of the session I initiated a bibliomancy session by offering them each to dip into Rumi or Hafiz and have me read the verse they chose…some disarming and perfectly matched words came up for a few people, and I may use some of these texts in the show somehow…choosing like that, seemingly randomly, and then finding meaning that speaks to you, is a uniquely individual act that can betray a moment in time in the individual’s life and I am curious to see how the words might all cross over and work as part of a larger piece. At the end Humera presented us each with the perfect gift : a compact mirror with an Islamic design on it. To be treasured.

An-nisa NPG Visit (2)

What i understood from talking to Humera in response to some of the work we were looking at is that there is a distrust of work that is overtly created from ‘ego’, with the self at the centre of the work, and that the perception is that Western art (whatever that means now?) is dominated by this and that Muslim artists, because of exposure to ‘Western’ values are losing their connection to spiritual values. This is apparently being widely debated within Islamic circles- very traditional ones I assume. She reiterated the fact that art should be transformative and that it is now impossible to create work that has those longed-for traditional values as ‘we are not in that place’. So either there is a lot of reproduction of old style work or new work that is attempting to reference it but is breaking with those values. She questioned some of the work I was showing the girls last session from the ‘Word into art’ book and suggested that some of the artists in the book were examples of muslims who has lost this connection.

Personally I like it when it all gets mixed up, I enjoy hybridity and the questioning that comes from all this… If this is a created universe, then this very process of ‘loss of values’ is part of that creation, part of the journey. i really enjoy getting her perspective though, she is a formidable and very inspirational woman.

And finally.. we had a very exciting end to the day, since there is a recent arrival at the NPG of a new portrait , Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, with such an amazing narrative. The first portrait of a freed and named African slave (who may have been a prince, was a learned Muslim from a family of powerful clerics) . He was kidnapped while slave trading himself , taken to the US then identified as a learned man and saved by a British missionary and brought back to the UK where he achieved celebrity status, wrote copies of the Koran from memory for translation. Interestingly, relating to what I was saying earlier, he resisted having his portrait painted for a while since he was worried that he would be ‘made an idol’ and they had to reassure him it was just to ‘keep him in mind’. It is a beautiful painting, he as such a soft face. His beard is only half grown (they shaved it off when they captured him, to humiliate him probably – the curator said) and he has a copy of the Koran around his neck. Looking at him I started to forgive him for being a slave trader in the first place and developed a romantic story of personal transformation through having been enslaved himself. O, the stories we make up – I read later that the money was raised to return him home and he took up business again – as a slave trader! I felt very conflicted but still compelled to find out more

The NPG are trying to raise a further £100,000 to keep the portrait in the country. Seeing the groups and other reactions to the fact that it was in the gallery, I really hope it can be kept. One gets tired of seeing all those powerful white men in the more historical galleries..and what a story, if controversial…..always the best ones.

An-nisa Visit to the NPG (1)

Saturday’s session at NPG with An-nisa was a lot more satisfying than Friday. Five girls came, with Humera and we had a full day. We began with a warm -up, doing I minute portraits in pairs of each other, the first with eyes open, then eyes closed, then with the left/non-dominant hand. We then looked at which ones we preferred, which is always a surprise and I think it got them focused on really looking. This related to an activity we did in the BP Portrait Award Gallery at the end of the day, where I paired them up and asked one to take the arm of the other who would close their eyes. The ‘seeing’ one would then direct the ‘non-seeing’ one to a portrait they were drawn to, and describe in as much detail as possible what they saw. After a few minutes, the ‘non-seeing’ partner would open her eyes and they discussed the imagined image in comparison to the real one. I asked them to focus on work that had objects in them, as the Gallery tour that Peta did had this emphasis, since I am building up to the contribution and wrapping of personal objects for their last session next week.

Again, Peta created a brilliant path through the chosen works (which I mentioned in my last entry on the Paiwand visit). Marc Quinn’s ‘Self’ was controversial (of course) – getting a traditional Muslim perspective on this underlines some of the context that goes with this project, the questioning of the very notion of the individual and it’s depicted image. Also, the perceived over-emphasis on the physical aspect of self with works like this and lack of attention to what is believed to be beyond the physical.

Comments on ‘Self’ from the group ;

‘…It depends if you put the human being at the centre of everything and you don’t see the human being as part of a wider creation’

‘He has a god -like image of self…ego…’

‘if you’re using your blood in that way, it loses its sacredness,,,’ ‘ It’s part of god created nature, you’re not supposed to use it in that w ay…’

‘You don’t hold onto life because death is a natural part of creation’ .It sounds like the traditional view is that death isn’t fetishised in the same way , it;s seen as a natural part of the cycle of existence. This also came out when looking at the BP Winner, the ‘Last Portrait of Mother’ by Daphne Todd ; ‘Death and grief different in Islamic culture’. ‘ Her physical body is not her. Spirit departs, you focus on the spirit, the body returns to earth, gets recycled’ . ‘Why didn’t she cover her up more?’

I see my son Moses, 3 in October, grasping for complete sentences now to communicate, reaching for the fullness of a new language that we share, and I realise, here in my studio as I do experiments with the ideas and material I have so far, that I am doing a similar thing. I am expanding my visual language slowly and sometimes I feel very young in the process. I have been trying out using the name scripts from the groups so far to sketch out a potential large scale horizontal wall work for the first gallery space.

I used the name scripts from the last sessions to do a 1:2 scale sketch on my studio wall, and am now seeing how I can integrate ‘micro-script’ into the lines of the names. I’m trying it with bias binding and writing on this, then pinning it to the wall. It’s very DIY but it gives me a sense of where it might or might not go. Nothing’s fixed. I guess I knew I would want to take the idea of the poem bound around ‘Mother Tongue’ further, and a 2 dimensional version is something I want to explore. I’m clear that the first Gallery needs to be 2D, and that multi-lingual writing and mirroring will be the main channel of ideas. Until I have finished the cycle of engagement, in early august – it’s impossible to define what the content of these walls will be, but some elements are becoming clear already. On Monday I have a meeting with the Heads of Design , Participation and Art Handling and Louise so I’m working on more detailed drawings, as I have already submitted aerial plans which have raised a lot of questions and I’m taking it as far as I can until I have all material after the sessions are done. Time is tight so this focuses the mind but I am aware too that I have to follow the content to create the final form, or it won’t work.

Last Friday’s session with Paiwand at their home was challenging. The only way to get the six boys in the house into the living room in the first place was to use old school tactics and offer to draw their portraits, which I managed to do with three of them. The others were nowhere to be seen. I have to say I really enjoyed the experience of drawing them, (and they seemed to too). It’s been a while since I drew anyone apart from my children…Two of them, Zenullah and Ramatullah, then stayed to work on name scripts and we tried to talk about meanings of names but there was no translation present in the morning and this was tricky — I was frustrated at my poor Farsi and these kind of situations increase my desire to start learning properly again, which I guess is a good thing.

With Paiwand, I have been limited to these two names only for the name script, since, after the morning session, all the boys went off unaccompanied to the Mosque and never returned, leaving us with one of their college friends, Milan, and Sami the key worker. He later commented that he should have gone with them to ensure they returned but didn’t want to leave us on our own. We were a bit gutted that they didn’t bother to return and got distracted with having lunch with Mosque buddies. But then they are teenagers and a hard to reach audience so it goes with the territory – an attitude of extreme flexibility was required. It raises lots of questions for me as it felt like in the first session they were really engaged and the feedback wa very positive. We learnt quite a bit about Gujarat from Milan and about Sami’s background and aspirations. He has been here in London for 15 years (he came with his entire family) so he is a good reference point for the boys.