Portraits of the Unseen

Hunter Gathering…

All the threads are being gathered and deadlines bringing the image of the work into focus. This is when what is not essential to the work gets dropped – however beautiful- and saved for another time..and the bare bones of the body that will form the final version of the installation start to emerge.

Nicky the designer has ordered a sample name to be cut in mirror and sent to me to work with on the wall, and she has been doing layouts to see how large they will be and what they might look like in a long panel around the room. I spent an entire day working up a very different layout idea last week, inspired by 19^th century Persian ‘broken’ calligraphy, was certain it was the right one. Then rather frenzied and noticing it was full moon, (the impulse to smoke large numbers of roll-ups should have given it away) woke up realising the original layout of a simple panel around the room is the right one. Simplicity. Keeping the gaze steady. Nicky has also given me a word count for the text that I am collating/editing that will run under the names so this is my next written thing to work on, after sending back comments on the PR that s being sent out this week.

Meanwhile, in the studio, I am wrapping my response / proxy objects, things I have sourced, mainly in response to the Paiwand group’s written /drawn’ objects (who had no possessions to offer up for obvious reasons). Among the objects I have put into that collection so far are; a model of a couple – wish for relationship with partners/mothers, a model of an apple – the memory of an apple tree back home, a pair of goggles – current swimming routine to stay ‘safe and strong’, a mobile phone – three people asked for this, a wristband – a lost present connected to a cousin back in Afghanistan, a man’s signet ring… I have a copy of the Koran on order (I can’t quite part with mine even though I don’t really read it much anymore).

The wrapped Barbie you can see in the images is my donation to the Tallo portrait and has it’s own story, related to my own teenage years, which will be written about in the show…

Anyway, I have to now go and find or make something that looks like/stands for a spanner, a washing machine and 65kg weights (!), a passport and source the lyrics to Rihanna’s song ‘Emergency’ and look up certain passages of Rumi …eclectic job that this is… 

Refining ideas

The other week I presented my plan for the installation to a large-ish group of staff at NPG and a rep from Paiwand (reps from the other two groups weren’t available) at a meeting facilitated by Louise. I was impressed how much listening, input and communication there is around specific projects within the NPG and saw how important it is that there is face-to-face contact between my ideas and the staff running various departments , to get them engaged in the project and understanding it in a deeper way than just from a written proposal or a second -hand account. This culture of listening is refreshing and motivating. They are also not dumbing down my ideas or the writing about them which is even more encouraging.

I’ve posted up my sketches and it’s all focus now on refining the texts to be used in Gallery 1, as the sculptures for Gallery 2 are relatively straightforward in terms of knowing how the production process will go. I have been sourcing objects to match Paiwand’s written objects – nearly all of them by trawling through junk shops in Bexhill on the way to the De La Warr the other day to meet my mentor Janis Jefferies. Some of them I have put in from my own life for personal reasons of resonance with the group’s experiences – you can work these out when you see the work!

It will take me a week in September with an assistant to do a test-hang of the three sculptures that are modelled on The Gifts (1-99) and from that to create three maps that will enable the fabricators to prepare the mirrored discs from which the objects will hang, in the right places and with the right length monofilament. Now I am working with the designer Nicky Doyle who is a very experienced and reassuring presence and very upbeat in what can be done. I haven’t yet encountered anyone shaking their head and telling me things cant be done despite the fact that I know this is an unusual project to install for this gallery.

Re Gallery 1, we have decided to return to my original idea of using the participants’ hand drawn names in Arabic to get them cut directly into mirrored acrylic to form a panel running around the room, referencing the borders on walls in Mosques and Shrines that are seen as the symbolic ‘place of transition’ and often contain or delineate areas of sacred texts. I’m still considering exactly what texts to use in the two alcoves in that Gallery,(and I don’t want to give too much away) but am referencing here the Mihrab (which indicates the direction of Mecca) and literally means the ‘place of struggle’. I’m pulling our sections of the UNHCR report I have mentioned before on Afghan minors as well as poetry chosen and discussed by the young people in playful bibliomancy sessions, songs gifted to the project and other texts too. It’s like laying out the threads and it isn’t quite clear, along with the final colour scheme for that room, what it will be. But I am spending quite a lot of time in the studio over the next few days with aim of clarifying this and sending Nicky material to start doing layouts with. There is a big project design meeting next week which Louise, the project manager will present at, and the sign -off for all this is a not far -off now. I’m leaning towards less in more and a more minimal approach than I had first thought, since Gallery 2 will be full of colour and texts related to the hanging objects.

Deadlines are very focusing for the mind , and I am enjoying reaching the other side of all these choices so that I can begin logging and hanging objects.

TALLO

Peta and I started and finished our sessions with Tallo, the Somali young people’s group, within a week. Our sessions were part of their Summer University at Acton College and there were a lot of other courses going on at the same time. I felt by the end that I had been in a sandstorm, it was fast and hot! They were a group with a lot to say, huge energy and often short attention spans, sometimes tricky to comprehend or handle until we realised that food and drink -or lack of – had a lot to do with it -a s well as pockets of peer pressure. It’s so often the basic elements that can make or break a session. I felt this group were the hardest to engage and we never really knew what was going to work, so we had to be flexible.. For example, the identity weaving, which has never failed me before, just didn’t work with them, but the name scripts in Arabic and the object wrapping, did.

In the main, they seemed to like and respond to the idea that, effectively, their names are going to be’ tagged’ on the gallery walls and the objects they have given be seen by a large audience – concealed and revealed. This was fortunate , since these are the two main elements of the show, and I was impressed with how willing they were to offer up objects and commentary on what was being wrapped.

Most of the group are second generation, (and only one had been to Somalia), apart from two girls -sisters- who have arrived here within the last year. The difference in behaviour and self expression is huge, and although a lot of this is of course language related, I was moved to see how outspoken and upfront the second-generation girls were in their views and focus. And how poetic and subtle the more recent members of the group were. One thing that struck me during the ‘future object’ wrapping was their lack of concern with being rich, famous or remarkable (hooray, advertising doesn’t always work!) .Many seemed aware of how they had come from extraordinary backgrounds (ie the circumstances which drove their parents to leave Somalia) and so the aspiration was for stability, a ‘decent’ life etc.

The star of the show during their NPG visit was the portrait of Ayub Suleiman Diallo. It was like a mixture of relief and excitement filled the group when they saw him, at last someone who looked more like them and was a Muslim, and is getting so much attention! Debates ensued during the next session as to whether the portrait should be kept in the UK or returned to his home country – overall, they felt it would serve a better purpose here, positively representing a rare moment in history and portraiture. Despite their disappointment that he returned to slave trading, he made a real impression on them and I really hope enough money is raised to keep him there during the show, as it will make a brilliant link with the work we are producing.

All in all, it went too fast and the engagement felt like the beginning of something rather than the whole story, but then I realise I now have to engage with the material that has come out of this all, that it’s my response to these encounters which will synthesise the experiences into a coherent work of art (Inshallah…).

More reflections later, now, back to the studio!

Paiwand and the present and future.

The last session with Paiwand was the most successful in terms of a feeling of relaxed engagement with both the work and each other. Since we had already done one wrapping session, the request to write down and wrap three things they valued in their present life and three things they wish for for the future was more easily responded to. It was on this session that some of the boys started to really open up about their experiences. They mainly offered up activities based on places that they are connected to here (none of these related to being in the house, interestingly) and I asked them to think of objects that could symbolise these activities. For example goggles and weights, a Koran, mobile phones, a pen from college etc.

The wild card were the three objects from one boy who had been reluctant to engage but agreed to contribute if I drew a ‘royal picture’ of him. He hadn’t liked the profile portrait I had done of him the week before and wanted a better one! He offered a drawing of  a helicopter, attached to a story about meeting Massoud, the Northern Alliance General . Secondly, a washing machine – initially it seemed that he just appreciated being able to wash his clothes so easily, but then a story broke out from the others that they are always saying he should be put in the washing machine because he is ill so much, to ‘clean him up’. . Quite a few of the boys have health problems, mainly stress related, due to their unstable circumstances  and its lucky that Paiwand are there to monitor and make sure they get treatment. His last object was a picture of an apple tree. I particularly liked this combination of objects and am going to seek out or make miniature models of these things- a model helicopter, an  model tree and a dolls house washing machine  that I can wrap and add to the collection.

When it came to them thinking of three things that they would like for the future, the one was caused a lot of hilarity – ideas ranged from ‘a wife, a passport and a ferrari’  to peace, a home and becoming a mechanic.

One of them, a very reflective and melancholic young man, talked about walking to Iran from Afghanistan , it took him three days. He left with a group of other boys and was the only one to reach the Uk of that group. This person’s future object took a long time of reflection to emerge. He finally turned to me and said ‘I just need my mother’.

He chose to wrap her in silver grey because she is ‘old’. It turns out she is 37 and has had 6 children.. These are boys-turning-men who have been sent away by their families to keep them safe from conflict and hardship and live a ‘better life’ (and yes, economics is intrinsically part of this) – much like the way children were sent out of cities in World War 2. Behind all these boys is  most probably the wrenching emotion that a mother /father  may feel in knowing that they may never see their son again.In some cases these boys are orphans and don’t even have that. I know this happened within my own family to Iranian aunts and uncles who sent their sons and daughters to the UK, to live with us following the revolution. One of these became my sister  through adoption and her mother, my aunt, died in a plane crash the following year. She had been on a plane (suspected hijack) from Mashad to Tehran to say goodbye to her older son who was to join his two siblings in the UK. He never left Tehran after that..I guess I am trying to find an emotional point of identification with this current phenomenon of young men being sent here from Afghanistan. To look at the human motivation, which is a parent’s desire for their first born to experience a better life, at the expense of not seeing them turn into men.