Portraits of the Unseen

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.

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?’