Whos looking at you?

Monday thoughts

We live in a time of terrible violence, upheaval, cruelty, greed and injustice. Now, more than at any other time in my life, it is so glaring.

I have spent much of the last 10 years particularly quietly seething and turning inwards, working in conventional media as a camera woman and director and shunning too much News, (even as I worked in the News) as it seemed as if I was just about holding on in the fragile freelancer world I was in, never knowing where the next job was coming from. Now and possibly because I feel more responsible as I age, I consume world news media with a slightly thicker skin, mostly Al Jazeera with its daily updates on world atrocities, hopelessly corrupt regimes and unwinnable wars, and I pour my feelings into making pictures.

My wanting to be an artist came from taking photographs of whores for a few months in the early 2000’s. I was amazed, perhaps naively, as now I see prostitution as so ubiquitous, so mundane and everyday. It is the ugly mirror side of our culture. It was a gut wrenching, life changing experience. Any woman, everywoman, even the most ancient can do it, any woman can find a market for a fake sexuality, turning herself inside out to play what she has learned throughout her life she ought to play, even sometimes to the extent of masochistically ‘loving’ it. And as the wealder of a camera I was in the position of uncle Tom arraying the wares for sale.

It caused a revolution in me. Mainly in viewing photographs as evidence of a performance. What has a woman to do with a whore? From pimp to photographer all she can do is market her own kind. And even though she can consume a prostitute’s services, it is only a man who can make a woman into a ‘whore’. It is an inter gender commodity relation that can alter and define the very essence of a woman. This is not to deny the trade in children and young men. I am speaking more of the alchemical change with which the appellation ‘whore’ can bring about to how a woman is viewed and in her view of herself. This shock is what caused me to want to re make and recontextualise the text that is the photograph.

I had to go back to the basics. Both in terms of ideology and craft. My feminism had slept for years. We had all assumed that the second wave of feminism had brought to light all the inconsistencies and that people somewhere were moving forward and were living enlightened lives. And if you weren’t enjoying the media hype, the pole dancing lessons, the celebrity worship, the fast track career or enjoying the fruits of mass consumerism and the ‘tongue in cheek’ sexism of the age, then you were a spoilsport.

Right now I am sitting here with several bodies of work completed but not really shown in the last 4 years since my MA. I haven’t fast tracked, applied for enough things or hassled people for shows. I was never sure my language was the right one, that my ideas were sophisticated enough, my techniques masterful enough. The main thing that has kept me going is going to shows and meeting other artists. This dialogue has been my life blood. And this is what intensifies once you leave the institution.

As regards inequality and injustice, it is all around. Perhaps there is nothing new to say, the only thing is to say it and to say it in however many ways you can, refine your language, play with your audience, entertain them and keep doing it. For it will not be you that is looked at but what you do with your words, your images, your stuff and how you show it to the world. And what if the wider world or the art world does not listen to you? Well someone somewhere will want to have a conversation with your art. You are part of something much bigger than you.

Veil works 2013

These works started with my fascination with Gaitan De Clerambaults obsessive and somewhat fetishistic photographs of veiled Moroccan women – where simple rough fabric takes precedence over a usual kind of photographic Orientalism, where Eastern women are seen as sexually available odalisques or caged and hidden slaves.

It was the use of material and its many meanings that caught my eye and have subsequently led to a much more complex understanding of the global and historical currents that flow from those ideas.

My subjective experiences of being a unveiled European woman in an Islamic country made me look much more closely at drapery, its connections with colonialism, with Orientalism and with our own current debates.

Debates around the Muslim and notions of the Islamic are affecting our societies deeply. The West’s involvement in North Africa and the Middle East, the influx of Muslim immigrants from all over the Islamic world and their visibility on our streets mean that we are experiencing a real change in our views of ourselves. We are not a homogenous entity of Westerners and Easterners. And the wearing of a veil does not necessarily mean one thing.

The Islamic religion and the regions history is far more complex than most Westerners realise, comprised of many millions of adherents often with very different views of what is Islamic or not Islamic. Many of the Islamic nations have had a long history of corrupt governments, wars and economic deprivations.

I loathe the idea, the kind of feminist Orientalism that uses the veiled woman as a metaphor for female oppression generally. It is far too one dimensional and I am conscious of trying not to fall into that trap. It would be patronising and too simplistic to look at the veil or veiling this way, just as it is to view female nakedness as being representative of freedom. Neither is true, it depends on the context.

This year the Ukranian feminist group FEMEN held a ‘solidarity action’, where they demonstrated naked in support of a Tunisian woman who was punished for baring her breasts on Facebook. The outcry from various Muslimahs and others lambasting Femen for racism and colonialism and for getting attention with their nakedness has further simplified global and historical issues.

Its interesting to note that in the media reactions – veiled or naked, women are reduced to their bodies and their sexuality and that the debates assume that women and their issues are somehow divorced from specific historical and political agents. Femen may be Islamaphobic or racist and have a narrow pop feminist stance but it is Eastern European women who have been sex trafficked en masse and exploited in many other ways.

I recently met Ukrainian photographer Roman Pyatkova who has just won the 2013 Sony World photography award for conceptual photography. He uses home spun photographs of orgies and naked girls over political propaganda images. The nude images were forbidden for people to take and to own and for him represent a moment in time. His photographs are of ordinary people expressing their own version of freedom. “Our tiny apartments, our personal and even intimate life became the proving grounds for our art,” he explains. Lacking high-quality equipment, materials and formal education, he explains photographic art was made more intellectual. “Our existence outside the socialist context critically distanced us from the Soviet art system and the political structure in general.” http://cargocollective.com/pyatkovka/

Im now looking at using the street, urban spaces both in the East and the West and mixing personal imagery that comes from a specific point in time to try to express complex ideas around the clashes in contemporary cultures.

Ok, I am going to try to keep this blog going as I also have a WordPress blog and have started in earnest to use twitter. My head is spinning with all the external distractions, the artists, galleries and organisations that Im trying to keep track of.

I was rather at first daunted by being amongst the company of other artists in this blog, it seems slightly more terrifying than just throwing out into the blogosphere where about three people probably read my more mainstream blogs.

But its time to bite the bullet. Im investing very heavily in my practice now and really have a will to be looked at.

I work with photographs. I see them as objects and texts, I try to go behind them and pull out the ideas that they suggest to me. Sometimes as in my current project which is inspired by the Islamic veil I have taken new photographs. This veil project has so many meanings and I am having to sort through and divide it into different strands. The one that alludes to Orientalism, the one that alludes to drapery and the one that alludes to gender and then the city.

The presence of the veil in London, in the cities of the West and how that impacts our awareness of gender – the dialogues around Islam – all of these things are so rich and worth exploring.

I am finding that I cannot just use a photograph on its own. I have to either write on it or meld it into another, from a different time or place.

I have a history. I have many stories with a myriad of characters. Once I wanted to tell them in film narratives but I got caught up in a film world that bewildered and confused me. None of my stories fitted the three act structure. I found that the history of art and the dialogues therin were much more interesting. I am sure I will use film again one day. In fact I saw some work recently that was a sort of mix of the still image and film. It was a very powerful experince. Look at these amazing works by Ailbhe Ní Bhriain at http://www.domobaal.com/artists/ailbhe-ni-bhriain-01.html

I would like to find out more about this technique.