Part One: Migrations and Meanings in Art
The artists’ statements, essays and images in this part are both creative and cultural responses to a range of migration experiences. These works are shaped by historical references and personal reflections exploring a range of experiences from artists living in, or hailing from the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The section is arranged to uncover and examine motives for migration. It also explores how identities are realized, rejected, performed, and desired by artists considering these experiences in their work. It foregrounds varied perspectives on migration from concepts of dislocation, border crossings and storytelling. The artwork challenges various narratives on identity through migration practices and looks at their impact and reception. These projects address questions and concerns raised by each artist in the hopes of expanding perceptions of migration while exploring identity and family life through the creative process.
Sama Alshaibi combines photography, nineteenth-century printmaking and installation with her narrative about women leaving home. Alshaibi, an Iraqi-born multimedia artist, explores absence and what happens when women’s stories are lost or not preserved. In considering migration, she imagines and explores questions such as ‘what do you carry with you?’ and, centering these in her work, Alshaibi expands upon her own family’s narrative of migration, one that is full of love, longing, and trauma. By doing so, she memorializes the struggles of migrating women globally. Firelei Báez’s paintings and installations explore Afro-Latina and Afro-Caribbean women and migration. In this volume she creates a painting of Marie Louise Christophe, the first Queen of Haiti, which gained independence from France in 1804, and who was eventually forced into exile, moving to Pisa. New media and performance artist Tsedaye Makonnen’s work consists of photography, sculpture, and installation focusing on experiences of forced migration globally. Through her installations she often uses her body to channel self-identifying Black women or girls who died from state-sanctioned violence in the US or while migrating to Europe from East Africa across the Mediterranean. Carolina Mayorga is a Colombian-born and naturalized American interdisciplinary artist whose work explores identity and migrant domestic workers. Through her performances she explores stereotyping of immigrant women of Hispanic origin.
Shirin Neshat’s Rapture series image reflects on the role of women and fashion in Islam. The image replicated in this book is a still from her thirteen-minute film of the same title, and shows veiled women in black attire moving through the desert. In the photograph, the women stand in the sand, facing away from the camera. Neshat is suggesting that even as the women face unknown restrictions, they also form a bond based on their gender, allowing the viewer to ponder freedom and movement. Muna Malik’s work consists of imagery and installations based on the narratives of women of color and refugees, using a boat as a vessel to share stories and preserve messages about their experiences. Gabriella N. Báez’s Island Putas is an ongoing photographic documentation of queer sex work in the Caribbean, following their economic decline in the aftermath of natural disasters and the pandemic. She is responding to the popular notion of sex tourism in the Caribbean as heavily tied to migration.
Leslie King-Hammond’s “Barbadian Spirits—Altar for My Grandmother” is an homage to women who have migrated from the Caribbean and further afield. This altar reflects her personal memories. What emerges from King-Hammond’s installation is a sense of joy and respect for the women’s creativity through foodways and craft art. Brandy Dyess’s portfolio is a composite of photographs of migration in California as she moved from the Midwest to the East Coast and eventually to the Mojave Desert, which foreground her desire to redefine intimacy and beauty in a desolate area. Ana Teresa Fernández resists borders. She actively crosses boundaries by creating work that challenges the complexity of migration. Her work is performance-based and shows the plight of migrants encountering border walls. Of Bodies and Borders explores the hopes and despairs of the thousands of people who have crossed a border. Maria Elena Ortiz writes that “she is committed to questioning stereotypical female gender roles; heels and her own body are central motifs in her performances and paintings. Her practice is indebted to performance art. Through her visual metaphors, Fernández’s works explore the relationship of life, politics, and poetics, inspired by ideas of magical realism, surrealism, and contemporary complex realities.” Allison Janae Hamilton’s photography explores memory, mythology, and the Southern landscape in Tennessee and Florida. Hamilton’s relationship with these locations forms the foundation of her artwork in this volume, providing a context for an exploration of history, memory and the impact the Southern landscape has had on black bodies.
Patricia Cronin’s Shrine for Girls is a site-specific installation and meditative experience depicting loss. Cronin’s images document a space where clothing is stacked high to allow visitors to mourn and recognize the dignity of those women and girls who were denied it in life. Hồng-Ân Trương’s From a Hot Border (2001) considers Trương’s childhood and her family’s migration to the United States from Viet Nam during the tumult of the mid-1970s. Layering photographs of herself playing and riding a bicycle along with images of war, she creates a background of tension, pleasure and terror. Nashormeh Lindo’s tapestry for her father’s family lineage, entitled NormanNamesake: First Generation North, is a reflection on belonging and longing for her grandfather, who migrated with his family from South Carolina to Philadelphia by way of the Underground Railroad route that led to Mother Bethel AME Church in South Philadelphia. The artists in this section offer distinct perspectives on the themes of migration that shift our understanding of the ubiquity of national and global movements in our current cultural and socio-political environments. They contemplate the idea of migration as it intersects with personal narratives, self-invention, issues of cultural identity, sexuality, social justice, leisure culture, the discourse of domination, and global freedom struggles. In a society where stories of migration are often stigmatized and excluded, this section locates these diverse stories at the forefront, expanding the discourses of migration and the processes of identifying oneself and one’s community in the context of social and cultural transit.
1. Carry Over
© 2022, Sama Alshaibi, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0296.01
Photography plays a historic and burdensome role in the construction of how the Middle East continues to be imagined. My work explores the impact that images of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) women have had. In my photographs, I aim to disrupt the Western cultural paradigm through a strategy of assigning power to the MENA female body and the sets of the photography-studio scene. By using albumen and photogravure print processes of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in my project Carry Over, I am evoking a not-too-distant century in which the West controlled the Middle East and North Africa.1 Photography studios were largely run by Western photographers, and their portrayal of MENA women sought to express the region’s inferiority. Their photographs constructed a singular narrative of the Orient’s female subject—isolated, lacking social context, docile and sexually consumable. Women were repeatedly depicted carrying vessels on their heads and lounging with ‘oriental’ props that, along with veiling and nudity, staged a non-ambiguous formula of otherness. Carry Over recalls and subverts these images and their legacy: contemporary Western media continue to subject MENA women to a flattened visual representation.
The traumatic burden of such enduring representations is made tangible in Carry Over through the placement of a physical sculpture, absurd in scale and function, on the subject’s head. In Mashrabiya, the Arabesque latticework of carved wood normally found on the windows of Iraqi or Egyptian homes is substituted with a latticework of laser-cut wood shaped as barbwire and framed within a box reminiscent of the mashrabiyas found across the region. This traps the subject’s face in a cage formed from a water-pipe hookah, an object found in most historical portraits of ‘Oriental’ women. Not only is she objectified by the studio prop, but her body also distorts into a physical object itself. In Gamer, the looming stack of pans forms a ladder, resembling an escape route out of the frame. In Water Bearer, the once compulsory ceramic water jug found in Oriental portraits is referenced by a vessel shaped like a massive grenade or a wooden wasp’s nest, and hoisted high up towards the sky—exhibiting the subject’s Herculean effort in surviving conflict. The Harvest depicts empty jute baskets, and Eternal Love Song, a hollowed-out travel trunk. Both of these objects contain a spatial void, reminding us of their former purpose and function, which has been amputated by forced migrations. These images challenge the invisibility of MENA women’s suffering in conditions from which they cannot escape.
While the social, economic and psychological dimensions of war and displacement are referenced by the sculptures, Carry Over also implicates Western imaginings of MENA women’s actual struggles as obscured behind a singular preoccupation with the hijab. MENA women’s well-being is often related to the politics of veiling, and inversely correlated to how covered up we are. Instead of visualizing women’s freedom and empowerment in terms of social, political, and economic rights—such as access to jobs, education and health care, or the critical importance of their physical security in accessing those rights, Western photographs perpetuate notions of women’s oppression through their focus on how much skin and hair are revealed. As such, Marjanah and Justice depict the female figure as the personification of a water fountain or an electricity pole. The implication in both works is that through her isolation, the subject is transformed from a passive object into an empowered, dynamic body that sustains and delivers herself. She is the embodiment of transport, hauling and moving in her diasporic and migratory reflection. She is the vehicle of her own resistance, displacing the internalization of a Western and Eurocentric social order. As a site of refuge and regeneration, these images inscribe mechanisms of survival through the woman’s body.
1 Carry Over was funded in part by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, The Arizona Commission on the Arts, Artpace International and the CENTER 2019 Project Development Grant.