When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to 'live'. But we must. Thus we are launched into Space – time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed. Always. At no moment can a previous bereavement serve as a model. It is, frightfully, all new. Turning, Returning: A Beginning The 2006 Biennale of Sydney aspires to be about the 'now' of the contemporary, bearing the disjuncture and discontinuities as much. As correspondences and traversal movements of encounter and exchange. To do so is to think of the present as successive points of intersection and zones of contact as we inhabit it. Always in motion, the contemporary constitutes a plural history that is fragmentary, inconclusive, without totality. The work of the artists in the Biennale offers a reflexive relation of the lived experience of the now across cultures. They explore what it means to be in and of the world. Shaped by the uneasy contradictions between cultures, the unstable, transient zone of inclusion and exclusion of peoples. Art speaks from within, and of the co-existence of heterodox and divergent contemporary cultures in which we have played a part. These are our histories imprecated as we are in the tragic events of violence and destruction as much as in dreams and realization of peaceful co-habitation and conviviality. We are given the shards of history, fragments of the present and pieces of a puzzle, the assembling of which may configure not so much a blueprint but a provisional guide to the present in which we live. There is nothing offered here to suggest ways to resolve conflict or disorder, or the right paths to be taken, or five – year plans to be drawn up; no alternatives proposed. This is not to say that the Biennale claims neutral ground or that there are no judgments here. There are, and the work resolutely seeks to expose the fault-lines of present in which the past persists and the future is uncertain. It is an event of which the present is constitutive and there fore never complete, but always taking place. The work of these contemporary artists gives shape to what these zones of contact may mean. It involves a reading of these scenes or encounters, of being faced with already existing and dominant forms that either can be complied with or challenged. To engage with these forms, as many of these artists do, entails the idea of agency and transformation of images. This is radically distinct from imagining contemporary art as a practice of transcription or translation. The first would attach itself to the notion that art practice functions at the level of the informational, and that the informational operates as transparent field and an unmediated transmission. Couched within such a framework, art would be seen as a potentially universal language corresponding to the idea of globalization. Similarly, the model of translation would be understood as making legible another language in the terms of its host. This making legible means to provide a context in which intelligibility and coherence is brought on the original. In adopting the term translation from the literary field, it becomes a term that signifies a bearing witness to the originating source or the 'other', obscuring the formal apparatus of editing and the process of authorship involved. In contesting these transcriptions or translations as forms by which to understand the workings of art, many of the artists within the Biennale return to the point of encounter and exchange between cultures, languages, events and their telling. From this perspective, the language model of translation and idea of dialogue or of the dialogic would seem sufficient to catch the movement of exchange. And yet, the potential of art practice to engage with inchoate sites and borders of intelligibility, of showing the invisible, the gaps and silences (themselves being the evidence of history) also demonstrates the impossibility of ever bearing witness. This is manifest in the gap between the spoken work and the unspoken, the said and say able, or within the itinerary of the image. As the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere has suggested, the sound of history is to be found in these sensory gaps. 1 Moreover, it is not that the work of art simply operates as a form of representation, but within itself carries the possibility of its enunciation and hence recognition. Jayce Salloum explores the interstitial spaces between the body and landscape, speech and image, memory and the event. 2 Amar Kanwar's film homage to Gandhi, "To Remember", explores the history of sectarian violence through the interposition of different narratives. 3 He speaks of 'the quiet scrape of the blade', as if to reference both the work of editing and the appearance of a ghostly image of the Gujarat massacres during 2002 throughout the film. Silence becomes not only a form of respect to the founder of the movement of non–violence but also silent testimony of those unable to speak of what they have witnessed. Zones of Contact In proposing Zones of Contact as a framework for the Biennale, there is much to be spoken about in terms of mapping, of place and locality, of surveying and surveillance but equally, of the architectural and forms of occupancy and segregation. In each case, these zones constitute different discursive practices, with their own rules of operation and accompanying values. From this perspective, the notion of zones characterizes how the very notion of space, whether it is material, physical, geographical, psychological etc., has been defined, codified and hounded by techniques of observation and surveillance. Consider the increasing occurrence of the use and experience of being faced with demarcated zones in daily life: war zone, hot zone, danger zone, no-fly zone, strike zone, combat zone, cease–fire zone, buffer zone, dead zone, transit zone, border zone, Western zone, Eastern zone or, alternatively, trade zone, free zone, comfort zone, forbidden zone, pleasure zone, erogenous zone, symbolic zone. The proliferating use of the term 'zone' in contemporary times indicates the specific mobilization of a term to denote regulation of the movement of bodies within and across those spaces. As such we may index its rules and guidelines, its closures and cultural constraints, as much as the domain of possibility and potentiality. In his film The Stalker [1979], the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky called this place a zone. It is a form of non-place that exists in the midst of what appears as an industrial wasteland. Three figures, including a poet, take refuge within this zone that is suspended from laws governing the normal course of life. In this place, they are able to speak of `human desires, imagination or spirituality rather than the physical word`. 4 Within the zone, the force of contact is not only animated by a series of encounters of exchange or mis–encounters, but also as crossings in which occupancy becomes a contested ground for sovereignty, or a potential ground for a mutual reckoning of what has taken place and the desire for co-habitation and multilateral trust. We may also speak of zones as a more abstract designation, mobilized by modernization and the ideology of a global order that has designated a series of zones that partition, structure and sanction the world into levels of lesser or greater levels of social inequality, impoverishment and destitution. Chen Chieh–jen`s videos create mise en scenes that picture derelict factories and inoperative systems of computer terminals, exposing the failed aspiration of a global system of exchange. 5 The idea of an ever-expanding zone of contact that will provide the promise of prosperity has not only dislocated local communities, but destroyed the fabric of accumulated signs of a lifetime that trace the geography of memory. As the artist has noted, `Memories lose the place they belong to. The "past" ceases to really exist. At this ever–transforming “moment”, we can’t even locate a point in which to begin our imagination for the future. `Correspondingly, Fikret Atay's video practice orients itself around the breach between the promise and the reality of globalization and how artists operate to insert themselves back into the system. 6 In so doing, Atay providens an alternate circuitry, a means of circulation that exceeds the imposed limits of dwelling in the hinterland of the globe. The power of the work is its ability to tap an imaginary within the rhythm of song, dance and sound, without losing recognition that this rhythm too is haunted by the memory of event and a bounded geography of place. The modalities operating within and across zones of contact provide the topography or ground for a geo-politics of memory and the legacies of family, colonial and other forms of occupation, or that of violence and war. This concept of zones operates both literally and symbolically to delimit spaces, places of permit and prohibition, and the anxiety of belonging and dislocation. A number of these artists grew up during a time of war in their own cities or country. The fear of the outside, the sense of being contained or trapped in one’s house or of having it destroyed are recurrent images that persist and infuse the experiencing of the present. As a young Croatian woman at an airport terminal in Dubrovnik whispered in response to my asking whether there were any flights to Belgrade; they burnt our houses; the image of the destroyed, demolished house and its ruins haunt many who have lived through war. It signifies the confrontation with absence, and the traumatic recognition of the amnesic gaps in what remembrance remembers. In many places these zones operate as a field of authorized state violence, through the militarization of daily life and control over the movement of peoples and the paternalistic state laws of segregation between the sexes and their participation in civic life, The symbolic and real power of visibility becomes precisely the subject around which both Raeda Saadeh and Ghada Amer elaborate their work. 7 The artist Hassan Khan has explored the formation of social consciousness, `a secret consensus which betrays a cultural reflex … a hidden ideology: the buried agenda which guides culture into a present, monumental form`. The work weaves together spaces, a `landscape which depicts a location, but a location whose shape is formed by an invisible social agreement, a fleeting spectral coercion: culture as role–play`. 8 Calin Dan portrays Bucharest as a place in which the authoritarian ideology of the dictatorship was built into the cement of people's houses – a place of control, shaping its future citizens. 9 In Sample City a man is seen roaming the city with a door strapped to his back. Dragging part of his house through the streets, he appears as a vagabond in his own city seeking a place to belong, a place to hang the door. A sign of failure of the system or of a wayward life and individual disorder as a member of the civil society, this gesture represents a symbol of refusal against the rule of law. Architecture no longer signifies a place of belonging the rule of law. Architecture no longer signifies a place of belonging but of dislocation and estrangement, of life consigned to perpetual wandering. Mis/encounter and Mobility The idea of `Zones of Contact` as the framework for the Biennale exhibition and event provides a specific place to enter, and the site of encounter, correspondence, and departure, following the route taken by the artist. It refers to both a temporal and sensuous mode of experiencing that which guides us in our encounter with the world. To be faced with these encounters with the world, and to consider the production of a work of art and enable that work to circulate freely, demands a measure of risk. One enters these zones of encounter with another, either in the being hope of dialogue and exchange, or the danger of being misunderstood, misappropriated or subject to discrimination. Writing of how economic globalization has provided a technical infrastructure for cross-border flows of art, the sociologist and economist Sakia Sassen has identified the emergence of a transnational `imaginary` alongside the actual technical and organizational infrastructure for cross- border transactions. She notes that this imaginary construction, generated by the leading institutions in the world of art and culture, may risk becoming a process of `Westernization` and appropriation of non–western elements. Or does it lead, she asks, to a `greater diversity in the circulation of meanings concepts, and to greater contestation`? 10 This would then produce `counter-geographies` to describe `alternative networks to globalization…deeply imprecated with some of the major dynamics constitutive of globalization yet … not part of the formal apparatus`. 11 Returning to this point of entanglement also necessitates disturbing easy binaries, such as fixed points of origin that, in claiming the authentic, relatives cultures according to the grand narratives of progress and universalism. But this does not mean turning to the notion of hybridity as an antidote to such schemas. 12 Hybridity belongs now to the transnational as much as it did to the era of colonialism. Rather, this point of entanglement means turning to its inchoate messiness and contradicting points of view and histories. This means, too, that engaging with the movement of the transnational - its economies of trafficking and trade, of migration and deportation, of mobility and mixing – is to acknowledge the prehistory of modernity, as much as its contemporary manifestation. This is to suggest that mobility, or a sense of dislocation, is not simply a symptom of globalization. The histories of Euro-America, of empires and their colonies are imprecated in one another as a history of capitalism and emergent formations of nationalism. Palestinian writer Edward Said noted that `to ignore or otherwise discount the overlapping experience of Western and Orientals… the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other through projections, as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories, is to miss what is essential about the world in the last century`. 13 As we know, the formation, if not the defining moments of Euro-American modernism's self–definition was contingent upon the ability to gather and classify the material culture of its colonial subject and render its subject transparent. Yet, insofar as acknowledging the collusion and complicity on the part of the local elite, transparency was itself a means by which to structure cultural differentiation within the colonial centre. The 2006 Biennale of Sydney was composed on the road, that is, of not only being on the road, but about the road and its sense of mobility that affects us as liberating and estranging. The artists chosen are those for whom mobility is neither a curse nor a gift but, for some, a voluntary necessity, and for others, an involuntary necessity. From this perspective, these artists are not what may be called ` world `or international artists. The choice to live or work in more than one place has economic, if no social and political, reasons. More than that, their work is not a hybrid art that purports to meld difference into one, or serves as a strategy of contaminating the purported purity of the center, or reflects the historical consciousness of the colonial subject. Each of these construct a transcendent position construed by an imagined synthesis or fixed essence veiling the torsions - the irreducible and contradictory perspectives – which constitute the formation of zones of contact. The work of these artists, then, is not a matter of translation but an interrogation and transformation of a dissonant and fractured subject. Mona Hatoum proposes seeing the entire world as a foreign land – for many in the world, there is no going back or alternatively forward. 14 Sixty years ago, Stalin exiled the Tartars from their native land in the Crimea, to Central Asia. They became outcasts, restricted from moving. Having never felt at home elsewhere, but dislocated, many Tartars returned home after the fall of the Soviet Union, only to find their houses and land occupied and to be told by the Russians that they no longer belonged. And yet, the violence would only be repeated if the successive generations of Russians, born in the innocence of the unacknowledged, were to be now uprooted. The work of Mona Hatoum invokes the home as a place of unsettlement and displacement, a condition she refers to as the `fractured dream of home`. Her work, as in "Mobile Home ll", literally destabilizes the idea of the home as a fixed place. Yet, by force of the presence of barricades at either end, the artist not only signals the condition of mobility and movement, but also, a sense of its involuntary imposition; the barricading of people's homes gives rise to the sickening desire that one has no choice but to leave one's home. The idea of `taking place` becomes not only a movement toward settlement, but its dispossession. These artists who re/search the zones of their adopted countries and cities, or the forgotten backlands and hinterlands beyond metropolitan centers, do so in order to expose the fault-lines of history and to disrupt its neat binaries, which serve the interests of the few. There is no `true time' but a heterogeneous present. They seek to expose the perpetrators behind gangster nation states that relegate their citizens to the violence of ethnic absolutism or the motionless time of destitution. Similarly, these artists contest the philosophers of progress who embrace modernization and world – systems, as promulgated by global capital, as the promise of freedom. While this vision seems to answer the matter of survival for many who live under occupation, political oppression or economic and social containment, we see here the underbelly of the much vaulted notion of globalization. The image of containment runs through the Biennale as a recurrent subject, as in the photo and video-based work of Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix / MAP Office or in the installational practice of Milica Tomic. 15, 16 Tomic`s appropriation of the container as a sculptural form belongs to a sequence of events surrounding its use as a vehicle for both illegal human trafficking and a method of killing. In having it sprayed with bullet – holes she creates the brutal mise en scene of an actual event and providing the possibility of entering the space, she dramatically places the audience in the position of imagining that event. However much the possibility of traversing the world seems more open there road taken is shaped as much by unforeseen borders of regulation and, control as by a limitless horizon of potentiality. Such promise omits the price paid: the restrictions that it bears and the haunting spectre that they will be forever condemned to live in a no-man`s land of the undocumented or as the economic plaything of the state. It omits to acknowledge the daily recurrence for many who, for reasons of the color of their skin, their values and beliefs or gender, are the object of violence, and whose lives in the interstices or edges of metropolitan centers are a mixed blessing of community solidarity, yet segregation. The artist Ghazel has continued to advertise herself for marriage since immigrating to France from Iran. Experiencing the difficulty of being an immigrant woman, she has co-opted the conventions of mass media advertising by which to play with both Western and Islamic conventions of visibility. At a cost, she transforms herself into a commodity object whose power of circulation and exchange, nevertheless, provides a means of survival. The crossing of these zones of contact is the dream of many to find lost family or friends, economic and social well- being, or an end to daily oppression and conflict. For many, such terms are all too familiar in their day-to-day passage through controlled circuits of movement. Consider those whose lives are shaped by having to pass daily through transit zones, or whose families are divided by controlled borders, as in Cyprus or between India and Pakistan. As the Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar explores the border rituals of state sovereignty and exchange between these two countries, we are reminded of the utter artificiality and violence of their partition; and equally, that for many people, crossing this zone symbolizes the dream of reunion. 17 Opposing the ideological claims of origin, this dream is a reminder that zones of contact represent not only the point of entangled and violent histories, but also potential spaces of hope against hope, of hospitality and conviviality in the face of despair. In the long aftermath of the war in the Balkans, Sejla Kameric of Sarajevo pictures the solitude of the profound fracture caused by the destruction of her culture. She writes of her work,"Dream house; we are dreaming, of different worlds, different circumstances. In our dreams, I am not a refugee shelter, they are not refugees. I am home, and they are people living on the home of their dreams.` 18 After the Event The reconstitution of an event is an inscriptional form that marks the present. Read in this manner, its significance provides a way of distinguishing the movement of transformation from that of translation as much as to disrupting the imagined sites of origin and of end. The artists in the Biennale offer an alternative engagement with the world, neither as an object - an artifact subjected to the laws of classification – nor to be rehoused, but as and act of re-collection. It is only through retracing the itinerary of the trace that revelation occurs, even though the consequences of the event or experience may have been devastating. |