Jack Persekian
Art Director 

The Sharjah Biennial 8 has undertaken the exigent task of addressing some of the ecological challenges confronting the world today, from the perspective of art and through the involvement of artists in various areas and on several levels: environmental, social, political, cultural, individual, etc. At first glance, this might seem restrictive and insensitive, or powerless in the face of the pressing issues and calamities presently raging in our region (the Middle East and the Arab world). It is the winter of 2007 and the list is hefty: Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, the “War on Terror”, nuclear armament, disarmament, sectarian and factional violence, assassinations, corruption, renditions, lawlessness, illiteracy, poverty, child labour, human rights, democracy, and on and on. As Jean-luc Nancy wrote in the summer of 1995 in the introduction to his book "Being Singular Plural":

It is an endless list, and everything happens in such a way that one is reduced to keeping accounts but never taking the final toll. It is a litany, a prayer of pure sorrow and pure loss, the plea that falls from the lips of millions of refugees every day; whether they be deportees, people besieged, those who are mutilated, people who starve, who are raped, ostracized, excluded, exiled, expelled. ⁽¹⁾

In this part of the world, even the simplest terms we use to discuss ecology and the environment are elusive. In Palestine, for instance, the signifier “land”-ever precious and revered, and, more often than not, the motivation for people to kill or die- has become like landfill, its original content emptied and replaced with detritus; thus debased, the word now exists as merely a strategic idiom in political speech, granted valour and respect only in games of rhetoric or nationalist sloganeering. Moreover, most of the signifiers that coin our existence, the environment in which we live, the paradigms that underpin our humanity, have become “landfills” as well. Organized crime corrodes social relations; violence, aggression, and treachery dominate the lived experience of our every day. Auditory and visual pollution are rampant. “Post-political cynicism,”⁽²⁾ as Gary Genosko phrased it, spreads torpor amongst citizens, and the body of ethical principles that we set as cornerstones on which to build our world has been usurped so casually that the moral fibre of social systems threatens to collapse.

When witnessing a calamity, whether natural or human-induced, my mother tirelessly rants, “The end of the world is near”. Beyond wide-scale apathy towards the consequences of our deeds on our environment and ever diminishing prospects for an equitable sustainable existence for all on this planet, my mother’s prophecy of doom unmasks the more sinister face of our humanity, namely, the desire for sheer destruction. Speaking of destruction, Mona Al Mousfi, the architect for Sharjah Biennials 7 and 8, noted in one of our conversations that the body of threats from which humanity needs to be protected has changed markedly in the last hundred years, from hazards or dangers caused by nature to those caused by human beings. Man needs to be protected from man, from a psycho-emotional perspective (hence deterministic to the point of fatalism) one could revert to Jean Baudrillard’s postulation that human beings’ destructive tendencies stem from a desire to witness the end, given that they were not present at the beginning:

We will never get to know the original chaos, the Big Bang… because it is a classified event. We had never been there. We could retain the hope however, of seeing the final moment, the Big Grumb, one day. A spasmodic enjoyment of the end to compensate for not having had the chance to revere the beginning (l’origine). These are the only two interesting moments, and since we were frustrated with the first one, we invest all the more energy into the acceleration of the end, into the precipitation of things or events towards their ultimate loss…⁽³⁾

The brave new world that we were supposed to achieve with scientific and technological progress has, in the end, served only to subdue nature, exploit its resources, devour its flesh, and forecast its outbursts. And if one tries to elucidate where things went awry, the answers invariably go back to the human agent, whose greed and unbridled exploitation of nature and its resources has driven colonialism, imperialism, racism, and capitalism.

We can illustrate this point with the example of oil spills (mindfrul, of course, that this project, this Biennial, is fuelled by the vast oil resources of the Emirates). We know that tankers are prone to accidents, that they are driven to breakdown by the unquenchable thirst for oil. Yet, in incidence after incidence, we regard oil spills as accidents, acceptable happenstances of the economy of the oil trade and of our lifestyles. Worse yet, the consequence of an oil spill is regarded matter-of-factly, with a “life goes on” shrug of indifference.

While the grand and visible issues of ecology (such as natural catastrophes and global warning) ought to b addressed, they should not eclipse or diminish issues on the level of social relations, culture, and politics. In his book, The Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari proposed a “transversal” approach for thinking about the ecologies he identified:

Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of references, we must learn to think “transversally”… Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, strurated, by “degenerate” images and statements (enonces)⁽⁴⁾.

These intersecting, cross-fertilizing forms of pollution - mental, visual, auditory - still go unnoticed by official and non-official bodies mandated with protecting the living environment. They are not yet very visible, and thus their harmful impact on people, habitats, and societies is not yet measurable, but they need to be identified and brought to the fore. The ecology of the social sphere, or “social ecology,” calls for attention as well. Using the example of real estate developers, Guattari rather hyperbolically warned that:

…men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he “redevelops” by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.⁽⁵⁾

We are living a historical moment when things are changing quickly, unpredictably it would seem. References generated by globalization replace modernist and post-modernist ones. The software age transforms ideas of nature and artifice, and relations of space and time are renegotiated. We can now digitally detach from the once constitutive elements of our subjectivity (as, for instance, avatars on the internet or in computer games). We are propelled into a “chaos-world”, as Edouard Glissant observed, “a kind of universal erratic, an anti-systemic celebration of chaos and errance,⁽⁶⁾ such is the new world order.

"We live in a time in which we can no longer impose conditions on the world, Glissant wrote"⁽⁷⁾. Where does this leave us and what is to be done? Between the notion of trying to change the world, give it a future, and going with the flow, we, the Sharjah Biennial team, see our role as opening possibilities, providing the means, and establishing the platform for individuals and groups (artists, intellectuals, thinkers, activists, politicians, bureaucrats, scientist, people at large) to raise awareness of pressing ecological issues and sound the alarm. It is high time these issues were taken seriously, not only by specialists and interested parties, but also by the general public. These issues should "stop being associated with the image of small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists"⁽⁹⁾, as Guattari advocated. We intend to build a critical mass of unpretentious propositions that aim at disturbing prevailing complacency, and eroding the luster of fake progress and its fictitious promise of paradisiac bliss on earth. At the same time, we intend to present works that embody alternative methodologies in thought and assessment, and models compatible with increased awareness of our endangered ecology. We want to bring art back into the process of social, economic, cultural, sustainable development without relinquishing ethical and aesthetic considerations.

We see the role of the artist as fundamental, pivotal. In contrast with scientists and analysts, artists have the freedom to experiment with intellectual inquiry beyond the pressures of market imperatives, where models "do not need to be tested, and found wanting, in terms of profitability or market share because (they have) no purchase on these terms"⁽⁹⁾. The artists autonomous free zone is, nevertheless, tied to market economy (which rides the tide of every booming wave in the stock market and every gush of millionaires and billionaires) but articulated under different terms. Unbound by the narrow purviews of fields of specialization and the rigid adherence to equations and formulas; artists can bridge and connect between disciplines transversally. And they can propose networks and models that interrogate lifestyles and practices critically.

Our premise for this Biennial was simple and straightforward: we invited a number of modest proposals addressing issues of ecology in the social, economic, political, and environmental contexts. We expected to receive a barrage of criticism and indictments of the excessively consumerist lifestyle, apathy, and inconsiderate urban development in the Emirates. This has been invariably the case with all artists who have come here on exploratory visits. Our challenge is thus to sustain an ongoing dialogue with profoundly critical works and remain positive, to continue to invest in the creative ability of artists to innovate and imagine bold, sustainable, and engaging work. One possible response came to us from outside the Biennial's immediate sphere of activities and exhibitions, namely, carbon off-setting. When I met with one of the artists participating in the Biennial, she posed carbon off-setting as a condition to her boarding a plane to travel to Sharjah. She mentioned a few companies that calculate the cost of the amount of carbon spewed in the air by the plane for the length of the flight, and identify projects in which an equivalent sum is invested into "off-setting" by increasing carbon dioxide absorption. We also were motivated to raise awareness amongst the wider public of the environmental imperatives that call for immediate action at the most basic levels of the conduct of everyday life, and so we sought contact with Samer Kamal, a local entrepreneur, whose endeavours to introduce the practice of recycling in Sharjah seemed to have a meaningful connection to our desire to offset our contribution to global pollution. Kamal was looking for an aesthetic approach to render recycling bins attractive to Sharjah residents and had managed to earn the endorsement of official bodies for his project as well as to win over partners in the private sector to his cause. The artist concerned with carbon off-setting and Samer Kamal, whose endeavours could only intersect in the context of the Biennial, emblematise how we envision the Biennial as proposing scenarios with positive outcomes and modalities for dealing with the ecological imperatives that press on our lives.

But it may seem naïve to believe that a Biennial of art could reverse the trend or bring tangible positive impact. We are aware that the exponential increase of populations (particularly in underprivileged areas) eclipses all attempts to mend the damage or to reverse apathy and the mindset of "feudal anachronism, the opacity of local customs, and stubborn nativism"⁽¹⁰⁾. Therefore, to side with Baudrilard's psycho-emotional outlook, yet stay tethered by rational assumptions, and in light of the current state of unpredictability, I would think that whatever we do - be it damage, deplete, erode, consume, exhume, pollute, destroy, derange, deface, despise, contain, constrain, occupy, terrorise, harm, spoil, spill, litter, corrupt, contaminate, or attempt to mend, amend, alter, fix, change, improve, condition, control, glue, develop, secure, repair, revamp, renovate, better - the world has its own safeguards and logic of sustaining equilibrium that transcend the actions and abilities of man. Yet systematically tipping the balance and disrupting the mechanisms of this self-sustaining equilibrium will (if it has not already) overwhelm the universe's ability to self-adjust. So if we would refer back to Newton's Third Law - that every action has an equal and opposite reaction - then our reprieve (not deliverance) from the wrath of the earth is through doing whatever we can to defer the end, denying what Baudrillard referred to as our "spasmodic enjoyment," and hoping against hope for salvation from apocalypse.

I am greatly indebted to Rasha Salti for reading this essay and pointing out several weaknesses and errors of thought, and to Joseph R. Wolin for editing the text.

References:

1. "Being Singular Plural" Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anee E. O’byme. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000, p.xiii

2. “Prospects for a Trans disciplinary Ecology”. Paper delivered at the RSA, London, 27 April, 2005.

3. Jean Baudrillard, Hystericizing the Millennium, L’Illusion de la fin; ou la greve des evenements, Trans, Charles Dudas, Paris: Galilee, 1992, http://www.egs.edu/faulty/baudrillard/baudrillard-hystericizing-the millennium.html , (12/12/06)

4. Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies. Trans Ian Pindar and Paul Stton, New Brunsweck, New Jersey: The Athlone Press, 2000, p.43.

5. Ibid.

6. Quoted in Peter Hallward, Abslutely Postcolonial Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2001, p.xvii.

7. Ibid.

8. Guattari, op. cit. p,52.

9. Charles Esche, Modest Proposals, Selected Writing (ed, Sercan Ozkaya), Baglam Press, Istanbul, 2005.

10. Hallward, op, cit., p.7.