Bilal and Farouk: Works and Bios

Lauren Sokolov

Wafaa Bilal, born in Iraq on June 10, 1966, is a video artist and former professor of art, and is famous for creating works demonstrating political, social, and racial tensions. His life and experiences in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and eventually the United States provide the basis for his works, along with their compelling yet sensitive and even difficult-to-confront subject matters.

Since his early childhood in Iraq, Bilal aspired to become an artist, and developed a specific interest in political matters and their subsequent social effects. Even one of the early pieces he made in Iraq led to his arrest, due to its controversial critique of Saddam Hussein. In 1991, Bilal fled Iraq upon his refusal to take part in the invasion of Kuwait, and spent two years in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a children’s art teacher.

Bilal came to the United States in 1992. He studied art first in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then in Chicago. Despite his success in teaching and giving lectures on the situation in Iraq, he was deeply affected by the death of his brother, who was killed at a U.S. checkpoint in 2005. From that event, he was prompted to create one of his most memorable pieces, “Domestic Tension,” (2007). This digital-interactive piece displays his childhood in Iraq, along with the time he spent in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. It is an installation-performance piece that brings his experience to life through a remote-controlled paintball gun and camera connecting him to the internet. It displays the contemporary issues of political and cultural tensions that we are forced to confront.

City Lights recently published an article, “Shoot an Iraqi,” (2008) expanding on Bilal’s story and on “Domestic Tension.” The article discusses how Bilal demonstrates his situation in Iraq by presenting the tense, nerve-wracking conditions he experienced – ultimately representing the conditions of all Iraqi citizens under Saddam Hussein’s regime. He builds seclusion and fear of violence into a reflection of his immigration to the United States, depicting the obstacles and eventual benefits he has encountered.

Other notable works by Bilal include “The Human Condition,” “Virtual Jihadi,” “Midwest Olympia,” and “Sorrow of Baghdad.” These projects, which contain photographs, installations and video, also display the situation in Iraq and its social and political effects. Examples of the heart-wrenching works include a statue (in “Sorrow of Baghdad”) depicting a mother trying to protect her child moments before her own death, and images (in “Human Condition”) of surreal (“hyper-real”) landscapes portraying oppression and fear, in a non-specific, open-narrative sense that allows audiences to draw their own interpretations and conclusions.
Wafaa Bilal continues to spread his art and political messages, through museum exhibitions, lectures, and travels around the world. His main incentive in presenting the situation in Iraq is, ultimately, to stress the importance of peaceful conflict resolution. His poignant, powerful works have left a significant impression on audiences worldwide, and his artistic presentation has added a large contribution to video, photography, and installation.

Ismail Farouk, the “Urban Photographer,” is an artist from Johannesburg, South Africa known for his videos and photographs examining spatial relations in urban places. The aim of his work is to display public space while conveying how private authorities and organizations have asserted control over them. His pieces force us to confront the truth about cultural inequalities based on class, race, and political matters.
Farouk began his studies of cultural inequality at Wits University, where he earned a degree in Fine Art and, later, a Masters degree in Urban Geography. From there, he began working with an architectural firm on a project regarding the modernization of Yeoville, Johannesburg. He applied his observational skills and the theoretical approaches he learned at Wits to develop the “network approach methodology.” It was then that he set the characteristic theme of his work: the idea of mainstream urban society, and the contradiction therein.

Amongst Farouk’s most famous works is “Trolley Pusher Project,” which shows globalization in Johannesburg and uses video to demonstrate cultural discrimination and pre-judgment in society. The piece contains footage of “trolley pushers” and their important but illegal service of transporting the luggage of people commuting from one Taxi service to another. The shopping cart trolleys are stolen from supermarkets by Zimbabwean gang members, and the trolley pushers use them to earn money by offering their services to commuters. The illegality of this service is well known by customers, who rarely pay trolley pushers more than a small fraction of their asking price. This and other exploitation problems exist in this service, including the issue of police raids, which result in heavy fines for the trolley pushers and, after repeated offenses, even imprisonment.

Farouk has used “Trolley Pusher Project” and his other pieces in Johannesburg to compare mainstream urbanization in South Africa and in Los Angeles, California, in exhibitions such as “Cancelled Without Prejudice” at the MAK Center. His comparison shows a surprising parallel between Johannesberg and Los Angeles: the similarity of their racial/socioeconomic issues in public spaces. He has also contributed to a collaborative project, “Urban Concerns,” again a social and political research piece in which Farouk used artistic approaches to connect citizens of Johannesburg. His aim was to spread awareness and unity amongst those living in the urban conditions he has studied.

Ismail Farouk continues to research geographic and social conditions throughout the world, and strives for spatial and economic justice within the urban locations he has encountered. The creative and artistic methods he uses to apply his subject matter have helped to empower countless citizens in the struggle for justice, and make audiences aware of the struggle and the importance of ameliorating it.

Sources and Information:

Wafaa Bilal

Ismail Farouk

MARTIN KERSELS

“I’m not a photographer. I’m an artist who uses photography when the idea dictates. And I think that’s okay because I’m also a performance artist who makes objects, or I’m an object-maker who does performances. I think these labels are less important than the ability to go in the directions I’d like for each work.”
—Martin Kersels

These pieces are excellent examples of the kind of work Martin Kersels creates. He doesn’t limit himself to one type of artistic expression. Here he combines performance art with sculpture/installation art. He also video tapes them and screens them at galleries and thus transforms them into video art.

Martin Kersels doesn’t pigeon hole himself into one category like so many artists do. He doesn’t define himself by the medium he works with and this renders him extremely versitile in the art world. Kersels is also not afraid to take risks. He uses his body as way to explore the boundaries and limits of space and of his impact upon it. Many artists that use their bodies in their art often have bodies that they want to show off because they are aesthetically pleasing. It is usually just an excercise in self-indulgence and narcissism, but not for Kersels. He has a less than perfect physique, in fact the whole nature of his work surrounds the fact that he is larger than life.

Kersels towers over most people at 6′6 and over 300 pounds. He uses his massive body to play upon how dwarfish objects in the world seem to be around him.There is one sculpture at the Santa Monica Museum that is just an enormous pot. It seems like sort of a tragic commentary on how this world isn’t made for someone as large as him–how everything must be custom made for him, even a simple pot to boil water in. The other sculpture of his that I spent a lot of time with was this enormous bird’s nest, entitled “Rickety”, that had a motley of different items woven into it. There were pieces of furniture, childrens playthings, articles of clothing, and all sorts of other miscellaneous household objects. It looked like parts of a dream or a memory stitched together–it was incredibly beautiful.

“Rickety (2007), the artist’s latest work, is a sculpture that compresses and oppresses furniture and other oversized objects beneath a platform. This lower, slightly topsy-turvy world stands in sharp contrast to the clean openness of the top part of the installation. Unlike some of the other sculptures in the exhibition that are surrogates for Kersels’ physical being, Rickety is about the experience of the trials and tribulations of navigating a large body through the world.”

It looks like the kind of nest he would need if he were a bird. Everything he creates reflects the way he experiences the world through his body. He gives the viewer a sense of what it is like to be in his body–to see the world from his eyes. In a sense, he endows the viewer with a literal “bird’s eye perspective” of how he navigates himself through a world that is too small for him.

BY: WHITNEY JACKSON

Video Art, Collaboration, and Public Space

The students in this class, MS71 PZ Video Art, was charged with creating a collaborative project that engages with the Resolution 3 Symposium, which took place from October 24-26, 2008. They chose to create a blog as an on-line venue for them to report, reflect, and comment on their experiences at the event. In all, this format lends itself well to a cumulative process of writing, and allowed different students in the class to adapt their individual experiences, their interests and focus in contemporary video practices, and their different writing styles into a coherent, collective expression. The multimedia platform also allowed the students studying media production to incorporate moving and still images into the project, which augmented its text-based main body.

In reading the posts, the reader who did not attend the Symposium will get a sense of the different programs that took place. Those, like myself, who attended the event, will encounter personal, and sometimes idiosyncratic takes that individual students had on the Symposium. In reading these posts, it seems that selected events—the twenty-four hour screening (in which one of the students spent the night!) and artists such as Wafaa Bilal and Ismail Farouk in particular have made an impression on them. This blog is by no means a comprehensive review of the Symposium, but it serves to convey subjective views of the events and discussions that took place. I invite other participants of the Symposium to respond with your perspectives and experiences in the “comment” section of this blog. This way, we will hopefully end up with a more comprehensive, multifaceted record and review of the event.

One interesting issue that arose with this project is the unease with its public and global nature. Specifically, some of the students are concerned that others, perhaps some of the artists and scholars they are discussing, will see what they write. I think this speaks to how the internet and communication technologies are changing the scope and reach of pedagogy (see my colleague and Resolution 3 participant Alex Juhasz’s course Learning From YouTube, where the class is held in and on the video-sharing site.) The audience (and potential adjudicator) of one’s work is no longer just the professor, but also one’s peers, one’s subject, (the artists and presenters at the Symposium) as well as strangers from all over the world. This can be both an impetus to create better work (these posts are more in-depth, personal, and interesting compared to the more traditional academic papers I received from the students in this class) or to self-censor (some students are hesitant to be critical of an artist’s work for fear they might actually read it).

Another interesting characteristic of the narrative presented here is the linear and non-linear representations of time in the blog. On one hand, each of the posts reports on specific events, days, or experiences at Resolution 3 in a linear format. But on the other hand, the chronology in which these posts are written and posted, and the events they report on represent a non-linear and roughly reversed chronology of the events—i.e. the students wrote about events they attended after the Symposium, for example Symposium participant Ismail Farouk’s opening and talk for “Cancelled Without Prejudice”, before they wrote about the Symposium itself.

There was an attempt to re-arrange the posts to better approximate a linear chronology, but the subjective and participatory nature of this project asserted itself against a strictly linear representation of the events anyway. What we ended up with here is a reflective, multi-vocal, and looping report on the Symposium and follow up events we did as a class. It would have been interesting to see a more conscious manipulation of and play with this attribute. Perhaps that could be addressed in some of the responses and upcoming posts on the blog?

Posted by Ming-Yuen S. Ma, instructor

Keeper of the Shrine

On November 15th artist Amitis Motevalli opened Santa Monica’s 18th Street Gallery to our class to view her piece Threshold of the Innocents and Martyred. 18th Street Gallery’s current exhibition War as a Way of Life looks at the way different people and communities in Los Angels are responding to “conflict as a constant refrain in their daily lives” as a way to understand the “collective psyche” as it is essential to create change that is affirmative and practical. For more on this project please see: http://www.18thstreet.org/futureofnations/WarAsaWayofLife/index.html.

Amitis Motevalli is originally from Iran and immigrated to the United States in 1977. The name Motevalli literally means “keeper of the shrine” in Farsi. Her family has been the keeper of the Imamzadeh Yahya shrine for hundreds of years.

Her work has “centered on signage and symbology from Iranian and Islamic art such as pattern and miniature painting. (She is) also influenced by symbology used in American pop culture in particular, symbols generated by American media”. She relates a “near-eastern aesthetic with (her) western art education” creating a “dialogue that critiques dominant views of oppressed people”. Most of her work has to do with an intersecting of Iranian and Los Angles’ visual culture. She is interested in how power is given to images and how in turn that represents events. (For more on her other work, please visit her site: http://www.amitismotevalli.com)

For her piece Threshold of the Innocents and Martyred Motevalli has recreated a beautifully hand crafted scaled down version of a traditional shrine dedicated to “those who have lost their lives in recent homicides (in Los Angeles since January 2008) at the hands of Law Enforcement upholding occupation”. The walls of the room display an Arabic prayer that is said before a body is laid to rest in the ground.

by Nina Becker

While traditional Islamic art does not allow for any representations outside of pattern and images of nature, because depiction of the human form is idolatry which is forbidden in the Qur’an and therefore a sin against Allah, Motevalli’s piece displays representations of some of the men her piece is dedicated to. She says of these depictions: “Actually, in the Shia tradition, images are quite often used. That is why I’ve used them, but I also wanted to push the way we define “Islamic Art”. There is an inner dialogue that other Muslims (practicing or cultural) will recognize which looks to expand our definitions of Art/ritual”. During the opening of the piece, and every Sunday during the month of October, Motevalli stood inside the shrine writing on a glass wall boarding the inside of the shrine, the accounts of these men along side the accounts of victims of war slain in the Middle East or those who died as martyrs. One account reads: “Christian Portillo, 35 – July 23 Murdered by Sherriffs in front of his home in Lennox. He was waiting in his car for his girlfriend when the sheriff crept up beside him. Sherriffs claimed he reached down for something when he was shot, yet he was shot point blank in the heart. No gun, no drugs were found anywhere near him. Sherriffs also claimed that he was wanted drug dealer, yet everyone knew he was not.” Another reads: “Eddie Felix Franco, 56 – August 31Was a homeless man on Market St. in Inglewood. When police attempted to “sweep” him off of Market St., he refused. They asked him to put his hands in the air, but he refused. He never acted violently, or had a weapon, but he was killed for not obeying orders. The many bullets from the Inglewood police hit a passerby and Mr. Franco’s dog.”

Haram Eh Massoumeen Va Shohad Ha

The binary created between the East and West is beautifully exemplified in Motevalli’s shrine. She points out that “People live in similar oppressive conditions” and that these “dominant narratives have defined (the) third world”. While I’m sure there has been some controversies in choosing to depict some of these men as some of them were defying the police, the larger picture for Motevalli is not the so-called crimes that were being committed but rather the way the militant Los Angeles police choose to respond to such defiance. During our reception she spoke of the way that the Los Angels police are trained in that they are the most militant force in the country. This is important in the comparison she makes to those killed by military or other forces in the East.

To speak of the logistics of her piece, Relational Aesthetics and contemporary art more generally allows for work outside the traditional contexts of the institution, when asked about the shrine Motevalli says “I do consider the piece to be art. I think the piece is both art and a shrine (I did not add Holy to that title). I also consider shrines to be art…be they temporary, such as street shrines or more permanent like the shrine that my family cares for. There is also a genre of “Shrine” art or alters or sacred spaces. I don’t believe things are so concretely defined as shrine or art, they can be varying degrees of both, so the answer in terms of the performance would be that it was both as well”.

I then wondered why show it in a gallery (other than for funding issues)? She replied: “I was honored by being invited to be a resident fellow at 18th street. That invitation gave me access to space which is very much a privilege if you are not wealthy. Most of the people I know who love the piece can barely house themselves, let alone the piece. I thought it was a great opportunity for me to create and show the installation. It is the first run. It may be up somewhere far less “institutional” for another run. Another issue is that institutions have been inaccessible to many people of color, so if I can create the piece I want and open this door, I will”.

Why not show the media documentation of the performance along side the shrine? Motevalli: “The documentation was presented in the form of my writing. Anything that documents the space it’s self, I didn’t believe belonged inside the space for many aesthetic and symbolic reasons”.

I hope to come into contact with more of Motevalli’s work and would encourage Pitzer College to invite her back to speak. Her work is meaningful and important.

-Delaine Ureno