Issue 03

12
ARTS & LIFE
you draw your inspiration from?
AS: There’s a performance artist named Ana
Mandieta, I like a lot of her works but she really
incorporates her body into the way her
pieces are read. Many of them have these
intersections of her body and landscape or
her body and different materials and the
ways that she can use her body to convey
something to a viewer. It’s really personal
but it’s also very moving and vulnerable.
For Deface I was interested in the
idea of the psychodynamics of subjects and
objects, the ways that we read bodies, situate
them and visualize them. One of the
pieces was kind of paying homage to her.
Liminal was an outline I did on a sheet and
then I had my partner trace my body with
red paint and stitched that outline of a body
onto another bedsheet. I thought it was very
vulnerable but personal because these are
domestic objects that experience so much
of us in the ways that we use them. It was
kind of playing on this idea of a body that is
marked itself on an object but it’s not there;
this idea of absence and presence. I think
underlying a lot of this was ideas of uncanniness
and death drives. When you see the
outline you think someone killed themselves
or [you think of] the way police investigations
work. I thought a lot about her and then
expressionist painters and the ways they’re
using colour cause I wanted colour to be a
big element in this.
UG: How did the themes you explore disrupt
space?
AS: There were parts of the exhibit that I
could tell was not foreseen by a lot of the
people organizing it and was also something
that, I guess, you wouldn’t expect from a
student-run gallery or from a student. One of
the pieces that I’m referring to was _______
(read: blank): the journal entry and the bed
sheet came from an event that I was experiencing.
I went through an abusive event
and the only way I could forget and remember
it was to write it. My safety counsellor
told me to start writing things down and I
didn’t want to because when you go through
trauma, well at least for me, I kind of get
very mechanical and close up. I don’t always
feel the need to translate what is happening
mentally outside of myself, to externalize it.
I had to explain the text that was
written because it’s not clear at first until you
get to the end and I guess you can sort of
piece it together. I had to explain that to my
teacher and people who where they cause
they thought it was a narrative of about the
mannequin. No, this is actually my experience
of being defaced and being stripped
of my agency and my ability to be, live and
thrive in a healthy manner. Also, just the
idea of what we think of performance artists
as like white people who do all this weird
shit and no one understands it. To bring your
identity into that and into these spaces that
are obviously dominated by whiteness was
something that felt a bit disruptive and vulnerable.
I’m not sure how it was received
by everyone. It was the idea of—and this is
something that gets spoken about in art and
in unhealthy and healthy ways in Muslim
communities— it’s like you’re allowed a certain
amount of agency as a woman but once
you start crossing boundaries and really expressing
yourself the way you want to, then
it’s not okay. How do we speak about these
ideas and these conversations? That’s also
something that was worrying me. You can
own your identity to an extent but once it
gets too personal, you start worrying about
who’s reading this, who’s gonna talk about
this...so there was that element.
The idea that displaying Muslim
identity onto walls and very explicit, bare
and present, that felt a bit disruptive. I think
a lot of people were pleased with it cause
you don’t really assume that you will start
mattering enough to be located in these
spaces, I think that intrigued people...I was
thinking a lot about like how do we combine
my ideas of monstrosity, ugliness, pain,
hurt and catharsis and embed it into photograph?...It
just felt more empowering to
have these unconventional portrayals.
UG: What did you intend the takeaway
be for gallery attendees?
AS: I’m a very private person but this exhibit
almost felt very open to me in some
sense. I didn’t want to make art that was
very detached from who I am so I just
wanted that element in there. I have a diary
entry written on a sheet and that was
something that is directly connected to me
as opposed to these other things more abstract
in nature.
Just the idea that of thinking about
bodies and thinking about spectacle and visual
economies, the way they read bodies,
faces and things that make us feel uncomfortable.
There were mannequins and they
really freaked people out. One of the mannequins
were also bandaged so there’s this
idea of [wondering], ‘Is this supposed to be
human?’. It’s not and that’s why it’s making
us very uncomfortable and we can’t see
them, which is also playing on this discomfort;
the idea of this unreciprocated looking
and trying to figure out what is underneath
these things.
You get those comments a lot
where you look people who wear the hijab
or burqa, people come up to them and say,
‘I want to see your face’, ‘Do you have hair
underneath?’. There’s always this idea of
wanting to strip and wanting to bare things
to see them. No one realizes how politically
embedded that can be. This idea of
stripping layers is also an analogy towards
understanding who you are as well. The
idea of unravelling someone to find out who
they are, getting to know them at their bare
bones. I think that’s something that drives a
lot of us towards ourselves and others.
www. the-underground.ca NOVEMBER 3 - NOVEMBER 30, 2016
VOLUME 36, ISSUE 03