Hiding in a plain Sight
Sasha Shestakova
9th June 2020
In this text I intend to discuss the work of three female artists from Kazakhstan and Russia using the concepts of refusal and opacity. Firstly, I will discuss the artwork by Medina Bazargali from Kazakhstan. While revealing some of the operations of power, it acts as a refusal to follow the logic of the Russian or Western colonial gaze. Then, after a short walk, I will move on to discussing partial visibility and opacity. Like refusal, opacity is a way of turning one’s back to extractive logic of complete visibility. I will look at the work of two artists from Russia – Alexandra Sukhareva and Katia Khasina and discuss the ways in which opacity operates in their works.
Refusal
The work Talaq by an artist from Kazakhstan Medina Bazargali is about the “triple talaq” – Islamic law which allows men to divorce their wives by saying “talaq” three times either in person, on the phone or simply in a form of a text message, while the only way a woman can divorce her husband is to go through a complicated system of asking for permissions. In an interview, Medina Bazargali describes the reasons of this situation “that became increasingly popular, not only as a consequence of Islam spreading aggressively in Kazakhstan since its independence but also because of the absence of age restrictions for marriage.” Therefore, she connects the existence of the oppressive practice to the way it is used by the state and supported by the local legislation.
Thus this work criticizes the "return to the traditions" within the supposedly secular nation-state. In Kazakhstan reshaped traditions assert hierarchical gender relations, where the male and masculine have pre-eminence over female and feminine. “The return to the traditions” in Kazakhstan is not so different from similar processes in Russia, which tend to privilege the “traditional values” of an orthodox Christian patriarchal family. The “traditional values” are universal machines for the reproduction of the oppressive states apparatus.
Medina Bazargali’s work, while acknowledging the clearly sexist nature of the practice of Talaq, emphasizes the agency of the state, which renders a woman as completely invisible the moment she gets married. The installation is interactive: once a visitor enters the space and covers her head and face with a red piece of cloth, which is of the same colour as the traditional wedding dress, she is photographed. After the photo is taken, in a picture one can only see her eyes, while the whole body is morphed with the wall. The perspective of a camera mimics the gaze of the state: it is not the red cloth that conceals a woman after she gets married, it is the algorithm inscribed in the camera, that renders her invisible. Similarly, the laws of a state (which does its best to return to the “traditions”, while rendering invisible the women, who are affected by certain traditions that are oppressive) not the abstract Islam itself. I am clicking through documentation pictures, showing only the eyes of the installation-visitors, when I scroll too fast it feels like the eyes were also bricks in the walls. Even though in this I process I occupy a position, which might seem like the one of an outside observer, my position is situated as I am repeating the patriarchal gaze, which renders a woman invisible. By making the artwork participatory, the artist refuses the viewer any outside perspective, which tends to concentrate on the images of suffering but not on what produced them.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang theorized refusal as the turning back upon power, specifically the colonial modalities of knowing persons as bodies. Another work of refusal, according to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang is to “set limits to settler-colonial knowledge”. Talaq sets limits to the knowledge that see Muslim women as the victims of the abstract patriarchy and does not consider the agencies of nation-states and colonialism. As Talaq shows, the refusal requires positionality and the understanding of the absence of outside perspective, I will look at this more as I will discuss opacity.
A short walk
“Look there are frog-eggs in there!” – my sister Sonya screams while standing near a muddy puddle on a forest road. I can hardly see anything from a distance still holding our dog. The sun shines through the pine-needles and leaves and disturbs the calm opacity of frog-eggs, concealed by the mud from human and dog gaze. I am led by the sense of wonder and city-person curiosity so I come closer to look at what Sonya has found. Sonya is led by a need to reveal every hidden aspect and the absence of respect for the opacity of the other. She takes the longest stick she can find and causes as much disturbance to the puddle as possible so that she can see the eggs. (Who hasn’t done something similar in their pre-teen years?). After a while, we finally agree to leave future frogs alone. Hoping that they have survived our intervention, I keep thinking about the mud covering the eggs, and my thoughts keep rolling back to the opacity the mud created.
Towards the opacity
In one of the key texts on opacity, Eduardo Glissant discusses the solidarities, which could be formed with respect to mutual opacities. He sees the opacity as the impossibility to reduce anyone to the truth he would not have generated on his own. In a trialogue on Nervus Rerum following Glissant’s insights Kodwo Eshun proposes the definition of opacity as intimacy without transparency. We completely failed this opaque way of relating to the frog-eggs. Yet it is hard to abandon the idea of opacity after the first failure. Opacity is a way of relating, which does not privilege the full knowledge or a complete understanding of the other. Zach Blass contrasts Glissant’s concept of opacity with "identity politics" claim to visibility as a political platform and proposes seeing opacity as a tactic and a material condition. I will look at the production of opacities in two artworks, thus calling for a situated and differentiated approach to opacity.
Opacity of the document
Comb in the grass (small descriptive models that have turned into action) by an artist from Russia Alexandra Sukareva was the first presentation of the archival research of spiritual practices during the Siege of Leningrad (September 8, 1941– January 27, 1944) in Garage Museum of Contemporary art.
Sukhareva’s work makes partly visible ways of life, which escaped the official narrative due to the fact that any spiritual practices were legally banned in the USSR. They were located outside the Soviet modernity both on the legislative level, but also on a discursive one as it was impossible to even describe those practices in terms of the language, sanctioned by the Soviet Empire. The project narrative begins with the description of a common settlement of members of several spiritual societies - the Tolstoyan agricultural communes, theosophist collectives, anthroposophist and anarcho-mysticist groups – in the village of Guarek, near Sochi in the south of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. According to the project-text, it was possible because of common living practices mixed. It all ended abruptly:
In the 1930s, over 40 people were accused of promoting a boycott of the Soviet way of life, as part of the so-called Sochi case. As a result, the story of a common undertaking broke into a number of personal histories.
Sukhareva’s work consists of six volumes, each tells a singular story – about a person, a family or an object. However, during the initial presentation of the project, only four volumes were open for the viewers, the other two stayed closed and it was impossible to tell what was inside them. The viewer encountered a container with evidence, however, it could tell absolutely nothing.
Each of the volumes has its own time and space, the gaps between them were highlighted physically: in the exhibition space, the boxes with volumes didn’t touch each other’s sides. That way of installing was a materialisation of the principle of nontotalising empathy, described by T.J.Demos, the volumes were co-present but didn’t suppress each other.
The first volume is about theosophist Olga Obnorskaya, who received “dictations” (heard voices) during, before and after the siege and included pictures of her. The dictations, received by Obnorskaya, created an alternative space within the traumatizing one. The second volume includes pictures of some possessions that belonged to the family of the famous Russian spiritual artist Nikolay Roerich; they had left Petrograd before the Revolution and left their possessions with the Mitusovs family. The time of this volume was the fragmented time of the things, which bared witness to the traumatic events, yet, it could tell nothing in the human language. The third volume features a picture titled Future Moscow made by Misha Mironov, who escaped from Leningrad and managed to walk to Moscow, he hoped to then move to Central Asia, where his sister was, or to the North of Russia, where his mother was. On his way to Moscow, he was first captured by the German army, and later by the Soviet one. After his arrival in Moscow, he disappeared. The image presented a model of the future, which was similar to the future of the Soviet propaganda, but its context made the utopian linear time freeze. The fourth volume contains a Masonic watercolour from the beginning of the 19th century, which was acquired into the collection of the State Hermitage in 1941, however, its provenance is unknown. Several times – the early 19th century, the Second World War and the time of the viewer on Sukhareva's work – overlap one another, however, their exact constellation remains unknown. The documents in the volumes don’t contain much information, instead they highlight gaps and absences of knowledge. The perspective fluctuates, making any expertise impossible.
The opacity was weaved by partial bits of knowledge, unresolved uncertainties and partial visibility, which appear from the absence of outside perspective. This way of sensing radically opposes an extractive perspective, which tries to create “comprehensive” knowledge by seeing everything from a distance.
Weaving the opacity
Exhibition a — died-off nacre, a hollow riddle by an artist from Russia Katia Khasine discusses illustration. It consists of several texts, mostly black and white images that are hung on the walls of the ISS MAG gallery.
The first text of the exhibition says:
"There are three ways of reading:
- The image comments the text
- The text answers to the images
- The pleasure of rapture
- Indifference"
While walking through the exhibition one realizes that the relations between the texts and images are the ones of mutual opacity. Neither of them “makes the other of its image”: there are always gaps between texts and illustrations. As the text puts it: two twins had the same voice tone and were practicing singing as one. Firstly, there was no way it could happen. Secondly, what for? Images and texts generate its [their] own truth, but also interact with one another. In an image, illustrating the part with singing twins, two figures are holding poles for jumping, partly referring to the part of the text that says “this work is an acrobatic exercise in gloomy weather”, partly creating connections, independent from what the text or, to put it more accurately, the meaning making-making of text and images each went in its own direction, yet their threads crossed.
When analysing Katia’s work, I would reread the text and images several times in attempts to make sense in a more or less familiar way. I would scroll the text of the post-exhibition publication back and forth and it seemed that I was walking around sense in circles, but wasn’t able to come near it. The whole process of meaning-making resembled attempts to iron a piece of silk-cloth, slipping away from iron. Following Glissant I focused on the structure of the weave.
In the space the reading is embodied: one needs to walk through the process of reading of both images and texts. The moves, required to read the exhibition are: to come as close as possible, to make several small steps, to bend, to make several more steps and stops, to bend once more, this time a bit lower. Looking at an exhibition had its own specific direction: always clockwise, from the left wall to the middle one, then to the right. As a result one feels the familiar (western) process of reading with one’s body, realising that there is nothing natural about it.
The exhibition is rhythmical: the distances between illustrations and texts, the distances between grey canvas holding images and texts, the pearl pins creating micro-cuts on the surfaces. One has to pay the closest attention possible to “small actions” both coming from a viewer and happening inside the artwork: to eye-movements, to “the choreography of pearl-needles”, to the multiple scratches on the found image, to strikes through Ludwig Wittgenstein's quote. The artist writes: Small actions might not stop the disaster, yet they can slow it down; a disaster is a long succession of accidents. In this project, small actions support, one another, while keeping a distance. The rhythms, gaps and small actions in Khasine’s artwork weaved both connections and separations, thus sketching a way towards possible solidarities.
The walk continues.
As Sonya and I keep walking through the forest, our dog smells the ground, looking for mice. Yet, mice manage to hide in her and our plain sights, concealed by the sick grass. The dog tries to catch a mouse but fails as it escapes to invisible underground labyrinths.
Sasha Shestakova is an interdisciplinary researcher currently based in Moscow. She holds an MA Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths UoL. She is a part of research unit Distributed cognition cooperative (with Anna Engelhardt), which aims to disentangle post-soviet space as heterogeneous with specific attention to the materiality of bodies in the work of seemingly abstract machines. DCC projects include lntermodal Terminal, which facilities the dialogue around the possible space of decolonial resistance, using the intermodal terminal in Nakhodka, а port city in Primorsky Krai as an entry point; Caring for the Shaky Ground, performing cognitive cartography of (de) colonial irrigation infrastructures in Crimea. Her other projects include Constructing infrastructures for the futures, the investigation in infrastructures' construction through the agency of material labour; and symposium Alien processes: reproduction and time, which she co-organised as a Certificate student in the New Centre for Research and Practice.
Edited by Ira Konyuhova and Tamara Khasanova.