JAMELIE HASSAN

Jamelie Hassan produces many installations on research and material from her travels through Mexico and Cuba, Europe and Middle East, Hong Kong and China. She examines historical realities through contemporary eyes, and in doing so realizes her own sense of cultural displacement. Her cross-cultural travels in Europe, Central and South America and Middle East has reflected in a body of work highly conscious of the fields of power and politics of representation.  It was when on a trip to Central & South America, visiting Mexico, Columbia, Cuba and Nicaragua that she became a social being, identifying with the struggles of these people to maintain and reconstruct their own cultural identity, fractured by economics and cultural colonialism. This led into her first show in 1976; Forest City Gallery, marking this example. While in the Middle East, Hassan was plunged into a moral crisis and caught into a nightmare of urban welfare. She felt directly, the same bodily forces that had historically ravaged the Latin American countries she had visited years before.  Here she confronted a sudden devaluation of humanity, and a terrible confirmation of her own rootlessness of double colonialism; her identity lay transfixed in the rubble of Beirut. Jamelie Hassan is deeply interested in locating collective and subjective sites for resistant and transformative readings of dominate social texts. Her work intermingles elements of historical information, insisting on links between subjectivity and political and cultural realities.  She employs visual language that embodies an alternative representational practice, one, which eschews didactic and rhetorical in favour of allegory, metaphors and testaments. “They are material commodities of knowledge facilitating tactile transactions.” In 1982, while perusing historical and linguistic texts, Hassan chanced upon a description of several ‘slave letters’ sent from captive slaves to their relatives. These letters were composed of objects, bits of cloth, rocks, etc. whose cultural connotations were unmistakable to the recipients.  The ‘material language’ was culturally inviolable, transmitting knowledge through symbolic and common objects; this was exactly what Jamelie had been working towards for years in her research. Slave Letter became an objective verification of Jamelie’s methodology, where she recreated one of these slave letters in a style she coined ‘social actualism.’ An oppressed culture, whose individuals transcend the captor’s censorship through intrinsic cultural strength, was being understood here through the connotation of objects. Along the same lines, in The Oblivion Seekers (1985-6), Hassan takes historical ruins that do not exist as counters to play with, but as realities whose meaning binds her to them, demanding to be heard. These ruins are bits and pieces of things forgotten, things lost and sometimes found, a fragmented past trying to shape a meaning for the present. Her art then becomes largely of documentation, turning historical realities into her own memories of a forgotten past.   “Textual references are really common in my work as text is in the Islamic tradition of manuscript illustration or embellishment. I feel words are paramount, and language has always been THE communication device within Arabic culture. It is such a potent force; if anything is revered it’s the power to communicate, whether it’s oral or written communication or decorative Arabic script.” In L’espace de L’alphabet-II, Hassan asks her viewers to question definitions of identity as belonging exclusively to realm of language. In this installation she presents various cultural artefacts in a replica bookshelf, originally designed to hold rare books. The installation includes two videos where two children are filmed over a two-year period.  Topsy Turvy Land includes children who investigate the relationship with Arabic geography, history and language as they discuss efforts to learn Arabic as they move through the framework sites of communication.  Les Langue du Monde is set in a library where a third person reads in French text on Arabic language. Both films move between fragments of English Arabic and French languages.   “May they never again be buried without their names spoken.” Jamelie Hassan’s work in the early 90s explores aspects of language, narrative and translation.  In April 1995, a series of discussions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, ‘ Locating Communities, ’ Hassan and Homi K. Bhabba had a conversation entitled “ Identity & Cultural Displacement.”  Here they discussed issues concerning her latest installation of works in an exhibition entitled Aldin’s Gift ; a manuscript that found itself in the deconstruction space of an interdisciplinary project due to a gift by Aldin Rashid of Vancouver.  Her work in this installation dealt with cross-cultural and trans-historical references, where the re-presentation of the past in the present uses the notion of ‘third space’ where different cultures intersect. Some of the works included; The Conference of the Birds (1991); Si-Mirgh a la Montage du Lotus, Chine (1993); Even Onto China (1993-6); The Copyist (1995); Good News (1996), drew upon existing texts, parables and artefacts from a number of different cultures, each being interweaved and re-written with personal history and experience. One piece in particular, The Copyist , consists of a copper diacritic and accent marks of Arabic Script on wall, utilizing visual devices in relation to sound and verbal enunciation. The infant in the centre of the installation relates to the emergence of language in relation to a child as a site of learning, corresponding to Hassan’s own introduction to spoken Arabic and potential, multiple positions as mother, assuming the role of the manuscript’s copyist. Through this space she transposes archival activity into the gallery, offering the viewer a more intimate and personal engagement; moulding forms of an intimate journal or diary with archival information. A female copyist whose foot rocked her son’s cradle while she wrote inspired the piece. “What the process of translation metaphorically taken does is it allows you to see transformation as a continua, as an ongoing process, not, to rest with abstract notions of identity and abstract notions of similarity and abstract notions of difference.” Homi K. Bhabba’s theories of the radicality of deconstruction to the analysis of Imperialism and Post-colonialism constructions of notion were highly influential to for Hassan. They tended to expose the tenuousness of authority and discuss how the production of meanings and cultures are never fixed nor unified. He rejects notions of binarisms or polarities of opposing social forces, setting the stage for a complex working of overlapping spaces between the so-called opposing forces.  His theories around cultural translation are inspirations from Walter Benjamin; to understand the process of cultural interaction, one must catch it as it is actually happening as a process.   “Rare and beautiful things wisely collected herein instruct the eye to see as never before seen all the things that are in the world.” Homi K. Bhabba was not the only theoretical influence on Jamelie Hassan’s artistic expressions.  In the field of anthropology, Hassan looks to Claude Levi-Strauss, a linguist who believes that language has a phonemic structure.  These particular influences are seen through her installation entitled Vitrine 448, where Hassan insists on bringing into presence the repressed registers of Western discourse, even as she acts to elude the fixity of a binary structure.  It intersects the basic duality at all levels while acting to destablize the existing construction of established knowledge, revealing partially of its truth mobilization of set of questions: questions framed in turn by alternative epistemologies, discursive practices and political understandings.   Both structural linguistics and structural anthropology are predicted on a binary model, and a dualistic relation often characterized culturally by the hierarchy between the two terms.  Levi-Strauss believes that the parts that acquire their value and meaning through oppositions and correlations to other parts within the governing system, are distinct from having an intrinsic meaning, so human culture might then be seen to have a basic structure analogous to those of language. What was revolutionary about structuralism was in its dismantling or dethronement of an already integrated ‘I’ at the centre of all ideological discourses.  The moment that Hassan frames her installation, Vitrine 448 , is yet another turn in this theory. It is a recalling to the presence of the ‘I,’ the subject, the figure of history.  The ‘I’ of Hassan is of a female subject, an object of exchange among men where it is the ‘I’ of non-Western subjectivity. The object of study by Western science, the ‘I’ who for so long was looked at and spoken for, looks back to the lookers and mimes his speech.  The miming for Hassan is of an ironic nature; scrupulously she copies the format and categories of Levi-Strauss’ distinction system of archival file cared, setting a parallel narrative with her own photographic images, reference, categories and text.