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JAMELIE HASSAN's ART INSTALLATIONS: The Ways That Art Reflects Identity, Memory and Territory |
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Jamelie Hassan’s work has focused on a myriad of issues and her commitment as an activist underpins most of her work. For Jamelie, travel is the creative spark and point of departure for many of her installations, exhibitions and projects that she has created in the course of her career. Writer Monika Kin Gagnon ’s thoughts on Jamelie’s installations may be described as cultural engagements with the politics of the everyday and how they are negotiated in relation to often repressive social and political forces. Throughout so many of Jamelie’s installations, a controlled juxtaposition of crafted and found objects, drawings, paintings, photographs and diverse forms of text are manipulated to form her message. Through her travels, Jamelie, born a Canadian of Lebanese parents, has become aware of the situation of those who are culturally displaced. She has travelled to Central and South America where she identified with the struggles of these people to reconstruct and maintain their own cultural identity, which had been hurt by colonialism. During her own travels to the Middle East , she has confronted society’s devaluation of humanity as well as her own rootlessness or displacement. A series of three installations entitled “ The Satanic Verses”, “ Midnights Children”, and “Shame” (1990) are particularly concerned with how art and writing come about as cultural expressions of resistance. Her instillations combine factual information, personal memories, and political views to these three books by the author Salman Rushdie, who like Jamelie, is displaced from his hereditary culture. In her first instillation of the trilogy, “The Satanic Verses”, Jamelie constructs a physical place with many layers. On the wall, positioned as if on a plate rack, are a series of photographs of a book burning of The Satanic Verses , inlaid into photos of architectural sites. These sites have rich golden buildings and flowing water, which is a symbol used in Islamic culture. These photos are also arranged around a dry fountain with “copies” of “The Satanic Verses” and small artifacts such as scattered pieces of cloth, and pieces of religious text. The dry fountain contrasted with the lush water in the photos leaves one with a sense of a dry or lifeless culture. The fire of the burning book is meant to remind one of the passions of the fanatic which can threaten those who choose to speak differently. The second of the trilogy, “ Midnight ’s Children”, refers to Rushdie’s novel about Indian children born at the stroke of midnight beginning India ’s independence. On the wall, photo images of the children encompass a central section around a large brass plate by Aly Aly Hassan inscribed “Midnight’s Children” in English and Arabic, with the name “Salman” in Arabic in the centre. The final sentence of the novel “ Midnight ’s Children”, written in a spiral in Gold lettering around the large brass plate on the wall, speaks the fate of the dispossessed children who lost a country in 1948. This quotation reveals Jamelie’s own concern with the inhumane treatment of some thousands of Indians. It reads, “Yes, they will trample me underfoot…reducing me to specks of voiceless dust…and a thousand and one children [will] have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both victims and masters of their times, to forsake privacy and sucked into the annihilating whirlpool…and to be unable to live or die in peace.” The photos of the children are echoed in the bottom of china cups on a brass table with wooden legs, her own son among them forged into the porcelain. The brass table is focused on the theme of fortune-telling, reading the thick coffee grounds in the bottom of an Arab coffee-cup. These children are meant to be psychically linked. To further support this idea of annihilation of those who are different she places among the glass cups containing the images of children, china books opened to reveal the burning fire of condemnation. The third and last installation in the trilogy, “Shame”, is considered the most personal of the three. Text mounted on the wall beside large paintings of ancient human sculptures juxtaposes an event in Jamelie’s life with a misogynistic excerpt from a 12 th century Persian romance. The personal event involves her being questioned and searched by a US customs inspector in 1987 who asked her many questions on her way back from Mexico, and on opening a parcel containing an ancient pre-Columbian Mexican goddess-like sculpture asks, “Is this pornography?”. In this installation, the viewer is made aware of the violations to her privacy as they also listen to a tape-loop of four messages on her answering machine, placed beside a dead telephone and a little clay figure in a nest of shredded paper on a small table, which speaks obscene rants of one of her callers. The text, “Is this pornography?” is repeated in large letters above her watercolour and gold-acrylic representations of the figurine in attempt to scream to us of the absurdity and pervasiveness of the discrimination of women, and the Persian romance gives the traditional context for this. It reads, “Woman does not keep her promise, not even one in a thousand. Woman does only what satisfies her. Woman’s friendship corrupts”. The questions that the US customs agent asks her are of particular interest to me. He first tells her, Q. I noticed your name is Arab. And she answers with, A. That’s right Q. Where are you born? A. Canada Q. You from Arabia ? A. No Q. What country are you from? And Jamelie replies yet again with, A. Canada Q. Where are your parents from? A. Lebanon It interests me because the question of identity is introduced and is made somewhat complex in this context. The questions could have ended when the customs agent asked her where she was born, and he insisted on pushing it further as if unsatisfied with her answer and questioning her identity, in a sense violating her. Should she consider herself Canadian because she is born in Canada ? Or should she consider herself Arab because of her name and where her parents are from? Or both? There is no simple answer. Christopher Dewdney states in his article, Material Knowledge:A Moral Art of Crisis, “…away from Canada she realized her sense of cultural displacement, not quite Canadian, not quite Arabic, was in some way a natural state for most of the world’s inhabitants.” In Jamelie’s travels, she has always attempted to do more than locate her own cultural roots, her concerns have transcended national boundaries to embrace solidarity with all victims of cultural colonialism and military oppression. People’s territory or the urban landscape carries with it the visible history of economic exchange, cultural displacement, ecological transformation and psychological alienation, and is reflected in her billboard installations called “Because… there was and there wasn’t a city of Baghdad”, and “Linkage”. Jamelie’s own perceptions of the people and culture of Iraq personally challenged those without any direct experience to consider both how they were informed and what they informed of regarding the Gulf war. In 1991, Jamelie Hassan installed her work on a public billboard in London ,Ontario . In bold type over a hand-painted picture of a mosque, it read: "Because … there was and there wasn't a city of Baghdad ”, which is in contrast to the falsified image of Iraq which dominated the press at the time of the Gulf war. The billboard challenged the presumptions behind the mass media coverage of the war and addressed a more personal aspect of the war that was suppressed by the media. The billboard revealed the limits of media in always advertising ideological content. The image was based on a photograph taken by Jamelie herself in 1978, when she lived in Iraq and studied Arabic for a year at the University of Mustansyria in Baghdad . For Jamelie, the billboard was part protest against the U.S. war on Iraq , part memorial for a ruined city. Another billboard installation entitled “Linkage”, portrays the real human and environmental cost of war. “Linkage” also incorporates image and text on a billboard outside the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon in 1993. The image is of “a forest of palm trees, from the marsh area of Southern Iraq ,” and the words: “40 tons of nuclear waste was fired by the coalition forces into Iraq during the Gulf war…”. Jamelie explains that this installation …“presents reminders of the continuing disastrous effects to the Gulf region of Operation Desert Storm during 1991. Among the under-reported details has been the Environmental Contamination of the Soil and Water through the use of radioactive bullets Recycled from American Nuclear Waste…International Medical Personnel suspect this may be the cause of the mysterious increase in cases of Leukemia among Iraqi children.” These billboards successfully express Jamelie’s outrage as an artist and activist. She is determined to give a voice to those culturally silenced and to challenge the sanitized image of warfare, and these two billboard installations ask the viewer to consider how they think about war by critically examining our own culture’s “stereotypical frequently media-generated attitudes”. In closing, Jamelie Hassan has consistently blurred the boundaries between her art and her political activity through mixed media installations, billboard projects and critical writing. She expresses attachment to the countries she has visited, her places of childhood, and pays tribute to her adoptive homelands. One needs to remember that “culture is a reality that forms and transforms itself particularly in immigrant countries, where people from around the world meet on a daily basis, where exchanges and influences multiply…and each one of us as a culturally-mixed human being [is] in constant evolution.” I will end on a quote from Jamelie Hassan’s piece called “Shame”, “I come from many places; I belong to many symbolic worlds; I am one of theirs, I am one of yours. What I live, what I express, is a line that comes to be added to the great text of all of us, born here or elsewhere, are in the process of writing”. http://www.fims.uwo.ca/olr/feb2603/art.htm http://www.yorku.ca/agyu/exhibitions/hassan.html# http://www.civilization.ca/cultur/cespays/pay1_14e.html |
