PART 1: WHOSE BODY IS VALUED?
The concept of ‘othering’ plays a very important role within the colonisation and Orientalisation of the black and brown body. ‘Othering’ means to alienate those that are intrinsically different from the idealistic human being and treat them in unjust ways (Said, 2003:40). ‘Othering’ is facilitated by a system of binaries which sees everything in society as polar opposites: “The binary logic through which identities of differences are often constructed – black/white, self/other” (Bhabha, 1994:3).
Activated by the dense and heavy history of colonialist occupation, oppositional binaries were applied to the construction of gender which saw society become dependent on the binaries of ‘masculine/feminine’ (Lugones, 2007:190). This is really important to how everything functions currently as the colonialists placed themselves in the masculine binary, and those colonised under the feminine binary. These genderised binaries then influenced not only ‘white/black’ within race, but the way that people from these races and communities in general were viewed and treated (Lugones, 2007:190). The masculine/feminine binaries came to represent:
· Human/unhuman
· Deserving/undeserving
· Civilised/ uncivilised
· Powerful/powerless
Therefore, ‘othered’ bodies under the feminine binary became ‘unhuman’, ‘undeserving’, ‘uncivilized’ and ‘powerless’ (Said, 2003:171), and the ideal human being came to be the cis-hetero white man who was deserving of life and had the most power - anybody who looks different is subjected to a colonialist gaze, stereotyping and marginalization (Lugones, 2007:190). Globally, we see women become the main subject of oppression and in Britain ‘othering’ applies largely to the lives of black and brown women.
Recognising the colonisation and Orientalisation of the black and brown body is absolutely integral in examining identity and place within institutional space. The identity of an individual determines not only whose labour, history and voice is valued, but also allows us to detect who can and cannot speak. Projections of otherness affects how institutions engage with the work and ability of black and brown people (Powell; Menendian, 2017). It is not a body that is valued, and thus their labour and history is not worthy of documentation, recording or preserving. The possession of space by the white masculine figure produces a censorship that lends itself as part of systemic abuse in institutions. The art world is an example of this.
The consequences of the colonial conquest by the British during their punitive expedition was the destruction and eradication of a large array of history (Horton, 2018). Archaeological looting, theft of stories and sacred knowledge, the selling of intricate and complex art, as well as the denunciation of who these things belonged to led to an epistemological violence (Horton, 2018) that has seeped into the contemporary arts and culture world. It continues to deny the preservation of heritage built by the colonised black and brown body.
In an article titled ‘Whose Heritage?’ for Third Text Journal by Professor Stuart Hall (Hall, 1999), he illustrates how labour, voice and presence is deemed worthy of preserving dependent on the person’s identity. He points out the outcome of this colonial system: “No proper archive, no regular exhibitions, no critical apparatus, no definitive histories, no reference books, no comparative materials, no developing scholarship, no passing-on of a tradition of work to younger practitioners and curators, no recognition of achievement amongst the relevant communities... Heritage-less.”(Hall, 1999:10). Hall recognises how the black and brown colonised body has been wilfully ignored and systematically written out of history. The colonised body is thoroughly deprived of the preservation of their history and existence as artists, curators, archivists and researchers. Whiteness continues to pervade the art world and its museums, galleries and archives today (Reading, 2015:401).
Hall explains that these dynamics are “always inflicted by the power and authority of those who have colonised the past, whose versions of history matter. These assumptions and co-ordinates of power are inhabited as natural — given, timeless, true and inevitable”(Hall,1999:6). This is witnessed in the racially exclusive narratives that are presented in museums - art history is told as if it never existed anywhere else other than the West (Kee, 2004). When hints of inclusion or diversity are presented, they are either a subject victim to the white gaze or as an artist organised under an ‘ethnic’ theme that prioritises the artist’s ‘othernesss’ or ‘identity’ rather than their artistic ability and work (Kee, 2004).
These wider systems of structures that influence the ideological eurocentricity (Bhabha, 1994:31) in institutional spaces create disparities in experience and attainment for artists and practitioners from non-white backgrounds. The long standing cycles of exclusion cause for an under-representation within archives especially.
PART 2: ARCHIVING THE WORK BY WEST ASIAN AND NORTH AFRICAN WOMEN ARTISTS
A trait of colonial and Orientalist violence is the deliberate destruction and hiding of historical information by women, but especially the black and brown colonised woman. Due to laws and regulations (National Women's History Alliance, 2013) put in place by supremacist male counterparts, women as second class citizens were never granted accolades for their inventions and accomplishments. The institutionalisation of art and the role of archive has meant that gender operates the same way in the museum and archive sector - the same patriarchal gaze and act of ‘othering’ has meant that women practitioners and their work in the arts were never documented, recorded, preserved or rightfully credited.
In the 80s and 90s, many feminist activists and artists in the art world used their work explicitly as a political act, addressing the lack of representation of women artists in institutions, and more broadly, art history: “Earlier work on representation in museum exhibits tended to focus on counting the gaps and silences relating to women and the dominance of representations of men. This, in turn, led to an emphasis on the development of special exhibitions featuring women to fill these absences.”(Reading, 2015:401). Groups formed such as the Guerrilla Girls who work anonymously (Tate, 2019) or the Women of Colour Index led by Rita Keegan began to draw out the disparities within art institutions (Goldsmiths, 2019). Spaces then formed that actively exhibited, collected and archived the work by women and women of colour: “part of the impact of gendered heritage work has also involved feminist activists developing women’s museums, women’s collections and women’s memorial sites, as well as lobbying heritage charities, organisations and governmental bodies to fill the gaps of women’s history”(Reading, 2015:404).
Of course, institutions reacted to this and began addressing the lack of diversity in their spaces. Exhibitions that approached the “issues relating to questions of representation” (Reading, 2015:401) seem to have done so to prove the West’s true democracy that actually only existed as a fantasy and idealized goal:
“We see it reflected in different ways: in how the texts supporting art works and framing exhibits are written by museums; in the attempts to make explicit the 'perspective' which has governed the selection and the interpretative contextualisation (…), in the exposing of underlying assumptions of value, meaning and connection as part of a more dialogic relationship between the cultural institutions and their audiences; and in the tentative efforts to involve the 'subjects' themselves in the exhibiting process which objectifies them”(Hall, 1999:8) The proof for the lack of success is the continuity of this discussion, as a new generation of artists continue to feel as “invaders of space” (Puwar, 2004:57-58) whose body does not reflect the white masculine figure, and does not belong within institutions related to arts and culture (Puwar, 2004:57-58).
It gets more problematic when observing the role of West Asian and North African women. The West’s theme is that they are deemed uncivilised and inferior to white women (Lugones, 2007:189). Not only have they also been structured as outsiders in terms of institutional and political power but the stereotypes of West Asian and North African women as ‘oppressed’ by their brown male counterparts (Spivak, 2010:5) has complicated the relationship between West Asian/North African women and arts or cultural practices.
It is important however to also observe the political environment of the 70s-90s in Britain. During this time, the anti-racist movement in non white communities developed the idea that anyone affected by racism could identify as ‘politically black’ (Brinkhurst-Cuff, 2016): “'ethnic minority communities' from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent, whose presence in large numbers since the 1950s have transformed Britain into a multicultural society”(Hall, 1999: 9). The unity of specifically South Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities saw militancy against injustices in Britain affecting their living conditions, worker’s rights and more. In addition to this, women’s groups such as the Brixton Black Women’s Group and Southall Black Sisters comprised of members from South Asian and Afro Caribbean communities that worked together against inequalities affecting women of colour (Roper, 2014). The term ‘politically black’ itself came to gain extreme political weight: “black is a political colour, not the colour of your skin… the colour of oppression today is black”(Roper, 2014). ‘Politically black’ therefore represented the shared experiences of oppression between South Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities, and helped build a solidarity between the groups against the fascist and white supremacist racism that was occurring at the time (Brinkhurst-Cuff, 2016). Although the West Asian and North African community wasn’t as involved in these movements, perhaps due to their later arrival and community growth in Britain, ‘political blackness’ did seep into the art world and influenced not just archives, but also the movement of many artists at the time: “Everywhere, universalisms of every kind were being unmasked and historicised. No social category – gender, race, sexuality – seemed immune to re-thinking. The same was true of key concepts like resistance, domination, culture, agency, power and subjecthood”(Mani, 2014:4).
As aforementioned, several feminist activists and artists began moulding their own spaces to exhibit and preserve their own work. Hall explains in ‘Whose Heritage?’ for Third Text Journal that: “these communities should now be culturally represented in mainstream British cultural and artistic institutions. Our picture of them is defined primarily by their 'otherness' — their minority relationship to something vaguely identified as 'the majority', their cultural difference from European norms, their non- whiteness, their 'marking' by ethnicity, religion and 'race'. This is a negative figuration, reductive and simplistic”(Hall, 1999:9). The Woman of Colour Index archived specifically the work by Black women artists and spaces such as the Woman’s Art Library based at Goldsmiths University (also run by Keegan) actively set out to work with women from non-white backgrounds to collect their work into the archives (Goldsmiths, 2019). This saw a rise in South Asian and Afro-Caribbean representation in the art world, with women artists taking up the space they deserved.
Due to the West’s archaic ways of thinking, there was not only a natural assumption that ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’ were simply Western inventions (Hall, 1999:5), but the Orientalisation of the brown woman from the ‘Arab World’ meant that stereotypes portrayed them as victims of oppressed societies (Spivak, 2010:5), with no space to become art practitioners. This excluded the work of several women from West Asia and North Africa, since the concept of West Asian/North African/Arab artist didn’t exist in the 70s. Rasheed Araeen expands on this through Mona Hatoum: “She positions herself as a black artist, understanding ‘black’ as a political stance and result of a shared history of colonial domination”(Araeen, 1988:33) - her identifying as a ‘black artist’ was specifically in relation to the term ‘black’ representing oppression. This contextually suited her work which focused on themes such as political conflict (Wafa, 2017). Hatoum came to be one of the very few to identify in this way, which explains why when looking at archived work by women artist in the 70s-90s, you will mostly find the work by a variety of Black women artists, South Asian women artists….and then Mona Hatoum.
The political environment of this time was alsoevident in the commercial sector of the art industry as the auctioneering of contemporary and modern Middle Eastern art only came about in the late 2000s – it was especially disregarded after 9/11 as the art world was impacted by the political context of the post 2001 setting (Said, 2003: xiii). The Orientalisation of the brown body heightened the stereotype of it being a threat to the West (Said, 2003: xiii). There was also no such thing as cataloguing or archiving “Middle Eastern” art apart from homogenous categories such as ‘Islamic Art’ (Wafa, 2017) until the establishment of economic free zones which saw the opening of “Christie's in Dubai and hosted the first auction of modern and contemporary art in the Middle East in 2006”(SMITHSONIAN.COM, 2018).
CONCLUSION
Regardless of this slow development, todays art world continues to build barriers that prevent the preservation of work by West Asian and North African women artists, curators, researchers and archivists. Governmental structures are encouraging the closing of borders which is heightening Islamophobia and the racialisation of religious women. The art world’s inconsistency in standing against “cultural displacement and social discrimination” (Bhabha, 1994:8) will see less articulation of cultural differences in a positive light, but also West Asian and North African women will continue to be unpresentable in the museums.
PRIMARY RESEARCH: THE WEST ASIAN AND North African WOMAN’S ART LIBRARY
As a result of the representation that West Asian and North African (WANA) women have been starved of, and taking note from Araeen’s idea of asserting yourself and your identity to “be located within the history or historical continuity of our struggles against colonial and neo-colonial domination” (Araeen, 1988:37) I have decided to build a West Asian and North African Women’s Art Library (WANAWAL). Drawing from The Woman’s Art Library situated at Goldsmiths University, I have generated research that consists of three parts, using a methodology which would write a history of the world that does not place Europe at the centre of the narrative. There is now room for women of all aforementioned communities to create their own platforms under their own terms, absent from the patriarchal and white gaze. The two main parallel collections of the WANAWAL (physical and digital) go hand in hand in relocating, redefining and controlling the presentation of WANA women.
PART 1
For the first part of my research I looked up different libraries and institutions that archive the work by women or people of colour especially. I proceeded to contact Glasgow Women’s Library, The Feminist Library and The Women’s Library (LSE), The Woman’s Art Library (Goldsmiths) and the African and Asian Visual Artists Archive. I emailed them all with an introduction into my research, the project I was building, and then attached a set of interview questions (see appendix) for them to answer. Only The Feminist Library got back to me with answers (see appendix), and not all questions were answered.
Due to the lack of information I had, I proceeded to email Althea Greenan again, the curator of the Woman’s Art Library. She got back to me eventually and I arranged with her an appointment to spend the afternoon at the Woman’s Art Library to interview her face to face about the way she runs the archive, the material she collects and to also observe the way the Woman’s Art Library is structured and organised. I had recorded the interview, however due to file corruption, could only transcript some parts. Luckily I had also taken notes whilst speaking to her and took pictures of the material she had shown me.
Our conversation was very organic. I began by explaining to her what my idea was. I then proceeded to ask her about her role at the library and what the Women's Art Library consists of. Although I prepared a list of questions to ask her (the same questions I had sent to the other organisations), I only got to ask 3 of the intended questions due to the fluency of our conversation as the trajectory took a different path. She was naturally giving me information without my asking; I was gaining the information I needed without influencing her thought pattern.
The questions I had arranged for all organisations to answer focused mostly on who is deemed worthy of belonging in the archive. The reason I went for this approach was because I wanted to find out whether there was room for WANA women artist to exist within these spaces, but also if these institutions were actively engaging in decolonisation. The Feminist Library admitted “Our collection is quite dated, and I feel as if material on intersectional and LGBTQIA+ discourse isn’t well represented” (Evans-Hill, 2019). When I explained this to Althea, she stated that it was something she couldn’t necessarily relate to: “I started off political but I ended up political too”. Admittedly, it was refreshing to see a white woman utilise her privilege in a way that elevated the voices of not just women in general, but especially those from marginalised communities.
After our conversation, I had asked Althea to share with me the work by WANA women that existed in the archive. Although there was not a significant amount at all, she showed me a book made in 1999 by Siumee H. Keelan, a curator from the UAE titled ‘Contemporary Arab Women’s Art’. In the book existed a listing of several women artists from the ‘Arab World’ whose work was also in the slide collection that is archived in the library. Ideally, the work by these artists would eventually exist in the WANAWAL also.
PART 2
The second part of my research is inspired by how Althea runs the Woman’s Art Library and how the archives is structured/organised. At the Woman’s Art Library, the work of artists is placed into archival boxes and categorised alphabetically. I decided to purchase three boxes to archive the work by three women artist from the WANA region, but who are currently based in the West. The artists are Estabrak Al-Ansari, Iraqi artist based in London; Khadija Baker, Kurdish artist based in Montreal; Moza Almatrooshi, Emirati artist based in London.
The process of creating the boxes has been lengthy but had to be done delicately. I did not want to take the work of an artist based on the fact that I personally wanted their work to be archived. I wanted them to be equally invested in the idea of WANAWAL and the archives. I did not want to conduct the process without their permission, approvals were also documented. This is perhaps the reason proceedings took a little longer, but it was important for me to gain each artist’s trust. The overarching goal was to not duplicate the actions of institutions who use material created by the black and brown colonised body to only further themselves.
Alongside building these separate boxes of each artist’s work, I interviewed them. The form of interviewing was different with each artist. Due to the time difference between London and Montreal, I interviewed Khadija via email and communicated with her throughout the entire research process via email too. I also kept in contact with Moza via email throughout the research process however used Skype to interview her, which I recorded with her permission and later transcribed. With Estabrak, I was able to gain information from her via a few means. We communicated via email and phone, the interview questions were sent to her via instant messaging services, which she then replied through a recording that I transcribed. All these methods used were to accommodate the artist, as I did not want to impose any particular method as comfort in their means was my paramount concern. I asked the same interview questions to all three artists. They began with an introduction into their own practise and how they work. The questions then moved into the topics of visibility and how they place themselves within institutions. The interview was intended to be an insight into the artist themselves. What was interesting was how each artist naturally spoke on the essence of archiving and ‘othering’ without me having used that word necessarily.
The transcription of Moza and Estabrak’s interviews was a very lengthy process. As it was my first time transcribing, I was unsure of how it should be structured and edited. I decided that I did not want to force Western academic standards on their voices, so I transcribed their recordings word for word, and did not edit any of the answers Khadija sent to me via email.
Following these interviews, I asked them to donate any material they would want to include in their box. I also began researching into each artist’s exhibition history and began collecting any leaflets/posters/magazines/essays/articles that contained the artist’s name or work. Some material was only found online or donated by the artist in digital form - depending on the quality, I printed out many items. I also added a pomegranate into Moza’s box, as her practice is performance and food based.
Lastly, I used the material they donated to me to create a catalogue about them. The catalogue consists of their bio, CV, the interviews I did with them, images of their work and lastly screenshots of their presence online. The catalogue is placed in each artist’s archival box.
PART 3
The political environment of today means there are different ways of creating platforms. Although the WANAWAL has the physical aspect to it, I wanted to make use of the digital age we live in, inspired by Reading’s explanation of the relationship between feminist heritage and digitization.
Ideally (perhaps eventually) the WANAWAL will exist online as an archive itself for not only all curators/researchers/other artists to access information, but also the general public. I created a template of what the digital archive would look like, and what information institutions and the public would be able to see. The digital archive is divided into region; name (alphabetically) and then when you choose the name of a specific artist, you will be able to see links to their bio, CV, images of their work, any articles of them online, their website/social media amongst any other material related to them. The amount of material would be different for each artist depending on how much there is.
It was important for me to create something digitally in order to make the WANAWAL as inclusive as possible. I am hopeful that this will give people the opportunity to contribute and donate names and material to the archive from across the globe. I am also hopeful that it will bring out the ability and achievements of WANA women artist that have purposely been hidden as a result of the epistemic violence that colonialism has generated.
The digital archive is shaped very broadly. I have also given myself a parameter around collecting by focusing the archive on a specific identity and pursuing the idea that WANA women never get represented in full. I am giving WANAWAL the opportunity to have material added to it constantly. I have faith it can be a starting point in what feels and presents like a vacuum for these communities.
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