at the far edge of words
books | jamelie hassan by stephanie white
diaspora culture translation fami ly history
looking at a life
ی (Manuscript Page), 2005
Manuscript Pages, 1996
Jamelie Hassan is a London Ontario artist who currently has a survey of four decades of her work at Museum | London: At The Far Edge of Words . Curated by Melanie Townsend of Museum | London and Scott Watson of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, it will travel from London to Vancouver, Lethbridge and Ottawa over the next couple of years. The book accompanying the exhibition includes new essays by Monika Kin Gagnon, Dot Tuer and Andy Patton, and reprinted essays by Mireya Folch-Serra, Cliff Eyland and Scott Toguri McFarlane. Several of these writers also wrote in Ron Benner’s survey of his work that came out last year, Gardens of a Colonial Present . Both Hassan and Benner’s work comes out of a community of critical thought and art ranging from landscape to sculpture investigating migration and exile, coloniality and identity. Displacement is critical to Hassan’s project, despite the fact that she grew up in a large warm Lebanese family in London Ontario. This was a distant pre-9/11 London where in 1955 the first mosque in Ontario was opened, reported in the paper, films made, people danced – it was clearly celebratory. However, the world impinges: like Mahler, one leaves one’s family, one learns that the outside isn’t and wasn’t all lovely. Hassan’s work investigates her own positions in the world and how they are framed by experience, by critical theory, by historical discourse, by politics. This really is about growing into the world, rather than bobbing along on top of it. When one’s native place as a child is revealed to be a chimera – a temporary anchor in the larger and longer process of exile, one’s difference becomes the subject of one’s life. The loss of one’s native place in the world can be the result of war, occupation, high-handed colonial practice, persecution, racism, etc. The inaccessiblity of the native place amplifies it, enriches it, makes it roseate, makes it tragic. The loss of one’s native place can also be by economic choice, by restlessness, by sheer curiosity. The results are the same, homeland remains significant by its absence.
Mireya Folch-Serra quotes Judith Butler: ‘the notion of identity carries several burdens: the meaning of culture, the problem of historical formation and contextualization; the possibility of agency, social transformation, representability in both linguistic and political terms’. Folch-Serra sees these burdens represented in Hassan without minimising the complexities they entail. Almost everyone writing about Hassan’s work discusses the necessary entirety of a life as the subject of one’s art: Andy Patton quotes Joseph Kosuth on Ad Reinhardt: ‘in evaluating the work of Ad Reinhardt, all of his output must be considered, not just that aspect of his work which satisfies those conceptions of tradition maintained by official culture’. Both in criticism and production, the more that is excluded, the narrower the focus, the less validity it has. No matter how difficult, one’s own gaze must be turned to one’s own life and we must understand it as such. Most of Jamelie Hassan’s works are installations of ceramics, text, film, photography, recordings and painting – there is little media restriction: each object carries an idea, both on its surface and in its making, which is then installed in space: the space of a gallery or in the public realm, establishing extremely complex cross references between what Hassan has provided and what the viewer invariably brings to the installation both physically and as a cognisant being. It is perhaps a distraction to view the material substance of Hassan’s work – red embroidered slippers, eighteenth century Persian manuscripts, the headscarves of Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, neon arabic letters – as primarily cultural references. Of course they are cultural, but this work is not an object lesson in multiculturalism. These objects are culturally specific to Hassan , ranging from Canada to Argentina to Hong Kong, to Lebanon — it is her examination of them, the isolating of them, the pairing of them in a visual narrative that we must look at. Why look at the slippers? It is the close and sustained interrogation of a life, preferably one’s own life, that is the heart of this project. v
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On Site review 23 Small Things
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