ENACTING EMANCIPATION-an exhibition at A-Space gallery
The sixtieth memorial of the Palestinian Nakba
(catastrophe of 1948)
inspired this study of the interconnectedness of Indigenous experience
under colonialism.
Tannis intro-When addressing the similarity of colonial oppression(s) between the Indigenous peoples of North America and Palestine, it is crucial to remember the words of the late Edward Said, who stated that the task at hand was for the individual “to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, [and] to associate that experience with the suffering of others.”[I]
Born from this intention, Enacting Emancipation unravels a universal, international system of colonial technique and strategy in order to reveal diverse, localized modes of resistance. Cognizant of the dangers in homogenizing resistant cultures, the curators sought contrast in defining the individualized artists strategies of defense, which in turn elucidated the fact that the differences of defense were culturally based and inheritably Indigenous.
The importance of maintaining diversity was addressed by the late Anishnawbek scholar and activist Rodney Bobiwash, when he said…
We will reject the mediocrity of cultural homogenization and embrace the immense power of diversity forged in respect for the complementarities our different communities bring to the struggle. The heart of the struggle must be community. Although the struggle is international in nature, the site of conflict and resistance is local.[II]
Enacting Emancipation honors these distinctions in both the display of artwork as well as the structure of curatorial text.[III]
Tannis:
The universal nature of colonial strategy is predicated upon “the myth of emptiness” theory. Whereupon Indigenous peoples are viewed as living in a “state of nature”, without morals, government or civility, deemed to be forever thought of as; primitive, savage, backwards and inferior in comparison to euro-centrism. The belief that Indigenous peoples are without knowledge and unable to govern lands- is the myth which is used to justify colonial occupation. The ongoing confiscation of Indigenous land in both America and Palestine, is the continuation of such mythic belief. The artists of “enacting emancipation” aesthetically deconstruct the colonial “myth of emptiness,” through their revisionist portrayal of Indigenous identities, rooted (as always) in relation to land."
The heart of the struggle for Indigenous Peoples has always begun with Our profound relationships to Land, and the immediacy of needs in defending it. This relationship to Land is the preeminent, analogous essence amongst our nations. Although knowledge system(s) stemming from Turtle Island are not universal in nature, a common teaching – amongst an array of ideology – tells us that the Land we are fighting to protect – is Our Mother.
She is the living / breathing infrastructure that provides us with the essence of our Being; She nourishes Us with the basis of our inherent, epistemological system(s). Through these teachings we have come to know that WE ARE the Earths descendants; Our “Women – are the direct manifestations of Earth – in Human form.”
Erica Lord knows this to be true. Lord (re)defines her body / her land as being rooted from a particular ideology, born of the ecosystem of particular place. It is from this traditional place that Lord receives her power, to re-write / recover her context as an Indigenous woman. In the Sun Tan Series Lords body is written as the “site of conflict.” “Colonize This!” read the English words, branded upon skin, slithering up on flesh, toward mounds of thigh and buttocks, the language of imperialism impounded against body, attempting to exploit her land. Imagery embedded behind the psyche of a “colonial gaze,” reading Lords body only as exoticized savage, empty, there for the taking, the settler, master, preacher, man, who is wanting to harness her Lands. The racist’s own ideology is used as bait in Lords’ re-writing of the fantasy of their encounter, wherein Lord successfully undresses a universal ideology of oppression. For Lord lies not in waiting and NEVER in submission, rather she is prowled, painted, traditionally prepared for their encounter, in defense of her territory, resistant to the Rape of America saying “Colonize this” – you patriarchal prick, I dare yah.
Lords relationship to land is the gendered addition to the Artifact Piece, Revisited performance, (first performed by James Luna in 1987. Luna’s original performance challenged the taxonomic study of the American Indian. By inserting himself into the anthropological discourse as a living breathing animated Indian, Luna “un-wrote” the theories of race based representation). Lords (re)writing of the western taxonomic study of her body-as-artifact, challenges the notion that man is in control of her nature. Lords Lands – refuse to be contained – especially by a language not her own.
This strategy of recovery’ of body / land and culture is also evident in James Lunas Apparitions piece. An image consisting of five Grandfather Spirits (seen as smoke, transparent in the sky), is joined by five of their descendants (standing on the ground below). All men raise rattles and shakers (instruments of ceremony) to salute and honor the Spirits of their past, present and futures. Recovering memory, based in Land, moving forwards, a circular continuum, of warrior men, who portray the necessity of utilizing culture as a weapon of defense.
The colonial strategy of forcefully uprooting Indigenous nations from traditional lands is an attempt to remove us from culture and erase our inherent distinctions to Land. Stripped of sovereignty, dispossessed of Land, we are left fragmented, broken divided, missing parts of our epistemological foundations, upon which we are dependant for survival. For the descendants who’ve been disenfranchised from their lands and culture, Luna provides them with a chance to (re)connect. Situated directly below, (a ceremonial object that provides us with the ability to communicate with Ancestors). This peace pipe is no artifact – it’s still being used in an esthetic sense of ceremony. The work reconnects us to the Ancestors, who remind us that in order to (re)gain our strength and heal from oppressions, we need to reconnect with the traditional foundations of our land and culture.
Vicky:
Originating with the moment of forced exile from indigenous lands, John Halaka’s larger-than-life-sized figurative drawing memorializes the Nakba: the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that took place in 1948, when the state of Israel was created. Stripped of Our Identity and Driven from Our Land is built from a single stamp that reads “forgotten survivors.” Through the aggressive act of stamping the ink and paint onto the canvas, the artist has created a pounding (rather than a drawing). The rhythm of Halaka’s muscular action expresses “the harsh style [and] hand-to-hand struggle” that political theorist Frantz Fanon argues artists create when fully engaged in the resistance of their people.[IV] The monumental repetition of the phrase “forgotten survivors” dwarfs the viewer’s body. Standing before the pounding, viewers are encouraged to confront the violence and disorientation of this cataclysmic moment in history. At the same time, the rendered figures are devoid of specific cultural markers, thus rather than the Nakba, the work could evoke the Cherokee Trail of Tears for some viewers or the Jewish Holocaust for others, for as cultural critic Walter Benjamin has written, history can be perceived as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” [V]
Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From looks at familial and cultural fragmentation caused by the restrictions currently placed on the movement of Palestinians within their occupied homeland. Jacir’s photo- and text-based social intervention began with a question posed by the artist: "If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?" The question’s resonance relates to the fact that Palestinians are denied the right to return to their ancestral lands, as well as denied freedom of movement based on their citizenship status. Those in the West Bank and Gaza, for example, are stateless refugees and are essentially jailed within a maze of checkpoints and behind the apartheid wall – the Berlin-like Wall built by the state of Israel that is taking more Palestinian land and estranging Palestinian communities from one another. Jacir, however, has an American passport that allows her a somewhat privileged freedom of movement. In one request to the artist, Jihad, a man who lives in Ramallah and is denied the right to travel to Gaza to see his mother, asks her: “Visit my mother and hug and kiss her and tell that these are from her son,” In this work Jacir has made visible the absence and longing that haunts the intimate moments of those living under colonial rule.
Halaka’s pounding shows us the originating moment of removal from the land, while Jacir’s installation shows us the ongoing forced fragmentation of an indigenous community. These are some of the strategies – part of a larger project of genocide – that make possible the colonizer’s myth of terra nullius (empty land). By stripping people of their identity, driving them from their land, and denying them the possibility of return to a connected community, the colonizers’ hope is that these people will perish. In the words of the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, “the old will die and the young will forget.”
In North America the strategy of forcing the young to forget was enacted and supported by government policy. Beginning in the 1800s and continuing in some places until 1996, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in church-run residential schools, where they were forbidden to speak their languages, taught their culture was evil, and often physically and/or sexually abused. Rather than simply forgetting the moment of violent displacement, residential schools aimed to estrange Indigenous children from their families and their culture. This is a desired end for the colonial power, as the empty-land myth becomes successful when the survivors and their offspring no longer claim membership in the oppressed group.
After and during the forced estrangement and dispersal of colonized communities, and while our ancestry naturally continues to become mixed as we live in the world, James Luna’s Half Indian / Half Mexican triptych series suggests that we do not become half. Rather than loosing authenticity or the right to speak as a part of the colonized community, mixing instead causes an expansion where the mixed persons become links. The terminology of “half” suggests that something is not whole, that part of it was lost. Luna’s visual terminology suggests that he is doubly whole. Identity is fluid and fragmentary, yet Luna refuses to have the indigeneity of his identity dispersed. Rather than the estrangement that is forced and fostered by colonialism, Luna’s essentialism is self-aware and strategic. The strategy of defense that Luna offers here is one that keeps him linked to his inheritance. In other words, if there continues to be First Nations people then there continues to be someone with whom the occupier must settle land claims. And if there continues to be Palestinians then there remains the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state. What is at stake in claims to Indigenous identity in North America and in Palestine is the refusal to foreclose on the possibility of decolonization.
Tannis conclusion:
Together, the artists in this exhibition – James Luna, Emily Jacir, Erica Lord, and John Halaka – signify the individualized experiences of Fourth World peoples who have been stripped of context, denied distinction, and disenfranchised from traditional territories. Together, they present an immediacy of need in defending land and citizenry, the recognition of sovereignty, and their personal engagements in the quest for freedom.
-Tannis Nielsen & Vicky Moufawad-Paul, Curators
[I] Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. (Pantheon Books, New York, 1994), p. 33.
[II] Rodney Bobiwash, “Statement to the World Social Forum,” in Porto Alegre, Brasil, 2001.
[III] The curators’ belief in the necessity of articulating two distinctive First Voice pedagogies in the interpretation of these artworks was maintained with the hope that their unique readings would offer the audience a wider means of language to work from in the development of emancipatory knowledge.
[IV] Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press, New York, 1963), p. 220.
[V] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (Schocken Books, New York, 1988), p. 257.
