Light and Shadows

MISBAH-: Mona Hatoum's body of work manipulates the intrinsic qualities of materials, often appropriated from the local culture, to subvert an object’s familiar function within the space and site of the exhibition.This strategy is clearly at work in Misbah (2006-7) a kinetic installation at Darat al Funun. Misbah, the Arabic term for lantern, was originally created in 2006 for an exhibition at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. The work is composed of a constantly rotating brass lantern incised with the figures of soldiers and eight-pointed stars. Upon entering the space, the viewer is drawn to a soft, mesmerizing light in the darkened room. On the room’s walls and ceiling, the circling lantern casts the silhouettes of soldiers brandishing guns, constantly pursuing one another in a perpetual cycle that engulfs the visitor in its dizzying motion.

The installation, which at first invokes happy childhood memories of lanterns popular during Ramadan, is abruptly invaded by the soldiers so that the work becomes a metaphor for lost innocence and a childhood interrupted by violence and conflict. No matter where the viewer stands in the space, his/her body becomes the central axis of this celestial motion that evokes the purity of Mandalas or Sufic dance, a purity eclipsed by the soldiers’ multiple shadows whose perpetual rotation is a metaphor for the futility of war.

In the context of Jordan, a country that prides itself on its relative political stability in a region beset with conflict, Misbah destabilizes this status quo by threatening the safety and comfort of the ‘buffer zone’ that claims to shield from violence. The viewer’s unsettling encounter with Hatoum’s work is further accentuated by the physical setting of the exhibition spaces at Darat al Funun. Housed in a 1920s renovated home, the galleries’ thick stone walls muffle the surrounding urban noise and maintain a cool interior typical of the tranquil and sheltered spaces in Islamic architecture. The serene and contemplative environment of the building contrasts with the emotions elicited by the installation.

 a country that prides itself on its relative political stability in a region beset with conflict, Misbah destabilizes this status quo by threatening the safety and comfort of the ‘buffer zone’ that claims to shield from violence. The viewer’s unsettling encounter with Hatoum’s work is further accentuated by the physical setting of the exhibition spaces at Darat al Funun. Housed in a 1920s renovated home, the galleries’ thick stone walls muffle the surrounding urban noise and maintain a cool interior typical of the tranquil and sheltered spaces in Islamic architecture. The serene and contemplative environment of the building contrasts with the emotions elicited by the installation.

 

   
Nalini Malani's "In Search of Vanished Blood " is another work which uses light and shadows.It introduces us to the pan-cultural, timeless mythology she has woven from iconographic elements and touches of the irrefutably modern. This narrative reveals itself fully with even more layers and subtext in the large, cavernous room that houses “In Search of Vanished Blood” (2012), a multi-channel projected video stretching and overlapping across every wall combined with larger-than-life, image-covered transparent cylinders suspended from the ceiling, spinning slowly and casting ever-shifting shadows. Perhaps one explanation for the collision of sensuous Eastern lines with stark, stiff Greek-looking silhouettes and gestures could be Malani’s own history as an inhabitant of India at the time when colonialism fell, a topic mentioned both in her artist’s statement and biography. India’s 1947 Partition following the British withdrawal from India created two new nations (India and Pakistan) divided along religious lines and ultimately thrust millions of religious refugees into the hands of two newly formed, inexperienced governments. Millions of Pakistani Sikhs and Hindus fled to India as a similar exodus occurred with millions of Muslim Indians entering Pakistan. The Partition, and the resulting well-documented plague of religiously-motivated rapes of women on both sides of the border, serves as the haunted core around which Malani’s exploration of the marginalized is wrapped. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uK9iRoPds8

“In Search of Vanished Blood” is almost silent at moments, until voices emerge from the spinning shadows. Malani’s use of overlapping layers of audio implores the viewer to search for cogent pieces in the undulating cacophony. Something sounds like a spoken poem, something sounds like many voices chanting then singing, something breaks like glass, and then whispers rise above a steady, ominous drone. While this soundtrack envelops the viewer in female voices and violent crashes, the walls are lit with a whirling, quickly transforming series of video clips and still images. A woman’s face fills two walls, then she is shown wearing a gauzy white hijab, finally her entire face is wrapped in the fabric, obscuring her features entirely. A glowing fingerprint appears, hands rapidly form sign language letters, a woman’s static body and face are slowly claimed by earth (or perhaps blood)-colored splotches. These cycles of identity being revealed then obscured in different ways feel like a more specific version of the cultural ambiguity and morphing seen in Malani’s painted figures. The effect is crushing displacement, as though the viewer is witnessing the horror of a human’s losing battle against marginalization, as if her existence is so tentative that it is endlessly engulfed and manipulated by external forces—like clashing cultures, stifling gender roles, the weight of religion, even the medical world’s objectification. The painted cylinders in the center of the installation interrupt the videos with their spinning shadows of Malani’s constructed mythology. Some of these painted figures are posed triumphantly, even as though they are perhaps deities, yet they mutate as projected light smears their shadows across the wall, again obscuring the woman who appears to stand in for many women essentially crushed by the patriarchy.

Even with little personal understanding of Malani’s personal struggle or exposure to life as a refugee in the aftermath of the Indian Partition, this body of work clearly evokes a sense of disenfranchisement. Malani carefully constructs then modernizes a sublime, yet visceral, mythology from fragments of reality, and then throws the viewer headlong into it.