149 | 2020

SABRINA MANDANICI

Facing Janus

I
The first image I saw was actually the last. It was projected onto the wall of an old building towering over the subway tracks along Vienna’s Naschmarkt. A crowd was facing a stage—clusters of heads, shot from behind, staring into blinding spotlights as confetti circled in the air, twirling like gigantic snowflakes. The exaltation is tangible, even in black and white. And you would almost buy into it, if it weren’t for that one freak flag, sticking out from the audience. Then the wall turned black and the projection began anew. What was I looking at?

II
In 2017, Christina Werner developed a projection of fourteen slides for Vienna Art Week, in collaboration with Camera Austria, as part of her series “The Boys Are Back” (2015–ongoing). The projection begins with a text, inspired by the lyrics of Thin Lizzy’s song “The Boys Are Back in Town.” The sense of foreboding tightens with each succeeding image—most forcefully, the hands of headless men in boring suits: a fist, a wave, a push. Appropriated from news footage, these visual tropes are instantly recognizable as the rhetorical gestures of political speech. Interspersed with close-ups of a microphone fronting a wall of flags, balloons, and more confetti, these fragments, despite their diverse origins, build momentum and contextualize the final image. The message is obvious: politics in the guise of a rock concert. As the American talk-show host Jay Leno so aptly stated, “Politics is show business for ugly people.” In Werner’s projection, this ugliness lies in the workings and doings—the spirit—of right-wing populism.

III
As an artist, Werner gravitates toward matters and events that shake society, her work tackling the subjects of migration, nation building, identity, and memorial culture. But instead of referring to her practice as theme bound, she prefers to consider it as a means to “highlight” and “condense” current states or social conditions—which are, ultimately, always entangled with politics. While most of Werner’s projects spark from headlines, articles, or images circulating in daily media, they also arise from heartfelt inquiries and lived experience (although she makes a point of concealing personal or biographical hints from her work’s aesthetic and formal structure).

Text feature in Camera Austria International 149/2020, pp. 11–20.

NINA STRAND

Lesbian Lands: Carmen Winant and the Ovulars

“Is it possible to leave everything behind? Is it possible to begin again, outside of and beyond every system of living that you’ve ever known, reinventing what it means (and looks like) to exist, as a body and its soul, on the land?” These are the introductory words of Carmen Winant’s essay in her book of photographs Notes on Fundamental Joy, published by Printed Matter last year, subtitled: “seeking the elimination of oppression through the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us.”

For her project “My Birth,” shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2018, Winant extensively researched the international lesbian-separatist community Lesbian Lands (or Womyn’s Lands as they were also called—the “y” replacing the “a” to eliminate the word “man”). The movement began in the United States during the 1970s—only five short decades ago—when it was still a white man’s world. The gender inequalities in society and the lack of acceptance and protection for gay people made many women move out of the cities and form their own communities. “It cannot be overstated how hard it was for lesbians to find each other before the networking and consciousness raising that came with the women’s movement,” Rose Norman writes in her essay collection Landykes of the South from 2015. A solution was to move away from the patriarchy and form their own Lesbian Land communities. These groups had clear rules: no men and no heterosexuals. “The lesbian feminist back-to-the-land movement made the conscious choice to disengage from the patriarchal mainstream rather than continue participation in their own oppression,” Heather Jo Burmeister writes in her 2013 thesis “Rural Revolution: Documenting the Lesbian Land Communities of Southern Oregon”: “They viewed lesbian feminist separatism and the creation of safe lesbian land as a way to reconstruct their self-identity and influence the continued self-perception of lesbians the world over through art and literature.”¹

The vast number of publications produced by Lesbian Lands—zines, pamphlets, magazines—show us how photography was an important tool for these women: the making of pictures became a way to reclaim and reinvent.

¹ Heather Jo Burmeister, “Rural Revolution: Documenting the Lesbian Land Communities of Southern Oregon” (MA thesis, Portland State University: Portland, Oregon, 2013), https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2079&context=open_access_etds.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 149/2020, pp. 21–30.

RADEK KROLCZYK

Sky / No Sky

The huge pictures overlay the city. They overlay it gently, nestle up to it, flutter in the wind, conceal, take the light, suffocate. The really big pictures move flexibly; they are found on tarps or fabric. Before elections and national holidays, the huge pictures get bigger and make all other pictures seem small and unimportant. The biggest of all pictures is the Turkish flag, the wide red expanse, on it a crescent moon, and the star as well. During the last big elections, in 2018, when both the parliament and the president were elected, red flags concealed the sky over the broad Tarlabaşı Boulevard. Even the sky became part of the fatherland and wore its own patriotic celestial bodies with star and crescent moon. Turkish flags were also spanned over the façades of entire blocks of houses and thus covered up the windows. Somewhere on the streets, there is always one merchant hauling red national flags in sizes for domestic use along with him. It seems as if they want to preempt a possible scarcity of red national flags. It seems as if the red national flag is an object of everyday use, along with other street merchandise like handkerchiefs, water bottles, and corn on the cob. On April 23, National Sovereignty Day, which is simultaneously also Children’s Day, entire school classes parade with red national flags over their shoulders and in their hands on Taksim Square. Found there year after year is a stage on which the school children march in camouflage uniforms, salute, and do push-ups, surrounded by an enthusiastic audience. The red flag with crescent moon and star already envelops all of them at an early stage.

Those who have gone missing remain invisible. The fact that many have gone missing is something we are well aware of. We read of them and see their pictures in other places. We read of them in the German news, see their pictures there. In other places, we learn of their arrests and the serious accusations made against them by the public prosecutor’s office. In other places, we also learn of their imprisonment and of the fact that Europe’s biggest prison is located only seventy kilometers to the west of the city, in a different city, Silivri. Ten thousand of those who have gone missing, and of whom there are no pictures in Istanbul, are in Silivri. The fact that hardly any pictures of those who have gone missing are found in the public sphere in Istanbul is striking, since this city is so big, so diverse, and so unmanageable.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 149/2020, pp. 31–40.

ARNISA ZEQO

Civic Poetry: On the Work of Bouchra Khalili

“How many cities do you have?,” asks Bouchra in a café in Amsterdam, as we meet after a lecture by the art historian Darby English early this year. My story, like many stories of displacement, involves several streets and corners in which my thoughts and heart unfolded in different languages that I called mine. I was born in Tirana and grew up in Rome and then moved to Amsterdam and spoke English. That is my short story, as many other places existed in between, like Naples as a child, Washington, D. C., as a teenager, and Athens as an adult, where I first met the artist. My navigation fluctuates between necessity and privilege; between migration, colonial past, archaeological digs with my mother, and a desire to find a home, a right place, and justice; between political awareness, love, and the force of conformity. What is my voice and what are my cities? I speak for myself and I carry within me the voices of friends, dead and alive, from many different street corners.

In her artistic works and films, Bouchra Khalili opens up to a multiplicity of cities and places, where biographical trajectories and subjective geographies weave constellations of political struggle. This is a consciousness shaped by many unheard stories of civilization and its barbarisms. Her films are strongly performative, in the sense that they make tangible the complex relationship between the cinematic and the theatrical. The films thus embody the power of theater in political and civic awakening. While multiple locations are present, the focus is on the inhabitants and their bodies in the urban space.

The camera is often working from a fixed point, framing the characters frontally, at times capturing their hands and most importantly recording their voices. The different film scripts are constructed in an active collaboration with the protagonists, where they discuss their own involvement in and opinions on performing their “selves.” They also carry the voices of earlier witnesses and fragments of publications on political thought and poetry.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 149/2020, pp. 41–50.

YASUFUMI NAKAMORI

A Conversation from South London

Both the photographer Liz Johnson Artur and Tate Modern’s senior curator of international art Yasufumi Nakamori live in the Kennington neighborhood of South London. Both the Russian-Ghanaian photographer and the Japanese curator were born in the mid-1960s in different parts of the world, and are now part of South London’s diverse and vibrant arts community. One gray Saturday afternoon in January, they met in Johnson Artur’s studio, reflected on her productive past year, and discussed where she might be going.

YN Let’s talk about the year 2019. You had two really fantastic shows transatlantically, one in the Brooklyn Museum [“Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha”] and the other in the South London Gallery [“Liz Johnson
Artur: If you know the beginning, the end is no trouble”]. The Brooklyn show seemed to be a mini survey exhibition of your practice of over thirty years, looking at the “Black Balloon Archive.” The South London Gallery [hereinafter, SLG] show was more experimental, looking at your new direction as well. Would you start with the Brooklyn Museum, do you have any thoughts
LJA Having my two first shows in a year was new and interesting to me. When Drew [Sawyer, the Brooklyn Museum’s curator of photography] asked me if I would like to show in Brooklyn, I was like: Really? And my first thought was: Actually, I kind of started off in Brooklyn. Because a trip to New York in ’86 was the first time that I traveled with a camera. I wasn’t confident as photographer or anything, but I thought it was quite a big deal going to New York. I’d never been to America.
YN Where in Brooklyn did you stay?
LJA It was somewhere around Brooklyn Heights. The family I stayed with, they were Russian Jews. And the area was mostly either Hasidic Jews or black people. I think it was the first time I saw black people in an everyday context. And I was constantly told, like: You can’t go to Harlem. Because there was a real sort of gap between the two groups that actually lived just across the street from each other.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 149/2020, pp. 51–60.