LARA SCHOORL

We Are All Alone in the Dark: On Brittany Nelson’s Baroque Parallels

“[T]he past is present in the present in the form of traces, diffuse memories.”¹

I.
Alone, in the darkness of a Northern city’s late summer night, Bonnie
Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” takes me by surprise and I become absorbed in the time capsule the song presents. The black screen that sits in my lap and accompanies the ballad gradually shows the interior of a volcanic cave, then turns black again—and leaves me with the feeling of nostalgia as the lyrics from the nineties set in: “turn down the lights / turn down the bed / turn down these voices inside my head.” It is my last day in Amsterdam. As a result of my physical distance from the work and the email correspondence with the artist during the process of writing this text, I watch Brittany Nelson’s film I Can’t Make You Love Me (2024) on my laptop, at 11:00 p.m., just as the last of the sun’s light has disappeared behind the horizon. Alone in the dark, as per the artist’s suggestion.

For close to a full minute there is only music. Then a flashlight pans across the center of the screen, illuminating not only the large structures I now witness in the dark, but moving in such a way as to touch—with the light—what is otherwise untouchable. White, round edges of disk and cylinder-like shapes appear and disappear. The gentle tracing of the objects with the light inspires a desire to connect with extraterrestrial intelligence and, as the light extinguishes, it simultaneously prefaces we may never connect with life in space. My incomplete view of them mimics a kind of barrier in my full understanding of their meaning, of meaning in general: “the undecidability of the visual,” notes the cultural theorist Mieke Bal, “is understood to be paradigmatic of the production of meaning in general.”²

1 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 66.
2 Ibid., p. 9.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 167/2024, pp. 9–20.

AMELI M. KLEIN

How Many Voices Does It Take to Form a Choir? Jasmina Cibic’s Anti-Systemic World-Making

The reinforcement of national identity through the appropriation and reinvention of art and architecture from past times is a tried and tested strategy. Jasmina Cibic’s deconstruction of the mechanisms of propaganda questions the merging of ideological narratives and culture construction, fracturing the facades of institutional power. Cibic’s practice delves into archives that reveal how culture has been used and abused by ideological and political interests throughout history.

She is particularly drawn to moments that forefront national and political identity crises—where culture has been employed to help create a visible (aesthetic) cut with the past and build a scenography for a new sociopolitical future that has often presented utopian visions but many times resulted in dystopian failures. However, rather than voicing criticism for criticism’s sake, Cibic holds space for optimistic relief. Fashioning moments of exceptional beauty and careful hopefulness out of fragments of history, she reignites a belief that the promises of the past might become actualized within our future. By focusing her work on alternative modes of institution and world-building, Cibic highlights the potentiality of transnational solidarity and revisits the potential of art and culture as an active agent.

To produce the subversive magnetism of her pictorial language, she returns to existing sites of power, highlighting the physical hardware that undergirds political systems. For the last two decades, Cibic has been making films and photographic projects addressing some of the most iconic historical ready-mades, including grand architectural projects such as the former Palace of the Federation in Belgrade (Tear Down and Rebuild, 2015) and the political gifting of culture (The Gift, 2021). She delves into her subject matter through a feminist lens—highlighting the processes behind the familiar patriarchal narratives.
Her recent works have been reflecting directly on artists and cultural workers during national and transnational moments of identity construction, questioning the complicity of cultural capital within the persistent authoritarian systems of state, justice, and human rights. Cibic has also pointed her gaze to the objects in state collections, which speak of attempts of transnationalism where artworks were used as illustrative tokens, physical evidence of abstract political ideas. An example of this is her photographic series The Gallery of Non-Aligned (2023), which includes portraits of sculptures gifted by the Non-Aligned member states that were housed in the only official gallery the movement held in former Yugoslavia’s Titograd (today, Podgorica, Montenegro). Cibic photographed only the sculptures of the female form—metaphors for the emerging mother-nations: female torsos, busts, and heads. Pictured against colorful backgrounds, they stand reminiscent of flags and national iconographies, but also contain references to darkness, decay, and corrosion, as they are coated by various species of moths, referencing historic vanitas painting—a reminder of all there is to lose in the act of forgetting past potentials of alternative world-building.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 167/2024, pp. 21–32.

CHRISTIN MÜLLER

“I will leave this for you to finish”

Huda Takriti’s video On Another Note (2024) begins with the nocturnal chirping of crickets and polyphonic birdsong, which remind her of family visits to the mountains in Lebanon. We also see close-up images of the Japanese lacquer paintings called Urushi on a photo album belonging to her family, which show an idea of the “Orient” shaped by colonialism and can presumably be read as motifs of longing. While writing this text, the nights here are also filled with the pleasantly warm sounds of crickets and birds. During the day, there is disquieting news about the war between Israel and Gaza, whose outcome is as uncertain as its long-term consequences for the population.

In her artistic work, Huda Takriti occupies herself with the charged political relationships in the “Middle East,” which have also shaped her family. She shifts the perspective from current events to the effects of migration on collective and individual visual memory and seeks out alternative forms of archives that take a stand against power relations shaped by history. Souheir Takriti, Huda Takriti’s mother, uses the album in On Another Note for pictures from the professional life of the artist’s grandmother. The photographs show Hikmat Al-Habbal, a successful modern textile artist, with her works at exhibitions openings and as a lecturer with students and colleagues in Kuwait in the 1960s. While her mother browses through the album or caresses textile works, we learn that the grandmother traced her Sarma embroidery directly on the fabric without a preconceived pattern, that members of the government often purchased her works and those of her students directly from the exhibitions, and that her sister advocated for the education of women in Kuwait and taught the Kuwaiti princesses. We also learn what is not shown in the photos: that Hikmat Al-Habbal married a refugee who as a result of his Syrian-Palestinian travel documents was forced to go through the process of obtaining a new residency permit every six months and had to close his business while doing so, that the family was also unable to remain in Lebanon because the father did not want to convert to a different religion, and that they ultimately moved to Syria.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 167/2024, pp. 33–44.

SERUBIRI MOSES

Circuits of Blackness

Looking for a metaphor for Cédrine Scheidig’s imagery, I gravitated toward zouk, which is a musical genre born and popularized in Cayenne, a city in the French Caribbean, and connected further off to France and West Africa. Artist and curator Marie-Julie Chalu writes in
the exhibition catalogue An Open Anthology of Afro-French Songs that: “Zouk, in its genesis, is an Afro-diasporic, Afro-Atlantic music, from Pointe-à-Pitre to Fort-de-France, through Abidjan, Kinshasa, Luanda, Dakar, Yaoundé, and Paris. . . . We can already call it transnational music.”¹ I view Scheidig’s imagery through zouk, because of its movements and circuits, through the French Caribbean and beyond.

It follows a map of Blackness that is outside the Anglophone world, and this is one of the main insights of Scheidig’s work. I would argue that zouk enables one to inhabit a world, such as that depicted in her imagery of French Guiana, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. The artist’s biography, too, recalls the circuits of zouk. Scheidig was born in Paris to working-class parents and grew up listening to her parents’ music, including Kassav’, a popular band that is said to have started the musical sound of zouk. An alternative biography states that the musical sound was born in Cayenne, French Guiana, in 1983. And Scheidig would return to Cayenne to continue her creative practice. Even the fact that Jacob Desvarieux, a founder of the band Kassav’, would be born in Paris, but declare that “It is not my home,” reminds of the circuits which are properly diasporic.² In a similar way, Scheidig is unmoored by the movements of popular music made by Black people in Dakar, Cayenne, or Paris. This insight is central to her work.

Starting with a focus on questions that concern Black experience, the artist’s work ultimately engages with theoretical and conceptual problems relating to the construction of identities. Geography plays a role in her inquiry, but so do history, race, and culture. Though her inquiry is essentially centered in the French Caribbean, its geographical boundaries stretch toward France and the United States, and thus “Blackness” is pushed beyond notions of nationality, even limiting ideas of ethnicity toward sensibility and/or expression.

1 Marie-Julie Chalu, Andie Oxybel, Audrey Célestine, “Zouk Vintage: Excerpt of episode 3, Paris, La Migration Antillaise et le Zouk,” trans. Aïda Sidhoum, in An Open Anthology of Afro-French Songs, ed. Aïda Sidhoum (New York: Bard College, 2024), pp. 46–49.
2 Ibid.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 167/2024, pp. 45–56.