Reconsidering Horizontality in the Work of Iranian 'Diaspora' Artists

AMNA MALIK

(Chapter 5- Surface Tension Excerpts)

In the 1990s the so-called 'crux of minimalism' - the continuation and break with high modernism - reappeared in an unexpected form. Once condemned as symptomatic of US imperialism, the industrial materials and the labour of the factory worker that defined it in the 1960s gave way in the 1990s to scatter pieces and grid structures evoking repetition as the exertion of an anonymous power or the ephemeral nature of the body and play! This body of work frequently, though not exclusively, drew on the formal organization of the grid, sometimes in a horizontal position on the floor or in the space of the everyday. This normative response to the form of 1960s minimalism is remote from the following: a scene from Rapture (1999, Fig. 3) by Shirin Neshat, a photograph from Goftare Nik (1998-2003, Fig. 5) by Shirana Shahbazi (1999), and Silent Carpet (2000, Fig. 10) by Maria Kheirkhah. Here the ground is either the site demarcated by prayer, the setting of sacred ceremonies, or the contested urban space between the civic institution and the street. The model of horizontality is that of the body close to the ground but moving in space, between locations, destabilizing identities and changing the context for spectatorship.

Silent Carpet

The minimalist grid is reconfigured in Kheirkhah's early work Scheherazade's Carpet (1997, Figs. 8 and 9) to evoke the labour of nomadic carpet weavers, indicating the global conditions of labour and de-centring minimalism's emphasis on the factory worker. It also suggests the consumption of Persian culture through the lens of orientalism, in which photographs are embedded beneath sand, veiling them, and requiring great effort to see up close. The entire piece was created in situ for a temporary period, thus evading the status of object. Approaching the minimalist orthodoxy prevalent in the British art school system from the perspective of someone conscious of the politics of the marginalized labourers who lie behind official culture, Kheirkhah's Silent Carpet (1999, Fig. 10) takes on minimalism's concern with the situation, the space that constituted the work of art, by extending her practice to the contested sites of belonging in London.

The 'situated knowledge' that informs this project is the history of racial conflict in Brixton, Notting Hill in London and Handsworth in Birmingham in the late 1970s which emerged as a response to the hysterical surveillance of 'black' and immigrant bodies." This 'ground' as contested territory is an important aspect of Silent Carpet - a temporary project that took place outside Camberwell Law Courts.

Like Brixton and Notting Hill in the 1970s, Camberwell is home to immigrant communities, predominantly African and Caribbean.

Kheirkhah spent some time observing the activities of people entering and exiting the building and established where the divide between a civic institution and the street might be delineated. She then drew a red line in chalk on the ground to mark that space. Forty different questions were posed to passers-by and visitors to the courts which varied from the personal to social, political and trivial. The respondents wrote their answers on the pavement, its ready-made grid creating a 'carpet' of text.

The temporary condition of the work's production meant that it never attained the status of an object; nor could it be easily seen, because this required viewers to read each paving stone in turn. It was also eroded by rain or as people walked across the pavement. Like large parts of southeast London, Camberwell suffers from poor public facilities and limited travel networks. As a location, the meaning of surface and ground takes on particular significance because it draws on the communal to create a collaborative piece that exists as a temporary document drawn from interviews with members of the public.

The public space of a civic institution the also anonymously carries out judgement over those who have been criminalized and brought into alliance with the public space of the street. In this respect Kheirkhah's project recalls Mona Hatoum's Unemployed

(1986) and a related performance in Brixton for 'Roadworks' (1985, Fig. 11) performances of marking and inscription of public space and the surveillance of the street at a moment when citizenship was not determined by being born in Britain but by complex rules of lineage and descent, and those of Asian and Afro-Caribbean descent were designated as alien invaders.40

In Silent Carpet the same strategies of marking, inscription and an attention to inner city areas occupied by immigrant communities is evident, but its attention to public space and the street has an entirely different resonance. It has to be understood in the light of New Labours rhetoric of inclusiveness. The 'silence' of a carpet of text, though active soliciting and valuing the contributions of passers-by and those who might have an antagonistic relationship with the law, is far from the model of commonality that currently goes under the title of 'relational-aesthetics'. Writing on the surface of the urban fabric and expressing antagonism, conflict and dissent in the environs of a civic institution becomes a form of protest and of disillusionment.