Sohrab Shahid-Saless and the work of exile
“Statelessness as Practice” is based on a fundamental question: would Sohrab Shahid-Saless see his work succeed or fail in the cultural landscape of media, galleries and commentary today? By exploring ways in which contemporary practitioners have situated themselves in and against the lived reality and ideas of statelessness and displacement, and how the reception of such constructions by the art world and cultural society has developed since Shahid-Saless’ time, this paper offers a new perspective for contemporary debate of archive, moving image and curatorial practice. Considering the cultural gap between the audiences that Shahid-Saless found in Germany and his own heritage, this essay suggests possible motifs in some of the major trends in curatorial practice over the last decade that have led to the foregrounding of statelessness in public displays such as screenings/exhibitions. Bringing these ideas together, this paper concludes by considering how curatorial strategies play out against the creative production considering a constant need for ‘new’, or the ongoing activity of national or regional promoters. The text looks at some developments in distribution channels such as galleries and digital platforms that were not available to Shahid-Saless.
In the early 1970s, Sohrab Shahid-Saless was internationally recognised as a pioneer of a new wave of Iranian cinema. However, as filmmaker joined the ranks of the European filmmaking avant-garde, he turned his attention to German society, producing films that focussed on the lives of outsiders and outcasts. The 1976 Reifezeit, the story of a boy coming of age next to his prostitute mother, marks a turning point in the young director’s ascendant career.
A desire for mainstream success would hardly mark Shahid-Saless out were he a German-born filmmaker. By the early 1980s, even a number of the signatories of the radical 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto were beginning to enjoy international recognition, with the likes of Wolker Schlöndorff and Wim Wenders eventually establishing Hollywood practices. In a sense perhaps best symbolised by the phrase Film ist Kultur – which could well have attracted a capital K even without German orthographic rules – the German cinematic avant-garde became the mainstream.
With time, Shahid-Shalees’ personal mythology came out of alignment with his filmic interests. Recognised initially for work that brought images of Iran or Turkey onto the European screen, his later oeuvre divorced itself from nationality and assumed an insider’s view on German society. Deciding to be a filmmaker and not an Iranian filmmaker in exile meant that Shahid-Salees had to forego the reputation and support he had enjoyed as an Auslander.
The tensions in the film career of Sohrab Shahid-Saless have some parallels in the more recent histories of visual artists since the early 2000s, including those whose practices involve moving image. The increased currency of contemporary art within mainstream western culture (here culture with both a lowercase and capital c) has rendered space and created intellectual demand for work that approaches issues of displacement, statelessness and exile. Not only has a desire for news from elsewhere made it possible for artists to develop transnational careers in a mode analogous to Shahid-Saless’ early experience, but the proliferation of art institutions and the unstoppable expansion of the art markets have made some of these practices commercially viable and integral to the mainstream.
At its inception, contemporary art’s regard of ‘foreign’ art practices was market-driven. In the 1980s and ‘90s, European auction houses tried to develop demand for Russian art, and soon after shifted their import focus to South Asia. These attempts were met with limited success, as domestic European and American artistic production was still only freshly fulfilling the expectation of the shock of the new. Conceptual practices like those of Young British Artists did not need to look far past the local or personal to secure a place in newspaper headlines or to break sales records.
After the end of the Cold War, Western democracies indulged in narratives of a unipolar international stage: conflicts and changes sweeping through parts of the Middle East didn’t palpably mix with domestic news agendas preoccupied by evolution of neoliberal capitalism. In a dramatic rift, the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York played themselves out as though specifically for the media, and the advent of rolling news and internet communication focussed the attention of Western audiences on the international. These tools allowed society to observe and critique the effects and complexities of globalisation in real time – and contemporary art practice followed suit.
[ppwp passwords=”sohrab bruno” whitelisted_roles=”administrator, editor” headline=”” description=”This text was published elsewhere behind a paywall.” desc_below_form=”Get in touch if you would like to read this text.” desc_above_btn=”” label=”To continue reading, you need to enter the password.” error_msg=”Please try again or get in touch if you don’t know the password.” ]In the past two decades, the Western European art world’s appetite for this ideas of otherness and alternative modes of expression has been almost inexhaustible, with world events regulating both the supply and demand. For example, the 20th anniversary of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall saw coordinated efforts by cultural funders on both sides of the Iron Curtain to facilitate engagement with 20th and 21st century art from the post-Soviet block. Marketplaces like Vienna reinforced their position linking Western-European collections with Eastern-European artists and their legacies, while the expansion of the European Union in 2004 gave rise to countless spotlight exhibitions in old Europe’s art institutions ‘discovering’ the art of the previously isolated nations. Later, the events of the Arab Spring, combined with the growing importance of the affluent parts of Middle East as markets for contemporary art, shifted attention of art institutions onto those geographies. Most recently, the academically-driven attempts to decolonise Western tools for understanding non-Western cultures, and public attention to Europe’s migration crisis have given rise to deeper visibility of contemporary art practices of Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Asia. This rapidly-developing demand has allowed artists, whether practicing in their non-Western domicile or in the ‘exile’ of the international art world to devise structural techniques for sharing narratives of cross-border peril or nostalgia.
Artists have made work commenting on displacement with a range of motivations. For some, such practice reflects on their own lived experience of exile and the circumstances leading up to it – for example in Mounira al Solh’s I want to be a party series of drawings and embroideries which collect family anecdotes from the Lebanese war. For others, like Bouchra Khalili in her 2008-11 Mapping Journey Project which tracks the geographical movements of individual migrants trying to settle in Europe from North Africa, observation of statelessness and its conditions is an intellectual or political exercise. For others still, migration and exile offer opportunities for a particular type of voyeurism or sensation – arguably so in the monumental 2017 Law of the Journey by Ai WeiWei which renders a dinghy such as seen on the Mediterranean together with a dozen faceless figures as oversized rubber inflatable. The boundaries between these types of practices are not always clear, and in the interlocking discourses of post-colonial theory, identity-politics and market trends can become further blurred. Despite this complexity, galleries and museums have been increasingly keen on displaying works that pay attention to the troubled idea of the nation-state and the individual caught in or out of its boundaries. Alongside, contemporary art has adopted the documentary as a mode of expression, and this has helped moving image media to enter exhibition spaces and to receive attention from audiences. A glance at institutional exhibition programmes announced on the platform e-flux reveals a plethora of titles like No Place – Like Home (Argos, Brussels, 2008), Asylum (Bielefelder Kunstverein, 2016), or It is obvious from the map (Redcar, Los Angeles, 2017), all creating platforms for artists’ film. Experimental and participatory practices are also growing in institutional acceptance and at points have found their ways into commercial structures. The refugee mutual-support network Silent University initiated by Ahmet Öğüt has attracted support from multiple institutions including Tate Modern and received recognition from the Visible Award. For the artist Christoph Büchel, it was a commercial gallery that brought some of his most ambitious projects – for example turning a space in London’s Piccadilly into a community centre to fruition – to fruition where museums have struggled.
The following examples of artistic practices map out some of the ways in which the ecosystem of galleries, museums and collections have been prepared to support intellectual, research and production attitudes to issues of exile or migration, and also indicate a range of artists’ motivation for engaging with such work. To draw fast links between conceptual desires and market or institutional success may be cynical, but certain patterns make themselves apparent.
The artist drawing on personal experience of exile or conflict has at their disposal an emotional and intellectual genuineness, and this offers an opportunity for audiences to engage intimately with first-hand experience. Rabih Mroué’s work, for example, has been deeply affecting to its viewers, combining as it does theatrical proximity and intellectual rigour. Mroué has been deliberate in the choice of platforms for his practice, aligning himself with research institutions and avant-garde festivals. Characteristic of such an approach is an absence of reference to otherness and resistance to exoticisation. Through their personhood, the artist transcends geographies and brings a subjective experience that sits on par with that of his or her viewers.
Artists can take on statelessness as a social cause, directing their work as indictment or call to action. In documentary mode, as in the example of Oliver Ressler, artist film and video tend to expand in long form on stories and images already familiar to their audiences from the news. But where in reportage, a news-camera’s presumed impartiality enforces distance, here, the artist’s subjectivity welcomes a viewer’s own. The same subject matter is rendered more universal still through a prism of abstraction: Castro and Ólafsson for example quite literally translate political maxims into graphic shapes or music. A broad range of art institutions (save for the most commercial outposts) have been supportive of such work, and in recent years a conviction that art practice can overcome the limitations of other political action has prevailed.
The most problematic to situate are practices that use notions of statelessness or exile for their intrinsic otherness or conceptual appeal. As individuals, Slavs and Tatars can claim some limited personal experience of life in the turbulent international political arena, but in their practice, they take on ideas representing a range of ethnic and national groups to which they have only tangential connection. It could be claimed that the work profits from emphasising the otherness of its subjects, while at the same time proclaiming unity of cultures or bringing attention to underrepresented narratives. In more extreme examples, Artur Żmijewski’s filmic visits to refugee camps could be seen as exploitative, while Ai WeiWei’s Kurdi photograph resulted in significant backlash. Nevertheless, these artistic approaches attract attention and commercial success, arguably by creating spectacle and inviting audiences to participate from a comfortable distance.
The Beirut-born artist Rabih Mroué begun his career as an actor, playwright and director. In the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War in the 1990s, Mroué’s early experimental work in theatre, film and installation combined political urgency and intellectual innovation, and quickly gained recognition from international theatre, film and art institutions. To audiences outside Lebanon, Mroué’s works like Three Posters (an evolving lecture performance which examines the role of the body in political and religious martyrdom), or The Pixelated Revolution (a participatory installation composed of first-hand mobile phone images of fighting and death in Homs, Syria) offered an insight into societies torn apart by conflict by means that are at once intimate and voyeuristic. The 2008 Je Veux voir, a collaboration with artist-filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige in which Mroué stars alongside Catherine Deneuve, is perhaps the starkest example of the economies of exile. In the film, the French star (playing herself) tours war-torn Lebanon with Mroué (playing himself) as guide. By 2012, Mroué’s work was exhibited at Documenta, in Manifesta, at HAU 2 Berlin, as well as myriad independent arts institutions, and is represented by a commercial gallery in landmark events like Frieze Art Fair.
Mroué’s practice has consistently attracted engagement from its audiences. Given the complexity of the Arab world that the work depicts, this is testament to the sincere approach the artist deploys towards his subjects. A degree of solidarity is implied in both the making and the reception of the work. Installations like I, The Undersigned, 2007, in which Mroué publicly apologises for his role in the Civil War, show the artist connected to his place and people.
The very notion of statelessness itself drives the practice of artists Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson whose manifesto campaign Your Country Doesn’t Exist, has taken the form of film, performance, publishing, billboards and murals, as well a political action – resonating with local sentiment wherever staged. Castro (Spanish) and Ólafsson (Icelandic) are themselves in no way stateless, but had an opportunity to develop their conceptual approach to issues of migration in the early 2000s while settled in the Netherlands. At the time, the Netherlands seemed a cultural land of plenty that boasted ‘open’ borders and enviable funding opportunities for artists of all provenances. Key to the artists was their participation in Van Abbemuseum’s 2008 research and exhibition project Becoming Dutch that placed questions of geographical privilege and nationhood at the centre.
Castro and Ólafsson’s works combine first-hand accounts by refugees, as for example in the Bosbolobosboco series (amorphous sculptural structures composed of rags and packaging tape that serve as listening posts for oral histories), and abstract iterative political thinking in the Do it Yourself projects (inviting Icelandic state ambassadors to execute a painting-by-numbers to reveal the slogan ‘your country doesn’t exist’). The artists presented Your Country Doesn’t Exist as an operatic performance on a gondola at the 2011 Venice Biennale, a public-realm campaign in the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, and in multiple further manifestations in dozens of institutional exhibitions across Europe. Their film works like Caregivers, highlight the exploitation of Southern Europeans by labour markets in service of the economies of the north. These have been featured in the art film festival circuit, and have also gained the support of museum and private collections.
Castro and Ólafsson’s political stance may appear unusual: at first glance, their works do not sympathise with the individual, but instead call out the notion of the state as bogus. As action, their stylised and often aesthetically humourous works have not been without wider impact: a project the artists created in collaboration with Australia’s refugee communities for the 2014 Sydney Biennale contributed to the resignation of the the event’s chair whose business interests were implicated in human rights abuses at the Manus islands refugee detention camps.
The collective practice Slavs and Tatars describes itself as a ‘faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia.’ The group’s output comprises visually-appealing objects that often incorporate multilingual slogans or visual puns, performance lectures on geopolitical and cultural events, and publishing with distinctive graphic design qualities. At the group’s core are a Pole and an Iranian American, and the contentious histories of their ‘home’ regions have nourished the practice as much as the linguistic diversity and untranslatability of the cultures.
Slavs and Tatars’ work is not per se rooted in personal experience of exile, but explores the meta-fictions of nationhood or regional or ethnic identity. Many of their works point to the glibness of prevailing narratives, as in for example the series of mirrors and etched text Nations, 2012 (with slogans like ‘Nice tan, Turkmenistan’, or ‘Men are from Murmansk, Women are from Vilnius’) or to the insuppressible desire to be marked out as ‘particular’ active in the cultures (Make Mongolia Great Again, 2016). At the basis of the practice is a question of usefulness of nationalistic or culturally exclusionary boundaries to anything other than hegemonic control.
The combination of accessibility of the visual works, and the charisma of the theoretical arguments put forward by Slavs and Tatars has won them substantial international recognition, and the artists have participated in numerous biennials (Sharjah in 2011, Venice in 2013), and held solo exhibitions across much of Western and Eastern Europe and the Middle East (from Trondheim Kunstmuseum and CAC Vilnius to SALT Istanbul). Their work was subject of a special project Love me, love me not at the 2013 Venice Biennale, was shown in Art Basel’s signature section Statements in 2012, and continues to attract the attention of art institutions and private collections across the regions.
Slavs and Tatars’ practice brings together meme-making and intellectual discourse, and seeks opportunities to both emphasise and collapse notions of the exotic or foreign. The work appears driven by exhibitionism as for example in Monobrow Manifesto, 2010-11, which contrasts the facial hair of a Persian prophet (hot) with that of Sesame Street’s Bert (not). The strategy of presenting highly polished and surface-level treatment of histories, cultures and conflicts in the exhibition practice gives the work instant recognition and creates access to platforms for deeper engagement in parallel.
Plenty of other visual artists have chosen statelessness as a subject in perhaps reactive or opportunistic fashions. Europe’s recent migration crisis has provided ample opportunity for observation and mediation of humanity in displacement, and this has roused interest from the continent’s art institutions.
The Polish social provocateur Artur Żmijewski created Glimpse in 2017. The series of video portraits was filmed in the Calais ‘Jungle’ and Berlin Tempelhof refugee camps, presented at Documenta 14 in Athens. In 2016, Ai Wei-Wei, renowned for his own dissidence and forced exile, recreated a press photograph depicting the death of the three year-old Alan Kurdi on a beach near Bodrum. More traditionally filmic or documentary practices such as that of Austrian video artist Oliver Ressler take on migration in works like There are no Syrian refugees in Turkey, 2016, and gain audiences just as readily as the artist’s investigations into issues of climate change or financial markets.
In parallel with sustained appetite for work of and on exile, the infrastructure of galleries and museums has significantly expanded its support for artist film and video, and has sought ways to incorporate moving image work into public programmes and collections. By the 1990s specialist institutions supporting artist video work were prolific around Europe. In Germany, festivals like Videonale pioneered the distribution of artists’ work within contemporary art structures, while ZKM, the centre for art and media in Karlsruhe established itself as the ‘Mecca for media arts’. In England, organisations like London Filmmakers Co-operative and its successor LUX have worked to carve out a productive space for artists working outside traditional cinematic funding structures. The past decade has seen strong representation of film practices on mainstream platforms: flagship events like biennials now routinely include substantial amounts of moving image on par with other media.
With this proliferation of opportunities for screen-based work to reach contemporary art audiences, public acceptance for film in museums and galleries has been developing steadily, although not uniformly. The most commercial of circles like art fairs have not found sustained ways to promote film or video art, but this has not stopped galleries from trading in the material.
The relationship between film and art film has also become more bilateral. Artists working with film have found it possible to break into mainstream cinema: Steve McQueen, Turner Prize-winning artist represented by high-profile commercial galleries in New York and London, made his big-screen mark with films like Hunger and 12 Years a Slave. Conversely, contemporary art platforms have looked to traditional cinema for content: for example, the feature film work of a leading figure of New German Cinema Alexander Kluge was featured prominently in a landmark exhibition The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied at Venice’s Fondazione Prada in 2017, and the 2018 Turner Prize shortlist included the documentary and feature filmmaker Naeem Mohaiemen alongside three other artists working with film and video. Overall, the conceptual space for film work has expanded significantly, with boundaries between documentary, feature and experimental film eroding, while artists and filmmakers have been able to move with new ease between funding structures and distribution channels.
To imagine a career path for Sohrab Shahid-Saless in the cultural markets of today is at best idle fancy, but the filmmaker’s struggle in the realities of 1970s and ‘80s Germany is at some odds with the breadth of opportunities his work could have been met with now.
Shahid-Saless’ signature treatment and choice of subject matters were not controversial: personal and psychological drama, and society in the shadow of the second world war fall in line with other filmmakers’ preoccupations at the time. There’s little in his films that would have marked him out as ‘other’ or Auslander, and less still that could have been incomprehensible to German audiences. In reality, however, Shahid-Saless’ films had little chance of resonating with popular German audiences or building the commercial success the director desired. The Long Vacation of Lotte H. Eisner, 1979, for example, is a series of interviews with film critic and co-founder of Cinémathèque Française Lotte Eisner, a project whose cinema-on-cinema insularity is inescapable. The later Utopia, 1983, is a compelling human drama that is nonetheless demanding of viewers with a 200-minute running time and an inescapable emotional suffering of its characters. While lacking market appeal, these works were in a sense perfectly orthodox, and a couple of decades later their forms could have found comfortable homes at the crossing of film and visual art. Indeed, the recent revival of interest in Shahid-Saless’ oeuvre has been driven by research that spans film, media and art histories.
The succes gap between Shahid-Saless and his fellow filmmakers, is therefore perhaps more indicative of the director’s personal motivations and attitudes than his work per se. Shahid-Saless appears to have struggled with the expectation that he would continue his thematic associations with Iran and take on the role of an exiled Iranian artist, a brand that ironically could have gained in relevance alongside Iran’s troubled role on in international politics. The desire to assimilate into the German Kultur rather than the cult and to abandon his Iranian associations may well have cost Shahid-Saless his rightful place in the history of cinema.
[/ppwp]This text was originally published in ReFocus: The Films of Sohrab Shahid Saless, Ed. Azdeh Fatehrad, Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
Citation: d’Alancaisez, P. (2020). Statelessness as Practice: Sohrab Shahid Saless and the Work of Exile. In Fatehrad A. (Ed.), ReFocus: The Films of Sohrab Shahid-Saless: Exile, Displacement and the Stateless Moving Image (pp. 141-150). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.3366/j.ctv10kmd73.17
