I CREATE THEREFORE I AM...

“In my art I have tried to explain to myself, life and its meaning”

Edvard Munch was a prolific yet perpetually troubled artist preoccupied with the matters of human mortality such as chronic illness, sexual liberation, and religious aspiration. Munch expressed these obsessions through works of intense colour, semi-abstraction, and mysterious subject matter. Following the great triumph of French Impressionism, Munch took up a more graphic, symbolist sensibility and in turn became one of the most controversial and eventually renowned artists. Munch came of age in the first decade of the 20th century, during the Art Nouveau movement and its characteristic focus on all things organic, evolutionary and mysteriously instinctual. In keeping with these motifs, but moving decidedly away from their decorative applications, Munch came to treat the visible as though it were a window into a not fully formed, if not fundamentally disturbing, human psychology. One can see Munch’s extended influence even in the work of later artists such as Vernon Ah Kee and Shirin Neshat, whose work reflect societies psychological turmoil as is manifested in audacious black and white portraits, provoking text works and evocative video instillations.

Aboriginal artist Vernon Ah Kee has been referred to by Aileen Moreton-Robinson; Indigenous Academic as the ‘sovereign warrior’: an Aboriginal artist at war in the ‘white postcolonial border zone’ that is contemporary Aboriginal art. As a contemporary artist of national and international distinction, Ah Kee’s practice is profoundly underpinned by his personal experience as an urban-based North Queensland Aboriginal person. While he may not have the reputation of a ‘street fighter’ the ‘warrior’ appellation is appropriate as he possess no less a fighting-spirit; one that appears to be driven by deep resentment, and determined to disrupt notions of Aboriginal identity and the classification of Aboriginal art more specifically. However, the relationship between Ah Kee’s practice and Indigenous sovereignty is far more ambiguous, particularly in his rhetorical pronouncements on the relative authenticity of ‘remote’ versus ‘urban’ Aboriginal people and art.

As a founding member of the Brisbane based Proppa NOW urban Aboriginal Artists collective, Ah Kee identifies vociferously as an ‘urban Aboriginal Artist’. Ah Kee superficially appears to broadcast basic, clear, political messages about the Aboriginal experience. However a more critical reading of his practice reveals that the power of his art lies in the way it negotiates ambiguities, double-binds and catch 22 – Satirical and Historical novel by Joseph Heller, and by the manor in which it shifts the onus back to the (presumably white) viewer, implicating them in its inquiry. For indigenous audiences, Ah Kee’s practice can be seen to offer an example of a strong and self-confident artist, unrestrained in terms of technique and medium, while being inherently contemporary and uncompromisingly political. Yet, Ah Kee presents challenges to Indigenous audiences also, demanding that they realize and declare their own authenticity, rather than playing out roles he argues are determined by the art market a market dominated by no-Indigenous (white) interests.

Ah Kee has only been exhibiting for a decade now and in some circles is still regarded as an ‘emerging artist’. However he is possibly one of the country’s most controversial contemporary artists. Intially known for his direct and combatant neo-conceptual ‘text work’, he soon established his credentials as an ‘artist’s artist’ with his elegantly detailed large-scale portraits of past and present relatives. Ah Kee’s 1999 solo exhibition titled ‘If I was white’, loudly declared the artist’s polemic: to challenge racism in Australia by drawing attention to the unquestioned normativeness of whiteness. By turning the tables on his audiences and switching the subjective positions between the viewer and viewed, Ah Kee seeks to make the ‘coloniser’ feel colonised. Ah Kee challenges his audience ‘to perceive the black man’s world differently’:

"If you wish to insert yourself into the black man’s world with his history, in his colour and on the level at which you currently perceive him, then know that you will never be anything more than mediocre. You will not be able to involve yourself in the decision–making processes of this land, and you will not have any constructive access to the social and political mechanisms of this land. At times, this land will shake your understanding of the world, confusion will eat away at your sense of humanity, but at least you will feel normal."

Ah Kee’s invitation to audiences to perceive the black man’s world differently is developed dramatically in the installation CantChant. Created for Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art in 2007 the work was also selected for the 2009 Venice Biennale. CantChant confronts white Australian beach culture in the wake of the 2005 Cronulla Riots. The title is a sardonic reference to the chanting of (mostly white) rioters: ‘we grew here, you flew here’, which Ah Kee regards as an insincere excuse for racial violence. CantChant can be seen as challenging white Australian beach ideology by making visible the invisibility of Aboriginal sovereignty.

The work has three components: an installation of custom–made surfboards bearing North Queensland Indigenous rainforest shield designs; a body of surrounding text works; and a ‘surf’ video which contains three scenes. The boards, hung vertically with the traditional designs facing the audience as they enter the gallery space, are arranged in a formation which temporarily transforms them into warriors painted and prepared for battle; the viewers potentially the enemy. Once past the warring configuration the audience are confronted by something of a human presence protected behind and within the underside of the boards. What is present however are severely cropped large–scale portraits, most rendering a large single eye as the dominant feature, staring intensely, casting an ‘evil–eye’ on those who have intruded.

On the walls surrounding this installation is an assortment of text works, which engage the issues at hand in the ways made familiar in Ah Kee’s earlier works: they are overtly political as a whole, while politicising the everyday. Hang-ten for instance, an institutional reference to popular surf culture and surf fashion starts to hint at more sinister undercurrents when read in conjunction with other texts such as ‘your duty is to accommodate me/my duty is to tolerate you.’ While we/grew/here is a direct reference to the chanting of the Cronulla rioters, Ah Kee appropriates it, as a correction to some fundamental misconception. The video work is integral to how the larger installation is read. It consists of three separate but interrelated scenes: the bush scene, the beach scene, and the surfing flick. As a looped sequence there is no clear beginning and end. The bush scene starts with a picturesque but largely unremarkable bush landscape – not desert interior and not coastal fringe, possibly a hinterland. Nothing much appears to be happening, it just is. In a flash we are up close to a surfboard, entangled in rusted barbed-wire, suspended in the air. Next, another surfboard also bound with barbed-wired to a large burnt out tree stump. Suddenly, the explosion of a gun, then the impact on the surfboard: a gaping hole blown into its pale fragile body. The board recoils in the air unable to fly loose of its tether. The other board is also fired upon with its nose blown away. It also recoils against the shot but is pulled up fast against its binding. We see the ominous sight of the barrel – long, slender, and black, but we see no hand, and no obvious clue as to who the perpetrator might be. Finally the violence is over and we are privy to the disposal of the victim; a bound and shattered board is tossed into a creek to let nature take its course and wash away the remains? This scene can be interpreted as a metaphor for colonial violence against Aboriginal people – a lynching, a massacre site in Australian history, representing Australia’s repressed memory maybe. While the metaphor appears appropriate, what Ah Kee has achieved is far more challenging. At first glance the whiteness of the surfboard is un-remarkable (as whiteness tends to be), until it is seen in contrast to the blackness of the tree limb from which it hangs. Suddenly the board is more than the stock standard off the shelf variety, it is a white board and by extension a white body. Correspondingly, the sleek black shaft of the rifle can be read as being attached to a black body.

The tables are turned in a way, which unsettles the comfortability of even the most sympathetic audience. The idea of black violence against white Australia is not a concept readily toyed with. This may in part be a legacy of the colonial myth of peaceful settlement. This interpretation seems to sit with Ah Kee’s practice of exploiting ambiguities, reversing roles between viewer and viewed, and his desire to make the coloniser to feel othered. The video sequence in some ways can be read as corresponding with the degrees of Ah Kee’s anger. He fluctuates between them, but he’s not ready just yet to indulge any potential fantasy his audiences might have that reconciliation can be easily achieved.

Provocatively, Ah Kee has elaborated on the well-aired ProppaNOW catch-cry that ‘Aboriginal art is a white thing’, and that by producing ‘ooga–booga’ art and catering to white market desires for the ‘authentic’, many Aboriginal artists have reduced themselves to neo–colonial clichés. While elsewhere he has suggested that Aboriginal art should be as varied as the lives of contemporary Aboriginal people, he rejects the authenticity of ‘traditional’ Aboriginal art, contending that it is urban Aboriginal people and their art that is most authentically ‘Aboriginal’. However, challenging the authenticity of other Aboriginal people, who have their own cultures, their own histories, and their own relationships to broader Aboriginal and non–Aboriginal society, seems disingenuous. Claims to greater or lesser authenticity based on relative degrees of ‘white’ influence, whether in peoples’ lives or in their art practice, is highly problematic. In the short term it is divisive. In the longer term it seems counter productive to the ongoing struggle for Aboriginal people to be recognised for all their richness and diversity, and ultimately undermining of legitimate claims to sovereignty.

Ah Kee’s artistic practice has a valuable role in the discourse that is contemporary Aboriginal arts. Asserting the authenticity of urban Aboriginal identities and therefore the authenticity of urban Aboriginal cultural production, connects Ah Kee with a proud history of urban Aboriginal activism, a role that arguably has facilitated enormous developments in the awareness and recognition of Aboriginal rights nationally and internationally. Aboriginal art should be as varied as Aboriginal people, and the political strength of Aboriginal art today may be that it is an expression of contemporary Aboriginal sovereignty in action .

Shirin Neshat is a photographer and a film director who works in the United States. However, her artwork reflects the Islamic society, primarily in Iran, where she was born. Her focus lies on the Islamic culture and tradition, especially on women in Islamic culture. Due to her explicit attacks on sexual, political, and religious issues in Iran, she cannot work in her birth nation. Neshat questions the position of women in Islamic culture and the fight between the tradition and the revolution. Neshat’s work is daringly beautiful, extremely powerful, and at times even stark; women cloaked in black veils with excerpts of Farsi poetry inscribed across the surface; videos of clans of men and women listening to rousing moralistic sermons in a public hall, and more recently, magical realist works in which women fly or plant themselves in gardens to ensure their fertility.

Shirin Neshat works from the perspective of two very different cultural backgrounds. She focuses the visual discourse in her projects in the social developments of contemporary Islam, or specifically on conditions in Iran. Although she unambiguously brings out culturally specific phenomena in her work, she simultaneously succeeds in subtly striking the tenor of a more universal language; not only does she present a nuanced image of her country of origin but also delivers a revealing insight into "Western" modes of perception. The question of how she approaches these aspects in her work is answered by Neshat as follows: "For me it is vital to portray a theme from within in order to create something that is pure and not to succumb to the pressure of drawing parallels between two cultures." Her works can be read, "site specifically" and Neshat does not merely reach a limited audience.

The backward glance is not always easy. Every exile or immigrant carries an extraordinary sense of loss inside her- or himself and the memories have a certain life of their own. Those who have left their cultural homeland carry it inside them and have a very individual perspective on the country they inhabit now. And because they bear several identities at once, they are also able to contribute special points of view. Neshat has made a considerable contribution towards creating an atmosphere in which the rules of play concerning identity have been changed - because she has always maintained a fine balance between loyalty towards and the confession of the roots of her work without becoming ethnographic. With each new work she has developed a new and adequate language which can be understood throughout the world because she takes up profoundly human issues and transports universal values. With her doubts about civilization as implied in "Mahdokht", Neshat takes up a global, highly topical discussion which cannot be divided along according to "West" and "East".

For Neshat the encounter with this land she had once called home brought about a decisive turning point in her life, fundamentally changing her relationship to her current home. In coming to terms with these new impressions she began her photographic series "Women of Allah", which can meanwhile be called iconic. The series was highly successful on the Western exhibition circuit from the start and attracted a great deal of attention, for Neshat had touched upon, indeed instigated, several levels of reception at once. Discussions surrounding the decolonization of global culture and hence an interrogation of images of the Orient have been conducted since the early 1990s by artists and curators alike, and Neshat established the associated re-politicization of the image with such an incredible force that the echo of this early body of work can still be heard in the works of many artists since.

By photographing herself draped in a chador holding weapons, and by writing contemporary poems in Farsi on the remaining bare surfaces, she links several discursive levels. On the one hand there is the interface between the private and public spheres; public space is regarded as male, private space as female. A prominent, albeit incrusted symbol of Islam, the chador marks the interstice of cultural difference and is thus a sign of intercultural perception or image production, whereas the ornamental script, which further enshrouds the images, underscores the distance from reality characterizing perceptions of conflicts and culture in the Middle East. "There's a strange coexistence here of femininity and violence. My pictures show women as 'militant' and 'armed' and at the same time as strangely 'innocent' and 'spiritual'; they commit a crime because they love God, and this devotion brings violence with it." The warrior bearing a chador becomes a political statement, a banner, if you will, that expresses the women's solidarity with men in rejection of western cultural imperialism. There is a great deal of self-contradiction in strong and proud women, participating in the revolutionary process, willing to go to war with rifles across their backs, and yet still endure the laws of the harem.

In the series "Women of Allah" the contrast between the calligraphic text on women’s bodies and the prohibition on speech is often suggested by titles. In "Speechless" the barrel of a gun peeps out from between a head-c loth and a woman’s beautiful face laced with calligraphy, and in "Rebellious Silence" the cold steel of a weapon parts a woman’s face and dark body into light and shade. The clothing and weapons suggest both women’s defence of Allah in the revolution, and their defence of privacy and chastity in daily life. In these images there is a clear but ambiguous contrast between defence and attack, secrecy and exposure, eroticism and aggression. The range of imagery is kept within the cultural, religious and social codices of Islamic society, so Neshat is entitled to claim to have opened "a pictorial discourse between feminism and contemporary Islam", though "not as an expert" but as a "passionate researcher".

Neshat's work counters the Western media's culturocentrism while at the same time trying to ease the relgiocentrism of Islam in her attempts to signify the resourcefulness of Islamic women who turn the constraints of hijab to their advantage. She does so by representing the Iranian women who take advantage of the freedom from male sexual objectification and the anonymous passage among men the chador affords them. By now, it's been widely publicized that many Muslim women have expressed apprehension about the prospect of being denied the option -- the versatility -- of choosing between Western clothing and the chador for different functions.

From Ah Kees ambiguous video installations that evoke his rhetorical pronouncements on the relative authenticity of ‘remote’ versus ‘urban’ Aboriginal people and art to Neshat’s portentous black and white photographs that engulf the viewer in an Islamic women’s life.  These artists immerse themselves within their culture and draw inspiration from topics including nationality, religion, ethnicity, gender, the natural environment, history and traditional beliefs and values. They manipulate these “collective identities” in order to create exquisitely haunting works of art that both intrigue and dare the viewer to find deeper meaning. By creating works of art that contain both social conflicts and historical traditions they create a visual language that reflects society, identity, life and its meaning.