Varya Lyapneva

Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian

Sama Alshaibi was born in Basra, Southern Iraq, in 1973, to an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother. Hers was a forbidding migratory childhood, as her family was exiled during the Iraq-Iran War. She now teaches in Arizona and roots herself in the future tense, at the fog’s edge; surefooted in her belief that there’s a dawning million-man fight for the people of Palestine. In her photographs, sculptures, and videos, the academics disappeared by Saddam Hussein during the Second Gulf War are summoned, an irretrievable Baghdad is reconstructed, the drought-laden Mesopotamian Marshes are enlivened. This is both a political action and a directional promise. Alshaibi possesses the alchemist’s prophetic assurance: when the summon, the reconstruction, and the enlivenment will in truth occur is indeterminate: the seeds remain idle dispersed underground. Through enacting these processes she is leading us toward the day of germination.

VK: I’ve been thinking about sabotage and counterrevolution. With serious terror. You read about Indonesia after the rebirth of the Partai Komunis, Egypt after the Arab Spring, and it makes you embittered, absolutely paranoid: how will my country betray the rhythm of history? This terror has led me to reconsider allegiances—where they emerge from, how they endure. Allegiance in that you report to a people, a cause, led by the conviction ‘I am many and not mine.’

I want to know your allegiances so I can enter your work from that angle, especially since we can’t presume an allegiance aligns with identity, ethnicity . . . There are infinite reasons to split from the soil you sprang out of.

SA: I’m fifty-one years old and have evolved into an understanding of allegiance as something that stems from a knowledge of self. At the beginning of my career my mentors framed what I was trying to say; I adopted their language, thinking it approached something more correct than what I intended to articulate: that I am Iraqi and Palestinian. They made me into an Arab-American, and I leaned into hyphenation but didn’t feel comfortable with it. This was a struggle as the art world willed categorization upon my work.

I’ve always pushed for an expanded space in my identifications, in my allegiances, but I can’t deny the defensiveness that happens when I’m asked to articulate who I am. I am very malleable, moving, roaming in my allegiances. I am on the side of humanity, the land and the Earth, the spirit of liberation struggles. What I resent is the divorcing: when I say I’m Palestinian and Iraqi, that isn’t divorced from my being an American citizen, it’s not divorced from my being a refugee. I’m not into the exclusion of people’s experiences; I won’t draw parameters. We must fight parameters.

VK: Traitorship is the antonym I’m choosing for allegiance, and I feel the act of traitorship politically is sabotage.

SA: The first film project I made as an undergraduate, “End of September,” includes a section titled Sabotage. It’s about the self-sabotage of not understanding one’s place, where people designate a place for you. You are always interrupting others’ perceptions. The script for “End of September” was written out of dreams. The traitor of the cause, khayin as we say in Arabic, comes in and questions: who’s the believer? It’s a terrifying problem for people with fissured identities. Across decades the forms for self-definitions changed, countering the last that came out. And so you’re always at risk of being a traitor as you reformulate your self-definition, as you figure out your role within the struggle. You can become the traitor, the saboteur. Is it always bad? It could be a necessary ingredient of being Iraqi and Palestinian.

MJ: Artists exist so avidly in institutions. We are almost always dependent on them. This is a difficult dependency. We want to know what role you assume within the University of Arizona—is your identity affected by it?

VK: Academics on the left often also say that they erode the university from within, eat away at the rind; there’s a parasitism or sabotage that can only be accomplished from the ‘inside.’ I agree with you, Varya, there’s a hostility almost inherited by artists holding a professorship in the United States . . . But I don’t know, I do believe in the university, the leaps it allows.

SA: Younger generations of academics are more comfortable speaking about their institutions in an accusatorial way. They do speak of sabotaging from within. This is particularly so at elite institutions. Their accusations have so much use. However, I can’t forget the fact that I’ve worked at the University of Arizona for nineteen years! I am the institution for many students, the only face they know besides their student advisor, the administrators at financial aid. I am trying to call out or push past the systemic problems at the University: I cast blame on it, the psychologies it produces, what it funds and forwards. But public universities create an entire workforce, hundreds of thousands of workers each year, and how those people are educated can shift an entire state. So I don’t see myself outside of the University, or in opposition to it: I’m not an independent contractor at a distance from the institution. Political criticisms of the academy are affected by the function of the university you work in and the students that attend it.

MJ: Are you content, then, at the University of Arizona?

SA: From the outside people would say, how could you not be content? You are a celebrated faculty member, you rose in your career at the University of Arizona; you wrote your entire tenure application surrounding Palestinian liberation struggles, about feminist interventions in the Dheisheh refugee camp; and you received tenure: the University rallied around you. I am privileged in that I've been allowed to translate my activism into my teaching. My colleagues at other institutions are amazed by that privilege. I am not so agitational, so inflammatory. That is part of how I got here. By nature I am diplomatic; I’ve come of age as someone who negotiates understanding, who is always putting things in translation. I'm a middle child and a migrant so translation and negotiation, that’s me. Maybe I don’t move at the pace or with the intensity that people want. I am not on the megaphone, and I can’t hurl insults; I’ll blow back. I don’t think we should be so inflammatory. I don’t think everyone should hurl insults. We all must find our place within the movement, and I’m better off working behind closed doors.

I’ll say that the support and protection I received from the University ended on October 7th, though. I’ve felt betrayed because I felt like they knew me and everything I was about, they extracted every part of my identity. Then they galvanized the harm and the attacks that were coming from members of the community and the outside agents that wanted to patrol activists and attack vulnerable faculty and staff. I am Palestinian and therefore well trained for this moment, all my life I’ve witnessed this, but it doesn’t diminish the disappointment . . . It is hard, but we’re not going anywhere. They’re the same old evil coming in with the wind, and they’ll keep moving from place to place. We’re rooted in our struggle, not necessarily rooted in our institutional affiliation. The institution is a space in which that struggle expresses and manifests itself. Evil is unrooted, it blows from one post to another, we’ve blown it away, you know? You can’t unroot us from our struggle.

VK: I apologize, that’s heartbreaking, that abandonment. There are so many hollow intermediaries for evil. I don't know how people hollow out, or how betrayal happens without batting an eye. There’s an inhumanity in that, and in the institution. . .

I am straddling this attraction to the immediate and this desperation for more indestructible interventions. These years, nineteen to twenty-something, are definitive in determining the angle at which you intervene—and figuring out the forms of intervention. Could you please tell us about these feminist interventions at the Dheisheh refugee camp?

SA: When I was in graduate school, I was blessed to travel to Palestine with my professors and some of my cohort. That was 2004, I had just gotten an American passport. Three of us women who did this program in Palestine imagined a collective, and we began it right out of graduate school with three other women: it is called the 6+ collective. The first thing we did was work with women artists in the Dheisheh refugee camp. We were artist-academics and what we could offer was an outlet: we were told to work with the teenage girls, the young girls in the camp—camps are conservative spaces and they lack a structure for doing things outside the home. Now, in the last fifteen, or twenty years, there have been more cultural cooperations with NGOs around the world, but that’s new. This is the early 2000s. The Second Intifada hasn’t finished, segregation is starting to impose itself onto the larger structure of the West Bank. We did workshops, we did bookmaking, journaling, and performing. Leaning on what the site of the camp permits, what can be sustained. This work was explained and exhibited tens of times across the world.

Everything I needed to know about being an adult I learned in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp. Creative ingenuity is an engine, it propels people. You can’t solve political problems militarily nor through multinational entities and their leadership. It will be through the people’s struggle, the creative means of the people. Creativity is in the way the camp is designed, there’s a material knowledge in the makeshift; creativity is in the folklore, the lullabies; creativity is in the work people make for themselves; creativity is in resistance tactics, in the way you evade the IOF; creativity is in the streams for disseminating information and their adaptive nature. I don’t teach through a referential, canonical model of making, tracing to someone you don’t know, who is not proximate to your experience. Your body, your senses, and the places you’ve inhabited are the instruments. How do you walk through a camp and only pay attention to sound? How do you map through touch? Think about the history of the Palestinian struggle, from the First Intifada through the Second Intifada, and the adaptability across that: this is a history of creation. This is groundbreaking for students because they think they have to go to a formal school and learn something then they’ll arrive at an artistic mode. You have arrived, wherever you come from. I forget the question. What did you ask?

VK: It was about the Dheisheh Refugee Camp. We were both writing down some intercepting questions and then they’d be negated by the next thing you said. We’re running after you . . . and you’ve arrived at our destination before we sent along the directions!

The history of art is full of collaborations and collectives. If you want to unpack what pulled apart a collaboration, it’s unfortunately traced to the art world's patriarchal-capitalist-notoriety structure. I was in this landmark survey exhibition at the Bronx Museum with the 6+ collective. We did a performance and participated in a panel. All the women collectives attended, and it was extraordinary, we would one after the other have conversations about how the art world focused on an artist to fame them out, about the attention personal work would get over the collaborative. Collaborations enrich one another, they’re constant negotiation and conversation. It requires daring one another. The art world can’t handle such daring. Collaborations can take the path of least resistance, as it’s the path that everyone can agree on. That’s the only problem. The art market undermines the power of collectivity.

VK: This aversion to individualism, the way the art world whittles collectives down to individuals to reinforce fame-minor culture . . . This challenges my thoughts about your portraiture . . . As of late, I’ve felt wingless, and this feeling was shed when I looked through your portraits in “Carry Over” and “Catalogue.” It’s odd to admit this, it’s almost a surrender, but I briefly sort of teared up, not out of sadness or even reverence but because I hadn't encountered such simultaneous vulnerability and invincibility in so long. It was startling: You startled.

There’s an insistent audacity in self-authorship; self-authorship is the word I go to when thinking about portraiture . . . Is that word fitting? For you is portraiture an avenue for self-authorship; or do you see your body as more of an instrument that you employ?

SA: Woah. I wish I was indomitable. In my portraits it’s my body, there’s my face, but it’s representative of a female figure, anonymous. Self-portraiture is about the way you exist out in the world, the way you want to. I can’t say that for my work. It’s approaching accuracy to say it’s a site or a place or an embodiment of a struggle or a representation of a community. It challenges or juxtaposes historical references, contemporary references. There’s no singular way of saying how the body operates in my work.

The body is sort of an absorbing and receiving instrument, a medium for information, or on which information is transposed. Experience is filtered through and embodied by me. I give a lot of weight to the imagination coming from dreams. I allow it to direct me even if I don’t understand, the understanding comes after creation. There’s a lot of disparate, scary threads.

There’s also a lack of physical context around the body that my works pronounce through barren spaces and backgrounds, to centralize the figure. It is an outcome I came to recognize in my work many, many years later. I believe this barrenness is because of the statelessness that I existed in for most of my life. My connection to land has been made abstract, hollow and empty. Critics say I have a minimalist approach, but it’s not minimalist. It’s a lack of context. Every place is every place, it has nothing to do with me.

The work that returns to my childhood trapped in war is rooted in place. My body was almost incarcerated by its position. It couldn’t get out. We had to escape, that’s a physical escape I mean, but anyone who escapes can say it’s still inside you afterward. You are there. You still have lost your land, been betrayed by it, and are wandering landless from place to place, an alien. I lived as an undocumented person in the United States for so many years and then was given refugee status. Still, we were trying to disappear, go unnoticed. Then my body was disappearing.

This, all the contradictions, all comes through in the work. All of these ways of seeing the body, being in a body. It was subconscious for the first ten years I made art. Then I went through tenure and had to fucking look at everything I had ever done. It was amazing: I printed everything, including four years of work I’d never shown to anybody, for my book with Aperture. I put it down and could step out of myself and see myself. None of this was accidental. It is about me, and it’s completely not. I will give you all those answers, those contradictions. You know I’m a Libra.

MJ: We are both Libras. We are born on the same day, within a couple of hours. Our day is October 14th.

VK: We’re such pendulums, swinging between every position . . . And contradictions, so many contradictions! All my friends no longer see a finality to anything I say. It’s hilarious to meet other Libra women and remember you aren’t alone in your irrationality. Libra women are always implicitly saying, Come back later, I’ll reconclude.

SA: I love it, I love it. Our cheeks, we all have the cheeks. In art, you can evade decisiveness. It could be that or this, or it’s neither. It’s not a guardedness, a way of being cagey. I’m not unwilling. The way we talk about our work changes across our lifetime: work documents an instant of creation, and all art is an artifact. You have to always look at artworks through a historical lens and an immediate eye.

MJ: I was noticing, as you already mentioned, that the space of your work is nowhere, you place yourself no-place; or every-place. At the same time, you’ve described a sort of contested existence, that you are more a physical presence in a place and that place does things to you, instead of you inhabiting it. I’m wondering about this perception of art as locatable. How do you reconcile the importance of specificity and the fact that people impose a specificity on you?

SA: The art isn’t mine. I have an intention and I make work out of it, and then there’s a person, or persons, who receive that work, and the art is something between us: I can’t control this receiving. Art does not exist in the world with running commentary right next to it, so I can put out as many statements, there can be thousands of critics, but people will receive it as they receive it. Sometimes, it means nothing; sometimes, its meaning reveals itself later when something happens in their life; sometimes, it’s revisited years down the line and there is a different relationship.

This has been interrupted a little by the internet. Authorship over art now enters the space where ambiguity or anonymity used to exist, and closes its openness, bringing specificity. Some artists accept this. Some make it more difficult with obnoxious language that doesn’t offer any windows or doors into the space of what they’re trying to think through. It is smoke. This comes when people are not challenged and when understanding is assumed. Those of us from the Global South are very good at articulating what our art is about because we’ve had to advocate for ourselves without supposing that people understand. The problem is: that formulates a tunnel, and we must break from the category that they position us in, that we title ourselves under to be recognized.

I don’t believe in a world that’s fair, I’m moving towards that. I know things are not fair and won’t give an illusion of fairness. I give access points to my work, but I don’t care to control how my work is interpreted. I want them to think. I don’t want to rewrite their mind. If I didn’t want to be met with new thoughts I wouldn’t share my work, I don’t need to make and share things. I could live with my dreams and talk to myself, but I have the impulse to be communicating, in an imagined dialogue. You put down your defensiveness, put down your ego, and hear what you mean to someone else, and it’ll catch you by surprise. It might coincide with the truth, or have an equal amount of incidences, or be completely the antithesis of what you’re intending.

One of my big challenges is that I’m coded in the Arab female body, and it’s impossible to break from the social visual code of history. I’m working against image history, visual history, and the framing of my body in films, media, memes, and cartoons. In “Carry Over,” for example, I wanted to show the absurdity. The scale and dysfunction of the burdens placed on Arab women through those large sculptures that are impossible to hold, to carry. You have to interrupt the social visual code so that people don’t interpret your work through their subjectivity. Art is an antagonism.

Again, I say this so much, and it is no less true each time: I learned everything in Palestine. The world’s going to frame you the way they’re going to frame you. In “Carry Over,” I specifically deal with the legacy of Orientalist images of the woman as Other, the Black, Brown woman as Other. I was in that defensive mode, and I resisted orientalism, but I didn’t stay in that mode. Palestinians never remain in the defensive.

There’s so much misunderstanding, so much simplistic and stupid trapping in the social visual code. People are now more eager to ask a question rather than tell you and this is extraordinary. This is the product of artists inviting questions, inviting challenges. Challenges are gifts to artists. You have an extraordinary breakthrough because you’re facing problems—financial, circumstantial, spatial, and material. Those are all opportunities, extraordinary fuel. This is why the extraordinary work comes from the Global South. My students want to hang their sneakers after looking at what I show them, they think they can’t compete, and they won’t come up with great ideas. I’m like, it’s not about coming up with great ideas, it’s not solely struggle and real shit, it’s about making the most sincere work you can make, right? You must be authentic, attuned to what’s happening, and welcoming of challenges.

VK: “The defensive mode” is brilliant. It’s more battling than reactionary. I might write to you about that because art as, primarily, agitation, that’s a path I fear; art as a rattling, stirring . . . I don’t understand this desire to encounter ‘the real,’ this forbidding intimidation by what has already been written. I felt so foolish, a while ago, when that way of thinking was first introduced to me by my peers here. ‘The real’ was blasphemous in its implication that there is an unreality in an experience, in adolescence. Cambridge exposed me to artifice. . . We are so blessed to be born so late into the history of literature, so much preceded us, and there’s so much to borrow: Imagine being there for the fundamentals! Oh god, Hobbes and Rousseau being contemporary. Imagine assembling the periodic table. Thank god so much has preceded today. But encountering ‘the real.’ There’s nothing desirable there . . . Who isn’t in flight from gravity?

SA: Yes! Yes, I reject that work comes from starving and struggling. That is not desirable. Anyone who has been hungry will tell you go eat. That takes such perseverance. Nobody should wish for that. Words can come from serenity. The serenity can’t be artifice. When you have pure peace and serenity, there are beautiful possibilities, and that’s a blessing too.

VK: Look at the time! We need to end! Let me tell you about this exchange in Aimé Césaire’s 

 between Ariel and Caliban. It is frightening in its offhand fatalism. Both were enslaved by Prospero and are arguing about how to go on: Ariel believes they ought to destroy Prospero’s serenity so he’s forced to acknowledge his injustice; Caliban cackles— ‘Prospero’s conscience!’ Ariel again insists that they must give him one, that a conscience can be acquired and their freedom is contingent on this acquisition. Caliban cackles and the conversation ends with him declaring: ‘You might as well ask a stone to grow flowers.’

This is hilarious though underneath it is haunting: Caliban’s is an undertaker’s humor. Is that what you call the man at the mortuary? Regardless, me and many of my peers can feel like such fools: there’s a David-Goliath comic futility in fighting against these fortified institutions, these cemented, ceaseless injustices. But also I could go my whole life whispering to the stone, Please, bloom. You are older, and I think have settled into the situation of David, how do you stay strong in that?

SA: Everything I’ve learned, I learned in Palestine. This isn’t true but it all returns. It all came to the surface there. It’s also how we’re raised: We will always be Palestinian, We are Palestinian, Everything is in Palestine. These are undeniable facts. You can’t feel like a fool: it’s foolish to drive a car knowing you could die in a car accident, or somebody could seize your school and shoot everyone. There are infinite possibilities for suffering. And then what—you don’t allow any of them? The feeling of futility is so overwhelming but also you can counter it by activating a bodily response. The body refuses futility. You march, you paint, all these strategies are felt.

I was six months pregnant the first time I traveled to Palestine. I couldn’t travel before because I held an Iraqi passport*, and it was staggering the difference between the Palestine described by elders, a Palestine of the past, another place, illusory and lost; and then this fresh view. This is not to say my family is wrong, but Palestinians in exile keep an outdated vision alive. These visions are always there even if invisible, abstract. I thought I would retrace their visions, find remnants, but that alluded me and instead, I found an active resistance, embedded into daily life. If the schools were shut down, they taught in the roads; if from your apartment building you saw a blockade, you called people to reroute them. Whatever it is, people worked around, worked through. Everybody was working. There was no walking out of it. The vast majority of people couldn’t fathom leaving, they didn’t want to, it was how to stay and thrive. It wasn’t about resurrecting a pre-1948 Palestine. They can’t afford nostalgia.

There’s a different struggle here, the struggle of erasure, forgetting, feeling stuck on the losing side, and adopting an easier political, social, and economic stance. Palestine isn’t historic, though, it will emerge on the international stage over and over until liberation. It’s seductive to walk away when you are afraid and fatalist, but people will always be pulled back. You’ll be forced to contend with Palestine. I return to Palestine every few months, at least before the last three years, and am friends with activists entrenched in the struggle. They taught me to work without hope. You have to do without change. It’s a long struggle, the struggle as it is today looks nothing like sixty years ago. It isn’t disappearing but evolving, and a choice to exit the struggle isn’t a choice. Once you know, you can’t unknow; once you see, your eyes are altered forever. You might move through certain periods of fatigue. You might be a little forgetting. But time and time again you will wind up back in the struggle, I cannot tell you how many members of my own family fought against me doing this work for years. Why are you doing it? Why don't you work on this? Why don't you work on local politics? Why? We’re Palestinians, but we occupy a range of positions. There are shifts from Democrat to Republican. To be on the side of the people of Palestine is nothing like that. It’s a human understanding. If you are human it’s there. You can’t avoid it.

VK: Absolutely. These things transcend the ideological. You don’t have a choice. Once you start thinking in terms of choice, it’s dangerous! It establishes a cruel hierarchy, there’s the wretched and the contemplative witness. . . . . . . I agree that it’s not about hope but persisting. Those are not so codependent. You have to be so militant in your persistence. In the summer I was in Ongata Rongai, nearly an hour out of Nairobi, and one of my cousins had gotten dependable work for the first time in two, three years. When maandamano, the mass demonstrations, began, many found it offensive that he rallied alongside friends. Their sons didn’t have work and here was this boy who spit at his blessings. We argued about this all the time. You can’t abstain from protest based on having a future, because, who doesn’t have a future? Whose death is weightless? . . . You can’t claim that one breathing man is no better than dead because of how he spends his days. In my eye, every young boy might as well be my brother. Every maandamano is a rehearsal, not in the theatrical sense, but rehearsal in that you are there, amongst the believers, in the scene that creates the possibility for revolution. You must have the courage to be on-site, even if it’s with branches, or even if it’s only with a bottle of water. You are approaching something, even if there’s no hope.

SA: Exactly. You are approaching something, and it’s not necessarily hope, but it arms you with all kinds of other tools. We all have different roles in our struggle, though, and it’s difficult because you have to rehearse in different scenes. Not everybody will do the same thing, not everybody will be visible, alongside each other. In the spring, during the Gaza Solidarity Encampments, everybody was all hands on deck. Nobody can sustain this kind of activism day in and day out. Not everybody has that steady consciousness or such intense humanism, many aren’t persistent in rage. There are different temperaments in a movement. People are so exhausted. I was working with an Iraqi friend and he said, You know, I can’t cry anymore, I look at Palestine and I can’t cry, we’ve all been on the losing end forever and ever and ever.

I don’t feel the same as him. People in Palestine live their lives each day, they eat and feed their children and they go to school Inshallah, they make art at the camps—all of this is a winning day. I am not a revolutionary leader, but I do believe everything is possible, I believe revolution is there all the time. We are all reacting, participating in a battle for Palestine, it’s a fight for the Soul of the World, for who we are. This is an injustice that is enacted daily. Not the aftermath, the reverberations, but ongoing, adding bodies every day to the death count. I know it sounds spiritual or irrational but Palestinians hold the heaviest of commitments. I swear to God I could’ve been from anywhere and been equally moved by the Palestinian spirit. Palestinians instruct everyone. I swear to God they will never get rid of it. On my second visit in 2005, there had been no communication with this part of my family since 1947, before the Nakba, and I managed to find my grandfather’s home and find family in that village. Then I took my aunt and cousins there. They can’t take out Palestine, all they’ve managed to do is make millions more Palestinians, people who carry the heaviest of commitments. They’ve made you a Palestinian, they impart it along with all the other identities you have. To be Palestinian is not necessarily where you were born or your family lineage but that conviction, that allegiance to justice, that persistence without hope, that fearlessness. I swear to God we are going to win this fight.

*Iraq declared war on the newly established state of Israel in 1948 during the Nakba; since then, Iraq has refused to recognize Israel as a legitimate state, and the two countries have no formal diplomatic relations. Due to Iraq’s historic allegiance with the Palestine Liberation Organization and outspoken opposition to the Zionist genocidal project, Iraqis are considered high-risk entrants to the Occupied Palestinian Territories under Israeli entry policies.

Fall 2024 - Land

Features

An Interview with Sama Alshaibi

Hi, I really want to just rest this summer, because I know for sure that this spring semester is gonna leave me with half of the desire to move and think that I currently have, but I have been highly peer-pressured into working. And no one in their early twenties can resist peer pressure – I am applying to this internship just like I might jump off the bridge if my friends do, Mom.

I know, there is a pool of much more qualified people to go over your files and nod and smile at the pictures of your niece for $16 an hour or no pay at all with New York rent to pay, but you really should take me. I have this feeling that I am special and so helpful. Not just because I want to think so, but because it is objective truth, and also my high school English teacher said so.

You guys read my CV already, so you have read all about my experience and some frivolous phrasings that are basically lies. I am also convinced I can learn all of Photoshop in a week, if you take me.

I think this is all wrong and kinda rude, so I will apologize and thank you seven times in the following couple of lines – feel free to just skip them.

I’m sorry, I will totally forget to tell my roommate if you decide to interview me, and he’ll walk out of the shower into the background of the Zoom call halfway through it – don’t take it personally.


This is way too long – I’m sorry for that too. I think I’m really interesting, but you would disagree that I’m 500 words interesting, I’m sure. I swear, I am as sick of writing this as you are sick of reading it.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for your time. Thank you for being the father I never had. Thank you for this award. Thank you for letting me borrow your shoes for the party. Thank you for your 

Fall / Winter 2023

Notes

A Cover Letter To Everyone At Every Department Of Every Workplace Ever At The Same Time

Jumana Manna is a visual artist, filmmaker, and a visiting professor in the Harvard Art, Film, and Visual Studies Department in the Fall 2024. As I conducted this interview, I was a student in her class - 

. The obscurity that some might notice in the term “time-based media” speaks to the difficulty of defining Jumana’s practice through the already coined terms. As a maker without a strong commitment to one outlet myself, I was drawn to the multifaceted set of skills and modes of thinking that Jumana Manna reveals in her art.

Besides, the multiplicity of life forms and our hierarchical treatment of them has been startling for me lately. In Jumana’s work, I saw immediate and uncompromising respect for all life and a commitment to making space for it all. Of course, I wanted the work itself to be published in the issue, but, moreover, I was intrigued by the nature of the relationship between Jumana and her subjects. After class, I stayed a few times to talk to Jumana more and hoped that one of such conversations could become a brief glance into her practice for the readers as a cloud of thoughts to accompany her work.

 has the pleasure of publishing her work 

When talking about your work my instinct is to talk about land. I want to ask if I am misjudging it or imposing the issue’s theme?

Not at all! A lot of my recent work has had to do with human-land relations and the transformations of land practices under duress. I have been interested in the question of preservation. That has been a big theme within the institutions of modernity (think museums), because modernity brought with it accelerated change and many erasures, particularly the erasure of life forms that were considered pre-modern and in need of “civilizing processes”; of course a racist ideological construct and byproduct of the enlightenment and European colonial conquests.

I have been looking at the contradictions within preservation practices: preservation of musical forms, seeds, plants, or other living and cultural forms. Very often, the same institutions that have come to “rescue”, archive, or preserve, belong to the same colonial structures that caused the eradication of these life forms to begin with. And so, in a way, my engagement with the land is also my engagement with archival practices, and the wider associations that come with the term “land”. Technologies of rule, that, on the one hand, come with an aspect of care—because preserving something is often an attempt to delay death—but on the other hand, are embedded in power relations. Every act of preservation entails an erasure of something else. These kinds of contradictions have been my entry point into the theme of “land”.

You talked about archiving and preservation. There seems to be a chronological aspect to it: the conception of land in much of popular culture is associated with the archaic. Modernity seems to also be a pivotal point. How does the conception of land modify in modern times, and how would you envision it existing in the future? Where is it headed?

This is a great point—it reminds me of an issue I thought about when I worked on colonial archives. They often had to do with histories of the city and urban relations that excluded the countryside. What was being prioritized and documented, and what you see in many state archives, had to do with taxation, legal issues, registrations and court decisions, notable figures—often associated with urbanity because it is there that power has situated itself. Land has not often been thought of as something that is archived, until the introduction of property, because it was framed as timeless. These are binaries and categories invented by modernity, understandings of linear time, and progress that frame culture as something that moves from its barbaric infancy towards civilization.

Land is associated with various things: it could be the soil, where you cultivate and grow food. It could be the place where you live, or which your community was expelled from by colonizers, it could be the strata of the earth that are suffering from the toxicity from nuclear tests or pesticides. Land as it relates to the commons and different kinds of nonproperty was framed as backwards, as something of the ‘past’ by capitalist modernity.

Until the advent of modernity, Palestinians, or Levantines, like much of the world, practiced a relationship to the land grounded in the belief that certain things should not be privatized and are common heritage, there to serve human survival through cooperation, social reproduction, and communal solidarity. The introduction of land as property, as a way to shape and control futures, brought about severe imbalances and miserable exclusions across the world.  Notions such as land investment or land speculation often translate to dispossession.

How to resist the capitalist forces that have driven an extractivist and destructive relationship to land, or how something like soil erosion is tied to social justice, is what I have tried to unpack and understand through my work. We need land to live and to grow our food. We need land to maintain social bonds and cultivate our communities. Land is our past, present and future.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, as an extreme case in point, causes not only immense human suffering, and the destruction of Palestinian culture, knowledge, heritage and memories but has inflicted severe and lasting damage on the land. The plants, the animals, the soil and the human beings who will survive, will be subject to slow violence, that is the hidden forms of violence resulting from the intensive bombing, such as cancer, toxic soil or polluted waterways for decades if not centuries to come. And yet Gazans keep saying, we want to go back to our land, even if it is a ruin. This ruin is ours and we will rebuild.

Land is at the center of all kinds of decolonial struggles. Past and present. What the colonizer seeks to do is to occupy that land and extract all it can from it, its resources and the colonized people’s labor. In the settler colonial context, the settler wants to naturalize their claim to the land while eradicating and replacing the native with the settler and his culture. This is also why I have been interested in the topic. I grew up in the settler colony that is called Israel, or what we still call Palestine.

Tell me about the important points where your practice originated from.

That has changed over the years. I have consistently been interested in liveliness: the liveliness of things, materials, plants and human lives, especially those that have been subject to pressure. I have been interested in the concept of ruination, which is just another word to think through slow violence or the aftermath of colonial violence. Ruination is the planetary condition of our epoch, affecting every material and immaterial aspect of life and land. It is also a site where life emerges because most people in the world grow up in places that have persisted through some form of brutality. How life continues within the ruins is a running thread throughout my practice. I am always searching for markers of life, joy or desire as signs of resistance and steadfastness.

Maybe you are also asking me about my identity as a Palestinian, and how central that is. Obviously it is central. Palestinians, like all people who come from racialized contexts and experience quite extreme forms of dehumanization, cannot ignore where they come from, because they are constantly being reminded of it.

There have been periods in my trajectory as an artist where I was not interested in fronting my identity as a Palestinian and wanted to explore issues of gender, sexuality and the body that were not confined by geographic specificity. I do not know if it is ever possible to work outside of a particular geography. But I wanted to foreground other themes, and because Palestine is so overpowering, there have been periods where I wanted to deal with issues or sites that are not, in any direct way Palestinian. In these cases, I did not necessarily address the fact that I am Palestinian in my bio or the project descriptions, as it did not seem relevant.

What I have been interested in, more than identity, is positionality: where one is speaking from, how and to whom? This is a crucial consideration for any artist making any kind of work. It is really only those who come from a hegemonic position that believe in such a thing as a neutral voice. We know that neutrality is a false construction of Whiteness. The intentionality of how I position myself in relation to the subjects that I work with is something I consider quite a lot. Sometimes finer aspects of that get answered in the process but I never pretend that positionality does not matter. Of course, today, when Palestinians are being subjected to genocide, I find it more important to foreground, in certain events or certain platforms, that I am Palestinian.

How much agency do you think we have over our positionalities? Do you desire more agency, or are you at peace with it?

My agency is first and foremost in the making of the work. How the work is received or engaged with? Not so much. That is not true actually, I do have agency there. For example, the way that I write about or communicate around a film or installation affects how it is received.

But of course, films and artwork will be understood and experienced by different audiences in different ways. And that is the beauty of art, and that is up for subjective interpretation. But when I deal with issues, where politics can be misread, I do care to be clear on where I stand, even if the work is open to multiple readings. I think there is a difference between the research that I do, the texts I write, and what the artworks do. It has always been important for me not to burden artworks with information as such, and to maintain the space of art or poetry as one of incompletion, contradiction, ambiguity.

Sometimes I construct a particular narrative around a film or sculpture series because that is what I am interested in at that moment. But then I look back at it five or ten years later, and I think, sure, it deals with those issues, but it does so many other things that I did not highlight when I first chose to talk about or write about the work. These things are also open to revision, rereading, and there is no one answer.

I am lucky you talked about positionality, and your relationship to the subject. As someone who makes art, of course, I think about these things, aspiring to do justice. But as a viewer too, perhaps indulging in a search for moral judgments, I am looking for the artist to reveal their relationship with the subject. An inanimate thing can become a character but can remain an object, as well as an abstraction. In your work, there are so many different relationships with the land. There are foragers, and man-made objects that are part of the landscape, and there are imaginary landscapes. So, I am asking if you think there is a right and wrong kind of relationship to have with land.

Interesting, I’ve never been asked about land in relation to moral judgment. I don’t often use terms such as right and wrong in my artwork. But I have used terms like extractive or sustainable, for example. There are certain relationships to land that are destructive. Chemicals that kill the soil and do not allow the soil to rejuvenate itself. Nuclear Waste kills everything that lives around it. The invention of property, turning land, or any other living being into property is a severe form of injustice that is deadly. If the land is related to as kin, something you care for, are a part of, that offers sustenance in turn. That’s a cyclical, life-giving, human-land relationship. These are the terms that I have thought through, more often than the terms 

. But I do say it is wrong to occupy somebody else's land. That occupiers need to get out because land theft and dispossession are wrong and unjust.

Do you have your own relationship with the subject that is independent of your artistic practice? Can you feel divorced from this role?

I can say that I feel very connected to the Palestinian landscape because that is where I grew up. The plants and the smells and the kind of vegetation and animals – that is what is most familiar to me. I familiarize myself there more than in other places, and that gives me a sense of joy and belonging. I love foraging but have not cultivated as much. In general, I like plants a lot and enjoy being in what we call nature, or out on the land, regardless of the geography. ..

A lot of what you do in your artistic practice, but also what you are talking about now, is offering attention and care for very small things. Seeds would be one example, but also the work that we are publishing, 

—it pays attention to a thing that is discarded, and now, eternalized. That is the reason I am in love with the work. These small things—are they something that has to do with intimacy, or with another feeling that is important to you? Where is this attention and care coming from?

I think intimacy is its keyword. That is a nice way to describe my work: finding intimacy in things that have been left behind. looking at the overlooked, like this book title of Norman Bryson that we read in class 

(note: the reference is to the book titled “Looking at the Overlooked”, chapter four –“Still Life and Feminine Space”)

. That is why I love that book because it offers a reflection on what has gone unnoticed and why, and what it means to look at discarded items, at what has been categorized as unimportant to History, the domestic space, the quotidian, the everyday. Art offers a way to spend time with oneself, with other people and things, whether that is a particular habit, a memory, a discarded bread or a leftover pipe. There is a form of intimacy and knowledge that you build in studying these things. As we do with one another. We learn more when we spend more time and approach our engagement with one another with intentionality. Through this intimacy, we are able to understand the world around us better or see things in a different light. It is a particular kind of care.

Do you think the scale of your subject also shapes the scale of thinking or conversation about the work?

I am interested in big and small things. Big topics and grand narratives and how they manifest in the small details of everyday life. I work sometimes with quite large sculptures, and then sometimes with very small sculptures, big collages and small collages. Shifting the scale of things—enlarging or shrinking—also shifts the way we see things, allowing us to look again or see differently.

​​Finally, I wanted to ask you directly about the Old Bread International. What is the story of this particular intimate encounter?

This installation mimics a common sight found in cities and towns across the Mediterranean: along ledges or beside trash bins, uneaten bread is laid out as an offering to be taken, consumed, or grow stale and rot. I started noticing this left-out bread as I went on walks around my neighborhood in East Jerusalem during the pandemic. I took an interest in the web of guilt and generosity that defines this practice, and how it is also a reflection of the excesses of urbanity, of overproduction. Bread is a signifier of life, and is therefore not to be wasted, not to be thrown in the trash. Acting from the religious beliefs that throwing out bread is 

or a sinful act, the leftover bread is often left outside and “gifted” to unknown receivers. Historically, old bread would have been given to the chickens or other livestock. Many today live in cities and don’t have animals to feed, so this strange phenomenon constitutes a kind of informal recycling. Related to my interest in land, I have been interested in decay as a part of life and its regeneration. In the biological world, rotting organisms feed other processes of regeneration. I spent a lot of time photographing and looking at the way bread goes stale, rots and decays to be able to reproduce these ceramic objects fossilized at various states of disintegration, and lingering between the freshly baked “sacred” bread and the abject version of its decay. It was a pleasurable act of mimesis, and perhaps a reflection of my interest in sites of decomposition that fall outside conventional historical interest and preservation. 

An Interview with Jumana Manna

Maren Wong

I was born and raised in Russia — the country whose borders contain the biggest plot of land within them. Growing up, this knowledge was a given and a point of pride.

Russia is now at the center of geopolitical discussions, more than it has been for quite some time. The country placed itself in mouths and headlines worldwide by launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — making many of us young Russians look back at our history more critically than we ever had before. We are looking back with fear for the history of which we are a part, but we know that we need to keep looking.

How did Russia grow so big, stretching across eleven time zones for 9000 kilometers? On such a heterogeneous plot of land, what unites us? Does anything? Tragically, it took full-blown violence to set off these strings of thoughts. I am lucky never to have had my belonging or right to home questioned by the tyrannical ruling power in Russia.

So when this issue’s theme — Land — was proposed last semester, I latched on to it immediately. Knowing that every space is contested and that every struggle is a version of another one, and, thus, that our theme could serve as strong connective tissue across geographies and experiences, I had big hopes for this production cycle. One of them was to find those ties among the pieces in the issue that clarify my judgment of Russia’s tremendous terrains. Another - to learn about concealed land-caused pains. Another - to find, despite the parallels between all struggles over land, what makes each of them matchless.

In our solicitation message for this issue, we wrote that “

 is thinking about land” this semester. But of course, it is us, students of the 

, who keep returning to this concept — some of us weekly in board meetings, some daily, some never stop thinking of it. What a blessing we have, to turn our focus toward and away from land — land as an intellectual curiosity, as a deeply exciting topic, as a novel perspective on the world. But then there is a need for some of us to wake up and go to sleep, concerned and aware; for others, livelihoods are engulfed in contestations over land; others don’t enjoy the privileges of citizenship on “neutral soil” and are irreversibly hurt by the status quo.

 is in a unique position: sustained by our own efforts, but also by Harvard College, we benefit from the stability that few publications enjoy. And so we carry the weight of Harvard’s institutional legacy, of crimes against land and the people who inhabit it. As we considered all things land this semester, we found that this issue must not only house our perspectives and uplift artistic expression on campus but also be offered humbly and compassionately to those for whom land is a matter of survival.

I have long discarded my national pride and started doubting if I have ever been proud. These days, I am embarrassed to simplify growth and resulting hugeness to the point of unquestionable achievement. In the Land Issue, I find similar doubts. Why is a giant country, connected so faintly, by stamps and trains, yet hopelessly unwavering? How do we define the relationship between living things: humans and land, both of whom are strong characters and diligent laborers? Am I uniquely intimate with the landscape? And thus, am I always or never alone? This issue has brought me great joy, as all these questions — that we learn are unanswerable and, thus, meaningless — were not only asked but also debated with passion.

The final product is not without its shortcomings. We took upon this project knowing that it is ambitious, inexhaustible, and disputable. But this semester, I am very proud of the 

. I am proud of my friends and colleagues behind this name, for their curiosity and drive, for approaching with urgency and empathy, and for devoting a lot of time to our Land Issue. This issue is, I hope, one of many steps towards an 

 that serves the pursuit of justice through our fundamental means: visual and literary arts.

We bought a new outfit for my appearance in the climate change documentary. It wasn’t a decision so much as a necessity: I had arrived fully clad in black; my head seemed to float above my body, which had disappeared into the green screen I was being shot against; this called for a new outfit color. My mother ran to the nearby children’s shop while Amy, the show’s producer, had me remove my shoes and untie my hair to hang down my back. I was barefoot and ethereal looking by the time my mother returned with a skirt and shift in virginal blue.

A year later, when the documentary aired, we had already discarded both skirt and shift: trash that nevertheless survives eternally in a video of me singing Tom Chapin’s 

 — followed by a montage of turtles choking on garbage in a sea once ethereal blue.

 was a documentary about kids, for kids: a Gen-Z paean against climate change, mildly star studded (Liam Neeson, Tina Fey, and Laura Dern all made appearances), with the tenor of an enthusiastic acceptance speech (Us! Yes, us! We’re going to save the world! Thank you and please donate!) from a diverse cast of real-life children, whom 

.” Our anthem, the documentary’s theme song, was the 

The earth is our one home
The earth is so fragile it seems
It's warmer and warmer
And things have gone from strange to extreme
And then the kids took over
That's when the future began

That future was now, and that future was orchestrated by preteens. Critically, no documentary participant had outgrown middle school. Everyone had an adorable lisp, cringey braces, or a face studded with acne. My right foot tapped nervously as I sang, lips shaped in a taut 

 unless the lyrics called for the clearly enunciated 

 I had learned in voice lessons. My older brother, Ben, sat upright at the piano, leaning soulfully into the keyboard whenever the harmony resolved.

Amy, a parent at our elementary school, had plucked Ben and I from the school talent show — he, fourteen, an amateur climate enthusiast; I, eight, unsure if I liked to be outdoors — and plopped us back into the school auditorium that was now transformed into an HBO set. Ben played as I sang:

This pretty planet
Spinning through space
My garden, my harbor, my holy place
Golden sun going down
Gentle blue giant
Spin us around
All through the night
Safe till the morning light

 did not, in fact, follow Chapin’s original lyrics. Unintentionally I had changed them: from “

You’re a garden / you’re a harbor / you’re a holy place”

My garden / my harbor / my holy place.”

 Through this pronoun switch-up I had inadvertently transformed the song from a grateful ballad to a statement of ownership.

My lyrical mishap was only fitting. By Google Search, 

 is billed: “From the children who will inherit the planet, comes a collection of songs, activism, and heartfelt tips for protecting the earth.” Not yet fifteen, we received our inheritance: this pretty planet. Unified by our youth, we could never squander such wealth.

For ours was a very particular fantasy: that before we were old enough to vote, to breathe smoke from illicit cigarettes, to brush up against grief in joy’s clear waters, to tumble into love on a warm December night and out in a freezing July, Generation Z would rescue a planet about which we knew little — save that it was “ours,” and that we had very limited time.

When I think of New York City I think of the things that fall on it. Hosewater trickling through the caulk between sidewalks on fresh April mornings. Snow plows scraping white from the streets like crust from a thermos’ rubber rim. Gingko nuts that stink more than bird shit. Home in New York is a tightly-zipped pocket of sky or an unyielding plot of concrete. Land in New York is not soil but the thick layer of fallen residue that rises to meet the sky from which it fell.

I grew up in that city, and so compiling this issue has been a lesson for me in other ways of knowing land. Andrew Q. Kang ‘27 leads us through an unnamed city in his short story “Quiltro,” shadowing a dog’s kaleidoscopic view. Mohsid Hamid describes Lahore’s changing climate in an interview with Imaan Mirza ‘25. In an interview with Varya Lyapneva ‘26, Jumana Manna speaks of urbanization eroding earth’s soils as surely as colonial power corrodes the minds of the powerful, as mold eats through bread crusts in Manna’s 

In other stories, land is synonymous with house. The narrator in Rosalind Margulies’s “the maneater” promises to shoot the beast stalking Shady Acres retirement community, in exchange for allowance to continue living in his late grandfather’s house. Taylor Dorrell photographs an old man standing by his clapboard house in shirtless contrapposto. A dog with a gun bullies his owner into housebound seclusion in Christopher Wilson’s “The Bad Dog.”

Sometimes, plan replaces land, as in “The Machine That Makes the Machine”: Annika Inampudi ‘25 writes of her grandparent’s home in the meticulously plotted town surrounding a heavy electricals factory in Nehru’s India. In a chapter from Ishmael Reed’s upcoming novel “The Terrible Fives,” a necrophiliac named Termite Control plans to reshape America’s mortuary landscape when he becomes President of the United States. Sama Alshaibi describes making art with teenage girls at the Dheisheh refugee camp in Palestine, nurturing creativity in the face of planned destruction.

Frank Y.C. Liu ‘26 takes a transcontinental train ride. The earth is stitched with steel; humans flee, and land grows back around the stitches, inflamed with new life. In an interview with Liu, Homi K. Bhabha questions the geographic reach of postmodernity. “Rain Comes After She Dies,” Denise Low tells us. In her poem “Waldens,” McGowin Grinstead ‘26 swims in debt through a lake at the margins of her life.

Our garden, our harbor, our holy place — we think of land as something we own, something to be possessed; ownership licenses our irresponsibility. The stories enclosed engage that irresponsibility. They also engaged me to reflect on my own.

More than ten years ago now, I appeared in a documentary against global warming, costumed in the future’s trash: an outfit I would discard less than a year after purchasing it. Later I littered the Internet with candy-colored infographics. I spread awareness. The personal is political, and poetry is not a luxury but a means of action: weaned on the doctrines of second-wave feminism, I politicized my writing. Concurrently I aestheticized my politics. My friends and I thrifted new outfits to wear to climate rallies: red tube tops (a powerful color, a call to action!), casual light wash jeans, haloes of stick-on gems around our eyes. I remember little from those rallies other than the photos we shot for Instagram, the proselytizing captions that guilted others in order to deflect our own shame.

, youth was a promise. To many adults, “the youth” are an undifferentiated and self-perpetuating mass onto which one can perpetually foist responsibility to compensate for one’s own lack thereof. It’s natural to blame the parents. But it was I who spent my childhood performing climate justice, even as I contributed to its increasing improbability. Youth became my excuse — one that becomes increasingly harder to brandish.

Sweeping statements like “the kids will save the world” manufacture a superficial coherence premised on shared youth. This fantasy of unity elides real differences in lived experience, of climate change and many other things. But I believed in this fantasy. I lived it, until I was no longer a child, and it was abundantly clear that Gen-Z had failed to save the world before the age of twenty-one. Self deception nibbles at the soul as mold consumes bread — until stale ideology dries the mouth, encrusts the tongue, halts speech.

Coming out of this fantasy I was lucky to find the 

 — colleagues and friends who invite all to share in their curiosity.

Here is our offer: a thick packet of stories, broad in its scope and by no means exhaustive, that speaks not to unity but to the universality of difference. The pocket of sky in which I conducted my childhood years is not the same pocket in or under which you conducted yours. We will read the same stories differently. As we read, we will reflect on our own separate lives, and responsibility will fall with varied weight on varied individuals.

Here is my hope: that we are able to accept the responsibility that falls on each of us, and rise through our own self-deceptions, firmly planted on the land beneath our feet.

Editor's Notes

Editor's Note: Land Issue

Saturday afternoons are the worst at MoMA. Every resident and visitor in New York finds themselves at the museum, and you can’t see much art, rather a diverse sea of heads and a pretty decent shoe selection. But as I entered 

 on a Saturday afternoon – LaToya Ruby Frazier’s solo show running in the Summer of 2024 – the crowd dissolves, the air is fresher, and suddenly, it is quiet. I am in an alternate space.

The exhibition hall and a luminescent corridor with comfortable benches and floor-to-ceiling windows offering a view of New York sit side by side. The latter is more tempting, yet I advise you to enter the hall. Prepare accordingly for a mix of tender, expressive intimacy and unapologetic advocacy.

The soft pink walls welcome the visitor into the space, dedicated to the artist’s roots. In the opening piece, Ruby Frazier is merging with her mother, approaching the viewer at a proximity, reminiscent of the memory albums (fig.1). The subjects gaze right at the audience in all but one image - LaToya and her Mother distressed and feeling blue on the couch, not interacting. The photo is both the least real and least posed out, as the shot is clearly curated, yet, unlike her other images, tries to appear casual. This image is the first step of the escalation of personal and public tragedy that the viewer follows for the next couple hours.

Facing the entrance is a wall that does not awaken concern until one steps closer to read the scattered words. Cyanides. Benzene. Xylenes. And more. The poem introduces every chemical in the air of Braddock, Pennsylvania – an industrial town that Ruby Frazier considers  a family member, establishing the status through the industrial landscapes of decay and her nude against them.

The viewers are drawn into the family hall, thinking they are about to spy on intimacy, but the intimacy is presented voyeuristically: with no discreteness or shame. I am looked back at from every photo, and if not, the vulnerability I am offered is so jarring that I am tempted to look away. No men are in the family, except for Mr. Art – a mysterious gentleman, brought to the forefront, yet out of focus on one of the mother’s portraits. The world that LaToya offers is a space for the muted and powerless to defy their status as such.

Soon, the intimacy is over. A bright red catches the eye in the door opening into the next hall. “Who gets to go forth” states the work — no question mark. Right under it is a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., encouraging people not to believe advertising.

The small hall is painted gray. The room is filled with portrayals of industrial blight. On one wall, a hospital is being torn down; two large-scale photographs, parallel to the floor are printed in color, yet still seem to be monochrome, as the pictured landscape of Braddock offers little in terms of palette.

Ruby Frazier takes a personal and diligent approach to address the mistreatment of Braddock by Levi Strauss & Co. – using the town as a backdrop for a marketing campaign that celebrates the working class, while concealing and disregarding the struggle of the residents, caused by the hospital closure. “Everybody’s work is equally important,” says the campaign selling jackets for 200 dollars apiece. Ruby Frazier mocks the hypocrisy and makes some witty and tragically truthful corrections to the campaign. 

Nearby, a piece of recorded performance art is playing. In the recording she crawls and squirms against the asphalt outside of the Levi’s pop-up in a pair of their jeans, breaking them down. The hall presents Ruby Frazier as a protester and an artist with aces up her sleeve, ready to shock to win the fight.

From here on, Ruby Frazier goes silent. Ahead is a maze of small-scale billboards, where the voices of residents of Flint, Michigan sound instead: earnest photo portraits in companionship with their stories of living through one of the worst water crises in America (fig. 2). Wandering from one narrative to another, the viewer becomes a reader. The portraits are captivating, yet, somehow, secondary.

Large prints are placed against the sage green walls with scenes that are progressively filled with meaning and foreshadowed, as one goes through the series of personal narratives. Yet, some of them appear detached – reading turns into searching for the meaning behind the images of horse ranches and farms.

It is at this moment that the viewer remembers that they’re standing in the MoMA, a large modernist building on 53rd street in midtown, the wealthiest neighborhood of one of the richest cities in the world.  The viewer begins to miss the skylight and view of the city – the contemporary distractions that allow one to abstract from reality itself. Ruby Frazier brings America to the heart of itself, where visitors are unaware and, perhaps, uncomfortable with the present of the country they live in. She utilizes the space given to her to yield the floor, performing an artistic and honorable act of visibility redistribution.

One such act is the next room: oval, with the light ever-changing from red to redder. A portrait of Sandra Gould Ford – an artist and a steelworker - is towering in the middle, and the viewer is invited to circumambulate it clockwise as if a deity in a Hindu shrine. Light keeps changing, making it hard to focus on the textual and schematic evidence of the hell on Earth that is the steel industry in America. The lighting itself, however, is a manifesto of that struggle along with the grim photographs, depicting otherworldly factories, burning up in the toxic heat.

The following storytelling spaces are dedicated to COVID-19 and the General Motors workers union. Whether it is the abundance of text, the cramped space, the distressing yellow wall color, or the direct passageway between the entrance into the hall and the exit from it into the next space or, perhaps, the false notion that Covid is an issue I am well-informed on, it is imminently hard to force myself to stay for long enough to read more than two narratives. The showing of the stories is noble, but overwhelming, thus, ineffective, inciting guilt for the lack of attention into the reader.

The work on the union is a vast red installation – a row of metal stands, spreading across the biggest room so far. The visual is exciting and promising, having a great effect of contrast with the big body of words in small font, encountered previously (fig. 3). Up close, the stands are serving as a backdrop for more text as well as portraits. I am defeated, as my attention span and stamina cannot accommodate the information that LaToya Ruby Frazier is eager to share. The stories, however, agree and argue rivetingly, spotlighting American labor history from every angle.

For Ruby Frazier, the history is made not in presidencies or international politics, but in local crises, dealt with by the working people of America. A message so simple still appears fairly radical for a culturally elite institution. Through organizing this show MoMA allows for the critique of its own ivory tower, perhaps, performing (and inviting the visitors to perform) a set of “moves to innocence”, placing this exhibition as a substitute for action and a forestalling of criticism.

I exit through the previously spotted tempting corridor. I realize, the choice I made, in the beginning, was an illusion of one: the alternative to seeing the show was to see it backwards. Along its walls is one of the strongest works of the day – prints, scaled to match the wall, with the artist holding flags with images that reflect New York’s history of crude immigration policies. 

, covered by Ruby Frazier, is playing. The artwork is a closure – the last piece of the show. The only regret is its placement as a bypass my way out, and not at a more chronologically and spatially central place inside of the exhibit.

Despite the overwhelmingly journalistic feeling of the exhibit, LaToya Ruby Frazier, do not be mistaken, proves in full measure the “artist” part of her title as well as the “activist” in this show. Her portrait photography is raw and brilliantly piercing. The landscape she chooses is not canonically beautiful but tells the history of American labor unlike any other. Ruby Frazier sees value in objects and faces that are disregarded and ostracized, admiring their originative potential, rather than the aesthetics of decay. I wish only that the survey had left just another morsel of its space to appreciate the art as well.

If you read its promise carefully, the exhibition is exactly what it claims to be. It’s not a museum exhibit, but an alternate space: Ruby Frazier offers a survey, dedicated to artist-activists, and as long as you are not hoping to encounter bodies of symbolism and abstract commentary, the promise is kept. She interrogates the historical and present state of American labor, and in doing so, does justice to her community with her MoMA allocated space.