Something Very Dear | Article by Medea Imerlishvili
“She has come to take you home.” She came to bring you back to your roots, to find your home, your voice, your ancestors. She came to break through borders and barriers. “Remember the veld? The lush green grass beneath the big oak trees.” Do you remember those voices, rising from the heart of the earth, from the depths of the ocean? Do you remember those roads that led you home? Or the shadow on the road, the sounds of light? Do you remember something very dear, the footsteps of your ancestors, the way home?
The exhibition, “Something Very Dear”, hosted by the Tbilisi Photography and Multimedia Museum, brings together the works of 9 artists. Nine female artists from different countries of the world - Palestine, Turkey, Bangladesh, Yemen, South Africa, Egypt, Syria, and Indonesia. Photography, video, and sound are for them a way to perceive and understand the world around them, a way to read it, a way to return home.
What can be so dear, and what knowledge and inner experience do these works hold? These stories are of resistance, struggle, longing, freedom, finding one’s place in the world, transience, and life. What makes them act, why, and what did they want to revive and bring to us?
Marianne Fahmy’s film “Laws of Ruins” examines the ancient and crumbling water cistern of Alexandria, El Nabih. Marianne says that in “Laws of Ruins,” she used the diaries of one of the leaders of the Egyptian student movement of the 1970s. Arwa Saleh wrote these diaries in the 1990s, and in them she also spoke about the failure of the movement at that time. El Nabih has been covered by the land, people have lost touch with it - both physical and emotional - this destroys this ancient ruin, condemning it to permanent disappearance. The artist wants to preserve it in her film.
The parallel reality of a Palestinian resident can also be sacrificed to eternal disappearance, destruction, in the indifferent or hostile gaze of the outside world - "To be Palestinian is to exist within a disjointed temporal landscape, where time is dictated by the convoluted and relentless excess of colonial violence.”- "There is where they tossed his body from the rooftop", "There is where they started the fire, and it spread to the rest of the market", "There is home, where my family lived before the Nakba" - Dina Salem tries to complete and preserve the parallel reality - the fragmented landscape.
“She has come to take you home.”
Tahia Farhin Haque’s photo series, “Where is Home?”, tells the story of six sisters born in Bangladesh, who are descendants of the events of the 1947 partition and who embark on an odyssey to return to their roots, embarking on a painful journey home. “Where is Home?” is not a documentation of family ties; it is a story of identity, belonging, the search for one’s roots, and at the same time, an exploration of the “universal human longing” to be accepted and understood, regardless of all borders and barriers.
“The fleeting moments of freedom and belonging” are brought to life by another artist, Abeer Aref, in her photo project, “In My Nights, Jasmine Blooms”. With the jasmine flowers blooming under the night sky, you are supposed to feel that somewhere here, there is hope, and “freedom and belonging are not fleeting illusions.” As the jasmine flowers fade, this hope also fades, yearning for a place to belong, a place you can call your own.
“This is us” - the face of a woman is her hands. Her fingers, because we only see her hands. The portraits are their hands. The hands say - this is me. Riska Munawarah’s photo series tells the story of Acheh women who have to live under the laws of Saria. The photographer was inspired to work on this series by photographs preserved in family archives, which depict women before the entry into force of Islamic law. “This led to the creation of faceless portraits of women as a reaction to the government’s restriction of women’s space, portraying them as passive symbols within the Islamic community”.
“She has come to take you home
Remember the veld?
the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees
the air was so cool there
the sun didn’t burn
she has come to pull you away
away from the poking eyes of the man made monster who lives with his clutches on imperialism
and dissects your body bit by bit by bit
and likens it and your soul to that of satan
and declares himself the ultimate god
She has come to take you home.”
A Poem by Diane Ferris
Dumama's sound installation - "To Be a Voice / To Have a Voice" - through the technologies of deep listening to large bodies of water, oceans, makes us experience our bodies as bodies of water, and we begin to hear the water, to read the information, the knowledge that these waters carry in themselves, that we carry in ourselves, where we come from, where we will return, because it has come to take us home.
Grass will grow from this land. Grass will grow from our bodies, trees will grow. Come into the shade of my tree, into the light of my tree, step into the shade of the fig tree that has spread out before your eyes on the floor, connect your present with your past, connect your past with your future, do not forget the people who were sacrificed by war and violence, because you are now standing in the shade of my withered tree.
Larissa Araz’s installation - “Begin to See Through the Darkness” - tells us the mystery of the fig tree that grew from the body of Ahmed Cemal, who was killed during the war in Cyprus in 1974. She tells the grafting of life onto death. “The fig tree was discovered in a cave that can only be reached by sea.” Figs do not grow here, in this area. The investigation culminated in the discovery of the missing bodies of three Turkish Cypriots. The fig seed that one of them, Ahmed Jamal, had eaten before he died, had sprouted and grown into a tree when exposed to sunlight entering through a hole in the roof of the cave.
Exhibition curator - Ana Gabelaia.
The exhibition "Something Very Dear" was created within the framework of the Prince Claus Fund's Fertile Ground program.
