During 2011-2012, I joined Virginia Commonwealth University’s Art and Design School in Doha, Qatar, a geographically small country on the Arabian Peninsula. Despite its small size, Qatar has a broad cultural influence and encourages internationalism by inviting educational institutions from the United States to teach students from Qatar, and more generally, students from the Mid-East, North Africa, and South Asia. [1] There, my daily interactions with a diverse student population naturally stimulated many questions. How would my students and I navigate an American style art education in an Arabic culture? How might a visual exchange lay the groundwork for better understanding between people of different nationalities? In turn, what narratives could I draw forth to contribute to a fuller understanding of those living and working in Qatar? If asked to be mediators or interpreters or agents of culture in our globalized context, what would these young artists seek to convey? I decided to pursue answers to my questions in conjunction with my students, and those explorations are presented in audio, visual, and textural form.
Thus the students and I began a mutual cultural investigation of one assignment; as their instructor of the first year of spatial design, I introduced a project, called Prosthesis, in which each student designs and sculpts a low-tech prosthetic extension that expands the capacity of their physical body. The project was inspired by critical design, design-fiction, avant-garde fashion, and physical manifestations of psychological states of mind in sculptural projects. However, I initially rejected this project idea, which asked the students to consider their own bodies as sites for design, thinking it would not be possible in a culture where modesty of the female body is integral to the Islamic culture and human figuration, especially images of women, may be considered inappropriate. After discussing my fears with a colleague, a European-female faculty member, I decided to take a risk and continue with the project but to solicit suggestions from the students for how to accommodate their core cultural values.
It is from this student/teacher interaction in a cross-cultural context that the research project grew. The first part of this research was a journalistic impulse to better understand the young women with whom I worked. The second part was to investigate the more general possibilities and limits of visual communication. Eventually, I decided to publish details of this artistic research in hope that my findings may be of interest to the wider artistic community.
Initially, the Prosthesis spatial design assignment was introduced to the students using an expanded definition, considering a prosthetic to be applicable to all bodies, not just those traditionally defined as disabled. [2] For example, if we view the use of the computer as an extension of the human brain, wheel as extensions of the foot, and clothing as an extension of the skin [3], it follows that every human body may be considered as imperfect and inherently prosthetic. Normalizing deficiency thus allows for desire to be as useful a design motivation as addressing an absence, and thus freeing up more options for students’ design instincts. To better help the students understand this unconventional definition I introduced Aimee Mullins – an American artist-collaborator, model, athlete, history, diplomacy degree-holder, and a double leg amputee by presenting her online TED Conference lecture, “The Opportunity of Adversity”. [4] Mullins described adversity as a consistent condition from which springs perhaps the greatest human capacities, adaptation and creativity.
After her inspirational talk, I asked my students to conduct their own audio interviews [5] with a member of their families on the topic of Adversity as Opportunity. The definition of adversity became a way to investigate the experiences and values of those with whom I was working, a translation of the adversity concept through the students’ eyes. The artistic goal, as part of the research project, was to encourage empathy between speakers, listeners and transmitters of the audio.
The resulting audio interviews provided a nuanced portrait of lives, culture, and values of my students. The interview assignment allowed them to posit adversity as one aspect of creativity, positioning them to draw strength from their associations, the family and friends and elders they interviewed, and to encourage them to meet challenges with courage and creativity. The interviews presented in this site are the first part of the research that was conducted. It is important to note that these audios are just a few examples from a larger work; a full view of the material may modify or enhance the impressions based on a small sample, and extrapolation of the interviews for the purpose of characterizing the broader culture is, of course, problematic. However, the narratives contributed to my fuller understanding of students studying in Qatar because they identified and shared some of challenges and observations of resiliency that touched their lives. .
The audio recordings hosted by the Journal for Artistic Research website are a selection of three of the students’ “Adversity as Opportunity”, interviews, used with their permission, as well as, two more general interviews that I conducted asking students to articulate or interpret their position as agents of culture in our globalized context. What cultural differences do they experience and how are those navigated? Together, the conversations reflect themes of conflict, cultural exchange, bilingualism, educational opportunity, and warmth of Arab culture. While this project is not developed enough to constitute a full scientific study, the micro-journalism conducted by the students and myself may have interest for those in the arts and humanities. The selected audio components as part of this website can be envisioned as a virtual prosthesis of the young women I worked with in Qatar in an attempt to bring their observations to a wider audience.
As the prosthesis assignment for the spatial design class proceeded, the students found ways to translate the prosthesis concept into conceptual and sculptural designs for their own bodies. Students used modest areas of the body like the hand or eyes for their projects or used each other or willing participants as the models for their designs so to avoid immodesty. With the risk of misinterpretation due to lack of in-depth cultural understanding, i.e. “an exotic orientalist lens”, the students generated some very interesting cultural translations response to the assignment that made doing this project in Qatar very different than in the United States. I had a number of women use hair as a prosthetic site, and this was surprising to me since hair is generally covered for modesty amongst most students in the school and because I have not seen any hair prostheses in my American classes. One young woman turned her hair into a fully functional fan or personal cooling device. Another, project embedded steel sewing needles at the end of the hair, to be swung as a threatening device. A young woman devised two, 4.5 meter long prosthetic hair braids allowing her to suspend her own weight off the ground and swing from her own hair; a demonstration of strength and frivolity. In striking contrast to my initial fears about the body as site for sculptural design, the students creatively negotiated both the modesty issue and the prosthetic concept in very interesting ways.
If the first phase of my research project was to learn more about the individuals, the young women, studying in Qatar, via storytelling and interview, the second phase of my research sought to examine an artistic problem: I set out to explore the intersection of verbal- and image-based communication. Being a visual artist, I felt compelled to personally translate students’ narratives into visual form. I created five images, from the five audio recordings exploring questions such as the following: To what extent is it possible to translate a narrative into an image? [6] Is making an image as translation of a narrative a fundamentally different way of understanding a narrative, in contrast to reading, listening and writing? [7] What acculturated distinctions are identifiable when examining the results of such translations? In what context and to what extent are such exchanges of value? [8] How does visual exchange lay the groundwork for better understanding between people of different cultures? To what extent is visual language a universal language?
The only question I am able to answer is the one about acculturated distinctions: I can analyze the images.
A few strategies that played a part in my own image making included the following self-imposed rules: First, I would avoid approaches that might be considered inappropriate for my collaborators; audio and video must remain anonymous and visual representations of the students themselves should be avoided so as not to be taboo in their culture. Second, my process favored the photographed landscape as a means to build a sense of a particular place or theme, and I employed only partial human figuration, such as images of hands. This strategy was used and accepted by the students in their Prosthesis projects. Third, images I created are about the significance of the story rather than a specific storyteller. The images are a visual paraphrase of the student narratives rather than a literal translation or illustration. Fourth, with the photographs as the base image, I added vector drawings over the photographs to add a level of abstraction, a visualization of two and three-dimensional vector forms common to computer-aided design. The vectors in their non-representational quality are employed a thematic link to the concept of finitude and infinite.
The overlay of the abstract vector over the concrete photographs of various places emphasize the subjective viewpoint through tropes of first person perspective or point-of-view shots like a pair of hands holding up a piece of paper as if being read rather than angled to show another person. In this sense, the vectors may momentarily collect into a veil through which the photographs are engaged, at other moments the vectors appear as a kind of drawing or abstract visualization, a mental or diagrammatic projection into the space of the photograph. The image references fluctuate and meanings point to other signs and interpretations. For example, the vectors, in their non-representational quality, repetition and abstract geometric form, could be an adaptation of Islamic art pattern aesthetics. ‘This is based on the idea that what we see is only part of a whole that extends to infinity’ [9], while, however adapted in a secular context. Undoubtedly my students’ thoughts, divergent or otherwise, on the images would be an interesting extension of this research.
[1] Lewin, Tamar. In Oil-Rich Mideast, Shades of the Ivy League.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/education/11global.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Published February 11, 2008. (Accessed May 3, 2013).
[2] Significant to the prosthesis project was the subject of disability; I needed students to relate to the concept of prosthesis as an idea broader than its connotation to deficiency. The following article, “The Uncertainty of Placing” by Marquard Smith, citing David Willis, whose scholarly work in the field of disability studies greatly informed the work accomplished with the students. The essay provided an excellent definition of prosthesis; a discourse applicable to all bodies not just those traditionally defined as disabled.
For further reading on the prosthesis as a neurobiological diagnosis with aesthetic, cultural and philosophical implications please see the following:
Smith, Marquard. “The Uncertainty of Placing: Prosthetic Bodies, Sculptural Design, and Unhomely Dwelling in Marc Quinn, James Gillingham, and Sigmund Freud”. The Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory. Part 3.
http://www.artbrain.org/the-uncertainty-of-placing-prosthetic-bodies-sculptural-design-and-unhomely-dwelling-in-marc-quinn-james-gillingham-and-sigmund-freud/. Published 2004. (Accessed March 17, 2013).
[3] “…stressing the physicality of media extensions, [Marshal] McLuhan describes the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, and electric technology as an extension of the central nervous system.”
Coffey, Sarah. Theories of Media: Keywords Glossary: Prosthesis, University of Chicago Press.
http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/prosthetics.htm. (Accessed May 3, 2013)
[4] Aimee, Mullins. The opportunity of adversity. Video on TED.com. http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_the_opportunity_of_adversity.html. Filmed October 2009. Posted 2010. (Accessed April 27, 2013).
[5] Interviews were free to be conducted in the language the students felt most comfortable or appropriate, regardless of my comprehension. Roughly half used English or a combination of English and their fist language. Translation was requested in one interview, and both the original interview conducted in Indonesian and the English translation are available in audio format. All audio used on this site has the consent of the individuals involved.
[6] Another artistic undertaking that sought to translate a text to visual form was Robert Rauschenberg’s translation of, Dante’s Inferno, created in 1959-60. Joanne Morra describes Rauschenberg’s project in context with discourses on prosthetics in her essay, The Materiality of Rauchberg’s Dante and Derrida’s Freud. Published in The Prosthetic Impulse, From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, MIT Press, 2006.
[7] I would argue that art seeks to constitute a distinct but related form of human reflective capacity and that art making mirrors the act of translation. Scholar George Steiner, characterizes translation is central to acts of communication in visual, written and spoken language.
“…translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication… To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate. Thus the essential structure and executive means and problems of the act of translation are fully present in acts of speech, of writing, of pictorial encoding in any given language.”
Lund, Karsten. Theories of Media: Keywords Glossary: translation. The University of Chicago Press. http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/translation.htm. Winter, 2007. (Accessed April 31, 2013).
[8] The goal of the visual component of the artistic research was to experiment with translation as creative act with the possibility of pushing the boundaries of my visual language while mobilizing the work by the young women; bringing both forms, visual and narrative, to a wider audience. Karsten Lund’s 2007 summary of Walter Benjamin’s text, The Task of the Translator, published in 1923, parallels my aspirations in translating the work of my students. Benjamin stated that “…good translation was not about conveying information, but rather was centrally concerned with pushing the boundaries of one’s own language; the translator is at once ‘…finding the intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.”
Lund, Karsten. Theories of Media: Keywords Glossary: translation. The University of Chicago Press. http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/translation.htm. Winter, 2007. (Accessed April 31, 2013).
[9] Exhibition text on view during the Fourth Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium, God Is Beautiful; He Loves Beauty: The Object in Islamic Art and Culture, held at the Museum of Islamic Art, October, 2011, Doha, Qatar.