Derakht-e bi rishe (THE UPROOTED TREE) - exhibition

Article by Brigid Noone

Home is the place you left

The space Elyas Alavi has created with Derakht-e bi rishe (THE UPROOTED TREE) at the CACSA Project Space is a deeply personal one, housing artworks informed by stories and memories of the homeland he was forced to leave. Incorporating paintings on canvas and found newspapers, photographic imagery, a hand written letter and a frozen sculptural element containing his grandmother’s scarf, the exhibition as a whole operates as an expanded field of painting.

Memories of his younger years – of ‘leaving home’ as a refugee because of political upheaval in his homeland Afghanistan and the consequences of this move – inform a majority of Alavi’s work. It was a recent trip home to his village of origin in the Daikundi province that provided the specific focus for Derakht-e bi rishe. The opportunity to experience ‘home’ by walking on his land for the first time in so long provided Alavi a vast library of emotional and environmental fodder, and traces of this journey are throughout the show in both its literal and metaphoric content.

Found newspapers presented as a collection of clippings are adorned with thickly painted portions of meat, evoking both the open-air meat markets of Afghanistan and the values imposed by civil unrest, which can see people treated as little more than meat. Oil paint stains have seeped through and around these strangely tender works, serving as a sharp reminder of the violence of this created landscape, intimately referencing Afghanistan in all its brutality and beauty. Derakht-e bi rishe is not simply about Alavi’s physical home in Afghanistan; it is also about home – and homelessness – as an idea, a feeling, a principle. It is the artist’s ability to oscillate between these two realms, between the idea and the reality, that gives the show its emotional resonance.

In Political Emotions Martha C Nussbaum discusses the significance of personal narrative in apprehending abstract principles like that of ‘home’.

Real people are sometimes moved by the love of just principles presented just as such, abstractly; but the human mind is quirky and particularistic, more able to conceive a strong attachment if these principles are connected to a particular set of perceptions, memories and symbols that have deep roots in the personality and in people’s sense of their own history.

The strength of Alavi’s work lies it its ability to connect us to the abstract idea of home through the personal memories and lived experiences informing this body of work. “If the sources of memory are securely tethered to political ideas, however, such problems can be transcended, and the symbols may acquire a motivational power that bare abstraction could not possess”, Nussbaum writes. The embedded visual language Alavi brings to his work confers an instinctual understanding – Nussbaum’s ‘motivational power’ – of its emotional origin.

We cannot ignore that political weight and stark reality of the stories Alavi connects us to. Its emotional currency isn’t a device or a fashionable trope; it provides an entry point into the complex emotional worlds of human attachment and longing that displaced people negotiate daily. For many visitors to this exhibition, home may be a concept taken for granted. For second or beyond generation Australians, home traditionally alludes to family, local context and nationality, to structures which are designated at birth and often disconnected to an individuals desires or current status or placement in the world.  For Alavi and those denied this experience of home, however, it is a more complex issue. Emotional homelessness can be felt anywhere.

To evoke this emotional homelessness Alavi activates processes that play on obscurity and multivalency, utilising figurative and dream landscapes to articulate the instinctive and the intuitive whilst maintaining the poetry of lived experience. In spite of their often challenging subject matter, the works in Derakht-e bi rishe are undeniably pleasing to the eye – beautiful and poetic. In his book The Bridge John Hutchens, director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, writes:

Why do we long for beauty? Buddhist and Sufis might tell us that the world of harmony is our real home and that we are born with love for it. Until we realize that this home is inseparable from our deepest being, we suffer from longing and yearning – which, in effect, are a kind of homesickness.

This longing and yearning – Alavi’s homesickness – fills the gallery, asking the audience to share in it, however briefly. When entering an exhibition space we bring our own stories, mood and willingness to feel and process what is displayed in front of us. Creating work that cuts through or influences these emotional states and histories is surely one of an artists’ greatest challenges, one that Derakht-e bi rishe takes up willingly.

There has been a developing strength and confidence building in a group of painters that could be termed ‘contemporary figurative painters of emotion’ — notable amongst them are Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Elizabeth Peyton, Karin Mamma Andersson and Peter Doig. These artists are all aware of the historical background of painting, but have developed individual processes and styles based on the communication of emotional states, extending the impact of their work beyond a traditional skill base. Alavi’s work embraces the depths of the emotional painted surfaces, which through their loosely painted layers offer insight into the tension between the internal and external worlds we all negotiate.

Eric Fischl, in his essay A Meditation on the Death of Painting, explains:

There are certain qualities found in materials that can be imbued with the illusion that they embody consciousness, and paint is one of them. Painting is the investment of feeling, thought, vision, need, and desire into an object made by an artist who has done whatever was necessary to initiate identification with the object and the transformation that naturally occurs in the audience from this exchange. This is why art became synonymous with magic.

For Alavi, this identification and transformation of audience – this special magic – is  woven into the idea of home. Artworks that tackle the deeply personal yet political experiences of the displaced person force us to imagine a reality of not being able to access one’s home, something so many of us take for granted. Alavi’s work bridges the gap between emotion and the conceptual, and shows how painting and installation draw on the past with an active personal-political position that can be entirely contemporary and engaging.

The economic style and paint application that Alavi employs in his painting varies, yet there remains an awareness of creating surfaces that ‘let the viewer in’. Smooth perfect surfaces in painting relate to the photographic, and can often be experienced as cool, creating a sense of distance. In contrast, Alavi creates controlled yet loosely constructed surfaces with confidence and an element of transparency. This style is more penetrable, the controlled looseness allowing for a sense of ‘handwriting’ and human error and giving us a tangible link into the realms of memory and imagination. Alavi’s remembered (faded) faces and familiar landscapes are not perfect, but this makes them all the more engaging.

Walking through Derakht-e bi rishe, we are reminded that we enter an exhibition space as if it is a created land; as the story of the work grows so do the bounds of the gallery walls. In creating this installation, which includes objects and an intentional atmosphere created in collaboration with the paintings on offer, Alavi invites us into a world where…. home is where you are.

photographer: Emiliano Fernandez

Poetry in Landscape: Wind and Voice

 

Poetry in Landscape: Wind and Voice, a performance by Elyas Alavi

April 2012, Seedling Art Space, Adelaide.

Suleiyman’s Carpet: Wind, breath and poetry, catalogue essay by Andre Lawrence

Persian literary culture is historically rich in mythologies, epics and tales, and among the most notable characters is Suleiyman (Solomon), who harnessed great power and commanded the east-wind, which would transport him and his armies wherever he wanted to go atop a carpet. In his essays on Persian Poetry, Emerson acclaims the literary and cultural wealth inherent in the significance of poetry for Middle Eastern cultures throughout history. This very wealth, an alternate view of the world, is seldom acknowledged within a colonial and post-colonial heritage as an intellectual and spiritual cultural and literary agent that shaped societies through its content and stories: “Poetry and flowers are the wine and spirits of the Arab” . This intoxicating attraction for verse perhaps lies in the medium’s potency as a form of deep, affective and expressive use of language. While written verse remains a pleasure for the spirit, spoken verse can also be a delight to the ears. It is breath, wind and voice loaded with rhythm, purpose and meaning, a carpet on which our dreams, memories and identity can be swept along, back to the places we once knew.

Within her recent series of intimate performances to grace Adelaide, Cecilia White, PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, directed on one occasion a group of culturally and linguistically different people to enact a “Breathing Space”. Entitled Breathing Space: becoming foreign, the performers recited, in unison and their own rhythm, selected verses from their own, or their favourite poems in their respective mother tongues. Five languages were represented, and as the performers voices rose and fell, creating a luscious backdrop of sound, the audience, at least for those whom to no present language was known, fell under the soporific spell of the gentle waves of sound that permeated the room, transporting the listeners on a gently rocking journey towards a peaceful inner state. The purpose of the recital was to witness and enact a happening, observing what would occur as all voices in all languages spoke together. She describes breath as “key to our ability to engage with our emotions, thoughts and actions”, and intimates that the act of breathing is often unnoticed, yet “in breathing, we experience disturbance, transformation and connection “. This connection with life-giving breath, the wind that exits our lips and links us to the world immediately beyond our physical body, to others, to our communities and loved ones, places our very being as an immersed component of the broader physical world, an immersion with landscape.  

A breath, a sigh, a laugh, a scream; through voice we communicate, impart meaning and make ourselves heard. Speech, language and culture binds families, cultures and traditions, and the use of poetry in language is itself a masterful form of breath that explores the breadth and depth of human existence. Breath is wind that exemplifies the breadth of human emotion in breathing patterns and heartbeats, synchronised and mechanical, a rhythm whose intensity fluctuates with our feelings. Breath is resonance, particles of air squeezed out through vocal cords, giving birth to sound. How far does voice carry once it is harnessed by wind? Does it linger or perpetuate, existing far beyond that which we can hear? Does voice ripple through space, as movement in water, spreading ever outwards, and if so, how far would it travel? The wind erodes mountains and shapes deserts. It is a force of nature that can caress with the gentlest touch, soothing and healing, or batter down the strongest ramparts with zealous fury. As breath manifests into waves from our lips, and is mixed with the air that surrounds us, carried on currents of wind, it merges with the whole and leaves trails and imprints in the air. Voice, breath and wind shapes the world around us, and meaning inferred from sound may have its part to play in moulding our personal landscapes. In a world saturated by sound, can the quiet whisper, the loving word still be heard on the wings of the wind? 

The life of dreeams- Exhibition- 2010 SASA Gallery Project Space

Andrew Hill

* The Life of Dreams
One of the major strengths of the School’s visual art program is the sense of diversity it nurtures, and also how it fosters the confidence of students to promote their individual vision to both a professional constituency and to the broader community. I often feel frustrated that we as a School don’t do this enough – that whilst we are very good at the production of visual arts, we are less successful at providing an effective interface with the broader public, and potentially the consumers of these works, by building an awareness and a market for all that our considerably talented students create.

Therefore it is a special thrill for me to see these works displayed here, and I do congratulate Elyas for taking the initiative and negotiating the venue and organising this event.
Elyas, as most of you would know, was born in Afghanistan, moved to Iran as a child, and later moved back to Afghanistan. Eventually he arrived in Australia where today he is one of our newly naturalised citizens. He has followed his passion and built his early concerns with illustration, design and calligraphy into the accomplished paintings and sculptures you see about you now.

However, beyond these formal constraints, what Elyas does is charts for us a sense of displacement and cultural dislocation as he reflects upon the journey between homeland and new countries, describing what is remaining, what has been found and the distance which separates each of those places. As importantly he charts the emotional spaces which separate loved ones. He also charts new spaces and allows us to see possibilities where we may not have understood possibilities to have existed.

Professor Stephen Castles, who is currently a Research Professor at the University of Sydney and Associate Director of the International Migration Institute at the University of Oxford, has written extensively on forced migration and its links to processes of social transformation in both the countries from which people leave and in the countries which receive arriving populations. Stephen has said that people who have been forced to flee their homeland do not bring with them an intact culture, a perfectly formed, fully resolved, hermetically sealed, yet static, culture. The culture that they bring is ruptured and in flux and thus we cannot think of it in the romantic terms of enduring practices embedded within either the homeland institutions, nor indeed within the daily activities of its people.

The notion of crystalline cultures is broken as cultures evolve, as they wax and wane, diminish and expand, retreat and integrate. And so there is no perfect articulation of Elyas’s homeland culture, and yet, here in Australia we are able to say the Afghan people carry with them, as do all emerging communities, shards of their homeland culture, and that individuals like Elyas are daily recreating those in their social interactions, but as importantly for us, in inspiring works such as those around us.

Krzysztof Wodiczko wrote of the “new refugees” who “enter cities that are already fully built, with their architectural, ideological, and monumental theaters in place.” He said that it is these people who will “transform and unbuild the cities by inserting their presence, their performances, and their histories into the collective memories and democratic discourses of the city itself. The city (will be) reconceived with each new immigrant…. (for) within each immigrant lives an entire city, often richer, more complex, and more hopeful than the public one – (it is) the city to come.”So this work is about transformative practices, about what has been lived, what has been experienced, what has been imagined, what has been dreamt.

Here is the floating world, harshly located in war and violence. Yet here too is the realm of illogicality, of random actions, of unreality, that realm so well scribed by Goya – whose country also was torn by civil war and external intervention – in that most famous etching of Los Caprichos, “The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters.”

Here in Elyas’s paintings we see several suites of work:
•       There are gentle lyrical illustrations which rely for their effect on a contemplative approach in which poetic forms float through figurative and interior scenes infused with poetic calligraphy. They directly remind us of the delicacy of Persian miniatures and the tenderness with which those works were made
•       There are highly analytical, deconstructed portraits comprised of floating features and flayed flesh, often bringing together two dimensional and three dimensional elements to reinforce the dichotomy between the human as an organic, psychological creature and as both the product and creator of ominous technology
•       There are extremely expressive narrative paintings which chart disconcerting worlds of war, violence, displacement, journey and resettlement, in which the characters are acted upon, unable to exercise control over their lives, at the whim of overwhelming forces. Despite all the odds there are survivors and those who report these events
•       There is a series of formalist work based on the arbitrary spilling of wine, exploring place and memory.
In all of the post-expressionist works the brushstrokes scribe anger and resentment, yet ironically they also embody hope and prophesy new beginnings. In the process they strip the perceptual, reconstructing the visual with parallel experiences in lush, corporeal colours and in textures which remind us of the sensuous nature of paint and its ability to transcend the physical and to push emotive boundaries so that those rendered experiences become more than singular events and stand for both the inherent violence humanity has wrought upon itself and the sense of identification and compassion we all have for the suffering we inflict and consequences we bare.

And in Elyas’s sculpture we sense the longing and the physical distance between brother and sister, the devotion and commitment, discounting the physicality and the effort required to write so many letters.
I’d like to conclude by referring to one of the stories surrounding Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in which Solomon orders the construction of a space that was covered with slabs of polished glass or crystal. The Queen of Sheba interpreted the glass as a body of water and readied herself to cross through it. When she realized her eyes had deceived her, she understood that reality does not lie on the surface. We can understand therefore that a work of art is something of wonder, but also that it can give you the impression of something that it is not. In the Life of Dreams, our realities may have been constructed of the past and the present but they take us to places we can’t control, places we recognize but can’t locate, places we know but can’t comprehend.

Whilst we may not live in dreams they do allow us to see what lies beneath the surface.
Finally, everyone, I’d like acknowledge those people who have assisted Elyas to mount this exhibition, in particular Mary Knights, who’s overseeing this project space and has initiated a series of rolling student exhibitions, and Keith Giles and Peter Harris for their ongoing support.
I’d like to congratulate Elyas for what he has managed to achieve with this exhibition, and it gives me great pleasure to declare The Life of Dreams open, and would ask you all to show your appreciation to Elyas and to his supporters.


Andrew Hill
Associate Head
School of Art, Architecture and Design
University of South Australia

* Speech to launch the opening of Elyas Alavi’s exhibition, The Life of Dreams, in the School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia project space, 6pm Monday 13th September 2010 by: Andrew Hill, Associate Head, School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia



South of Sorrow, 2010, Wine, acrylic and oil on canvas, 70.40cm

We are birds, 2010, oil on canvas, 40.30cm

Ali Arabi, 2010,acrylic on canvas,40.30cm

You at once,2010, wine acrylic and oil on canvas, 40.30cm

Void number 2, 2010, acrylic and oil color on canvas,40.30cm

Cheri,2010, acrylic and oil on canvas

Expression, wine, acrylic and oil on canvas, June 2010, $ 650

Darolaman (house of peace), 2010,wine,acrylic and oil on canvas