Tag: muslim

Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest

ACTS OF RESISTANCE: PHOTOGRAPHY, FEMINISMS AND THE ART OF PROTEST

8 MAR – 9 JUN 2024

FREE EXHIBITION, The South London Gallery

https://www.southlondongallery.org/exhibitions/acts-of-resistance/

When I did my PhD and then got my doctorate published as a monograph, I showed that, just after the invention of photography, Victorian authors associated photography with women and a challenge to the patriarchy and its law. Because of this, throughout the novels of Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Henry James and Wilkie Collins, photography was belittled and there was an attempt to exorcise it from the text. They associated photography with a woman’s supposedly superficial and legally ignorant gaze in The Moonstone (alongside the Indian gaze of the Idolater). The reason was because photography was used to photograph the body and women were seen as bodies rather than minds. Therefore, the denigration of photography was the denigration of the body in Judaeo Christian culture and the repressed times of the Victorians. The most obvious equation of photography with women and their bodies is in She, where Ayesha, the epitome of feminine beauty and physical attractiveness is able to make telepathic mental photographs of the male heroes through her surveillance in her feminine empire and as an expression of her womanly power.

It was the feminine body of photography that was thought of as such a challenge to the male body of the law in these novels that I studied. A usurper to the throne. The medium of revolution.

Almost two hundred years after that equation of the photographic with women, I walked into a feminist protest through the means of photography at the South London Gallery. It was an exhibition space where women were fighting against injustice, state regimes and the law, like the laws controlling abortion. These women were trying to extend the meaning of protest photography. It was a fight of the truth of women against the ideology of the patriarchal state.

The exhibition label calls this ‘the fourth wave’ of feminist protest which is about the empowerment of women, uses internet tools and includes factors such as intersectionality, where there are overlapping oppressions such as misogyny, race and class (Wikipedia). The exhibition is organised in four different sections:

– Body as Battleground

– Institutional Failure

– Revising Histories

– Feminist Futures

Here, in this review, I am going to consider the photography that I had a particular interest in.

Sofia Karim, Ihtijaj (Resistance) (Delhi, 2019)

This photograph is part of a series against anti-Muslim citizenship laws in India which have gone against the ideals of cosmopolitanism and acceptance that Indian descent people like me have grown up on. The title of the series is Turbine Bagh, which is a woman’s resistance movement intended to go against the oppressive laws. The image is printed on a samosa packet made out of newspaper – Sofia was served a samosa packet with court hearings on it once. The image is something that is being fed to the recipient of the law, of news. It is food, nourishment. For the women’s resistance movement.

What strikes me in this black and white photograph is the relationship between the active body of the woman holding her hand above her head to make a gesture and the seemingly passive bodies of the other seated women around her. This is what is apparent at first sight: the movement towards resistance, the action. The active woman’s mouth is forming words. She is communicating, acting. She is energy in the face of passivity. And you look closely to the woman in the right that creates a relationship to this action – her hands are clasped in seeming prayer. The resistance is the prayer of the people, of women. The active woman is the heroine that they are praying for to overturn the injustice of the modern day state. And then, the passivity of the other seated women becomes something else. It is the gesture of waiting. Patient waiting. For the revolution. For the fire that burns and sears the world.

The humble samosa packet which contains the greatness of the revolution.

Hoda Afshar, In Turn (2023)

Tehran’s ‘morality police’ killed twenty-two year old Mahsa Amini for not wearing the hijab under government standards. These photographs are one with the protest against that legally sanctioned murder of a woman’s freedom and choice over her body.

The photographs are staged images that utilise the imagery of the doves, birds that are released at the funerals of those that have lost their lives in the protest. The birds stand for martyrdom and peace.

The women in the photographs are largely anonymous because anonymity protects the protesters on social media. These protest photographs show women plaiting each other’s hair and discarding their veils. The hair is plaited as respect is given to women freedom fighters fighting in Kurdistan against the Islamic state. They plait their hair before battle.

These monumental photographs are impressive and powerful. They give a body to the protesters and, with it, humanity. A community is formed around hair and the freedom to show it. The large format itself is a celebration of women and female bodily display, the ‘exposure’ that photography gives. Because, despite the fact that most of the models are anonymous, in the final images as we walk through the space, as you journey through the images and the story they are telling, you see the full frontal body of the woman with doves and her face is completely visible. And on the reverse, you can see the profile of a woman that braids the hair.

The plaited black hair of warfare and the white doves of peace tell a story. To have peace, you have to have the war first. Peace is the aim that can only be achieved through fighting for the rights to have choice and freedom. In the final photograph, a pair of hands braids the hair Another pair of hands superimposed on the back of the woman whose hair is being plaited holds the dove of peace and martyrdom. A reminder that freedom costs something. The fight.

These photographs are an inspiring celebration of heroism.

Sheida Soleimani, ‘Tulip Poster’ from the Series To Oblivion (2016)

This poster is a tribute to the Iranian women unjustly imprisoned and killed by the state. The tulips reference an Iranian revolutionary song that sees the flower as revolutionary hope – because although it is fragile, it is resilient and it regrows every spring. The numbers on the back of the poster show current published data of those arrested and killed by the Iranian state.

The redness of the flowers. Blood. Against the mountain in the background. With their stalks, the tulips are the ladders up to the peak. They are the scaffolding that can even go above the peak. To ascend the ladders, you have to have the revolutionary hope. Which no sword can cut down. Which no gun can diminish. The tulips are the beauty of hope. The beauty of the revolution. They transcend death with their growth. They have the beauty of growth, nature, resilience. To ascend the ladder of hope is the ascent into heaven. In the religious context of the photographer’s background, this is the image of faith in the revolution and eternal justice. Like Antigone, the photographer promotes the eternal laws of justice rather than the man-made laws of the earth.

Wendy Red Star, Amni (Echo) (2021)

This is a tribute to the matrilineal clan membership of the Appsalooke Nation which was erased by colonialism and its patriarchal laws. The artwork gives power back to the women in her family (the photographer who is Wendy Red Star, her daughter and her great-great-grandmother). And the power back to the names of the women of the Nation.

This was one of the most moving of the artworks in the exhibition for me. They called them Indians when they are Native Americans. They took their land and tried to destroy their culture and their people. They are us. We also have clan membership through our mother – Mother India is our mother and the religion of my mother is the Mother Goddess. It is this which the patriarchal, colonising state wishes to destroy and, with it, difference.

The names of power call out in the background, behind the photographic sculptures. And the photographs themselves build power. Out of the small photograph at the base, a greater entity is formed through the use of overlapping photographs. If you look carefully, you see that the aura is extended into the names of power behind, with the use of negative white space.

One of the ideas around photography when it first came into widespread use was that it could take away the soul of the sitter. Here, that idea is reversed through resistance against the patriarchy.

Because the photograph of the great-great-grandmother is there and the different generations, the photograph scultptures build up the matrilineal history which the law and the colonising state wanted to end. In the face of erasure, we have the form that has come back to us, become literalised in word and image. The phoenix has emerged from the flame.

…

The exhibition included many other pieces worth a careful examination and study. My overall impression of this exhibition is that I learnt a lot from it and I was inspired by it. We, our community, we also fight the wars against the patriarchal state and its patriarchal laws. For our way of life. For our culture. The patriarchal law wishes to kill what we are. We, the ethnic minorities, even if we are the men, we are also the women.

And the photographs showed the resistance can take many different forms. There are many dances to learn. Many songs to sing.

Time and time again, the photographs exposed what the patriarchal law of the state is. And why it has to be fought against. Not just in ‘other countries’. In Western type countries like Australia and Poland.

Sometimes, I was disappointed. One video installation said to become a ‘peaceful warrior’ and not ‘an angry warrior’. I don’t believe we should spit out our anger. But the philosophy of India is that everyone has their own path. Who are we to judge? As long as the warrior remains the warrior. That is the point.

The union of women with photography suggested calamity to the male Victorian authors that I studied. It suggested the revolution. The exhibit of feminist protest photography is the natural outcome of the resistance. As a form of truth which exposures the corrupt heart of power, photography has few rivals. These images demand more attention and more thought. Within them, they contain the resistance to the state structure and the patriarchal law. And, within them, they contain the conception of justice that the patriarchal law does not have, with its false claims to universality, timelessness and ‘truth’. By making photography concrete, by giving it the female body, these photographers have fought against the male body of the law with its male subject. They have created women’s – and photography’s – jurisprudence in the present moment.

In the end, the warrior loves the warrior. The exhibition is warrior culture.

Waiting for Justice

03.06.2018 –

Christianity, Islam and Judaism share similar features as religions. In particular, they are all based on similar ideas of justice. In each religion, an all-powerful god occupies the position of a judge and there is a day of final judgement when good actions are rewarded and there is punishment for bad actions. The idea that the god of these religions is a judge is said to derive from the political and cultural context of the time when the bible was first written, where it was the prerogative of royalty to mete out judgement. Since god was likened to a king, it was natural that he should also be seen as a judge. The idea of a final day of judgement that comes in the afterlife is possibly derived from the ancient Egyptian beliefs where there is a similar concept.

Because their god is a judge, justice is therefore considered to be a foundation for Christianity, Islam and Judaism and notions of divine justice inform and influence ways of living for believers. But what is interesting in each religion is the fact that the believer has to wait an entire lifetime in order to receive their just desserts. Justice can only be achieved upon death in another time and space, not in the earthly realm and earthly time and space. It is apparent that waiting for justice is really what informs the believer’s actions and choices. Why is the wait for justice so important to these religions and their philosophies? Why is it necessary for their conceptualisation of justice?

From an atheist’s point of view, the requirement that justice can only be meted out by a god in the afterlife and one has to wait for it forever is a convenient mystification that disguises that fact that god doesn’t actually exist and can’t intervene in earthly affairs. However, let us consider the wait for justice in the believer’s own terms. How can each believer wait their entire existence for justice?

Science tells us that human beings are driven by reward-seeking behaviour. We do something because we get a reward out of it. The reason why we hunt for food is so that we can enjoy eating it. The reason why we have children is because we enjoy the process of making children and derive pleasure from it. The religions mentioned above, however, all defer the concept of reward. There is no immediate reward (or punishment) for action in this world. There is only a divine reward or punishment, not an earthly one. One reason why a believer has to wait for justice is therefore to destroy the reward-seeking motivations and behaviour of the individual. The believer is prevented from following human impulse and the instinctual drives of the body. They sacrifice such impulses and drives for a belief. Hence, the human body is being repressed in each religion in order to foster and support an imaginary belief. The human body is being sacrificed for a thought. One component of the wait for justice is therefore an illusion. My speculation is that this illusion is pleasure-inducing, since the reward system relies on pleasure (the pleasure of food or sex). The pleasure derived from this illusion that there is an absolute and final justice which transcends earthly considerations and the desires of the body occupies a prime place in the reward-seeking and reward-inducing components of the believer’s mind (I believe one can say that this would exist in the dopamine system in the brain).

What kind of a pleasure is induced by a wait? There are two things that one thinks of here, each with a sexual component. First of all, one thinks of frustration. Frustration can be enjoyed if one is a masochist. The pleasure in frustration relies on a simple idea, that the reality of a fantasy will not match the pleasure contained within the fantasy. If justice is considered important and foundational to each religion, it is because the fantasy of justice is considered to be more pleasure inducing than the reality of earthly justice. The second thing that one thinks about is foreplay. The prolonging of the beginning of the act can induce pleasure as a specific type of frustration and inform action. The wait for justice in each religion can therefore be conceptualised as a type of foreplay.

I think there is one further component of the wait for justice. Divine justice is seen as final, absolute and perfect and true in each religion. One can therefore wait for it patiently and hopefully. On the other hand, earthly justice is messy, limited, imperfect and frequently based on falsity and mistake. The ones that wait for justice can therefore be likened to a single person that keeps on waiting for the perfect mate to come along even though he or she knows that perfection does not exist. Such a person will not go on dates or consider any substitute or alternative.

The ideas of divine justice have been interpreted in radically different ways by different groups in each religion. I remember reading a pamphlet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses which stated that the devil owned the world and there was no such thing as earthly justice. What is interesting and perhaps most important about the wait for justice in each religion is the case of the Protestant. In Western countries, those people that are most likely to support the earthly system of justice and the laws of the land are conservative Christians. These people appear to believe that the divine system of justice has been translated into earthly form in the mundane and banal form of the English judge. There is therefore a big strand in Western thought in which divine conceptions of justice still play a big role in the conception of what justice is.

What are my own thoughts about the wait for justice? I believe that one should never wait for justice. I believe that the wait for justice is a mystification that favours the powerful in society. If one keeps on waiting for this justice, then one no longer takes affairs in one’s own hands to change and transform this unjust world of ours. I do not believe in any perfect, absolute and unlimited form of justice that is out there waiting for humankind. The very concept of justice is an illusion. I do not understand how people in this world of ours can believe in this illusion. There is merely the self-interest of the powerful which governs all things in this world of ours, including our laws and conceptions of law. And this self-interest forces those with little power to lose their voices and their will, to forsake their self-interest. There is no justice. Yet, even though there is not justice, there is still self-interest. I do not believe we should wait for justice. I believe that we should fight for our own self-interest and our own truths. That is what the idea of “justice”, to use the outdated and misleading term, means to me.