Counterflows

Counterflows was collaboratively designed by Utp and Arts House to support a group of artists from Victoria and New South Wales to engage in a year-long program of activities which included labs at Utp and Arts House and travel to the UAE to experience the Sharjah Biennial 15.

The group is Paola Balla, Jody Haines, Samira Farah, Roberta Joy Rich, Eugenia Lim, Jagath Dheerasekara, Tarik Ahlip, Gillian Kayrooz, Akil Ahamat, Nithya Nagarajan (Arts House 2023 Co-Artistic Director) and Eddie Abd (Utp creative producer).

The program began early 2023 on Dharug Country, Bankstown with a reflective intensive bringing into focus, through group dialogue and artists’ practice sharing, the Sharjah Biennial 15’s curatorial theme, Thinking Historically in the Present. 

The group then spent ten days in Dubai and Sharjah. Visiting Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai Art Fair, Bayt Al Mamzar, Al Shindagha Museum and the Sharjah Biennial 15. The artists also participated in public programming with visiting artists and thinkers at Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting 2023. 

Upon return from UAE, Arts House hosted a week-long lab which included supported studio visits of Naarm based artists and arts spaces. The cohort also met with artist Hoda Afshar, whose work Remain was presented at the Sharjah Biennial 15.

This experience continues to generate rich conversations and ideas. Below are the individual artist contributions and the transcript of a conversation captured during a writing lab with Runway Journal at Utp.

Eddie Abd, a few reflections
Akil Ahamat, Opening to the Dark
Tarik Ahlip, Witness
Jagath Dheerasekara, A travelogue; from the Cataract river to the Port of Ashdod
Samira Farah x Roberta Joy Rich, afro-fractions
Jody Haines, ART DUBAI reflection piece
Gillian Kayrooz, Within a Droplet
Gillian Kayrooz, Sharjah and Dubai: 35mm Archive
Eugenia Lim, Notes from Dubai (before the flood¹)

19 May 2024

Speakers: Akil Ahamat (AA), Gillian Kayrooz (GK) , Jagath Dheerasekara (JD), Jody Haines (JH), Roberta Joy Rich (RR), Samira Farah (SF), facilitated by Eddie Abd (EA)

Others in the room: Bea Rubio-Gabriel (BR), Lou Garcia-Dolnik (LG), Varsha Ramesh (VR), Yuna Lee (YL) 

Speakers not present: Eugenia Lim (EL), Tarik Ahlip (TA), Paola Balla (PB)

Location: Utp, Dharug Country; Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung Country

Eddie Abd (EA): It’s been more than a year since we first met as a group through the Counterflows program to embark on a joint experience of the Sharjah Biennial 15. Today we are spread across colonised lands, on the countries of the Dharug, Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples. Two markers of grave significance for us, both here and globally, weigh heavily on this conversation: the deeply troubling result of the Voice Referendum and the ongoing colonial violence inflicted on the Palestinian people. For this conversation and from the various spaces of privilege we occupy, we asserted the necessity to direct the attention to Palestine. As Jagath shared yesterday, if Palestine fails, we all fail.

Akil Ahamat (AA): I have a thought. I guess because you [Jagath] mentioned, and that’s because of how we started our conversation yesterday,  I was wondering whether I could ask you to expand what Eddie has just said because I think the implication of what you said is slightly different to what Eddie said. Because you were talking about the hypocrisy of the west, or your experiences in your life and the experiences that have led you to think about what the western project of civilisation is. Is that what you were talking about?

Jagath Dheerasekara (JD): Maybe a bit of a long answer. I fled Sri Lanka in the early 90s having seen 60,000 young men and women be murdered by the Sri Lankan government. Most of them had been detained and tortured. I was part of a group called ‘Students for Human Rights (SHR)’ - it was a part of the vibrant student movement which gave impetus to the 1987-89 southern uprising. Some members of the student movement survived, myself included. SHR was instrumental in distributing a dossier titled ‘No Money to Kill Us Please’ among the delegates of the Paris Aid Group in 1989. The dossier asked that foreign aid to Sri Lanka be linked with human rights protections which were in jeopardy. That was a time when we were seeing hundreds of dead bodies burning on tyres on the roadside everyday. The [Paris] Aid Group session doubled the aid package to Sri Lanka, which was shocking to me. I fled the country and lived in Europe, mostly in France, for several years. I worked with a number of antifascist organisations and left groups during that period. I returned to Sri Lanka in the mid 90s as a changed man, as I said yesterday; there was not much faith in the West left in me. Fast forward from that point to what’s happening in Palestine now. If there was any faith in the West left in me, the genocidal war in the lands of Palestine has drained it out.

Roberta Joy Rich (RR): Listening to you Jagath, I am thinking about the kind of futileness or despondency created when thinking about the continued systemic violence cycled by ‘The West’, or the way in which ‘The West’ centres profit or doesn’t think about the collective. The destruction and disregard for humanity that continually seems to come with this. Redirecting to our experience together on Dharug Country to Dubai, Sharjah and Wurundjeri Country, I wonder if this is what Okwui [Enwezor] was trying to conjure with this thinking of the ‘postcolonial constellation’, a nuanced complexity, looking away from ‘The West’ within his curatorial practice.

Do you think Okwui shares this same kind of faith in thinking about his work, the artists he supports and the Biennial that we experienced?

I kind of think, yes, in relation to a lot of what we were starting to touch on yesterday about how perhaps the reach or access of art, and its audience; who is it for when visiting institutions or accessing the Sharjah Biennial for example, and these kinds of relationships.

We witnessed so many amazing works expanding on geopolitics, exploitation, extraction, theft, land, loss, reclamation, but something that we all noticed when we were there was a kind of vacancy. It made me consider who is the audience for this international stage? And is this kind of ‘postcolonial constellation,’ is it effectively working against a Western framework, or is it just reinforcing it? (Is posing it in this way too much of a binary?).

Gillian Kayrooz (GK): I don’t know if it’s too much of a tangent, but maybe it also helps to contextualise ‘Thinking Historically In The Present’ because I was listening to this podcast with Hoor [Al Qasimi], the director [of Sharjah Art Foundation] and on the podcast she quotes the email that Okwui had sent to her and where the ‘thinking historically in the present’ came from. I think this kind of also changed, oh this is where it came from, because I feel like…thinking historically in the present in this standalone way is quite interesting to then seeing it in the context of this email. Maybe I’ll quickly read it: Okwui to Hoor says

And that might sound completely like an advertisement for the Sharjah Biennial, I don’t know, but I just thought it was interesting reading it in that context, as opposed to our experience of seeing the Biennial. To me, it reads very different thinking strictly in the present, compared to how we’ve discussed it.

(AA): Yeah totally, because it’s talking about the creation of an institution.

(GK): Yeah.

(AA): Whereas it kind of came to talk about all of these historical movements and I think that’s how we’re thinking historically in the present. It’s like a depiction of historical, political movement, and collectivism, and it allows me to think about what that means in the present.

(RR): But don’t you think that even to do so, to truly think historically in the present… is quite a remarkable act of doing, that it is almost inconceivable or pretty profound? To consider all of these histories and how they inform the ongoing present? We see glimpses of artists responding to various histories, past and present but there is so much that is unseen. What is visible, legible or invisible in ‘thinking historically in the present’ and the ways in which this ultimately influences our experiences

(AA): And like the fringes of history, the histories that haven’t been written that we don’t have an opportunity to think about.

(EA): So maybe in that sense, the Biennale was successful. These tensions we talk about, they could also be a result of misplaced expectations on our part. In reality there’s always ethical questions that come up around  the sources of arts funding, the exploitation of labour, of communities, problematic representations, that’s constant and ongoing. But if we consider the [Sharjah] Biennale as offering us insights into artists who are reframing narratives, reframing histories…in that sense, this biennale did that really well.

(JD): I agree with Eddie - I came to be familiar with some of the powerful works, which I’d never have been able to see otherwise. But going back to Roberta’s comment, censorship comes in many different ways … some are direct and others are not. Self-censorship is the other potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor. 

To see some important works we had to travel a long distance from Sharjah. For instance, for us to see Maharani Mancanagara’s work, we had to travel over 100 km to Khorfakkan. Her work touches upon the lives of political prisoners during the 1965-66 genocide in Indonesia etc. They were brilliant works. Since the 1970s, the relationship between those two countries, Indonesia and UAE, has strengthened. Did this play a role in pushing this important work out of sight or was this just a coincidence?

(EA): It also reminds me of some of the things that we’ve talked about around complicity. How in some shape or form, we are all folded into that system that is exploitative, that is built or funded by or has come as a result of oppression. 

There was this notion I think that Samira talked a lot about –Samira, sorry I’m bringing you into this, you don’t have to follow up– but you talked specifically about the shifting of class and privilege, and suddenly how there was a shift in how we were regarded [as a group of ‘Australians’] and that affected the access we were given, to the spaces we were invited into, the conversations we were invited into. 

(AA): Complicity is an interesting thing to talk about. It’s kind of interesting [how] you go to a place and there’s certain things you observe and there’s also a certain narrative about the things that structure that society, which of course I won’t call into question and I do certainly think those things about labour are quite true. But it’s something worth thinking about in our complicity there and here. That’s the surface in which you experience that place and one of the complicated things is coming back and thinking about how you’re implicated in those things here, and then there. And something you kind of gestured towards Jagath, is the links between political elite –and you’re talking about a very different kind of elite, too. You know, the privilege of being able to go see a biennale. 

I think that the link I was thinking about was this podcast by New Models. They did a Dubai Diaries where they talked about their trip and why do you think suffering is only the dominion of the developing world? as a thing. We don’t just enjoy the privilege of the extraction from those places there, we also enjoy it here. 

(JD): I do understand it. Privileges come from different sources. Your passport is your ‘insurance’. Depending on the passport you have you enjoy different insurance policies. As Australian passport holders we enjoyed a very high level of privilege and access which some others don’t have. Exploitation is like a web. The food we eat, clothes we wear and all the other goods we consume are part of this web. Some are in the periphery and some incidents of exploitation are right at the centre. Some are more obvious and others are not. 

(RR): The conversation about class and privilege feels very covert here, right? (I’ve witnessed and participated in plenty of conversations between ‘lefty’ folk arguing about their privilege while simultaneously not acknowledging it). We are within stolen lands and there are still ‘History Wars’. There is an amnesia and denial about the genocide and history of this place that relates to an understanding of privilege, class and proximity in this nation state that people resist acknowledging. 

Being somewhere like the UAE was kind of perhaps –and I think Rahel described it in this way– ‘an assault’ within this ecology of our senses. The assault of the in/visibility of very distinct encounters – like the yellow wall concealing the homes of poor migrant labour out of sight, to the quite assertive display of opulence and dripping capital. How is it different (or the same) to the complicity or modalities in which we experience labour and class within settler nation Australia? 

One of the experiences I had with Jody and Tarik, which really made me feel the intensity of working conditions for migrant labourers, was catching a taxi to Al Hamriyah. There was a strong scent of urine during the commute. Once outside, we also noticed the air quality had drastically changed. We felt tight in our chests and couldn’t quite breathe. All of these smells that we experienced… I said to Tarik, “Did something spill in the car?” and he kind of looked at me like, we all know what that smell is. 

And so this is one example of something that’s stayed with me in terms of the extremities of this place. 

(AA): I think it’s important to share those stories because it’s very easy to talk about structural things but it is those very visceral realisations of a place that make you really understand it. Unfortunately.

(RR): One of the last works we viewed at Al Hamriyah was by Joiri Manaya. Located in the cafe, was an extensive wallpaper of a pixelated plant motif with many QR codes embedded. I remember Jody and I engaging with the QR Codes while also kind of being overwhelmed by the access, density and vastness of it all. One of the comments I remember you made was, “this is someone’s PhD, I’m not reading this right now.” I think that work really speaks to the inability to ‘experience it all’, and how this echoes beyond this work.

(GK):  Thinking about those experiences where, I don’t know if it’s because the Biennale was not as organised in that they weren’t providing transport – or at least not for us or the general public in terms of a number of buses going on a schedule to those places – but I think about the opposite of it, if we weren’t to have those experiences, if we weren’t to have those conversations. And that links back to the visible elements of labour that we were talking about, about them being visible in contrast to here in so-called Australia. But then also thinking about, if, for example, the Biennial was exclusively located in Sharjah (around Al Majarrah), would we be questioning the other side of that? If we never got to visit the other side of Sharjah, to visit the Kalba ice factory, and didn’t take those trips and weren’t exposed to the mining and extraction on that journey, would we be sitting here and posing that the labour was even more hidden. We do know that those venues are new because they’re trying to push the venues and expand the Biennial into the region.

Maybe we went in an interesting year where it was the first of those sites operating in that way and so we came at this intermediate point where the city is still navigating the Biennial, still navigating what that looks like, and we’ve come in experiencing the reality of life outside of the Biennial in a way, or how things might operate outside of being the usual international Biennial tourists.

(EA): Yes – if I look at it in a different way, and I’m not saying this as a positive or negative, but I don’t think there was an attempt from the Biennale to hide this. This disjoint, this tension. I don’t think they talked about community engagement, or working locally with communities. 

There’s a kind of honesty to it: this is what we’re doing. We’re holding a biennale, with over 100 artists, well curated, well financed and produced. You go there and you experience the art, and this is what we’re offering you.

(AA): It’s just like I said to Jagath about that curator who was talking about decolonisation and [Jagath] asked a question about what they’re doing, and I was like, I think it’s better sometimes when people don’t tell you rather than lie to your face about it. Surely you would feel far worse if they were talking about community stuff and you were like, shut up, it’s not true.

(JD): I think one needs to understand, or as I understood it, the Biennale occurs in the context of Gulf states and their richness. It is no different to the way they do other things - there is no democratic engagement or any attempt at it. I must say, it presented some great work from across the globe, particularly from the global south. There is no doubt about that. But it’s an exclusive private party. Nation states are also private parties. As John Howard once said, “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” And today, coming to Australia by boat to seek asylum is illegal. Isn’t Australia a private party room? In terms of temporary migration - in other words, coming here to work - Australia’s system is a more exclusive private party room than the UAE, in my mind.

(GK): I can’t help but think even in the context of if we were looking at the Sydney Biennale and thinking about our own region, where our sites are situated…the idea that for this year the White Bay Power Station is the most complex place to travel which is 2km out of the city. And thinking what about Western Sydney, where does that fit in? It doesn’t. Why doesn’t it?

(AA): Like fake community engagement versus honestly showing you art from different places in the world.

(RR):  When we were talking yesterday about all the presenters and the March Meeting, I did have a thought towards the end of the day, about how this whole March Meeting finished with John Harvey and Jason Tamiru discussing The Return and their practices. A lot of us witnessed people get out of their chairs and stand to applaud. And for me, even though there were a lot of conversations I enjoyed during the March Meeting, I must say that was probably one of the most brutally honest presentations, perhaps the most authentic presentation. It was accessible, it was real, and it was speaking to the now and what is happening now in this part of the world.

(AA): There’s obviously really great things about ‘thinking historically in the present’, but I think that that’s also the problem. That felt very present. Obviously it talks about a historical injustice and some attempts to remediate that, but it talks very much about the present. So when we’re talking, this loops us around to the beginning of the conversation, and that can also feel like a complicated or dissatisfying feeling. It does give us tools to think about the present, but [what do we do] when we are so devastated by the present…and thanks Roberta for bringing that up. It was one of the really profound moments for a lot of us. Like a moment of presence and you really feel, as presenters they really talked like there was something at stake there.

Jody Haines (JH): For me, John and Jason’s conversation was a moment of re-grounding after an onslaught of stimulus to the senses – art, conversation, experience and breath. The March Meeting was an amazing moment for being in a room full of black and brown people who were presenting knowledge, a space not overrun by whites. But that said, I’d also never been in a room with so many black and brown people who sounded like they were white. I still question the structure of the meeting being set up through the lens of whiteness and privilege, with the first presenter being Terry Smith, and then progressively, the conversations being grounded in white academic rhetoric. But finishing off the March Meeting with Jason and John, grounded the conversation back into ‘thinking historically in the present’, not forgetting the ongoing struggle, (re)membering to maintain knowledge in the hope of doing better in the future.

bell hooks talks about that in terms of colonisation. Decolonising is to remember that past to then make a better future. To be constantly having to remember to create something new. And John and Jason brought the headiness of the conversation back down to a very embodied position of conversation. It was from the heart; it used language that was accessible, as you said, Roberta. Across the March Meeting, academics were obviously repatriating their own knowledge, unfortunately, it came across as a very white space still for those conversations to happen. But, that also is an indication of where we’re still situated in the concepts of knowledge – and what is deemed knowledge and what is not deemed knowledge. So the fact that we still have to performatively act like these Ivy League people to then be deemed to have knowledge…

(RR): For real. It also goes back to our conversations about class again, in terms of access to university education, language and oration.

(EA): It also reminded me of a point that someone in our group made. They noticed that the March Meeting did not include many artists’ voices and it may be that there is more of an unknown with what an artist might say in the moment. Especially if their practice is all about challenging these structures and their work is in the Biennale, right?

(AA): The one presentation by an artist was actually – I was actually kind of shocked…

(RR): Mithu Sen?

(AA): Yeah! I feel like that is a really good example of why artists aren’t [included]. It was quite critical in an in-your-face-way and entertaining. 

(GK): Speaking to what Jody was saying, we were sitting for that whole week in a very institutional, structured conversation where almost everyone did a powerpoint presentation and everyone was taking notes and it felt very university lecture-style and even the Q&A section was very like, I need to prove my knowledge or my research in respect to your presentation. I can’t help but think if there were smaller groups or if they just organised other ways of communal gatherings or communal chats and maybe it was smaller or broken up throughout the week, like after lunch or something, that maybe the week might’ve flowed, rather than just everyone waiting for their turn to get up on the podium.

John and Jason were the last in the program that week, it was a performance or an Acknowledgement of Country (I can’t remember which one it was) but there were people on their laptops during that. It was literally the one presentation that wasn’t written or wasn’t a powerpoint and it was crazy how the academics in the room just switched off at that point. 

(JD): Jody and Roberta mentioned interesting things. Black and brown academics … class … I just pulled this from the Internet. I have the book [Macauley Pros and Poetry] as well. The following is a quote from Lord Thomas Macauley’s address to the Governor General on India’s education policy.

“We must at present, do our best, to form a class who may be interpreted as between us and the millions whom we govern. A class of persons, Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

In 1833, a similar thing started taking place in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) through the The Colebrooke–Cameron Commission recommendations. That’s what we saw, that’s what Jody said. They created a class and we are part of it.

(JH): Yeah we are part of it and we’re also implicit in continuing on that class. Any of us who are studying as well, doing further academic studies, we’re perpetuating that class. I’m guilty.

(JD): No, not that. The spirit of what you said, in my mind, was decolonisation. We ourselves probably have to find a way, I may not know much, but we have to find some way.

(EA): And may I share, Jagath, I think you’ve shared this already, but this, at the moment, one of the cornerstones of your practice, that idea, that theme you are exploring through your work.

(JD): Yes. You are right.

(RR): A potential process towards a decolonial arts practice could be to consider and reflect upon the nuance and plurality beyond obvious binaries? Reflecting upon the Counterflows experience and visiting the UAE, our positionalities, and thinking, for me anyway, has continously shifted. My emotive responses evolve and continue to, within this spectrum. Colliding with encounters around all the places we have gathered makes me think about what was upsetting just as much as what was stimulating, and where does the power lie in this process of fluidity.

The experience evoked a lot of thinking around the representation of how Black work is presented. The types of spaces where Black artists are shown, and how we take up space or ‘fail to’ within this whole arena is something Samira and I continue to reflect upon. (I’m always approaching institutional spaces with caution and suspicion).  

Collectively being Artists of Colour going to a major international event with predominantly artists and academics ‘of Colour’ was an incredible experience and something that will stay with us and expand as time goes on.

(EA): We all talked about how much of a multifaceted, complex, nuanced experience this was on an individual level and as a group. We were looking at how art sits within the rest of the world and the society we live in and experience the history… we really unpacked this so many times. But I wonder if a simple question could also bring in another insight into this conversation: if we have the opportunity to go back to the Sharjah Biennale in two years’ time, would we go back?

(JH): [nods]

(AA): This is potentially too big a question to ask at this point but it’s another question that you asked – I’ve already thought about that one, I very much would go again, but the question that was posed when we were there is, “if you were asked to be in it?”.

If you were asked to be a part of either that or any biennale, would you accept it? 

I had a thought about this question and I feel like – and this isn’t an indictment on anyone – but I actually thought that the only person that I think that wouldn’t is Jagath. But I don’t even know if that’s true. I don’t know if you think that’s true.

(JD): Oh, Oh, I like to keep it hanging. It may not be black and white. It will depend on the particular context. We are a group of wonderful artists. More importantly, politically engaged artists. We need an audience. We need an audience as broad as possible to tell our stories. Given an opportunity, it is good to show our work as a group as well, at least once. I personally don’t think any artist should be predetermined about where you show your work or importantly where you don’t show your work. The Biennale in question is Sharjah. What about Istanbul? What about Dhaka? What about Sydney - knowing what we know now about the history of this land? What about Kochi? India continues to practise the world’s oldest apartheid system through the Hindu caste system. And again, Colombo. I don’t see a huge difference between Sharjah and the likes. Only difference is, arrangements of capital, labour, raw materials, and land are different.

(AA): I think with these things it has come up for a few different people recently and these kinds of conversations…not necessarily about — participation in different sectors in the artworld. But the obvious point is that you actually can’t answer it until a very particular point of time…until it happens and you can answer to the particularities of it. It is an important and entertaining question.

(EA): On the question of participation, I’ve been thinking about this because of the last eight months and the start of the last attack on Gaza– but I think it also has to do with you being really conscious of the idea [of] whether to participate or not, whether to boycott or not. Some things are clear cut: you boycott because you know exactly that by boycotting you are having an impact. So depending on how much impact my action could make, that’s one way I’ve been thinking about it.

(JD): I totally agree with you, Eddie. It depends on how much impact is made through your action. I have a personal experience to share, if I may. I took part in FotoFreo in Perth in 2013. BHP was a major sponsor. I, along with some friends from Friends of the Earth, was able to stage a silent protest, focused on BHP’s uranium mining in South Australia in my artist talk. Did I have to pay a price? I guess yes. But I am happy I was able to tell a story to an audience. I was able to protest. The artist needs an audience. If I take Al-Jazeera as an example, in Qatar, migrant workers face a range of abuses such as wage theft, forced labour and exploitation in that country. Women are discriminated against in law and practice. Discriminatory laws put the LGBTQIA+ community at risk of detention. It is quite similar to UAE. But as far as the ongoing Israeli and its western-allied war on Palestine, my media source is Al-Jazeera. It is partly funded by the Qatari regime and headquartered in Doha. Am I to not watch the channel?

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