Opening to the Dark

Before leaving for Sharjah, the majority of the Counterflows group were hosted by Utp on Dharug Country, for a two day intensive getting to know each other and preparing for what we were about to collectively embark on. On the first day we discussed the curatorial framework of Sharjah Biennale 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (SB15) and the sprawling notion of ‘the post-colonial constellation’ as devised by the Biennale’s original curator Okwui Enwezor and delivered on by Sharjah Art Foundation’s President Hoor Al Qasimi. On the second day of the intensive we were asked to bring offerings to share with the group which served as a neat entry point to each person’s personal, cultural and artistic perspectives through items like books, stories, video artworks, tea and treats. The activity gave me an opportunity to share something that was a recent discovery at that point and has taken a central role in my research and writing in the 15 months since then. 

In 2022, a few months before our departure to Sharjah, my partner Talei discovered a copy of the text Kidung Rumeksa Ing Wengi (Song guarding in the night) through a presentation by the scholar, Associate Professor Ronit Ricci. The original Kidung is commonly attributed to the Javanese ‘saint’ Sunan Kalijaga and is a talismanic text that calls for protection from that which might harm us in the dark, both earthly and spiritual. The particular copy featured in Ricci’s work was written in the early 19th century by someone banished by the Dutch from Java to Sri Lanka, the same exile that some of my ancestors experienced. While the text reflects a traditional Javanese belief in the unseen, this copy takes on greater poignancy in the exilic darkness of its scribe’s context. 

Over the last few years, starting with Dawn of a day too dark to call tomorrow, I have been using ‘the dark’, as a visual and textual motif to evoke the contemporary dark age stemming from information saturation and misinformation, that has lead to the collapse of the enlightenment project and rising global fascism. When Talei discovered Kidung Rumeksa Ing Wengi, she was excited to show it to me as it provided some kind of answer to a question which I was using to conceive of a new body of work: how do we find our way in the dark?

At the point of our gathering, I had only just started reading Ricci’s book Banishment and Belonging which is a significant study of Sri Lankan Malay literature that her presentation drew from. As such, my understanding of the Kidung was fairly shallow but I sensed a purpose in sharing it with the group. 

In our conversations on the first day of the intensive, there were certain senses of trepidation and concern; some that are common before travelling (how are we supposed to look, behave, dress etc.), some specific to the biennale context (that we touch on in our recorded group conversation like the legacy of colonialism, class, the role of art in flows of global capital, complicity etc.) and some particular to the location (humanitarian concerns that would come up recurrently during the trip which I will return to later). I offered the Kidung as a symbolic gesture (symbolic as I didn’t have a translation at that point) to help open us to the dark of the unknown we were about to step into.

This thinking with the dark provided a way to focus and cut through the sensory overload of travelling and the sheer volume of work at the Biennale. The works that most clearly spoke to this, Steve McQueen’s The Pursuit (2005) and The Living and Dead Ensemble’s The Wake (2021) were both located at Khalid Bin Mohammed School which is now the home of The Africa Institute. Located close to each other in one of the more sparsely inhabited spaces at the biennale, the two video works spoke powerfully to each other through sensory, textual and performative gestures by dark bodies, in and about the dark. 

The experience of McQueen’s work was disorienting in its minimalism. Entering in from the flat bright sun of the Sharjah afternoon, our eyes saw nothing in the completely blacked out space. Cautiously walking into the space and around the corner of the L shaped room unveiled a video projected onto two opposing walls, showing nothing but flickers of dancing light. Sitting in the middle of the projections as our eyes adjusted, the flickers started to take shape and synchronise with the muffled rustling of the soundscape. Perhaps this experience would have been far less profound had I read the didactic panel before going into the room but I was entranced by the emerging corporeality of the light - the gradual shift from abstraction to peripheral representation as the artist’s body (to which the flickering lights were attached) took more and more distinct form.

The experience felt sharper still watching The Wake (2021) alongside it. Across multiple scenes of protestors gathering in the day and building towards a revolutionary night, the three channel video work is threaded together by speech in multiple forms and registers. After scenes with manic monologues under phone screen light, the final scene contrasts with an older man in the central, screen slowly but emphatically offering a theory of the unbeing of slavery and the dark (which calls to mind Christina Sharpe’s orthography of ‘The Wake’ and the afterlives of slavery that the works title evokes). Flanked in the other two channels by slow motion footage of protestors setting fire to the night and accompanied by a soundtrack of sliding discordant horns, he reveals: 

The minimalism of McQueen’s works asks the viewer to heed the call of The Wake, to make ourselves with the night and the elusive and invisible creatures that inhabit it. It felt a particularly poetic notion echoed throughout the biennale, not just within other artworks but can also be extrapolated to begin to think through some of the recurring questions about the local context which I gestured to earlier.

One of these recurring questions was most poignantly and publicly posed during the Q&A section of The Archive and Art History panel talk during the March Meeting program that runs alongside the Biennale. The session discussed absences in archives and techniques adopted by artists to address them to which Dr Mahvish Ahmad (who had earlier presented about her project Revolutionary Papers) questioned:

While ostensibly the reason that Dr Ahmad’s question was unanswered was due to time constraints, it is fitting that it remained so. This question about the exploitation of migrant labour as well as questions about the visibility and engagement of local artists and publics were repeatedly asked throughout the Biennale. I don’t intend to offer an answer to these questions, but thinking with some of the other artworks in the Biennale alongside Emirati literature offers something to understand about how certain stories that remain unspeakable can be told through the unseen.

After returning to my home on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri lands in Canberra I continued to seek out new reference points to augment my memories and try to get a clearer understanding of our time away. Scrolling through Instagram I noticed a reference by Monira Al Qadiri (whose work Crude Eye was featured in SB15 and more recently in the 24th Sydney Biennale) to The Diesel, a 1994 novel by Emirati writer Thani Al-Suwaidi. The book tells of a society changing due to the impacts of petro-modernity through the story of a Mukhannath (translated as ‘ones who resemble women’ or transgender person in Classical Islamic Literature) djinn, born in a pre-Emirati fishing village. While the book’s account of a shifting society through rich allusive prose is worthy of serious consideration in its own right and far more than I have the means to, funnily, it was a comment on Good Reads by a naive reader doing a ‘Read the World Challenge’ that led me most directly to reflect on our trip.

The latter part of the review particularly gave me pause to think about what it is to travel and expect transparency and understanding of local aesthetics and culture and existing discourses around them. Specifically, it made me return to the Lebanese-Emirati artist Farah Al Qasimi’s work Um Al Dhabaab (Mother of Fog) which was a highlight of the Biennale for me. Featuring scenes with an ancient djinn, the ghost of an Al Qasimi pirate and a modern day Jack Sparrow impersonator, the work weaves absurdist narrative with documentary technique to playfully redress local history of British Imperialism, the Al Qasimi tribe and maritime piracy in the region. As there wasn’t sufficient information about the involvement of the impersonator who was a migrant worker, I had heard a few questions about the ethics of their portrayal. With those questions in mind, the part that most stuck with me was a line when asked about how he came to Dubai, the Jack Sparrow Impersonator recalled the work he used to do aboard shipping boats on the Indian Ocean. Remembering videos I’ve seen of ships tumbling through huge waves in the Indian Ocean, I returned to those persistent questions about the position of migrant labour in the UAE and wondered about the ability of visiting audiences to gain a comprehensive understanding during intense short trips. And while I certainly don’t think one artwork or artist can answer all the questions asked about local representation and involvement, the story telling techniques in The Diesel and Um Al Dhabaab (Mother of Fog) gesture to the many existing conversations that remain unseen, unheard or illegible to visiting audiences.

Thinking of the proliferation of research based art and documentary in contemporary art as well as contemporary viewing habits where already short attention spans are being algorithmically accelerated, the sensory, the spooky and the silly can offer a lot to overwhelmed audiences. When so many of the works within the Biennale provide clear and cogent histories, it feels imperative to ask viewers to sit with those that remain unseen and unspeakable. It feels important to state at this point that I don’t mean to diminish the spirit realm to tools of human cognition or curatorial strategy, although thinking in this way can offer something to those that neither see nor believe.

Looking across these artworks in the Biennial after a dense period of research and on the precipice of an exciting period of making in the coming months, it’s clear to me how much the experiences in our trip to UAE have affected my thinking about exhibition making, artistic practice and ways of being. When talking about the motivations behind the Counterflows project, Nithya Nagarajan, former Co-Artistic Director of Arts House talked about the rareness of artists being able to travel to Biennales and the importance of seeing such incredible work and for this I am truly grateful. I am also grateful for the opportunity of writing this essay as a way of returning to the beginning of a thought and tracing its trajectory. 

When my partner first told me about the Kidung Rumekso Ing Wengi it really felt like guidance both from and against the dark. It’s echoing across centuries, some kind of confirmation of the importance of taking on what sometimes feel too-big questions. However, looking back on my offering and my framing of it, I am struck by my misinterpretation of the text. As I understand it currently, the Kidung is a call for a kind of mystical strength that will carry the reciter through the dark, not an openness to it as I invoked. While I still have much to learn about the Kidung and the way that it has been used both in Java and in the diaspora, in this time of rising global fascism, it feels particularly dangerous to fixate on relics of the past or summon ancient strength when faced with uncertainty or weakness. Looking more deeply at the copy of the Kidung Rumekso Ing Wengi featured in Banishment and Belonging, its mistranscription and the variety of dislocations that could signify, I have been led to reflect on my place in a literary tradition of unknowing. Following this, I will finish with a renewed offering 

Take this unbeing
as gracious inheritance.

We misinterpret, 
we misattribute, 
we forget.

Let that help us extinguish 
the fire of hope
of what once was and
walk into the dark