Maryam Jafri, Death With Friends (work in progress), production still, image courtesy of the artist
Maryam Jafri is an artist based in New York City and Copenhagen. Her work, Death With Friends was the subject of a lecture that the artist gave as part of the Media Art Bath programme, A theatre to address: a festival of textual form – concrete, material, scripted and performed, at the Arnolfini in Bristol, June 2010. Jafri’s work was also recently shown in London at The Showroom, in the exhibition, Estrangement curated by Aneta Szylak and Iraqi-Kurdish artist Hiwa K.
The following introduction to Maryam Jafri’s work focuses on her film, Death With Friends, as well as her recent work Staged Archive (2008) shown at the Contour Biennial of Moving Image in Mechelen, Belgium, 2009. It approaches Jafri’s work through three aspects – the script, the image and the document.
The script
In a recent roundtable discussion chaired by the art historian Kathrin Peters on the ‘(re)construction of history in art and film’, the filmmaker Romault Karmaker talks of the term ‘rekonkretisierung’ or ‘reconcretising’ as a process of “making issues and matters concrete again”[1]; it is interesting to consider this point in relation to Maryam Jafri’s practice which starts from something that seems concrete whether that be an archive (such as the National Archives of Ghana) or a written text (such as the diary of Babur, Mughal Emperor) and then disrupts its established form.
So, while concerned with a similar impetus of attention to the outcome of “making issues and matters concrete again” – that is drawing our attention to or (re) consideration of an issue – Jafri’s work takes an opposite tack by entering into a process of fictionalising or transforming a given narrative, that is a process of working outwards from something that is (or was) concrete towards a lesser certainty, working from certainty to contingency.
In the work, Staged Archive, for example, Jafri worked in relation to the National Archives of Ghana to create a film that questioned the archive‘s relationship to knowledge and ‘truth’ by staging the archive through a series of tableaux that referred to the visual and narrative codes of TV and cinema such as the court room drama, for example – as Jafri has stated, it’s a “collage of filmic codes and conventions from film, theatre and photo history”.[2] The result is a kind of mannered or excessive overlaying of visual codes through a process of what Jafri has called ‘fictionalising’.
Jafri’s work deals with this process of fictionalising not necessarily through the making of a story out of an established historical narrative (and thereby replacing one narrative for another) but through a process of puling apart and reassembling narratives so that this reordering of parts (and with the addition of other visual materials and codes) creates a dynamic through which other possibilities can emerge. In this way, Jafri has spoken of her interest in ‘contingent narratives’ and she links this contingency with a methodology in which she favours adaption rather than reenactment in the fictionalising process.
Jafri makes this distinction between the two terms – reenactment and adaption – as that between the process of repetition and that of a kind of contingent expansion and implosion of a dominant narrative or narratives – actualising ‘the need to makes contingent and partial sense of the world’’.[3] This results in the very possibilities of this narrative being called into question through the resulting work, not through a form of didactic address but through a process that has more to do with expansion and excess.
Maryam Jafri, Death With Friends (work in progress), production still, image courtesy of the artist
Death With Friends (2010) takes the Baburnama, diary of Babur – the 16th Century Mughal Emperor – as its starting point. The Baburnama forms a kind of textual impetus for the work but at the same time it is present alongside numerous other visual codes and styles from the golden ‘bling’ of Bollywood to Fellini’s epic film, Satyricon, as well as textual reference to Machiavelli and Rabelais.
The resulting work occurs as an accumulation of these forms pieced together in a collage-like process so the work is an accumulation adapted for purpose rather than a direct quotation or re-enactment of the material itself. As Jafri comments, on the one hand, the Baburnama ‘eerily parallels present day political realities’ in Afghanistan/Pakistan with bloody accounts of warring tribes and imperial plunder. Yet on the other hand, Babur describes a highly cultured, somewhat hedonistic civilisation replete with “carnivalesque type descriptions of wine and opium induced parties populated by glittering poets and dancers.”[4]
In this way, we could understand the script of Death With Friends not only as the text – Babur’s diary – that forms the basis of the work but as also the visual form, which by being present, inform and structure our evocative response to the work. Therefore, Jafri’s subtle distinction between the strategies of reenactment and of adaption reveals an important aspect of her work and which coalesces with the opening up of spaces and possibilities for contingency through what seems to be at once both an excessive and a reductive strategy.
The image
While, the gathering of different visual codes and references to create a rich excess of style and the simultaneous implosion of these codes and their dominant narratives can be seen as a trajectory running through Maryam Jafri’s work from Costume Party (2005) to Staged Archive (2008) and the most recent work Death With Friends (2010), there is also a strong questioning of the representational function of the image itself.
And so, in the way that a strong preoccupation with Jafri’s work is a working against the strain of a dominant historical, social or cultural narrative, it is also possible to see this action in terms of a working against the straightforward representational function of the image.
While this question of the image’s function has been dealt with recently in some artist’s work through the use of found or low-fi images such as in Hito Steyerl’s concept of the ‘poor image’, Jafri does not comprise the rich visual aesthetic of the image in her questioning of the image’s capacities.[5]
Costume Party (2005). Three screen video installation, written & directed by Maryam Jafri. Photo: jens ziehe, installation view Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, May 2006
The film installation, Costume Party, for example, comprises a large tableaux vivant across which the camera pans pausing on various smaller vignettes within it – a party in which the guests are eighteen archetypes Western cultural history such as a monk, British naval officer, cowboy and so on – presented across three screens. In many ways, the vignettes presented within Costume Party are crude characterisations and the actors play their roles in a mannered overly performed performance yet this seems to be the point here, where role and characterisation are accented, mannered and made excessive in order for their operation as tropes to be made obvious – it’s a strategy of extremes with on the one hand, the accentuated or mannered performance emphasising the manufacture of these roles and on the other, the emphasis on historical tropes so that one addresses (and perhaps undermines the assertions of) the other.
Could it be said then that Jafri works through the image – through its rich visual properties – in order to work against it, or against our established expectations of it? That is to say, that unlike Steyerl’s strategy which equates the rich image – rich in resolution, high in production values – with dominant (and dominating) social values and power and therefore, conversely, the poor image with political resistance and socially utopian possibilities.
And indeed there is an interesting divergence of strategy here as we see Jafri’s investment in the image as a kind of over-identification or over-investment in its capacity – Steyerl of course does maintain this almost fetishistic attention to the image but she does so across its divergent forms, and in works such as November (2004), the visual investment in the image comes almost secondary in concern to the way in which the image’s form communicates to us – that is, whether it has been shot on Super 8 in the trash-aesthetic style of Russ Meyer for example, or whether we are experiencing an image played via video cassette grinding away in a VHS player.
On the contrary, Death With Friends, is constructed and formed through attention to the visualuality of the image from the geometric detailing of ceramic tiles suggesting an Eastern, abstract, patternistic style to the golden Bollywood-esque stage.
Document
In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Archive Fever: Between History and the Monument, Okwui Enwezor connects a current preoccupation with the archive and specifically a concern with the ‘truth-telling’ integrity of the archive arising from the manipulation of evidence that led to the US invasion of Iraq; he cites this as the key moment in which our collective belief in the veracity of the document was betrayed.
Enwezor states that this “manufacture of intelligence … disturbs the integrity of and confidence in the archive as a site of historical recall, as an organ through which we come to know what has been, that is to say, the raw material constituting knowledge and a reference in which to read, verify and recognise the past.”[6] Interestingly, Enwezor begins his text by asserting the relationship between photography and the archive as governed by the camera’s capacity for ‘mechanical inscription’ so that the camera is “literally an archiving machine, every photography, every film is a priori an archival document.”[7]
Yet who and what orders or governs the manner in which this archive is stored, read and produces knowledge? If every photographic image is a priori a recording device – or trace of an action – then there is here an immense investment in the image as a kind of pure entity that is faithful to its origins (that which it records) at all times.
Not only is this problematic in regards to our experience of the ‘manufacture of intelligence’ as Enwezor suggests but also in regards to the investment in the specific ontology of the photographic image based in a faithfulness of mechanical procedure that no longer applies with the advent of digital technology’s ability to manipulate also. It is then at this point in which the image’s status – that is, it’s function as a recording, as a ‘true’ representation of an event or a person that has been – is brought into question.
Staged Archive (2007), written & directed by Maryam Jafri. Installation view, Contour Mechelen, 4th Biennial for the Moving Image, September 2009. Photo: Kristof Vrancken
In Staged Archive, Jafri makes a neat move that plays the archive – in this case, the National Archives of Ghana – against itself to reveal its investment in the image as ‘truth’ and the impossibility of separating this from the role power plays in the production of knowledge. In the series of tableaux that make up the film, black and white images document the use of mobile cinemas by Christian missionaries as an integral part of their evangelising – which is in itself a complex mix of fact and fiction, witness and truth as one of the characters voices in the film, the missionary spoke first and then played films afterwards so that (very literally) the word comes to life.
In Staged Archive, these still images of the missionaries’ mobile cinema are projected on a screen within the film (and as such are staged within the film) as a fictional narrative is built around them. This achieves a double projection of the image – still image and artist’s film – and the image’s operation as the generator of both fictional narrative and knowledge because just as the tenants of Christianity are revealed to the audience of the still images something of the archive is also revealed to us.
Yet it is not only the double projection of image within image, which enables the opening of a space within which the image is questioned and becomes less stable but importantly, it is also Jafri’s use of voiceover. The use of voiceover is important within Staged Archive as it introduces a secondary body of information and reinforces the disjunction between the two types of information – the visual and the sonic.
Indeed, in the text, ‘Having an idea in Cinema’, Deleuze suggests that the uniqueness of cinema as a form arises from the disjunction between sight and sound, that it performs this “disjunction between auditory voice and visual image” and that the creation of this disjunction enables a third entity to emerge or to be produced.[8] In Staged Archive, we very much see Jafri following this precedent through the mannered polarisation – the accentuation of difference – between visual and sonic information, in other words between the image and the voiceover.
Footnotes:
[1] Peters, Kathrin (2009), ‘History and Fiction’ in Texte Zur Kunst, December 2009 / Issue No. 76, p.114.
[2] Reed, Patricia (2009), ‘Through, Around and Against the Document: Maryam Jafri in conversation with Patricia Reed’, Art Papers, January-February 2009, p.32.
[3] Reed, Patricia (2009), op. cit., p.33.
[4] Email correspondence with the artist, January 2010.
[5] Steyerl, Hito (2009), ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal, accessed 9/12/2009.
[6] Enwezor, Okwui (2008), ‘Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument’ in Archive Fever, International Center of Photography, New York and Steidl, 2008, p. 19.
[7] Enwezor, Okwui (2008), op.cit., p.7.
[8] Deleuze, Gilles (1998), ‘Having an idea in cinema’, in Kaufman, Eleanor and Heller, Kevin Jon, Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p.19.
About the Author: Bridget Crone is a curator and writer based in London and the South West of England. She is the Artistic Director of Media Art Bath – a publicly funded commissioning organisation based in the South West that champions contemporary art and ideas through the development of bold new work collaborating with artists and partners locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Bridget is Associate Lecturer at Chelsea School of Art and Design, University of the Arts London where she has taught on the MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice since 2008. Working both inside and outside of the gallery, Bridget is interested in work that engages with performance, installation, sound, film and video.
A theatre to address was a programme of performances, readings and screenings that explored the many forms of text from concrete poetry or sound sculpture to theatrical script, radio play, voice over or song. Within the programme, text was explored on multiple levels as something to be investigated through reference to an historical document or event, and as a means of address. And in this way, A theatre to address was also about the governing power of language to direct or order our experience. A theatre to address took place at the Arnolfini, Bristol from 4-5 June 2010 and included: Sovay Berriman (with Luis Alvarez, Paul Cordwell, Joe Devlin and Magnus Quaife), Phil Coy, Annabel Frearson, Clare Gasson, Beatrice Gibson, Julika Gittner, Maryam Jafri, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Sue Tompkins and a screening of Otolith III.
