Archives for sale

According to jurors and curators the art world over, Alia Farid (b.1985) is among the defining artists of our time. In the last five years she has had seven solo institutional exhibitions and featured in over ten group shows, including the 2022 Whitney Biennial and Artes Mundi 10.¹ In 2023 she won the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, which consists of a cash prize as well as an exhibition at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Høvikodden, just west of Oslo. The resulting survey, Bneid Al Gar, includes four major projects as well as a new series of drawings, providing an opportunity to assess the artist’s practice to date.

There is no better place to begin than Elsewhere FIG.1, a series of rugs Farid created in collaboration with weavers in southern Iraq, based on photographs and stories she had gathered among the Palestinian community in Puerto Rico. The results are characteristic of the izar (blankets) that have long been produced in that region of Iraq, with a vocabulary of bold geometric patterns chain-stitched into dark red flat-woven fabrics. They are infused, however, with signs of change, including fluorescent artificial dyes and dynamic street scenes: a mosque, an Islamic centre, a restaurant called ‘Jerusalem’. One shows the logo for Chucherias homeware store and another, a menu listing ‘Arabic cuisine’ alongside Puerto Rican dishes and ‘pasta carbonara’.

Farid was born in her father’s native Kuwait and moved five years later to Puerto Rico, her mother’s homeland, because of the Gulf War. Her practice pursues no single conceptual or material enquiry: she produces films FIG.2, large-scale installations and curatorial projects, regularly working collaboratively and using a wide range of techniques from drawing to computer animation. The work is conditioned, though, by the upheaval she experienced as a child, often attending to the migration of images and visualising the effects of modernisation, globalisation and political violence in and around Kuwait. It is defined by a tension between fixity, an impulse to preserve and forces of change.

This dualism is everywhere in Elsewhere: the birds in the sky, for example, and the cars running along the bottom edges – mobile objects trapped in the warp and weft. It is epitomised by the display of the rugs, which are not laid on the floor but suspended, as though flying through the air, on two diverging rails FIG.3. At times, this tension becomes a source of confusion. When Elsewhere was first exhibited at Chisenhale Gallery, London, in 2023, the accompanying text referred to the series as a ‘material archive’, suggesting stability and preservation.² The subsequent distribution of the tapestries across the market as individual products is at odds with this description. Two exhibited in Oslo are already in private collections and another appeared for sale at Frieze London in October. Not many archives are sold off piecemeal months after being formed.

The current series is envisioned as the ‘first chapter’ in an ‘accumulative and iterative’ project to create ‘an intricate map’ of ‘Arab and South Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean’.³ Surely the value of such an endeavour, not to mention its accumulative nature, lies in its existence as a unified entity, growing in scale and complexity with each ‘chapter’. In one interview, Farid claims ‘Elsewhere is about building up a volume of lesser-known stories’, noting that she chose to work with textiles because they contain a great deal of ‘information that can be studied’.⁴ How can viewers study this information, though, and engage with the project’s attempt to trace ‘the ways styles, symbols, rituals, and other social devices coalesce across continents’ if the archive itself is freely dispersed across continents?³

Perhaps this line of questioning is disingenuous – artists often conceive of their work as an ongoing whole while selling it in parts – but its blunt literalism is intended to highlight how hollow the language of research has become. Notable in this example is the conflation of the use of archives to make art, which is almost ubiquitous, with the establishment of a functioning archive: as a tool for storing, ordering and consulting information. The deployment of knowledge as a way of generating capital (in this case, to create works of art) is framed as the preservation of knowledge as a social good. This tendency is symptomatic of a society in which education is increasingly instrumentalised and marketised – one where public libraries are closing while Google digitises the history of literature, and universities produce huge quantities of peer-reviewed research to pass ‘impact’ assessments but cut teaching staff and cannot afford new books.⁶ It is telling that viewers raised in this knowledge economy are likely to understand the phrase ‘material archive’ instinctively as a mere figure of speech.

Similar problems emerge regarding In Lieu of What Is FIG.4, a row of five vast fibreglass drinking fountains, each of which has been made in the form of a different vessel: a generic plastic bottle, a Persian lota, a Levantine pitcher, a juglet and a jerrycan branded as a ‘lovely gift from blessed land’. It was once customary in Kuwait to leave water, sourced from nearby Iraqi rivers, outside the home in a clay pot as an offering. In recent decades, regional conflicts have made the rivers inaccessible and forced a reliance on desalination plants, which are also required by the booming oil industry. The plastic fountains, now a common sight in Kuwait, interest Farid because they encapsulate this history, holding the memory of traditional water offerings in their forms while in every other respect epitomising the rise of extractive industries.

To produce the sculptures, the artist employed a Kuwaiti fountain manufacturer and used a mixture of pre-existing and bespoke moulds. Normally the casts would, in her words, be ‘garishly painted’, but these are left a tasteful off-white and polished to a high shine.⁷ The sociopolitical significance of the fountains as found objects is quite clear, as noted here and outlined in the surrounding literature. The relationship between this context and the sculptures in the gallery, however, is not obvious. Claire Bishop’s critique of the ‘invocation’ of history in Danh Vo’s work, as a way of lending political legitimacy to sculptures otherwise ‘too slight and too beautiful’, comes to mind: ‘The ready-made object is injected with history-as-readymade: Both are presented wholesale, without any further complication’.⁸

What is remarkable in this case is not that the works are unrelated to the violent upheavals offered as context – ‘colonialism, modernity, oil extraction, and the weaponization of water’ – but that they affirm or accelerate them.⁹ The fountains are removed from the water network and their functional elements (a maintenance hatch and basin) are sealed. When it is left raw, as it is in these sculptures, fibreglass is slightly translucent, so the works glow under gallery lighting, and as the floor is covered in black vinyl they cast almost no visible shadow, appearing to float. Farid’s treatment of the fountains, in other words, heightens their ungroundedness, exchangeability and denial of use value – their complicity in the transformation of cultural traditions and basic needs into commodities. They are supersized objects made of Kuwaiti oil, replete with indications of their original lifegiving function, now useless and empty. Displayed here in Norway, having been shipped from one oil economy to another, they are most convincing as an ostentatious celebration of the wonders of ecocidal industry.

Although Farid’s rhetoric is typical of socially conscious research-based artists, the objects themselves – large, glistening and mass-produced – recall Reagan-era commodity sculpture. In this respect, the work generates at best a disturbing confrontation with the libidinal allure of extractivism and commerce, with the unsettling beauty of things that degrade us. The residual potential of the readymade – as a joke at the expense of art institutions or a cathartic release of consumerist desire – is based on its fugitive status in the gallery. Farid’s sincere assertion of the educational function of her sculptures, however, as a means of raising awareness, is an attempt to legitimise their position and so nullifies any ontological threat.

The most recent works on display, Izar 1–6 FIG.5, graphite rubbings on palm tree paper of rugs from southern Iraq, are more eloquent articulations of the fraught relationship between cultural memory and forces of change. From afar, the square drawings look like blank monochromes: all that is visible is a maze of marks made as the pencil traversed the paper, which bears no relation to the rugs below. Then, when viewed from around one metre away, this image disappears and is replaced by the mottled lines, zigzags and crosses of the izar FIG.6.

The monochrome is conventionally a rejection of illusionistic depth, a denial of temporal and spatial elsewheres. It is the antithesis of the rugs, which are redolent of a specific, distant place and a historical culture. Farid enhances this difference by orientating the rugs so their dominant lines are horizontal and appear like a landscape, encouraging viewers to ‘look through’ the paper towards a horizon, an elsewhere out of reach. Two distinct media, graphite and thread, as well as two opposing ideologies, modernist negation and heritage preservation, coexist but never merge in these shapeshifting objects. Perhaps they visualise the erosion of material history by the totalising force of modernity or even suggest that to document something is also to destroy it by rendering it flat and unreal.

The criticism raised about Farid’s work in this review is that it embodies the commodity form while claiming archival or pedagogical value, uncritically turning history into an easily accessible product and affirming the corrosive socioeconomic phenomena it sets out to investigate. By contrast, the Izar series uses frottage to picture cultural heritage without laying it bare. As neatly framed modernist drawings, the works are unashamedly attractive and marketable, but they withhold their ‘cultural source’ from the global institutional and commercial networks they move in, disguising it behind a familiar format. This is the only work exhibited without a wall text. Its ‘backstory’, the world behind the paper, remains ungraspable. Against total flow – of water and oil, art and information – the drawings are opaque shields, protecting something precious, something no one can buy.