Everything/And

In 2011, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York renamed its fifteen Islamic Art galleries “Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia,” attempting to divorce their contents from Islam. While it remains up for debate whether this approach was mirrored in the curating of these rooms, so clear in this clunky language was a struggle to contain a geography with heterogeneous cultures, histories, religions, and diasporas, through naming and classification. Unknown to Western institutions, such worlds cannot be aptly labelled by a colonialist museum or gallery, nor categorized as a series of rooms. For this vast land has no real borders, only those defined by Western nationalisms, that is, the modern nation state. And yet, things get ever thornier where and when geography collides with temporality. Art historian Miwon Kwon contrasts these poles of place versus time in her response to October’s “Questionnaire on the Contemporary,” circulated to North American and European critics and curators in 2009. She writes about the messiness of Western art history glancing through the looking glass at its “global” counterpart. While art history in the West is chronologically periodized (e.g. Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Modern), non-Western art history is often grouped spatially into general sub-fields by countries or whole continents (e.g. Chinese, African, Middle Eastern)¹. If contemporary art history follows a Western model², how can two varying modes of classification be merged, the Western temporal with the global, geographical Other, if the latter remains outside of time? And what if that geography is sprawling beyond any imposed border?

In the BlackFlash special issue Infinities from Fall 2021, guest editor Nadia Kurd assembles multitudinous artistic practices centred on Islamic cosmologies and their complex interactions throughout time within contemporary subjecthood. Rather than strive towards containment of these varied ways of knowing and working, Kurd offers an idea of endlessness: ongoing and possible engagements with the histories of Islamic art, a freedom in creative and intellectual meanderings across cultures. But this issue also speaks to the determination of making one’s own categories fit. However specific, each identity hovers between belonging and differentiation, in a constant negotiation between self and other, individual and collective. Resisting definition of the absolute, Infinities posits openness through the deeply rooted and intertwined histories of culture and religion, never monolithic and always responding to contemporaneity.

Perhaps it is most fitting that Shaheer Zazai’s letter-sized, risograph print BFM8.511-9 (2021) accompanies this issue. Taking inspiration from Afghan carpet designs and generated using Microsoft Word, Zazai mixes up rug motifs with the digital, inheriting a tradition of jacquard weaving, itself a technique imbued with roots in early computing. A conflation of old and new, analogue and digital, the risograph might resemble designs drawn from filled-in Scantron cards—Optical Mark Recognition forms used in school settings for test taking. Fringes, blocks, and lines of highlighted characters on the page give the appearance of pixelation in print—its saturated hues associated with European modernist painting traditions and backlit screen technology. While this work originated in the digital realm, the porosity of borders between our immaterial and material worlds means that a transition from image to object is only a click away. Pushing through these blurred divides between AFK (away from keyboard) and so-called virtual worlds, Abdi Osman’s essay “The Thin Line Between Modernity and Tradition in Queer Performance” speaks to reclaiming online spaces for gender and sexual diversity through social media performance. As a hybridized venue which neither fully equates AFK life nor its ephemeral other, the stage of the Internet offers a broad venue for the making and re-making of both alternate and true selves. What might be seen by some as fictive reality, social media worlds can also function as spaces of forever potentialities, expansions into a multiverse of identities against fixity. Osman focuses on the Instagram performance of Maroodi, a Somali, non-binary trans person who traverses gender binaries, and oppositions between Western and Otherness. Taken together with Osman’s idea of the “interdependence between nation and diaspora,”³ transness forms what might be considered a glitch. By this, I am referring to Legacy Russell’s concept of the “glitch” as a cyber signal or embodiment of difference and refusal of heteronormativity: “[g]litched bodies…cannot be programmed” as they adhere to no predetermined code and reject conformity.⁴

There is something inherently empowering in self-portraiture, turning the camera on oneself and one’s kin to re-establish narratives of individual and collective identities. Through colonial exploration and publications such as National Geographic, racist photography has captured so-called global cultures through an exoticizing lens, freeze-framing the Other in perma-folk culture. Photographer Faisa Omer’s images of women in modest fashion and of young Somali men provide counternarratives to Islamophobic depictions of Black Muslims in Canada, while taking up space in contemporary visual culture. Pushing back on beauty norms dictated by the white, hegemonic fashion system, Omer depicts Muslim women in fashion editorial form, sporting streetwear looks of jeans, sneakers, and track jackets, to formal occasion wear, mixing Westernized makeup with intricate henna. The reframing of visual narratives extends to the power to name one’s place in history. Moska Rokay, lead archivist of the Muslims in Canada Archive (MiCA) at the University of Toronto, writes of the necessity to record Muslim-Canadian experiences and stories on a wider scale. To tell one’s own story is to speak for the self, to own ancestral knowledges and histories as a step towards creating inclusive and truly representational archives for academic and community research. In the West, scholarly spaces have long been shaped by the white man’s folly of “objectivity” or “critical distance,” terms which police and estrange researchers from their lived experiences and enable white voices to speak for the Other. In reparation, histories must be written by their own people and be given opportunities to expand, fill gaps, and spill over.

Yet, the act of generating history on one’s own terms might also result in the creation of no terms at all. Resisting definition, Tazeen Qayyum speaks to monolithic, overly broad labels such as “women’s art” and “Islamic Art” as limited and sorely lacking. Upon her arrival from Pakistan, Qayyum grappled with positioning her work—a practice which includes Arabic script mark-making and skirts the borders between installation, drawing, performance, and other time-based mediums—within the context of contemporary art in Canada. Presented with no viable options, she dismisses categorizations which neither fit nor do her work justice. In this light, the term “Islamic Art” reduces cultural production of an undefined geography to an aesthetic, or renders it immobile in time, relegating practices—regardless of their temporality—to the annals of history in a taxonomical equivalent to amber entombment. Trained in miniature painting as Qayyum was, Azadeh Elmizadeh further fragments monolithic ideas of Islamic art through her references to American Abstract Expressionists Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko, or the French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard. As Tammer El-Sheikh notes in his essay on “Azadeh Elmizadeh, A Hundred Times, Why?” the artist’s series of gouache and ink on silk works move past binary East versus West conversations, untethering from flat associations to nationhood, religion or any other marker of presumed belonging. Intensely personal artworks and their makers cannot be so neatly defined when globalized; contemporary identities move fluidly between place and time, across land and water, between multiple selves. Attempts to secure any borders, whether literal or figurative, rarely endure. As history has proven—I write this as a 64-kilometre-long Russian military convoy advances towards Kyiv, Ukraine, threatening to put the capital under siege—boundaries are leaky and prone to breakage, stemming the flow if only for a while; they are challenged and breached on a continual basis.

The complex realities of global politics, culture, religion, colonialism, war, and migration constantly form new entanglements, like a knotty mess of long hairs on a head. In the essay “In Keeping House: Radicalizing the Mundane as Potential for Reconciliation,” Yasmeen Nematt Alla writes on Farheen HaQ’s domestic rituals of taking care, describing herself as an “uninvited immigrant Muslim settler.”⁵ These intersecting subject positions of diaspora are rendered increasingly labyrinthine when viewed in concert with reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and the land now called Canada. Where from, what history, and whose land? It is precisely this flux of being and belonging that complicates any definition of a singular Islamic art in history, at present or in the future. In contemporaneity, the task of art history is to reorient ways of looking against encyclopedic classification and to understand grey zones that escape categorization and binaries. A turn towards a philosophy of “everything/and” seems apt, less so a matter of “either/or.” The critical question posed might then be “What has been left out?” rather than “Where does this art belong?” Only then will art and its history remain open and ever in the making, never complete.

Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works. She has held fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Parsons School of Design, The New School; and Performa Biennial. Charlene has also held teaching positions at Parsons School of Design, OCAD University, Ryerson University, Western University, and York University. Her writing has been published in Artforum, TheAtlantic.com, The Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, frieze, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, Fashion Theory, and Journal of Curatorial Studies, among others. www.charleneklau.com

1. Miwon Kwon, “Response to ‘Questionnaire on the Contemporary’,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 13.
2. Miwon Kwon, “Response to ‘Questionnaire on the Contemporary’,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 13.
3. Abdi Osman, “The Thin Line Between Modernity and Tradition in Queer Performance,” BlackFlash 38, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 14.
4. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism (New York: Verso, 2020), 25.
5. Yasmeen Nematt Alla, “In Keeping House: Radicalizing the Mundane as Potential for Reconciliation” BlackFlash 38, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 29.