La-makan

Alize Zorlutuna’s Facing East (2019) evokes the question that echoes through much diasporic art—the interrogation of origins, place, and belonging. Or rather, origins in a now-imagined landscape, absence, and resistance to belonging. Facing East is simple but deeply evocative artwork: a prayer carpet from which the central mihrab design, upon which a Muslim would normally stand and pray, has been cut out; the carpet is draped over a monumental rock formation, which can be seen through the absent form of the mihrab. A many-layered work, Facing East brings to mind the hadith that the entire earth is a place of prayer. While the prayer carpet is the artifice of humans, the earth is God’s creation, and thereby pure by its very nature. The near-eternality of the rock stands in contrast to the fabric of the prayer carpet, ephemeral and destined to fray and unravel, hinting at the fragility of human prayers and human endeavours, and also at the hubris of humankind—why do we weave elaborate prayer carpets as a locus of piety when the earth itself is the original place of prayer? Alize Zorlutuna’s work speaks to our transience as physical beings as well as humankind’s vulnerability, expressed through the inventive, yet fragile, aesthetics and materiality of our religious rituals.

In contrasting the unforgiving and near-immortal surface of the rock with the softly woven fabric of the carpet, the work brings to mind human mortality by gesturing toward our bodily fragility. Instead of being met with the softly woven carpet, a Muslim praying on this carpet presses their knees and forehead into the rock exposed through the cut-out form of the mihrab. This artwork’s hinting at human frailty and mortality suggests the ways in which our demise is connected with our origins. The banal and often-asked question of “Where are you from?” is one that haunts the art of Muslim diaspora artists, and bound up in this question is the more insidious, “Where do you belong?” and “Where will you go from here?” A response to where your vatan or homeland is located, in much poetry and philosophy in the premodern Islamic intellectual tradition, was the qabr, our grave in the earth, in the soil, our khak, from which we were originally made, a notion hinted at through the earth that peeks through the cut-out mihrab of Zorlutuna’s prayer carpet: that is where we are from, our clay that disintegrates and returns to what it was before our souls animated it. The notion of the grave as the vatan or homeland, and the earth as our origin, resonates through the image of the prayer carpet with the earth underneath it as its mihrab, its point of focus and contact with the clay of our bodies.

The meaning of the word vatan, the homeland or origin-place, has shifted over time in fascinating ways. The word watan is Arabic, but also exists in Turkish, Persian, and Urdu (vatan) carrying the resonance today of “country” or “nation” and often associated with a nation state and its genocidal and ecocidal politics. This was not always the case. Like many things that shape what we say or things we believe to have always existed, the word vatan took on the meaning of “nation” only in the nineteenth century. Before the advent of modernity and nationalism, it carried a rich association of meanings layered one upon the other, leading back to their own complex origins—the vatan is identified with the celestial realm of the heavens to which the soul will ascend, and at the same time with the soil of the earth, thence the grave, thereby linking the heavens and the afterlife through one’s return to the earth upon dying. Mohamad Tavokoli-Targhi in Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography, traces this shift in the meaning of the word vatan, exploring its use in the works of pre-modern Islamic philosophers: “As the originary home of the human soul, the aterritorial vatan was viewed as a no-place or a-place (lamakan) to which the soul (nafs) was destined to return after death…In a related conceptualization, the grave (qabr) was viewed as the originary home of the human body: made of earth (khak), the body was ordained to return to its place of origin”¹. The no-place, or un-place, of the pre-modern vatan is the place of diasporic prayer and belonging in Zorlutuna’s Facing East, the un-place from which our soul emerged and to which it returns through the disintegration of the body in the earth and its return to its original element. The un-place, the original vatan, stands in stark contrast to the modern conceptualisation of the nation state, with its delineated boundaries, institutions, and structures.

In a similar vein, Zorlutuna’s performance piece, Crawl (2012), also featured in this special issue of BlackFlash magazine, is a poignant critique of the institutions that prop up the nation state—museums, galleries, and educational institutions—serving as both the state’s memory and its means of reinforcing class and racial boundaries. In her performances, Zorlutuna crawls down the imposing monumental stairways of these institutions; the steps are carved from a grey rock whose harshness only accentuates the softness and vulnerability of the artist’s body as they struggle down the steps on their hands and knees, a reminder of the contrast between the softness of the fabric of the prayer carpet and the body of the believer bending in supplication upon the rock emerging from the empty mihrab in the carpet’s centre in Facing East. The artist’s performance also challenges one of the central tenets of diaspora social aspirations: namely, that the route to “belonging” in the white supremacist nation state is through these institutions—through struggling for acceptance at a prestigious university, or fighting for representation and presence in the cultural institutions, such as museums and archives, that create and uphold the white supremacist colonial settler identity.  Zorlutuna’s performance art makes short shrift of these misplaced aspirations; the harsh granite stairs of the prestigious university can destroy the body of the immigrant just as easily as they can secure the same body’s place in the unjust social and economic order of the settler colonial nation state. The museum that claims to represent the “original” culture of the immigrant is revealed as lie; colonial practices of collecting through looting and violence and economic predation damaged this culture through removing its most treasured art and artefacts, de-contextualising them, and relegating them to culture of entertainment and display.

These themes and images are further explored in the work of Farheen HaQ, whose work explicitly addresses the meaning of being an artist in a racialized body, living and practicing on stolen Indigenous land, and asks what it means to press one’s forehead to the earth in a territory that one has settled in, uninvited, as a Muslim immigrant. Her digital photo series Retreat (2004), in which the artist performs her prayers on a carpet placed at the top of a monumental stairwell in an urban space, explores the potential of challenging the white gaze in public. Querying notions of belonging in public space bears similarity to Alize Zorltuna’s performance series of crawling down the stairs of imposing “western” establishments in Crawl (2012). A further parallel between the artists’ themes occurs in the interdisciplinary practice of Farheen HaQ’s later work The Ground Above Us (2019), which seeks to create relationships of friendship and trust across Indigenous and diasporic communities and reconcile what it means to pray on stolen ground, echoing—or perhaps responding to—the question posed by Zorlutuna’s Facing East, the prayer carpet whose central mihrab is the exposed stone of the earth.

This brings us full circle back to our meditation on the shifting meaning of the vatan—the premodern no-place or la-makan, understood as the soil of the earth or the celestial realm in which the soul found its home, that paradoxically has now come to signify the borders, the institutions, the hemmed-in and restrictive structures of a physical parcel of land, the nation state as prison. The premodern vatan was, according to the scholar Mohamad Tavokoli-Targhi, “the ‘originary home’ (vatan-i asli) of the human soul, an aterritorial ‘geosophical’ conception prevalent among Islamic philosophers and mystics.”². The nameless un-place or non-place, which is also the grave, the earth, and the celestial realm, is perhaps the only place we can or should lay claim to when asked about our origins, our vatan of un-belonging.

Nur Sobers-Khan is currently the director of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, an archive of Islamic art, visual culture, urbanism, and architecture. She was previously the Lead Curator for South Asia Collections at the British Library and Curator at the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. Her research interests cover the cultural and art history of the early modern Islamic world, the intellectual genealogy and continued life of Islamic dream interpretation practices, and how to turn these into AI oracles. 

1. Mohamad Tavokoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 115.
2. Mohamad Tavokoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 115.