NOT EVERTYHING IS GIVEN
As we negotiate structures of comprehension and the expectations placed on artists and curators to make meaning through our practices, these essays are opportunities for reflection. Leaning into the questions that shape our curatorial approach, we think with the artists whose work is critical in shaping
Not Everything Is Given.
Joyce Joumaa’s two breaker boxes are repurposed as lightboxes for photographs taken at two homes in Lebanon where power cuts left the country blacked out through most of the day. Timed to the power schedules, the photos of two interior spaces light up or fade out with the electricity supply. When the power is cut, the images are barely perceptible, yet never truly gone—always there and palpable, showing themselves only when they can. The work does not shut down the electricity of the whole building to simulate Lebanon's life conditions. Instead, it generates a fleeting, illusory moment for compassion, acknowledging art’s limitation in fully communicating others' experiences. Compassion, as Laurent Berlant sketched out, often rooted in privilege, inherently falls short as it transforms the moral imperative to alleviate others' distress into a performative act that distances the spectator from the sustained commitment required to effect real change, reinforcing the very hierarchies it seeks to dismantle.
Not Everything is Given is an exhibition on withholding. It does not mean refusing to participate but participating on its own terms. It’s about withholding digestible documentation or cathartic narration of one’s struggle. Coming from different localities and experiences, the artists disturb expectations and eschew satisfaction for the audience. The works in the exhibition preserve the violence within themselves, bringing it to the surface without fully forming it, recognizing the flattening effect of communicating and experiencing other people’s suffering. We are merely brushing the surface, being momentarily touched by an image, then moving on to the next. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a ghost of the exhibition, writes on the tension between the urge to articulate and to withhold: “Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say.” This tension is heightened by the knowledge that “to the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernible features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.” How can we communicate with the distant land without necessitating comprehension or apprehension of the foreign?
Conceived amid the relentless and audacious, live-streamed genocide in Palestine, we are confronted with "cruel images" that ‘‘selectively mute: it’s not that one refuses or chooses not to speak, it’s that one is left “literally unable to speak” about what is being seen.’’ These images do more than document—they participate in the violence, muting and weaponizing two-dimensional planes, effectively flattening political reimagination, and transforming viewers into complicit observers. The guilt of witnessing, of being drawn into the spectacle without truly comprehending or acting, and the shame of believing in art permeate the exhibition. Oraib Toukan's film Offing explores how to project images on other people’s suffering, pondering the space where speech and imagination meet. Emerging from the summer 2021 war on Gaza and an online conversation with artist Salman Nawati, whose spoken words from Gaza against Toukan's footage from outside Gaza. What we hear is the narration of the hardships and mundane realities of daily life under the conditions of war. What we see are close-ups, lush visuals, and manipulations of time, such as reversing or changing the speed of footage. Offing attempts to hear and relate to parallel stories behind the frame of war. Meaning the more distant part of the sea in view, offing suggests the limitations of perspective and the challenge of truly comprehending the experience of another, the one in the offing.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s site-specific installation, ,they feed on the altitude of our afterlife. studies the illusion of comprehensiveness that text, much like images, often projects. By employing a poem obscured, scattered, and arranged along a staircase, Rasheed disrupts expectations of legibility, clarity, and understanding. She challenges the notion that reading and seeing equate to understanding, emphasizing instead profound unknowability. Rasheed's installation underscores how meaning is always deferred, never fully graspable, and continuously shaped by what is absent or obscured. The scattered vinyl pieces of text, such as ‘A thing that seems to be ___ an output,’ ‘the ‘outside’ to that which,’ ‘Translator’s note,’ and ‘When it arrived, Your sentence is sweating,’ alongside black geometrical shapes reminiscent of censored images, serve as a metaphor for the elusive nature of meaning. They compel us to confront the gaps and silences that structure our perceptions and narratives. The unknowable, unseeable, and unreadable elements evoke the face of the Other, the ultimate image of ethical responsibility, which, as Derrida suggests, is not in front of us or even within our field of vision but is a ‘trace that dislocates the simplicity of (...) here-and-now present.’
A black square in the center of a paper accompanied by text in Ottoman is a work by Zişan (1894-1970). Fleeing Istanbul in 1915 to escape the Armenian Genocide, Zişan navigated the avant-garde art world unnoticed, disseminating her work anonymously. This piece Felaket, dated 1923—the year the denialist Turkish Republic was founded on the backdrop of the genocide—attempts to represent the unrepresentable and unrecognized genocidal violence through geometrical abstraction. The text reads "Catastrophe," a term connecting us to the Nakba, reflecting a shared history of legitimized violence and systematic denial. In her ongoing body of work, İz Öztat fabricates the (auto)biography of Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego. She adopts Zişan’s work to create a complex temporality that allows the suppressed past to intervene in the increasingly authoritarian present. No Turkish government has admitted that what happened to the Armenians was a crime, let alone a genocide. It is illegal to define the "Armenian issue" as genocide. As an artist from Turkey, İz Öztat fabricates the life and work of Zişan, she is mutilating herself to pay her debt, the debt of surviving, the debt of not being imprisoned, not being massacred, the debt of being an artist and making art.
The two video works delve deeply into the embodied and unspoken responses to collective violence, examining how rituals and movements articulate resistance and grief. Noor Abed’s our songs were ready for all wars to come stems from Abed's interest in folklore and social choreography and the way political ideologies are enacted through everyday movements. With a tone of magical realism and archival footage, the work features choreographed scenes and a song inspired by Palestinian folktales and communal rituals of mourning and death. Abed explores how myths and movements can serve as tools to challenge dominant discourses, reclaim narratives, and reshape realities. Aziz Hazara’s Takbir presents a scene where a young man from Afghanistan beats his chest while staring intensely into the camera. This act echoes the collective mourning rituals during Ashura, symbolizing resistance against injustice. Hazara uses this individualized act to explore how personal expression of mourning can sound in the absence of a shared language for grief.
The coded, gestural language of mourning and resistance is evident in the work of BAÇOY KOOP (Printing, Duplication, and Distribution Cooperative). Their piece Birding is named after the clandestine printing and distribution method originally used by leftist organizations to duplicate and disseminate dissident content. Created in 2016 amid heightened tensions from failed peace negotiations and increased state violence against Kurdish communities, Birding refers to the action of throwing pamphlets into a crowd to disseminate information while blending in. This work brings the public act of dissemination into an interior space, reflecting a distrust of the public sphere. Formally, the work stands in stark contrast to the canonical paper stacks of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which invite the audience to participate and take a piece. Instead, the papers scattered randomly on the floor of Birding disrupt the audience’s usual movement and expectation. Is it meant to be given, or is it to be shared?
There is another piece in the exhibition that is not on view, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, an artist who shapes the exhibition without being physically present in it. Untitled (for Parkett) is a billboard piece depicting a cut-up section of sand with multiple, zigzagging footprints that appear to belong to different people. Originally intended for outdoor, public installation, it has been relocated to an indoor wall. This transition from public to private space underscores a distrust in the public realm. The supposedly safe distance between the audience and the artists/artworks has vanished, as the public space is under threat, if not entirely destroyed. Now, we are unsure whether we can take a paper from a stack or merely observe an image of sand with anonymous footprints within a secluded art space, monitored by security. Still, the image shows a stretch of land marked by footprints, a space that is unsettled, unowned, yet co-traversed and co-passed by many.
Niloufar Emamifar’s Three Inches and A Half casts, taken from the narrow space between two buildings in Los Angeles, highlight the materiality and contested nature of unowned land. Despite being deemed "value-less" in legal terms as mere abstracted lines on zoning maps, these spaces hold significance. Emamifar, in her quest to obtain permission from the owners of the properties to cast the intermittent spaces adjacent to their properties, found that only two Palestinian businesses allowed her access. This underscores how, in the context of Palestinian-owned properties, these seemingly insubstantial spaces are imbued with profound meaning. As citizens of a contested and stolen land, Palestinian owners uniquely understand and believe in the materiality of these non-owned spaces, revealing the deep, inherent value that transcends legal definitions and challenges conventional notions of property ownership.
Alper Turan
Notes:
1-Lauren Berlant, "Introduction Compassion (and withholding)." Compassion. Routledge, 2014. 1-13.
2-Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, University of California Press, 2009, p. 3
3-ibid p.56
4-Oraib Toukan, "Cruel Images." e-flux Journal, no. 96, January 2019
5-Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford University Press, 1999, page 91.